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I’m a little confused by the OPs question. Of course there is a need for camoflage if soldiers are going to be in a place where the enemy might see them. The need for camoflage will go away once solders do all their soldiering from the comfort of an office 6000 miles away through drones or robots or whatever.
Nautical miles or nanometers? 
I know, right? That just seems dumb to me: Uniforms of the United States Navy - Wikipedia
They’re better, but it’s not a game breaking issue. They’re better in the sense that having performance tires on your car is better; it helps, but it’s a small part of what makes a car work well.
Any type of camouflage uniform that presents a dull, nonreflective color can be usefully used to conceal a soldier in most terrain. Effective use of camouflage also involves the covering of reflective surfaces, breakup of famliar shapes, avoidance of straight lines and right angles, presentation of non-obvious textures, avoidance of shadow, use of deception in lighting, and coverage by endemic features. Your uniform alone doesn’t do you a lot of good no matter what colour it is, but I can use a dull green uniform to hide in the desert with some knowhow and you’ll never see me.
Hell, I’ve seen a white Ford Crown Victoria successfully hide in some unmowed grass along Highway 6 in Texas, so that alone proves that a little knowledge of how to work the environment will take you far in concealing yourself from others.
The USN’s blue camouflage (or aquaflage as it’s sometimes known) is not to conceal Sailors from anything but rather to conceal a Sailor’s most common enemies…paint, grease, and other chemicals used in the daily maintenance of a ship. The previous working uniform was blue slacks and a blue collared shirt which had to pressed and creased…one stray spot of paint and the uniform was ruined and another had to be purchased. With the blue camo, a stray bit of paint or grease is no where near as noticeable and thus does not necessitate the replacement of an entire uniform.
Well, that, or they could have acted like rational beings and just accepted that work clothes get stained, like auto mechanics and painters and 8 million other professions.
Seriously? They had to replace their working-in-dirty-environment-on-a-daily-basis uniforms because of one noticeable grease stain?
With the old BDUs, in the Air Force, we had to keep them pressed and starched, despite the care tag on the BDUs expressly forbidding that.
Given that I had several pairs of BDUs wear out over four years in an office job, I tend to believe the people who claim the ironing and starching made them wear out faster.
It’s just a matter of time before they make us start pressing and starching our permanent-press Airman Battle Uniform (battle-ready with no fewer than five pen pockets!).
Edited to Add: Or, as the snarky “Shut up and Color” reply in the Air Force goes: “See, now you’re thinking things that make sense. Stop that, you’re in the Air Force.”
Different military forces, different practices… let’s just say that if anyone tried to iron a ‘B’ Uniform (the work uniform) where I served, he would have been mocked without mercy by his squadmates, and his commanding officers would have expressed severe doubts regarding his seriousness and perhaps, heterosexuality (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). Of course, whenever our B Uniforms got so dirty it was starting to get embarrassing, we’d just hop down to the quartermaster and exchange them for a fresh pair, just like any other piece of issued equipment.
“A” Uniforms were something different, of course, but you only wore those when going on leave or if you worked in an office.
They certainly did. Especially where the button was under the pocket flap.
Used to get my old BDUs pressed and starched so much that they could stand in formation all by themselves. When you wanted to screw with someone you would grab their flattened starched pocket and squeeze. It was called “breaking starch.”
Yeah, with the ABUs, there have been the occasional guy who just entirely missed the point of the new uniforms being permanent press with ironing and starching being prohibited, and proceeded to iron and starch them to be “extra motivated”.
They tended to be mocked as idiots and told to wash that crap out of their uniform before someone important thinks it looks good.
As far as office uniforms… ehh the Air Force has us wear our camo fatigues in the office 4 out of the 5 work days each week, to show that we are “warrior airmen” or some such malarkey. Heck, I drink the blue kool-aide and even I think that’s silly.
It’s been claimed that this is because we have to be “battle ready” at a moment’s notice, but then I point out that if that was the case, maybe they’d have us go to work with kevlar and weapons, which they pointedly do not. I think just too many people complained about having to get their blues dry-cleaned.
What can I say? Whining is a cherished part of American military tradition.
You think it’s just you? Hell, we *invented *the word “kvetch”.
More like paint. Or chemicals that would cause bleach spots. And not having to quickly treat and launder the stained uniform. A solid-color uniform is supposed to be solid-color. Besides, someone must have said, everyone’s going with digicamo, we might as well.
But yes, as Raguleader points the original American BDUs (the woodland camo that was worn by all services) were supposed to be “easy care”, and not ironed.
The “easy care” part was not quite as easy, the things had an odd tendency to have the black parts turn purple if laundered wrong. Besides, in the early 80s the officers and NCOs had all grown up with the spit-n-polish starched look, the laundries around the post had already contracted years’ supplies of drycleaning fluid and starch, and doggone it you’re right Sergeant Major, I’m not gonna have MY batallion look like a bunch of ate-up ragbags. That a heavily pressed-and-starched BDU tended to look kinda shiny and crusty after a couple of cycles seemed to not matter.
Battle ready? Did anyone point out it was the Air Force?