Some months ago in this thread and this week in Bluesman’s excellent thread, the issue of unpopular changes in military uniform – the Army’s recent berets-for-all, the 1990’s USAF’s “business suit” jacket – was brought up. For my thoughts and those of some earlier posters, see the aforementioned threads. Suffice to say that as a former Army Reservist I’m underwhelmed by Gen. Shinseki’s judgement in headgear (why not give the light brown ones to the regular grunts and let the Rangers keep the black?), and that I don’t see what was wrong with the black pullover that it had to be replaced with a cardigan (named after an incompetent general, to boot).
So I’m wondering if fellow veteran Dopers and current Dopers-in-uniform – as well as those with some special affinity for them – feel like sharing…
Any changes in your uniform (and associated regs) since your enlistment that you really dislike?
That you really like?
That still have you scratching your head and wondering?
That you feel SHOULD happen soon?
That you FEAR will happen soon?
I liked the new AF dress uniform. I found it dramatically more comfortable than the old one --yYou could actually sit down while wearing it. The only aspect of it I didn’t like was the loss of the nametags on the blouse.
I’m speaking strictly from an aesthetic POV. I used to be in the Honor Guard and I liked the sharp, stiff, military-looking uniform. Changing it to look like a more civilian type suit just doesn’t sit well with me.
The one change that I found totally nonsensical, indefensible, and NOT a change for the better IN ANY WAY:
No more crew-neck tee-shirts with the short-sleeve blue shirt without tie. Vee-neck only.
WHY THE FUCK DID THEY DO THAT?
Oh, there are any number of dumb-ass uniform changes they’ve done in my 15 years of service. (Like using aircrew-style name patches on the Battle Dress Uniform - STOOPID!) But somewhere, somebody could always claim this change or that was an improvement, even if they were in the minority, and wouldn’t actually say it in public, so as not to be hooted from the room. But THIS?
Sometimes I imagine that the Uniform Board has a checklist with the item “Irritating and Pointless - Does it annoy the troops?”
When I first went in in 1982, the USMC had a sharp lightweight set of Cammis called (I can’t remember), these were soon gone and by '83 or so, we were wearing a heavier, darker set (which I believe were called Woodlands).
Plus they got rid of the really groovy wide collars and went to a narrow little mid-80s collar.
Other than that I can’t recall any sweeping Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children uniform changes. When wearing Cammis, some COs allowed us to go without t-shirts, some allowed us to wear camo-colored ones, some made us stick to good old solid green.
I forgot about that one. Truly pointless. I guess they wanted everyone who could to show off how hairy their chests are.
And I didn’t mind the flight patches on the BDUs. It made buying a new set of BDUs a lot easier by not having to sew your name tags and things over the pockets - just a nice small square of velcro did the job.
A sweeping change that I’d have welcomed in the Navy would’ve been if Uncle Sam had stopped ordering overruns on our dungaree uniform to clothe his inmates in the federal prison system.
I’m still trying to get over the elimination of Army summer Khakis. It was bad enough when they did away with the Suntan blouse and trousers. I’m not too happy about ditching the tan shirt for the peppermint green shirt with shoulder boards. Hell, if I was any older I be all petulant about brown shoes and the “Pinks and Greens” uniform my father wore.
I’d have to second the AF’s change to the business suit style uniform…
I’ve worn both a USMC dress uniform and the AF dress uniform, old and new.
The USMC uniform feels like a military uniform. Yes it makes you sit up straight, yes it take hours of care and preparation to wear the uniform, but it makes you feel proud, it makes you feel like part of a cohesive unit.
The old AF uniform – It was not as sharp as the USMC uniform, but it still forced you to sit/stand up straight. It too took a significant amount of time to prepare and wear properly.
The new AF uniform? Dear god its a business suit. It almost feels like the AF is trying to distinguish itself by --Not looking like a member of the armed forces-- hea, guys, your in the business of protecting this company. That equates to killing people. Don’t try to look like something you are not.
Thank heaven I’m not in anymore, but I think it’s ridiculous that a skirt is part of a military uniform. I absolutely hated the days we had to wear it.
And if you have to wear a hat, can we be a little practical? How 'bout something with a brim to keep the cancerous sun’s rays off your face? No, let’s use a beret, and take away the tiny amount of coverage we had with the soft cap. Oh yeah, and let’s make it wool, since we wear it all year 'round, even when it’s 120 degrees out there, and heat is supposed to escape through your head.
And let’s wear highly-polished boots everywhere, so that every office has unremovable kiwi marks on every desk leg, filing cabinet drawer, and cubicle wall.
When the USMC got rid of white T shirts with cammies, going with green. You know, for camoflage purposes, explaining the white boxers that are issued. (The white T’s looked sharp).
The short lived crap about wearing our rank insignia on our covers (hats).
Adding nametags on the cammies so that we could look like the Army. I remember when being called Marine was enough, but that was to impersonal apparently.
Like Sir Rhosis, that change of the cammies to the little collars sucked. That big sweeping Elvis collar was great. And what the hell was up with the “waist adjuster tabs” on the jacket???
