A question to our US military experts:
This came up in another mailing list.
Assume a fight in some country that is mostly
steppe/prairie/pampa/savanna/open grassland. What would the vehicle
camouflage pattern for US vehicles be?
Among the older MERDC paterns, I would guess it's the 'Summer Verdant' (see
e.g.http://www.burleehost.net/ontheway/articles/MERDECcamouflage.htm).
Is this still valid? Or are there new patterns after the introduction of the
NATO patterns?
Any experience from exercises in such an environment?
Greetings
Probably some variant of the Desert pattern for the Battle Dress. For
vehicles, which usually end up covered in dust, probably a light tan over all.
Michael Brown
[quoted original message omitted]
Well when you consider that the US army is notorious for it's use of the wrong
paint scheme in a combat area. As an example 3 years after the Gulf war I was
redeployed to Kuwait were every vehicle we drew was green. The only green
things there in fact. Never mind the fact that every thing we left back at
Fort Hood was painted tan... There must be a logical reason for this or at
very least a plausible lie, but it escapes me now...)
> --- KH.Ranitzsch@t-online.de wrote:
> Assume a fight in some country that is mostly
Um, how much lead time are we talking about?
You gotta figure that if there's only a month or two, then there's not going
to be much repainting.
It also really doesn't matter exactally what color
they are painted since they'll be crap-brown from the
dirt anyway.
But at any rate, no one remembers how to do those old
4-color patterns and I doubt that would be practical.
In fact, very few people in the US Army remember
hand-painting vehicles at all. We have paint booths
which do that full-time.
[quoted original message omitted]
It depends on where the units are slotted to operate, it will be either the 3
tone Green,Brown, and Black or Tan. I have the old 4 color system down even
hand painted a few tracks in my time. But John is right it isn't done in the
units now mostly because of the type of paint.
Don
[quoted original message omitted]
> --- "K.H.Ranitzsch" <KH.Ranitzsch@t-online.de> wrote:
Yes.
Except for III Corps (Fort Hood), the entire US Army
is painted 3-color NATO.
Every Army vehicle at Fort Hood is painted Tan. It was considered evidence of
the CG's mental instability at the time that the decision was made. This was a
few years prior to Desert Storm. So of course we stayed that way and the next
war we fight will probably be in a jungle.:)
As a side note, CARC paint is highly cancerous and must be applied in
controlled circumstances.
> At 4:24 PM -0700 7/17/02, John Atkinson wrote:
It is now. It didn't use to be. The guys on the MV list have gone over this
quite a bit.
Ryan Gill schrieb:
> It is now. It didn't use to be. The guys on the MV list
MV list?
Curious