Gear: Chapter 5

Camouflage has trends too

I went hunting. I shot a gun for the first time.

Rebecca Chaisson and Fisher Neal

I loved it. But mostly because I didn’t kill anything. I was mostly tagging along as my friend Rebecca got a hunting lesson from Fisher Neal. I have to admit, I see why Americans like to shoot stuff.

Rebecca and Fisher are actually legitly bow hunting

But I wasn’t there to talk about guns. I was there to talk about camo. That’s the clothing I associate with gun culture, right? And even though hunting camo and army camo are very very different, they both serve similar purposes: they are both about hiding from stuff. But in both cases, the camo is also subject to trends. It’s not purely practical.

Take, for example, the military’s trend for digital camouflage.

This fashion movement was kicked off in the 1990s by the Canadian army, when they released their CADPAT (Canadian Camouflage pattern) in a pixelated form.

CADPAT, the Canadian camo

Kind of badass looking, right? And so the US Marines followed their lead, and released MARPAT (Marines Pattern)

MARPAT the Marines camo

By the way, the Marines still use this pattern! You just don’t often see Marines in their combat fatigues because that is so not a part of their culture. But my friend Alex obliged me by changing into his fatigues:

So after the Marines took on MARPAT, then this digi camo thing really took off, every branch wanted their own digital camo, no matter if it was actually practical or not. The most offensive example of this was that the Navy created their own digital camo… that was blue. And immediately sailors were like “….what the hell we don’t want to blend in with the ocean!??”

Actually what were they thinking!?

But the biggest branch to take this on was, of course, the Army. They created a new digital camo pattern called UCP, or the Universal Camouflage Pattern. It was called “Universal” because it was supposed to blend in with many different environments.

UCP

But as season consultant Charles McFarlane will tell you, UCP was “a camo that stuck out like a sore thumb.” The only thing that was universal about it was that it universally blended in with nothing.

And so this pattern was soon replaced by another trend. OCP. Operational Camouflage Pattern. Which I saw for sale on the military base that Alex took me to:

And you’ll note that this camo is very very very similar to another pattern called Multicam. Very similar:

And multicam is worn in a lot of places. Including by police and militias.

The military and local police are already looking very similar, in terms of what gear they have access to, and the camouflage is only making it more visually confusing. So much so that the New York Times had to release a guide for how to tell who is who.

How the Iraq War turbocharged police militarization

This episode is about the drama that got us to this point. There’s a whole story behind it.