ACU Uniforms

the U.S. Army recently unveiled a new uniform, dubbed the Army Combat Uniform, or ACU. The ACU garment manufactured by Propper International and retailed by tactical gear providers like RangerMade will become standard-issue for all deployed troops in the fall of 2005. You can count on one hand the number of major uniform upgrades undertaken by the Army in the last century, so this sweeping sartorial redesign begs further analysis. What does the ACU tell us about the state of soldiering?
The new uniform is far removed from the idea of ceremonial military dress or leather-booted authoritarianism that once dominated military dress; rather than constricting and constraining, it gives and breathes and is somewhat shapeless and untucked. The polished, spit-shined black boots have been replaced by suede, no-polish-required tan desert boots; unlike uniforms of yore, it need not be dry-cleaned (which saves soldiers not just money, but time). The design energy applied to the ACU went mostly into making a uniform that would be invisible to foes but visible to comrades. Even a ceremonial detail like the traditional U.S. flag emblem has been khaki-ized into muted tan-and-blacks on some uniforms; no longer a symbol intended to be recognizable across the battlefield, it's an infrared feedback element visible only to those equipped to see it.
Making the ACU as invisible as possible required developing an entirely new "digital" camouflage pattern, derived from the Marine Corps' so-called "MARPAT" camo scheme, which was launched in 2001. MARPAT is pixilated—bit-mapped on a computer, and then "printed" directly onto nylon. The effect is as if one had interrupted, at less than full resolution, the downloading of a picture of a traditionally camouflaged soldier, the stripes and whorls dissipating into pointillist bits. Unlike the old camo, digital camo suggests shapes and colors without actually being shapes and colors—like visual white noise. 1980Predictably, there has been grumbling about the new ACU among the ranks of chat-room soldiers—mostly about the use of Velcro on pocket closures and as backing for the name and insignia badges found on the chest. The concern is not only about the durability of Velcro (which the Army calls a "hook and pile fastener"), but also that a forward scout on a night patrol may reveal his position simply by opening his pocket. When I asked the officials from the Army's Program Executive Office Soldier—an agency charged with outfitting the soldier—about this, a staff member responded by e-mail: "During the evaluation … it was determined that the issue of noise associated with the hook and pile fastener in a tactical environment could be overcome with familiarity and use during training (noise and light discipline) much like what Soldiers currently do when employing other weapons and individual equipment items in a tactical environment." Velcro drills! The mind conjures a scientist, buried somewhere in a DARPA lab, working on super-silent stealth Velcro (a conceit, as it happens, that is played upon in the new movie Garden State).