New US Army Uniform

The green US Army uniform is dead. Long live the blue uniform for everyday office work. The greens go out in 2012. New recruits draw the blues starting next year.

The Army Times has the story complete with gruesome photos.

Your opinions? Seems still to busy and too fiddly. We need to get rid of the divisional patches on the Class A (keep them on combat uniforms). We need to get rid of the “US” and branch of service insignia. The white shirt (when worn without the tunic) looks very bad. Too many colors and general stuff.

Official message here.

Army Times link doesn’t work.

Photo link?

Obviously the ACU camo is working too well.

Fixed link.

(Redundant, re. link)

That first guy, with the short sleeved shirt and “bloused” trousers, looks absolutely absurd. His sleeves look 10 sizes too big for him.

At first I thought you meant they were getting rid of the BDU’s. Then I clicked the link and realized you meant the Class A’s and B’s. That uniform is ugly as sin. I still have my Class A and B uniform hanging in the closet. Going to go pull it out and long for the good old days.

My son isn’t crazy about the new Navy year round uniforms ( link – they ended up going with the khaki shirt option, so disregard the light blue shirt), but that mess makes the Navy uniforms look dowright attractive! Blousing your pants just about works in BDU-style uniforms, but it looks ridiculous anywhere else.

Well the pants don’t have to be bloused, but there is the option to do so if you want.

I’m just a civilian but I have to say I think our military’s uniform designers have been out to lunch for the past several years. The digital-pattern BDUs look downright dumpy on soldiers that I see walking around town. Without any gear over them, they look baggy and awkward. The dress uniforms they’ve just released seem to be a continuation of this total lack of style.

In my grandpa’s day, if you were in the Army, and you were going to be mingling with the civilian population, you wore your dress uniform. There was none of this walking around in BDUs. And the uniforms were extremely snappy. My grandpa still has his old Korean War uniform with the “Eisenhower jacket.”

Blue? He looks like a bus driver - IOW, an Airman, not a Soldier.

(duck & cover from the wild blue yonder crowd)

Well, BDUs are designed for function, not form. But yeah, I don’t dig the look on te new uniforms linked here.

The new ACU is perfect if you want to hide on an asphalt parking lot. How the heck did we get stuck with a French hat?

Wow, that’s awful. I laughed when the Airforce started looking like civilian airline pilots, but this. Ugh. I could live with it except for tucking the trousers into the boots.

I’d wear my BDUs every day I could.

If we want to simplify and modernize the Army uniform, why not start from a blank sheet of paper?

Czar Alexander III had the attitude that his soldiers were Russians, not wanna-be Western Europeans, and they dropped the spiked helmets & brass buttons and adopted the traditonal gimnasterka pullover tunic, which looked great.

I wish we’d do the same thing and put US solders in traditonal Native American hunting shirts like those worn by George Rogers Clark’s Rangers in the Revolutionary War.

It would make an excellent Worth 1000 PS contest.

Let’s just say that “snappy” was a lot more important in grandpa’s day than it is now. In a nation of slobs, style doesn’t cut much ice.

And add that the military of today is a lot different too. No more citizen-soldiers, but a warrior caste. Even the Marines, whose uniforms have changed least, wear them differently today.

Actually, naval uniforms change with glacial rapidity. Marines are style butterflies by comparison.

The Rhode Island State Police still have the best uniforms out of anyone.

That was what I thought too.