Hey, wearing Woodland camouflage in the desert is a tradition going back at least to Desert Storm. I didn’t get my desert uniform until I got back on the plane to go home (six-color desert aka “chocolate chip”), and the Army *still* owes me a pair of desert boots.
So the Army has the (horrible) ACU, and is now phasing in Multicam
The Marines have their Woodland and Desert digital
Air force has the ABU and some other pattern
The Navy has their own woodland (land-ops uniform) and their digital blues
Frankly, I don’t see this as a problem. The services have become highly-specialized, and therefore require patterns specific to the environments they have to function in. The only problem is that the DoD followed the *worst* possible path in developing and procuring the patterns. The Marines escape this because they did the job themselves and didn’t let Natick dick them around. The new Multicam pattern is a commercial pattern, and probably shouldn’t count in the procurement fiasco because Crye Precision did a lot of the work themselves.
I’d also point out that, in my opinion, AfriCom is going to be the next “big” thing, and Africa has an incredibly diverse range of environments. They’ll still have to use Desert patterns because of all the work they’ll be doing in Northern Mali, Sudan and other places, but they’re also going to need good Woodland again for all the sub-Saharan jungles, plus Multicam will work great in the Savannah regions. We’re also going to need a revamp of the venerable Jungle Boot, since those glued-sole desert sneakers they’ve been using are going to be worthless in the mud of the African Jungle.
Are they? From what I've read, Multicam is a proprietary pattern, so the Army is spending gobs of money to develop their own patterns that they'll own the rights to.