We were over thirty nations, assembled with a common cause. The setting was war-torn Bosnia. Coming from all corners of the globe as peacekeepers, we were technically a peace implementation force. Despite several years of military service behind me, I had never worked with the personnel of so many different countries. Besides the sixteen NATO nations of 1996, also present were the future alliance partners of Czechia, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia. Then there were others, from further afield, including Australia, Bangladesh, Egypt, Malaysia, Morocco, New Zealand, and Pakistan. The future opponents of Russia and Ukraine were there, too, as were traditional neutral Austrians, the Swiss (who arrived with real Swiss Army knives), and another future NATO nation, the Swedes. Cultures clashed. A young Turkish Üsteğmen (Senior Lieutenant) of Military Police tried to arrest me for taking his picture; a jovial Estonian Ülemveebel (Senior Sergeant Major) threatened to jail me if I did not.

The Americans were teetotal, the French insisted on sharing a post-prandial brandy. Britons managed half-hour midday meals in their canteen, the Italians compared notes on the thoroughness of their three-hour lunches. A vodka-quaffing Russian Podpolkóvnik (lieutenant colonel) I got to know thought it only correct to bring along his girlfriend in his armoured personnel carrier. Prins Willem-Alexander van Oranje, heir to the Dutch throne, who piloted his own military aircraft, was a frequent visitor, easily mixing with his forces. The Spanish and Malaysians were comatose without their mid-afternoon siestas. I was aware one of my colleagues, a Canadian lieutenant colonel of military intelligence, had quipped of our coalition that “Heaven is where the police are British, the chefs are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers Italian, and it’s all organised by the Swiss. Hell is where the chefs are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, the police are German, and it’s all organised by the Italians.” 

The universal currency was packs of Marlboro cigarettes (other brands being inferior), the common drink šljivovica, locally produced plum brandy that came in qualities varying from fine fruit cognac to eye-watering paraffin. The differences in dress, helmets, berets, side hats, baseball caps, and kit were endless. Weapons varied between World War Two-era Mauser carbines and bayonets, and the latest Heckler and Koch assault rifles. To carry a pistol in a holster on one’s belt was less a military requirement than a signature of status. Rank was a nightmare. As NATO’s historian, I soon had to learn that a French brigadier was a corporal of cavalry, whereas a German one was a general. I might assume I was addressing a Russian Polkóvnik (colonel) only to find he was an Egyptian Amidst (naval commodore), a well-braided Hungarian Szakaszvezető (Section leader), or Croatian Načelnik Odjela (Inspector of Special Police) belonging to one of our host nations. The trick, I soon discovered, was to click one’s heels, incline one’s head Teutonically, smile politely, salute anything that moved, and hope for the best.

Sartorial disguise has become a cultural touchstone, seen each year on the catwalks of the great fashion houses

I observed also that one way different nations differentiated themselves was via camouflage clothing. One might have thought there was a finite limit to the depiction of blurred brown leaves interspersed with smudged twigs and blobby moss printed onto thickets of ochres, blacks and greens, that could appear on uniform jackets, trousers, and sometimes extending to headgear, webbing, weapons parts and other equipment. But no, every country had invented its own. It is a tradition surprisingly young. Prior to the 1914-18 era, armies fighting in central Europe wore bright colours so as to be able to distinguish friend or foe. Those conducting peripheral campaigns, such as the British, had already drifted towards khaki, a Persian and Urdu loan-word for soil or dust, and first adopted as a tan-coloured uniform by the British-Indian Corps of Guides as early as 1846 for service on the North-West Frontier. 

Not until 1915 did camouflage really come of age, with the advent of military airpower. The word was a French verb meaning “to make up for the stage,” with its practitioners known as camoufleurs. It was soon realised that static machinery and personnel on land required protection from the eyes of pilots and observers, which was the initial role of military aviation. All nations recruited artists to devise exotic schemes for their ships, aircraft, artillery, and vehicles in different theatres of war. The colourful armies of 1914, which Napoleon would have recognised a hundred years earlier, had gone forever. However, the ability to mass-produce printed camouflage material for tens of millions was constrained by the lack of machinery designed to accomplish this.

