The New, Improved Brown Boot Army

August 3, 2012: By the end of the year British combat troops will be issued new boots. Replacing black temperate climate boots and tan desert boots, the replacements come in five types, all of which are brown. For troops in temperate and wet climates, there is one boot optimized for foot troops (like infantry). There is another type for troops who operate in vehicles. There is a similar pair optimized for hot (over 40 C/104 F) climates. There is another pair, in one version, for cold (under -20 C/-4 F) and wet climate. The older black boots will be retained for ceremonial duties while the old desert boots will, as much as possible, be forgotten.

Several thousand British troops tested these boots for months in a wide variety of climates. Some tweaks were made and mass production commenced. British procurement bureaucrats held their breath. In the last decade, the British Ministry of Defense has been greatly embarrassed by the failure of combat boots, especially in Afghanistan. Old timers remembered that British troops also suffered "boot failure" in the 1982 Falklands campaign. It seems that peacetime training never quite equals the punishment boots receive in combat.

What humiliated the Ministry of Defense most of all were the large number of news stories of British troops buying, with their own money, more rugged and comfortable boots made for civilian hunters, campers, mountain climbers and the like. The new brown boots are meant to match what the troops had been buying from commercial firms. Other Western forces, particularly the Americans, have had similar problems. What irked British troops was that the American Department of Defense moved faster to introduce new and improved boots. Some of these new American boots were not always new and improved enough, so British troops are withholding judgment on their own new boots until there has been time to put them through the battlefield test.


http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htinf/articles/20120803.aspx

Nemo me impune lacesset,

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"The chief aim of all government is to preserve the freedom of the citizen. His control over his person, his property, his movements, his business, his desires should be restrained only so far as the public welfare imperatively demands. The world is in more danger of being governed too much than too little. It is the teaching of all history that liberty can only be preserved in small areas. Local self-government is, therefore, indispensable to liberty. A centralized and distant bureaucracy is the worst of all tyranny. Taxation can justly be levied for no purpose other than to provide revenue for the support of the government. To tax one person, class or section to provide revenue for the benefit of another is none the less robbery because done under the form of law and called taxation." John W. Davis, Democratic Presidential Candidate, 1924. Davis was one of the greatest trial and appellate lawyers in US history. He also served as the US Ambassador to the UK.

Those are pretty fugly...

They look almost as funny as our CADPAT boots currently in the testing phase.



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They could have used a guy with a foot size bigger than seven for that pic!

Not a bad color though.

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That looks an identical style to the current cold weather boot, but in brown, hope they didn't waste much time deciding that! The current desert boots are great, choice of three types, all well know makes and you can get whichever you want.

We'll all still end up walking round in black boots, 2 of the 3 services are wearing the new combat uniform tucked in as it's 'scruffy' wearing it the way it's designed.....