How did American camouflage conquer the world?

Design students don’t start out in the field or on the hunting range. “You’re starting out in your own Adobe suite, right?” Thompson says. “Go straight in digitally, create it, print it, make a uniform out of it. Edit, edit, edit, edit, edit.” There’s been a lot of guessing. There was never really a reliable measurement to test the effectiveness of camouflage. “The human eye, the user, the guy in the field knows what’s good and what’s bad, but making that a test that you can replicate across different forces is going to be very difficult,” Thompson says.

However, Crye Precision was pretty sure they had found something special. In the early 2000s, they introduced their multi-environment camouflage concept to the United States Army. Crye explained that they intended to patent this pattern, an early design of which was called the Scorpion. In 2004 they did just that, and called it MultiCam. Around the same time, when the Army had an open call to introduce new camouflage to the Army, Crye suggested the MultiCam. It was rejected.

Instead, the US Army announced that it has designed its own version of a multi-purpose camouflage pattern that can blend into most environments. It was called Universal Blur Pattern (UCP) – a pixelated digital pattern that looks as if someone has uploaded a really low resolution blur image. When UCP was widely adopted throughout the military in 2005, it became, in the words of fashion historian and journalist Charles MacFarlane, “one of the most obscure camouflage patterns of all time.” Kate Parker, a professor at Harvard University and an Army reservist who served there Afghanistan In 2009, he wore UCP. “We were shot by these Chechen snipers from a long distance,” he told journalist Ilya Maritz. “It was like I had duct tape on my forehead.”

The only soldiers who can choose not to wear the UCP are members of the US Special Operations Forces. Elite teams like Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and the Green Berets have more wiggle room when it comes to their clothing. “Every unit, whether conventional or special, has what is called a tactical standard operating procedure, or blue book,” a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division tells me. The Blue Book will specify “third party items you are allowed to wear.” As for the Special Forces, “they’re usually very lenient.” He says he has a friend in special operations who wears sneakers, and he’s heard of someone who wears high-top Vans.

As such, Special Forces were the ideal audience for MultiCam. This sophisticated camouflage began to be worn by some of the United States Army’s elite soldiers, many of whom met Thompson and Kray during the duo’s many trips to Fort Benning. “These are people who have the ability to make their own decisions, and they’re also probably more open to some crazy things,” Thompson says. Crye began producing versions of its own camouflage, selling its MultiCam products in the early days of e-commerce and licensing the pattern as well.