Architecture students didn’t start out in the field or on the hunting range. “You start in your Adobe room, right?” Thompson says. “Enter it directly digitally, create it, print it, make a uniform out of it. Tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak.” It was very random. There was no reliable measure to measure the effectiveness of camo. “The human eye and the user and the person in the field know what’s good or bad, but making that a test that you can replicate with different strengths is going to be very difficult,” Thompson says.
And yet, Crye Precision was sure it had found something special. In the early 2000s, they presented their multi-environment camo concept to the US military. Crye made it clear that they intended to patent this design, an early design that was called the Scorpion. In 2004 they did, and christened it MultiCam. Around the same time, when the military had an open call for submissions for a new Army camo, Crye proposed MultiCam. It was rejected.
Instead, the US Army announced that it had developed its own version of a purpose-built camouflage pattern that could be integrated into most environments. It was called the Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP)—a digital, pixelated pattern that looked like someone had uploaded a camouflage image at the lowest resolution. When the UCP was widely adopted in the Army in 2005, it became, in the words of clothing historian and journalist Charles McFarlane, “one of the most popular camo patterns of all time.” Kit Parker, a Harvard professor and Army reservist who served in the Afghanistan in 2009, he was wearing a UCP. “We were being shot at by these Chechen snipers from a distance,” he told journalist Ilya Marritz. “It was like I had a street pipe tied to my forehead.”
The only soldiers who could opt out of the UCP were members of the US Special Operations Forces. Elite teams like Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and the Green Berets get more wiggle room when it comes to their outfits. “Every unit, whether regular or special, has what’s called a standard operating procedure, or blue book,” a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne tells me. The blue book will show “other people’s things that you are allowed to wear.” For Special Forces, “they’re usually gentle.” He says he has a friend in special ops who wears sneakers, and he’s heard of someone who wears Vans high-tops.
Thus, Special Forces were the perfect audience for MultiCam. This modern camo began to be worn by some of the most elite soldiers in the US military, many of whom had met Thompson and Crye during the pair’s many trips to Fort Benning. “Those are the people who are able to make their own decisions,” says Thompson, “and they’re also probably more open to other crazy things.” Crye started making their own camo, selling their MultiCam product in the early days of e-commerce and also licensing the design.
