From Schwarzkopf’s boots to traffic cones, the federal government’s official color palette—yes, it has one—controls much of what we see. An investigation into how America elects to paint itself.
Interesting read.
“The color that has come to signify America in today’s combat theaters isn’t the red, the white, or the blue picked by Betsy Ross, but an ignoble sandy hue commonly referred to as desert tan and officially identified as Federal Standard 595 Color No. 33446.
The color came of age in December of 1990, when, according to military lore, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, then stationed in Saudi Arabia as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Central Command, got a new pair of shoes: prototype combat boots, size 11.5R, which he unboxed, examined, and hurled at the soldier who delivered them.
Like almost every other piece of gear amassed by the U.S. military at the start of the Gulf War, those boots weren’t made with the Middle East in mind. Photographs of the conflict—ones taken between August 1990 and January 1991—show transport vehicles, trucks, tanks, tents, and soldiers covered in Vietnam-era olive drab and a three-color woodland camouflage that sticks out from the desert like a pickle on hummus. Schwarzkopf wasn’t having it….
By the end of the conflict, the lion’s share of the 697,000 U.S. troops who had served on active duty in the Gulf were wearing camouflage patterned with desert tan, driving in desert tan, sleeping under desert tan, and handling tools painted desert tan. Now, two decades later, with nearly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, 50,000 in Iraq, 10,000 in Kuwait, and almost two million returned within the past nine years, that tan, Federal Standard 595 Color No. 33446, is one of the dominant colors of America’s armed forces, an enduring symbol of our age, and another swatch in the strange chromatic history that the U.S. has painted in plain sight across the country and around the world.”
