As we’ve mentioned before, the US Army has adopted the new “Scorpion W2” camouflage pattern under the same acronym that they chose for MultiCam for use in Afghanistan.  To provide a bit more clarity, I’m calling them ‘OCP-1’ (Afghanistan) vs. ‘OCP-2’ (Scorpion W2).

According to Eric Graves from Soldier Systems Daily, it appears that the Army’s rationale in adopting the same acronym for the new pattern is to get around the wording of the 2014 NDAA which stipulated that the services could not adopt any new, service-specific camouflage patterns.  It also appears that part of the rationale is logistical, as no new NSN numbers would need to be created and no existing contracts would need to be altered or cancelled.  In effect, the roll-out just becomes an update to the current specification for pre-existing contracts. It might still all be a bit confusing for the average Joe or Jane though, as well as for his/her chain-of-command and for the Army’s Supply branch, as they try to keep things straight between “old” and “new”.  Thankfully, our friends at Predator Intel put together the handy side-by-side comparisons of OCP-1 (MultiCam) and OCP-2 (Scorpion W2) seen with this article. To my eyes, and I have seen “Scorpion W2” in the flesh, the new pattern (OCP-2) looks like a halfway point between Multicam and SLOCAM.  The pattern has larger shapes than MultiCam, is a bit simpler in design, and has colors that are also kind of halfway between MultiCam and SLOCAM (see below).

For a good up-close look at SLOCAM, check out this article over at Pine Survey.

At any rate, ACUs (with the enhanced sleeve pockets) in the OCP-2 pattern are due to start rolling out next summer – and I expect there will be a bit of a gold-rush as troops look to ditch their UCP uniforms for the cool new thing.  And we can also expect to see a lot of mix-and-mismatch ensembles for a couple of years (at least) until OCP-2 has completely penetrated through to every unit and individual soldier. Finally, it will also be interesting to see if all the other branches will follow the Army’s decision on OCP, and also what the future of MultiCam / OCP-1 will be within the units that currently use it… *UPDATE* Soldier Systems Daily has just published some exclusive side-by-side comparison photos of OCP-1 (top below) and OCP-2 (bottom below)…