Armed with the latest technology, this the face of the new British army soldier. Personnel in Afghanistan operate across a wide range of environments - desert, woodland/jungle, compounds, crops, grassland and arid stone. They frequently move through environments during their patrols, and often go through several in the course of one operation - but existing camouflages are optimized for single environments. An MOD Urgent Operational Requirement (UOR) was authorized in April, and a programme of research has taken place since then to compare in-service camouflages with newly developed patterns and commercial off-the-shelf products.
A wide range of camouflages and colours were trialled, in the UK, Cyprus, Kenya and Afghanistan. The trials included visual comparisons, objective assessments of the time to detect the different camouflages against different backgrounds, and subjective user opinions on the efficacy of the performance. Crye's Multicam technology was found to be the best performing across the widest range of environments by a significant margin - reducing the chance of detection in mixed environments - and it was selected as the new UK camouflage. It will be known as Multi-Terrain Pattern (MTP).
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