I was watching a film clip of some IDF soldiers returning from lebanon. They looked like they were wearing uniforms out of WWII! No fancy digital camoflage patterns, just olive drab (similar to what USA soldiers wore during WWI). My question: Israel has a modern, efficient army-have they evaluated camoflage BDUs and found them worthless? Od sis they buy up all the WWII surplus stuff, and are burning through inventory?
As an aside, the german Army in WWII seemed to be the last one that went in for fancy BDUs-I remember seeing an officer at Stalingrad-wearing what appeared to be a dress uniform 9complete with ribbons). Was this standard?
I’ve heard plenty of explanations over the years; I’ll be damned if I know what the “official” one is. Here are a few:
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An hour of walking through dirt/sand/mud/dust, and a uniform will “adopt” an excellent camo sceme of its own.
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Most of the times you’re supposed to stay hidden is at night, where you can’t se colors and camoflage is useless anyway, which leads to…
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Color is only a minor element of stealth; shape, movement, reflection and silhuette are far more crucial.
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For such a small country, Israel has a highly variable geography. A soldier might need one camo scheme in the morning and another at night. Which leads us to…
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A camo sceme inappropriate to the environment is actually worse than useless: it’sll stand out a lot more than a neutral color like olive drab.
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Plus, they can’t afford to buy another set of uniforms per soldier.
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As most other armies (and all Arab armies) wear camo, a good way to avoid friendly fire incidents is to not shoot at the guys who aren’t camoflaged. Most IDF soldiers have it wired in their heads that camo = enemy.
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Camo is just a bunch of hot-shot bullshit. It’s inherently uncool.
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Institutional inertia.
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Spite.
I think that #7 above is brilliant. I’ve been playing a lot of Battlefield 2, and one of the hardest things to avoid is shooting at the wrong team. In some of the maps, the uniforms are almost identical and you have to differentiate between teams by the equipment they’re carrying.
Absolutely. Couple that with the fact that soldiers generally don’t trudge around in the field with just their uniforms. Once you’ve added webbing, packs, equipment, one is no longer a monolithic single color even if the uniform is.
Mostly, but not always true. If it was PITCH black of course no one can see anything, but more often or not there is at least some ambient light, and deeper colors are less noticable at night or under low light conditions.
However, the dynamic has changed drastically with the advent of cheap night vision devices. Most of the newer digital patterns are specifically designed with this in mind. You’ll find that the newer patterns remain visible under night vision more so than the older types. (visible meaning that they are still having the effect of breaking up the human shape/sillouhette). It’s hard to describe this effect. There are pictures out there showing under ngiht vision new and old Australian camoflauge, where the newer type was much more distinct and helped to break up the shape of the wearer more effectively than the old type, although both look identical under daylight conditions.
So all other things being equal, the new digital patterns are actually quite useful at night.
Can’t emphasize this strongly enough. Jeff Cooper, who I understand is quite experienced in this kind of thing, once wrote that the very first thing that becomes visible on a soldier is the distinct shape of his RIFLE, then his webbing straps, which are straight lines, then followed by his HANDS, which stand out against his camoflauge uniform. This has more or less been my experience.
I am inclined to believe this. I have spoken to a number of old timers who were around when their respective armies switched from single color to camo pattern uniforms. Almost all of them agree that the most effective “camo pattern” was actually the old WW2 German Grey uniforms, since grey is a neutral color that doesn’t stand out anywhere, unlike green or black. The Germans complimented it quite effectively by issuing a camoflage pattern smock, which can be donned quickly when moving through heavily wooded areas, so that the lower half of one’s body is a solid color to blend in with the ground, while the upper half has more pattern to blend with the trees. We do something similar during the winter by wearing white pants and green jackets, to blend with the snow covered ground and the green treeline.
I had heard some month ago that the IDF has actually resorted to buying surplus American camoflague uniforms for second line troops, with some concerns over the chances of friendly fire incidents.This leads us to…
90% of what a soldier does probably requires him to be MORE visible, not less, especially now that many operations are conducted in urban areas. The sneaking and peaking business doesn’t actually happen nearly as often as most people think, and as explained above, when they do the pattern of one’s shirt is really only a minor issue.
Absolutely. However, the real reason why armies do anything are…
Some time during the late 80s and early 90s, the Canadian army, at the time clad in green, adopted a splinter pattern camoflage jacket. Soldiers were only allowed to wear this jacked while in GARRISON, and wearing it in the field was strictly prohibited. This was part of a number of other (5 or 6 probably) uniforms, some involving insanely high Nazi style jack boots, that were introduced for the sole purpose of confusing the wearer. Eventually this jacket was retired, along with the tan desert uniform, just as we were stepping up operations in desert-ish countries. Luckily we introduced a bright green jungle style camoflague uniform just in time to go to Afghanistan.
I’ve met and spoken to lots of older soldiers who lived through this. Not a single one had any clue as to WHY any of the above happened, besides institutional inertia and plain spite.
What is that bonnet looking headgear cammo?
The simple reason is cost.
Uniforms are really, really expensive. Camouflage uniforms absolutely DO offer the wearer better hiding ability, no question about it; the new CADCAM patterns adopted by the U.S. and Canada are phenomenally effective. But it costs a freakin’ pile of money and if - like Israel - you are perhaps a bit more confident of your military superiority than is merited, not paying the big bux for different-looking uniforms is an easy budgetary decision to make.
Sorry, but this is wrong. The cost of a uniform is nothing compared to the cost of a soldier’s life, or even compared to the supply system in place to distribute the silly things. The Israelis know this better than anyone else (see, they tend to not have as many soldiers to throw away as most of their enemies). They are also VERY good at camoflague, using olive drab uniforms is smart and sensible. They’ve used camoflauge uniforms in the past.
