This installment of Combat Threads was supposed to be the continuation of the story of Desert Storm T-shirts. But, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has been a lot of photos and videos of conflict on all our TVs and timelines and I want to unpack some of the dress and uniform practices going on. This is an ongoing war, the likes of which most of us haven’t seen before. This is just one way of trying to make sense of the images we are all seeing.
One of the most noticeable uniform characteristics of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers is many of them are wearing different colored bands around their arms and legs. You can see use and confusion around the armbands in the video below. Both sides of the conflict wear a mismatch of different camouflage uniforms (more on this later) and many of the same weapon systems. As I outlined at the end of Vol. 01, over the past twenty years camouflage patterns have undergone a series of trends, not unlike a fashion cycle, across international militaries in dialogue with each other.
The result has been many countries converging on “Multicam” type camouflages as their pattern of choice. With both wearing the same camouflage patterns, a rudimentary way of identification has developed, with many Ukrainian soldiers and irregulars wearing yellow armbands over their camouflage and sometimes around their legs as well. On the other side of the conflict, Russian forces wear white arm and leg bands as a means of identification. This underscores the main purpose of camouflage uniforms on the 21st-century battlefield, to identify the wearer to others. The use of colored armbands is one of the oldest forms of identification on the battlefield.
As Ukraine oriented itself towards NATO countries and worked with trainers from various other countries, their camouflage uniforms changed to reflect that. As a former member of the Soviet Bloc, Ukraine’s military camouflage was in the Russian family of patterns. After the 2014 war in the Dombas, the Ukrainian military began to adopt Multicam, like many of their NATO trainers. In 2016 the Ukrainian military debuted the M14 camouflage pattern based on the American UCP, seeking to both further aline with NATO countries and distance itself from Russia.
With many Ukrainian militias and just simply civilians taking up arms against the Russian invasion, many have had to find their own military clothing or decide what to wear for military service. One striking photo found via social media is of a group of young men, looking more like students than soldiers, newly armed. Most of them wear a mix of contemporary military camouflage, but the man in the center sports a pair of commercial tiger stripe trousers. A copy of the iconic pattern developed during the Vietnam War. It is striking, how decades of popular culture, televisions, fashion-led to this man wearing a camouflage pattern designed half a world away and nearly 70 years ago.
The Vietnam War created many of the images and material culture that we still think of when we think of war. Another echo to Vietnam War popular culture so far is helmet graffiti scrawled on the front of a Ukrainian soldier’s helmet in 2019, during the war in the Dombas. “Born to Kill,” a reference to helmet graffiti in the movie Full Metal Jacket.
This conflict has also begun to produce merch of its own. Just as T-shirts produced around the 1991 Gulf War reflected broader T-shirt trends of the time, the first Russo-Ukrainian War shirt I have seen is truly a product of our time. This T-shirt from Sonya Sem, looks like it could be have been made by any number of fashion T-shirt brands. The streetwear trend of political T-shirts has been going on for years, but greatly accelerated during the George Floyd protests in 2020.
While those shirts will broadly concerned with social justice and systemic change, the tone of this T-shirt is decidedly on the offense with the line “Never forget, never forgive,” a phrase popular in the US after 9/11. It will be interesting to see how merch around the war develops and if US brands like Noah or Online Ceramics, which have made political T-shirts in the past, will start to design their own.
Till next time,
C.W.M.
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Is there such person colonel andrew McFarland Falklands war
I’ve been glued to the news this past week, and couldn’t help but take notice of the wide variety of camo patterns in use by both sides. With the draw to multicam and similar digital patterns by both sides PID was definitely going to be an issue, it’s interesting to asses it as a popular culture choice as well as a tactical one. Really opens a new dimension to things.
Great material as always.