20040616

To have a unique combat uniform, all USAF has to do is wait ten months

Now that the Army is adopting a new combat uniform (tip of the K-pot to Airborne Combat Engineer), there will soon be no other US armed service left using either the woodland pattern BDU or the three-color day desert pattern DCU.

Granted, the Navy will still use BDUs and DCUs in those ashore instances where they need a camouflage uniform, but work with me here. Besides, the Navy can work out a deal with the Marines to use their exquisite MARPATs.

USAF will have the BDU and DCU effectively to ourselves. Then we can just stencil the new USAF brand on the pocket and the cap and call it our own.

The Army redesign effort appears to have gone much farther out of the box in its thinking, run extensive wear-testing in theatre, and is already closed on the deal to the point that they'll begin fielding their new uniform at about the time USAF opens a website to Airmen for comments on their tiger stripes.

We at WUTT! called the following, which the Army adopted---but a bottle of Johnny Walker says USAF will not:

  • Removable rank insignia centered on the jacket front, as on the Gore-Tex parka
  • Angled jacket pockets, easier to reach into than horizontal
  • Pencil pocket separate from the jacket pockets (though the Army put theirs on the sleeve)
  • Tan undershirt, instead of solar-absorption-maximized black


It merits mentioning: the Army's design team was run by NCOs.

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