As far as I can remember the Army has never made a "Dry" tent. We took ours right out of the crate and put them up. It looked like a planetarium inside there, with all the holes in the roof.
But Gunny Ermie, on "Mail Call", is showing all this neat stuff you guys are just about to get, like leakproof tents with poles in the walls, rather than the middle. They even have portholes for airconditiong and heat. Probably even wireless internet access built in. And they're "just around the corner".
I suspect most of that stuff is stored in Kuwait, where vast supply depots either can't find it, or won't send it out because it's so new, they have to count and inventory it for a few years to see if it stays in one place. And that's just how they treat the Regular Army.
hehehe... brings back some memories from my Coast Guard days. "We, the underappreciated, have done so much for so long with so little, that now we can easily do anything with nothing."
A favorite was one time I navigated our ship into Cabo San Lucas on a placemat. We couldn't get any charts of the harbor, but somebody came up with a placemat from a restaurant there and it had a background that was a chart of the harbor. I used it. Plotted fixes on it. Even though it had those cutesy pics all over it of Marlins and fishermen and beach chairs. Couldn't resist the tempation to loudly recommend to the Captain: "Plot shows us with a huge oversize beach ball immediately off the starboard bow. Recommend evasive manuever!"
who needs a tent when yuh got the GORTEX bivvy bag?... That is the single greatest piece of field kit the Corps ever got us... and the only reason we got 'em back in 1995 was cuz the Army was goin' to toss a couple hundred thousand "brand-new-still-in-the-wrapper" bivvy bags cuz they had too much brown in the camo pattern... what a bunchuh maroons... we got 'em fer free...
that bivvy bag is awesome... I've slept in downpours and blizzards in wet gear and woke up bone dry... it's almost better than sex... almost...