On 6th June 2016, while 1284 American, British and Polish paratroopers were dropping close to the Vistula near Torun in Poland, some 200 kilometres to their north-west a joint American and Italian force drawn from the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team and the Folgore Parachute Brigade seized Swidwin Airfield to secure the US 2nd Cavalry Regiment’s northern flank during the DRAGOON RIDE phase of Exercise SABER STRIKE ’16. US Army OEFP is MultiCam, which can be differentiated from OCP by the near-vertical ‘twiglet’ shapes The Special Forces community, with its own budgets and the ability to procure ‘outside the box’ was fast to spot that commercial MultiCam clothing was much better suited to operational needs, particularly in their primary combat theatres of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it did not take long for their international brethren to follow suit. This commercial derivative was, of course, Crye Precision’s MultiCam which took the basic ‘Scorpion’ camo pattern developed for the M-81 camo replacement trials and gave it more appeal by adding some more vertical elements to the design thereby giving it broader commercial appeal as well as overcoming any potential intellectual property rights issues. Whereas the unsuccessful UCP, introduced around 2004, was a digital or pixelated pattern its 2010 replacement was not only a more conventional analogue pattern but its design was a commercial evolution of a camouflage originally conceived for the US Army requirement which led to the procurement of the much disliked three-colour camo just a few years earlier. As seen in the previous feature, the US Army’s Universal Camouflage Pattern was not a success and was replaced by Operation Enduring Freedom Pattern, writes Bob Morrison.
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