Armed
with the latest technology, this the face of the new British
army soldier. Personnel in Afghanistan operate across a
wide range of environments - desert, woodland/jungle, compounds,
crops, grassland and arid stone. They frequently move through
environments during their patrols, and often go through
several in the course of one operation - but existing camouflages
are optimized for single environments. An MOD Urgent Operational
Requirement (UOR) was authorized in April, and a programme
of research has taken place since then to compare in-service
camouflages with newly developed patterns and commercial
off-the-shelf products.
A wide range of camouflages and colours were trialled, in
the UK, Cyprus, Kenya and Afghanistan. The trials included
visual comparisons, objective assessments of the time to
detect the different camouflages against different backgrounds,
and subjective user opinions on the efficacy of the performance.
Crye's Multicam technology was found to be the best performing
across the widest range of environments by a significant
margin - reducing the chance of detection in mixed environments
- and it was selected as the new UK camouflage. It will
be known as Multi-Terrain Pattern (MTP).
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