It was the Germans who first broke new ground in the inter-war period, devising multi-shaded splinter-patterned material for personal tents and rain ponchos in the field, and later tunics and helmet covers. Their airborne forces gained camouflaged overalls, whilst their Nazi rivals, the Waffen-SS, also got in on the act, in the early 1940s issuing their own dotted or mottled clothing combinations, which in the post-war Bundeswehr became known as Flecktarn. With the establishment of the British Army’s Parachute Regiment, the War Office turned to Major Mervyn Denison who in 1941 designed patterns to be printed onto denim from which parachutist’s smocks could be made. He came up with a light background varying between sandy yellow and olive, with overlying brushstrokes of reddish brown and dark green, a scheme thought to best merge into the North Western European landscape. Over in the Pacific, in 1942 the US Marine Corps had utility combat uniforms and helmet covers printed with a mottled, disruptive pattern to blend into the jungle environment, known as Frog Skin for its similarity to the amphibian’s ability to blend into its environment. After the war, most nations drifted towards cloaking their forces with some kind of arboreal pattern, though British units continued with uncamouflaged battledress until the issue of jackets and trousers in DPM (Disruptive Pattern Material) as late as 1972.

The mass-production of these various camouflage patterns by the Americans, British and Germans was much imitated by partner nations during the war, and extensively so afterwards. As field uniforms began to be sold off as military surplus, they immediately found favour with civilian hunting-shooting-fishing fraternities who happily donned the many hues of trousers and jackets, faded into new colours by numerous washes, for the mass assassination of wildlife, and related activities. Whilst the use of radar has since rendered disruptive patterns less relevant for ships, aircraft and vehicles, tactical personal camouflage of ever-greater cunning has continued to evolve for the infantry of every nation. This was the state of affairs that greeted me in Bosnia in 1996.

It took the hidebound British Army a distressingly long time to license its masking patterns to a variety of merchandise, from mugs, flashlights and biros to teddy bears. This reflected the end of the institution feeling it needed to hide away in barracks from an Irish terrorist threat, from 1970 until after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Homecoming parades from the variety of new theatres in which the wider UK armed forces found themselves, from Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan meant the military services could show off again. After nearly 30 years, wearing camouflage in public, arguably in itself an aggressive act, suddenly became normalised. Its leap towards a fashion statement was inevitable, just as the number of well-bristled young men returning from operations in Afghanistan has reintroduced beards back into wider society. Part of the popularity of camouflaged gear is that it’s classless. Rugged surplus items offer value for money and are available for only a few pounds online or at endless surplus emporia.

Since then, sartorial disguise has become a cultural touchstone, seen each year on the catwalks of the great fashion houses. Of course, civilians have no need to blend into their backgrounds, yet the rise of hunting camouflage outside military life has entered the high street, via surplus shops, as a slow burn over the last 25 years. Also, as Isabel Slone has observed in The Guardian: “hunting camo is one of the few current-day fashion styles that could be considered truly democratic and accessible to all”. Once upon a time dress — from hats worn at a rakish angle, svelte overcoats, suits, snappy waistcoats, razor-creased trousers, fine silk shirts and blouses, Parisien or Milanese-patterned squares, designer neckties and polishable shoes — defined class. Personally, I may mourn that “tis no longer so, but today fashion has dictated that we are washed up on a sartorially-challenged and classless desert island. 

There is perhaps no better illustration of this rejection of elitism than the adoption of “branded tactical clothing for hunting or fishing,” which in the UK is available through every online outlet from Harrods to Asda and everything in between. At the same time, the specific licensing of specific camo patterns or styles of military-type clothing can be worth millions of pounds. Camouflage sells, and as the nations in Bosnia found in 1996, there are endless different hues and splodges than can be contrived into a paramilitary fashion statement. Across the world, designers are charging fortunes for their wearers to blend into the background, rather in the way that purchasers of Laura Ashley clothes in the 1980s might have merged into the matching printed wallpapers and fabrics behind them, also bought from the same source. In the United States, Georgian outdoorsman Bill Jordan started creating his own masking patterns in 1986. Today, his company, Realtree, is one of America’s most popular camouflage-product retailers, whose licensed partners sell an estimated $4bn in branded items each year. “Over there,” Slone cites, “a woody khaki denim maxi skirt can sell for $300 or a hat with an identical print at Walmart for $5.97.” The point is that both demographics buy huge quantities.

