The Obama administration last attack on the U.S. Navy traditions and customs...sending the pea coat to Davy Jones Locker. This social engineering decision was made by Obama's PC Navy back in August of 2016. It's bad enough that todays American sailors at sea look like janitors wearing baseball caps and plumbers coveralls. And what's with sailors wanting to look like soldiers or Marines ? What's the whole idea with camouflage ? Blue camouflage !!! Who are these sailors trying to hide from ? The old salt Chiefs ? Navy sailor goldbricking while hiding out in the ships store Official U.S. Navy photo
The blue camouflage has proven quite effective in hiding sailors who've fallen overboard. I can't even imagine the logic of such a uniform. That Peacoat was pretty cool. Sorry to see that go...
I concur. I read the study, sailors would fall overboard while at sea and they bled into the ocean waters that they couldn't be rescued because you couldn't see the sailor.
On special occasions U.S. Naval officers usually flag officer wore the "bicorn" covers up to 1948. Remember Zumwalts Navy ? Beards, sideburns, beer vending machines in the barracks, allowing civilian clothing aboard ships, (good by locker clubs in every navy town) and replacing the traditional sailors uniform with landlubber uniforms. Good bye bell bottom trousers. Zumwalt even tried replacing the dixie cup cover with all sailors wearing garrison covers. U.S. Navy garrison cap Traditional sailors uniforms on the left the Zumwalt's landlubber uniforms on the right. The Chiefs and the enlisted sailors went vocal and rejected most of Zumwalt's changes. The military is about traditions and customs and sailors like to believe they are filling the deck shoes of sailors who served before them.
I always wondered why we wore this. The only thing we blended into was gravel. Plus we changed uniforms anyway when we were depolyed
The blue camouflage is on the way out. It's been replaced by a green camouflage, (although sailors still can wear the blue for a little while longer). The logic was that the camo hides stains better, and that the sailors wanted a unique camo pattern.
I always thought they wanted the blue camo so that they blend into the water when they accidentally fall in
As a uniform, it had a few pretty good design changes to take into consideration that it would be worn under a flack vest, and it was fairly comfortable, as uniforms go. But camo design and colors were ridiculous. Back in the early 2000's, Army Times had a poll on what type of camouflage the troops wanted to replace the old BDU's with. Multicam won hands down, so naturally the Army went in the opposite direction and choose that ACU design. 5 billion dollars later they eventually switch to multicam, although to avoid paying for the design they changed it slightly and named it "Scorpion." Still a better camo uniform though.
BDU's are actually quite comfortable no matter what color they are. For sea duty, if all you are worried about is man-overboard, then flame orange BDUs would be perfect same as many state prisoners wear. Sailors during the age of sail when man-overboard was a daily risk would wear white shirts striped in red. That's as close to flame orange as they could come. Their trousers were duck-cloth denim. White clothing blends-in with the whitecaps at sea so this is not a good idea. John Paul Jones liked white uniforms and got the idea from the Russian navy of Catherine The Great. There is a recent biography out about him where you can read all about it. Camo designs need to be balanced against heat retention of the colors in the hot sun. Blacks and dark blues and dark greens are terribly hot colors. So the green and black tigerstripes are not a good idea for the jungles. All black is perfect for SWAT ops at night but horribly hot in the day. For daytime regular ops I would go with khaki having black or green tiger stripes on it. But that's just me with 40 years' experience under my belt now. Kids will do whatever you tell them to. Grumpy old men don't take sh!t from anybody anymore -- just like @APACHERAT !!
Tan boots beats the heck out of black leather. You were lucky you did not need to deal with black leather.
Garrison caps were quite useless. They were simply a cloth solution to match a regular uniform. Boonie hats in any color make the most sense.
this sucks,another obama strike against Tradition ,GOD forgive me but i despise barack hussein obama,i never thought i would say that about a president.
What? Air Force has the best ones. Whaddya talkin bout? P.S. been retired 20+ years, and I haven't kept up.
We thought they(the dress blues) looked like bus driver's outfits too(LOL), but how about some respect? It's Air Force. Just like it would be Navy, Marines, Army, or Coast Guard.
In was in the Army when it went from the Vietnam era green uniforms to Camo BDU's. The Kaki Uniforms we graduated Basic in were also pretty much phased-out during my time from 1980-84. The digital uniforms, I've never been turned-on by them. Ugly. If you're still active duty, has everyone in your unit upgraded to the newest OCP, brown boots and so forth?
In the old days, there were wooden ships and iron men. Now, I'm not sure what the USN has serving on their metal boats. The Navy can wear whatever they want, nothing they wear will save them when the ship is sinking and they seal the hatches.
yep we're all phased out of the digital acus and are now livin the "good life" in our "multicam". I quote multicam cause it's darker than what we were issued before our deployment.