Updated: Now with more details from our Friday morning interview.
According to Matt Cox at Army Times, the Army announced Friday morning that it will begin fielding MultiCam ACUs to forces flowing into Afghanistan as soon as this summer. Program officials told us explicitly that we would begin to see MultiCam fielding in August. The Army plans to begin the fielding in two overlapping stages.
The initial push will be to get MultiCam on 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, at Fort Polk, La., and the Iowa National Guard's 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division, both deploying for OEF this summer. Once that effort is underway, the Army will then concentrate on getting new ACU-MultiCam and selected OCIE to currently deployed OEF-A soldiers.
Boom.
According to the Army's test results, MultiCam was the only camo pattern to rank first in all three categories of the Army's photosimulation evaluation.
... UCP-Delta did well in the detectability, not as well as MultiCam, but pretty well. UCP-Delta did perform significantly better than UCP and it would have been cheap, but we didn't want to go 'cheap Charlie' on the soldiers. If we can give them an edge, we wanted to give them an edge even if that meant spending some extra money.
Colonel Bill Cole, Project manager for Soldier Protection and Individual Equipment, U.S. Army, PEO Soldier
The MultiCam uniforms will have a few other improvements that are already headed for future ACU contracts. OEF-A bound soldiers will receive about $4,000 worth of gear including four sets of MultiCam uniforms, four combat shirts and matching combat equipment.