CADPAT is good, possibly even the best in the world, but only because of it’s properties under night vision. It would have been worth it just for that, but in practical terms it really doesn’t offer a huge improvement over what we had before, and it doesn’t help that the practical designs of our uniforms are so far out of date as to be unrecognizable to the modern soldier. It may have cost US a pile of money, but most of that was R&D, and we’re Canadian so we pay 5x the market price for everything. Even then, the army says my CADPAT shirt is worth $40 and change. This is peanuts in the big scheme of things.
That’s probably not true. Uniforms don’t last that long: everyday wear and tear usually terminates a set’s weariblity (if that’s a word) within a year or two - much less, if the soldier wearing it does a lot of work involving rocks/thorns/grease. I’dt be surprised if the IDF didn’t order tens of thousands of new uniforms a year, so issuing camo would be nothing more than specifying a new fabric.
In fact, the IDF issued new uniforms just last year (some guys in my reserve unit got them). Different pockets, integral knee and shoulder pads (basically, another layer of fabric) some subtle design changes… but exactly the same color.
I’m gonna disagree. Even when you can’t distinguish colors, you can still notice shades. Green/Brown/Black/Tan camo BDUs provide much better camoflauge at night than a solid color uniform–even solid black. (Despite what spy movies would have us believe)
I’m also going to disagree with the first part of the sentence. Camoflauge isn’t just for “hiding”. It’s not about laying still in some bushes and hoping the enemy never sees you. Camoflauge works even while moving under contact and closing with the enemy. The purpose of BDU/ACU camo is not to “hide”. It’s for making yourself harder to identify as a target–difficult to single you out among the background–therefore you’re harder to engage.
If you need to hide, get a guille suit. If you want to fight, wear camo!
In some of the pictures of IDF infantry in Lebanon, I’ve noticed them wearing big and weird-looking helmet covers. Do they work better than conventional camouflage helmet covers?
To answer the questions about the helmet covers:
They’re called a Mitnefet. It’s made by tying a piece of camoflage netting into a bag by a length of elastic. It’s worn over the helmet, over the usual helmet cover; it can also be worn directly on the head as a hat.
Basically, it’s job is to break of the shape of the helmet - instead of presenting a round, regular shape, which the human eye is tuned to indentify, it gives your head a random form. It’s silly-looking, but it’s very effective, and it’s dirt cheap: the materials cost less than a dollar, and you can make one yourself in about five minutes.
Thanks.
The concept is not specific to Israel either. Compare:
US Army Manchu Hair. (Scroll Down)
Aside-aside, you’ll probably want to ask this one as a seperate question, to get an answer. (Though I have a glimmer of a memory about this one—I think it was the Waffen SS that had fairly elaborate field uniforms, like what you describe. It might have been for psychological reasons, but I’m not sure. Someone else here would know better than I would.)
If you want some amusement, check out some of the “Dazzle Paint” camo patterns used by the British Navy during WWII. Ships painted with jagged patterns of black, grey, and even red. The whole point was to make it hard to see the profile of the ship, thus making it harder to determine
A) The type of ship, as a destroyer bears some similarity to a battleship at varying distances
B) the distance to the ship, which was vitally important for hitting the ship with anything if you didn’t have reliable radar-equipped fire control.
I saw some Navy Reserve F-18s out at NAS Fort Worth painted in this fashion about 5 years ago, presumably to make them harder to see/shoot by weapons systems utilizing the Mark I Eyeball Target Aquisition and Guidance System (ETAGS) at low altitude, where radar is less effective against airplanes.
It’s also possible that the guys who paint the F-18s for that squadron thought it would be cool to give their planes a crazy paintjob during peacetime (summer of 2001). Afterall, one of the Marine Reserve squadrons had their F-18s painted up with the Dallas Cowboys logo on the drop tanks.
IIRC, many US Navy ships (notably the USS Lexington (CV-16), AKA the “Blue Ghost”) were painted with a dull greyish blue paintjob, designed to make the ship blend in with sea spray and waves at a distance.
Which is part of the principle behind CADPAT/MARPAT – no worry about trying to simulate leaves and twigs (or stones on desert dirt) on the clothes, instead use a pattern that will be less easy to bring into quick focus for the few seconds you’re supposed to be in motion before ducking down behind something again. In that sense, plain OD or field-grey can provide effective service if the user knows how to rig it up (e.g. the Mitnefet, which makes sense – your head is likely to be the first part of you that breaks concealment, so let’s avoid it looking like a large breadfruit in the middle of a place where you know there aren’t any of those.)
Also, C) the direction the ship is headed since you got to point to where they’re gonna be when the ordnance arrives, not where they are now.
Wikipedia has an article on dazzle. The B&W photos don’t really do it justice; some of those intermediate shades on the Sperry are really a rusty red.
Summer of 1942 my mother was in San Diego (Natch since Dad was in the Navy) and witnessed the arrival of some Atlantic fleet ships sent to augment what was left of the Pacific fleet. While still ‘gray’ they were a noticeably different shade than their left coast sisters. She wondered whether there were different shades for different areas (to match local conditions) or it was just the result of a long sea trip. I’ve never seen anything either way.
The only thing that comes to mind is that it’s so when people watch the show on TV, they know those ships are from a different fleet, but then I watch too much TV sometimes.
WAG, it might just depend on what kind of paint they have in Norfolk or Key West or wherever the ships were based in the Atlantic. Possible that one batch just came out a different color than the other. Of course, different prevaling weather/color of the sea in either ocean would be a very good reason for a different shade of paint.