U.S. Army Transitional Camouflage Improvement Poll

(Vancouver, B.C. June 12, 2013) Earlier this week SoldierSystems.net put up a poll with a photo of the four finalists in the Army Improvement Program. Given that the photo of our (ADS Inc./Guy Cramer) US4CES pattern that was shown was a 7 color of Version-D that we never even submitted for the competition and our 4 color Version-D that we did submit was not even down selected for the finals, and that the BrookWood photo shown was of their Desert Submission, and the Kryptek image was from a clean graphic image and not a photo. I wanted to do something similar but on more of a level playing field: All four finalists in the same photo under the same lighting, representing each submission for same Transitional Environment.

Two items to mention; I do not know if Crye Precision submitted Multicam (they have not revealed their submissions), but Multicam is the baseline pattern the Army used for testing for transitional environments. I don't have access to the Brookwood pattern so I took their photo of their Transitional pattern and printed it in the exact colors and to proper scale on cloth (this was the largest image of this Brookwood pattern I could find).

Below close-ups of all four patterns from the same photo so lighting would remain equal

And the results are in after 24 hours of polling:

After one week of polling:

We need to point out a few issues. As this poll was done from our web site and company Facebook site so we would expect a bias vote in favor of US4CES. The vote over at Soldier Systems earlier this week caused Kryptek to ask their Facebook followers "Likes", which numbers just over 24,500, to go vote on the Soldier Systems poll. Their first call to vote on Monday would have gone to the feeds of these 24,500 and the story was shared (placed on their feeds to their friends) over 35 times by those people, their second call to vote on Tuesday went out to the same 24,500 and was shared 23 times. We never sent anyone to Soldier Systems to vote. I figured that Kryptek would not direct their people here to skew this vote. 

The point here is that presentation of the correct patterns on the same cloth in the same photo will provide a more accurate portrayal of the patterns and remove some of the bias. With today's internet age, any poll can and will likely be skewed. 

The value on aesthetics does have some impact on the outcome of the Army's decision but effectiveness in the Visual and NIR/SWIR spectrums should be the key factors, if they stuck to their program requirements.   

We will leave the poll up (below) for continued voting - perhaps we will be inundated with our competitor(s) followers attempting to push their favorite to the top.

For more information on the Army Improvement Program

Part 1: U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained

Part 2: U.S. Army Scorpion Camouflage

Part 3: Why not just use MARPAT?

Part 4: Why US4CES?