I currently read in the Marine Times that they are changing the boots to a black suede type which will eliminate polishing. WTF??? A pair of spit shined boots is an awesome sight. I’m not sure about the new computer generated cammies yet, but I’m pretty sure I won’t like them.
For other services, I hear they are working on getting rid of the bell bottoms on the Navy dungarees. NO!! That takes away half our jokes!!!
I’ll top you all with a Canadian horror story: Garrison Dress.
Back in the early 90’s the Canadian army had, basically, three uniforms:
Your dress uniform, with tie and jacket, polished shoes, etc.
Combat dress, olive drab fatigues and combat boots
Work dress, which was a short sleeved tan shirt with dark green pants and combat boots, suitable for office wear
Makes sense, right? You’ve got your combat uniform, your just-working-around-the-office uniform, and your dressy uniform. There’s formal attire to but you don’t often wear that and a lot of guys/girls didn’t even bother to get it.
But then they got the idea of… GARRISON DRESS! Garrison dress was sort of like work dress except they gave us all these absurd camouflaged jackets with black and gold badges. Totally unsuitable for field wear, they were for use only in work dress situations. Why, you might ask, would they make us wear camouflaged jackets that aren’t used for camouflage when we’re working in the office? Good question. Nobody had an answer (Note: If you want soldiers to distrust your leadership, a quick way of doing it is to make them do something that seems ludicrous and not tell them why they’re doing it) but it was widely speculated that they did it so lazy headquarters staff would feel “more military.” Really.
In addition to the absurd jackets and the ugly belts they came with, we also got new boots. They were high like combat boots but were completely unsuited to field use, because they were shiny leather like dress shoes and had to be spit shone. Now, you might ask why on Earth they would spend millions of dollars outfitting us with boots that sort of looked like combat boots but actually served no practical purpose when we already had lots of perfectly good boots. See my comment about the jacket.
So for a few years we trooped around in these absolutely ridiculous getups, feeling like dimwits. Well, actually, it was more like a few months before OUR CO decided it would be really convenient to just wear combat uniforms all the time, which he (correctly) believed would stop us from bitching about our garrison dress. Eventually so many units did the same thing they dumped the garrison dress altogether.
Total cost: Millions and millions, for stupid uniforms everyone hated and that we didn’t need.
Remember, this happened about the time that Gen. McPeak decided that he didn’t like nametags, ribbons, specialty badges or national insignia and that the Air Force should look more like airline employees…I heard a rumor that some general’s wife (McPeak, maybe?) didn’t like seeing the little triangle of tee shirt peeking out of the collar. Seems she thought she was seeing underwear. So her hubby raises a fuss and <poof> you get to know the exact amount of chest hair that a particular airman or officer has at his disposal.
Worst change had to be when they went from the centuries old traditional bell bottoms with their horizontal creases to a more ‘modern’ flares style, ugh! ugh! ugh!
Seems they had asked around the induction training camps for good ideas and the newbies wreaked their revenge.
While I agree with the anti-Garrison dress, RickJay, before we got that, the only work dress my unit had was those nasty zip-up rifle green jackets with no belt, all rank insignia on the shoulder boards, and the awful bluish/green, thin as paper, short sleeve shirts. That was hideous.
It wasn’t until we got garrison dress that we were able to change to the tan shirts and get rid of the zip-up jacket. We never wore the camo jacket, nor the boots, just the tan shirts and brush-shone combat boots. It was a godsend…we’d finally left the 70s behind.
Of course, I was reserve, and I have no idea what the regs were wearing before garrisons came out, so YMMV.
What base were you on? In Kingston we’d disposed of the zip up jackets and blue green shorts years before garrison dress was ever heard of. Tan shirts and brush-shone combats had been our work dress well before the introduction of garrison dress; I joined the reserves in 1989, and I never once put on a blue-green paper shirt, although I saw them once, the night the sergeant major told us “Don’t wear these anymore. Don’t even give them back. Feel free to use them as rags.” And that was regular force AND reserve; 1CDHSR went for beige at the same time. IIRC, the local reserve infantry regiment (PWOR) was the same. Maybe it differed from base to base.
No base. HQ (ALQ R) was Troy Armouries in North Bay, we were usually one of the last to get new toys. When I joined in '89, we were still using FN’s. I didn’t get my garrison dress until '91.
When you’re talking about the tan shirts, do you mean the thin ones that came with summer dress or the thicker ones that were standard with the garrisons? Up until the new ones were issued, we were stuck with the zip ups and they made us wear them. Bruh. Of course, now, my rag box is chock full of the things, and good riddance, too.
The old Utility uniform, the one from the late 70s, early 80s. Looked like a @#%$& bus driver, not a sailor. Glad to see that one go, even if it meant wearing bell-bottoms again.
Losing the beards. When the beard-ban was announced, a lot of sailors decided it was time to go, and they did. On the night before the ban became official, there were beard-shaving parties (Think: Wake with razors), and a lot of UGLY faces came out from behind the beards. I’d only just finished growing mine in, so it wasn’t a big loss, but some of the Chiefs… Holy Cow! Their faces were two-tone for months!
