I ran across a gallery of .mil pictures taken of what looks like a daylight urban assault exercise with 10th Group special forces Soldiers.
Besides all the customization and kit configurations with each of the operators, one of their uniform items struck me as particularly interesting.
In the lead picture above you can see a guy in the center of the frame talking to another guy pictured just over the shoulder of a fourth SF operator in the far right of the frame. If you look closely at the guy in the middle who's talking, you can see some high speed ACU pants he's wearing.
Notice the spandex reinforced knees and hard-cap pads. Now, I've never even heard of a uniform like this being developed, though we have written about the Crye combat pants that are pretty similar. But still, something tells me these are familiar. The only think I can think of is that I might have seen them in the cubicle of Lt. Col. Mike Sloane, the product manager at PEO Soldier for Soldier clothing and individual equipment.
Is there a new component to the Army Combat Uniform in the works? Is this just a one-off prototype for the SF community? Did Sloane hook this brother up? Who knows...We're checking with sources in the service to see, but until now, we'll just settle on 'informed speculation.'