In recent years, the camouflaged look has evolved into new directions, neither of which are particularly healthy. I first encountered paramilitary police uniforms bearing blue and black splodges and brushstrokes in 1996 when worn by some of the local law and order organisations across the Balkans and in the Russian Federation. Though imitating army troops, when worn on urban streets by baton-wielding constables, these uniforms perform the opposite function. Their disruptive patterns do not amount to urban camouflage but stand out aggressively and menace the very communities their owners are allegedly in business to protect. They in turn have triggered, or perhaps are a reaction to, protesters themselves wearing a variety of woodland-printed attire. Some will sport the outerwear because it is cheap, practical and hardy, however I’m sure I’m not alone in detecting the growth of a survivalist, uber libertarian fraternity that has replaced once-neighbourly trust of a generation or two ago. I know not whether this springs from too many Zombie Apocalypse games, movies and video games, or the greatest era of political unease I can recall in my lifetime. 

Back at the Millennium, one of the Sunday newspapers contained a double-page spread proclaiming that “peace is breaking out across the world,” whilst American historian Francis Fukuyama had already erroneously claimed “the End of History” in his 1992 book of the same name. Then, you may recall, he asserted with more than a touch of hubris that the worldwide spread of liberal democracy, free-market capitalism and its associated lifestyles, heralded the definitive form of successful government. Alas, neither the newspaper headline nor Fukuyama have delivered. Since then, political uncertainty in democratic bulwarks like the United States, South Korea, France, and Germany; growing authoritarianism in Turkey and Hungary; the sudden, Pearl-Harbor-type shocks of the 11 September 2001 attacks in America, 7 October 2023 assault on Israel, plus similar massacres in Britain, France, Germany and elsewhere; a time of obsessive individualism enabled by social media; global fear induced by the Covid epidemic; the questioning of previously sacrosanct institutions; and return of unthinkably intense combat in Ukraine and Israel, have collectively led some to feel a need to arm themselves against a dystopian future.

Outside of America, this doesn’t necessarily mean weapons, though with the advent of 3D laser printers which can create arsenals of “ghost guns” of the kind possibly used to kill the Chief Executive Officer of a medical insurance company in New York recently, we have to rethink what constitutes a viable weapon and access to them. However, such expression also takes the form of buying “survival aids” and associated clothing. The online auction sites are full of the stuff. Not just camouflaged jackets, or the hopefully soon-to-be-abolished “zombie knives” but helmets, gas masks, rations, and military style webbing, each hinting at beliefs of self-sufficiency in time of trouble. Thus, I’m sure the jump in sales of balaclavas (which are not just snug hats once invented to combat the cold of the Crimean War but conveniently conceal the majority of your face), or combat-style footwear, is not just a reaction to climate change. I am personally sanguine that the end of the world is not nigh, nuclear Armageddon is not round the corner. Solutions will be found to Ukraine and Israel, as the international communities have managed crises in the past. I believe in the bigger wheels of history; that future writers will look back on our times as akin to the revolutionary era of 1848, the post-Great War drift to fascism, or generational angst of 1968. In other words, international moods and beliefs that held sway for a whilst, then disappeared, evaporated or were defeated, as societal balance reasserted itself. 

Ironically, foliage-patterned uniforms have been part of my life in the forces and as a military historian for my entire adult life and were thrust into my face in 1996. Yet am I alone in sensing there is something dark about the spread of camouflage to police forces and civilians? I have a sense that whilst these imitations of nature are meant to protect, conceal and save us from danger, they also represent manifestations of other deeper threats conspiring to unravel our comfortable lives. I hung on to some of the kit my Sovereign saw fit to issue to me as a soldier, boots, trousers, jackets, which I now generally use for gardening. However, I look askance at those I see scooping up armfuls of the stuff who don’t look like gardeners to me, and ponder why they need the helmets and the gas masks they buy, and wonder what plans they have in store for the rest of us.