Given that there are dozens of varieties and each country seems to have their own patterns (ranging from the fairly coplex British one to simple olive drab), is there a pattern that’s better than the others? Are the different patterns to identify forces in a conflict (i.e. “us” or “them”)? Are the patterns trademarked?
Anything else I should know about this?
Some patterns are trademarked. Those from Realtree and Mossy Oak, for example, are, um, registered, or copyrighted, or something. I don’t know about the military camos. The US Marines, I see, have a new, computer generated, pattern.
There are various ways to hide something, or somebody. You can break up the shape; this is the way of the patterns with big lines and color blocks. At a quick glance, you don’t look like a human. You can resemble the background. This is the point of the suits that look like trees or cattail reeds.
There’s also the Ghillie Suit, which is an art form, and I’ll leave it to somebody else to talk about that.
A ghillie suit is a form of concelement dateing back to scottish gamekeepers. Today it is generally made by sewing netting to bdu’s and tying strips of cloth to the netting.
Here is the best discussion of guillie suit construction I could find.
http://www.ghillie.com/rules.htm
Its quite a chore making one yourself ,I tried.Long hours and lots of knot tying.
I doubt there is a “best” one.
Realtree has several designs for various settings, wetlands, hardwoods, etc. You can go to their web site and browse around. They have a camo primer that, IIRC, is informative. Here is a series of photos showing their Hardwoods Green in action. It’s pretty cool, actually.
If you google for “bow hunting” or “turkey hunting” and “camouflage” you should get myriad hits that will be useful.
That site you provided is quite interesting. I was actually searching for a site that would show different types of cameoflage in the same setting. Their primer was helpful (or at least before they started plugging their own products). Basically: not trying to make yourself invisible, just break up the human form.
I suppose it stands to reason, but I never thought of it like that.
I did like their photos of hunters in the forest. I’m half-tempted to test it out by getting a suit and hiding in the park, seeing if anyone will notice me.
As for the ghillie suits, I thought only snipers used them (or hunters), it doesn’t seem that it would be practical to run around in one of those things.
Then again, for concealment in a wartime setting, further reflection makes me think that the individual soldier is the biggest component of concealment. I’m thinking Vietnam wherein the VC who (as I understand) typically wore their black “pyjamas” and were masters of ambush. American “cameo” didn’t really help too well (to be sure, they were walking in large groups down paths). Then again, I’m reminded of a SpecFor teacher I once had who claimed that he and his unit were close enough to some elite troops that they pissed on him and didn’t realize that there was a guy not 3 feet away…
Are the different forms of cameo (camo?) then used by military for identifying their own troops? I ask because the Russian, British and American styles typically look different (then again, I’m not really able to distinguish between theri uniform cuts myself)? I presume that they don’t have the resources to buy a dozen suits for each soldier and instead will give a “theater of operations” suit and have selected that as being the best to mix in with the variety of terrain in a particular deployment zone.
Like a tiger’s stripes.
I knew a guy who was in the Marine version of ROTC, or something like that, and in training they had an expert who would ambush them while they were on patrol. He said that he alomst stepped on the guy when the guy made some wise-crack and then “killed” them all.
I googled for “comparison” and “camouflage patterns” and here are some links that you may like. I haven’t really vetted them, so some may not be so interesting. Also, if you’re really searching, I think there are books on the subject.
http://www.henrikc.dk/camouflage/comparison/comparison.asp
http://www.permissiontohunt.com/articles/next_generation_concealment.htm
http://www.battlefront.com/resources/poc/poc_easterneurope.html
http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~hezy/papers/j27.pdf
http://www.isisimaging.com/MemoryColorPaper.pdf
http://www.geocities.com/highland_heritage/naturejournal.htm
According to the book “Ultimate Sniper” by Maj. John Plaster, woodland camouflage (WC) is probably the best pattern for general use.
For the real answer see Monty Python’s “How Not To be Seen”. “Mrs Notlob please stand up. BANG. Step number one: don’t stand up”.
The Marines supposedly came up with their new pattern after much scientific study and claim its the “best”. I does seem to work better than the Army’s pattern. The Army is about to change to something similar.
The new ‘digital’ patterns on the USMC and Army uniforms supposedly help break up the image on nightvision devices. Eh. Also, the Marine uniforms looks like an old Waffen-SS flecktarn pattern and the Army uniform looks like the Soviet Spetsnaz pattern. Still, both look pretty damn cool, IMHO, and I have some faith in the procurement process, so they should be at least somewhat effective. (Probably very effective.)
Over at another board, a returning soldier posted that the ‘best’ all-around camo he saw was the old khaki monocolor uniforms that some of the coalition forces are wearing. Kinda funny. I believe the Israelis use a monocolor uniform, sort of a brownish color.
One thing that can said for certain, Americans will not have ‘perfect’ camo uniforms until we get some gee-wiz chameleon stuff, since we are deployed all over the world.