I’m not sure I believe any of this.
Seems like a convenient slam against the US and anything that sets us “unfairly” above “the rest of the world”.
The digitized camo is pretty ugly. I don’t see this as a slam against the US at all. From what I remember, they said black stands out because natural colors aren’t black, so really all they’d have to do, in my opinion, is redo the older camo without black. My favorite pattern were the desert BDU, though I do like the urban pattern as well. They could leave black in that one because there’s plenty of man-made things that are black.
The Navy did something similar back in the eighties. Until then, the summer khaki uniforms were made from cotton.
But someone decided that since cotton burns and presents a hazard during a fire onboard a ship, the uniforms should be made of polyester, which doesn’t burn.
When my husband told me he was going to need new summer uniforms made from polyester, I was both horrified and furious. No, polyester doesn’t “burn”, it melts, and sticks to the skin, creating burns every bit as bad. I was rather vocal about the change and discovered that numerous wives knew what a mistake the change was while the men had no idea. We had seen polyester become a fiery black little blob that sticks to the skin when we set manmade fabric swatches on fire in home ec.
A few years later the mistake was corrected and the cotton returned.
You can believe the camo story.