As a contradiction to the last post, this is a piece from Arc’teryx LEAF that I am overall a definite fan of – the Assault AR combat shirt. Luckily (as is the case in a lot of posts I’m going to make over the nest year) The Reptile House has already gone in to great depth on the details, so you can read all that via this link and I just get to waffle my infinitely more vague thoughts on the matter:

https://thereptilehouseblog.com/…/review-arcteryx-leaf-ass…/

I picked up this example in Ranger Green as a test of sorts to put together the ‘best’ combat set in NYCO for general temperate conditions, though this was long before the announcement of Crye’s Gen 4. So we’re not talking about any softshells or hot weather fabrics like Gore Katana, or indeed anything flame resistant. Since the G3 shirt has been rather outmoded for some years now, but I preferred the CP combat trousers over the offering from Arc’teryx, I came to the conclusion that on paper the ideal setup would a combination of the two manufacturers.

Since Arc’s ‘Crocodile’ and Crye’s Khaki 400 are rather far apart and Crye have never made any significant amount of grey gear, the options left were MC, RG or Black, but I already own way too much Multicam and not nearly enough Ranger Green. I’m really not a fan of plain black either and the one set I have is more than enough, so that made the decision quite easy. It would be nice to see come other high end brands offering MC Tropic and Arid, but for now the G3 remains just about the best combat shirt offering in those patterns.

The three primary draws to the Assault AR for me were the underarm mesh, the solid loop field/zip pockets with horizontal access and crucially the more complex pattern in the construction. Under the arm is of course one of the most prolific areas for sweating and any extra air flow or increased rate of moisture transportation in that area is definitely a plus for comfort in the heat. I find the vertical flap access on a bicep shirt pocket to be so awkward I will never, ever use those pockets and the split velcro on the G3 combat shirt is just awful at providing reliable retention of patches. The G3 is also pretty close to just having straight up tubes of fabric for arms, there’s very little extra shaping to them and as you’ll see in the pictures here, the Assault AR certainly does not suffer that issue.

I find the collar arrangement with the single button and velcro to be less practical than the commonly seen zip, it also seems to be cut rather narrow as it’s a tad tighter around my neck than I’d ideally like even though the medium shirt fits well otherwise. I never had an issue of a friction point from the zip on the issued UBACS when worn under Osprey, however the Mk4 is very thickly padded inside and I’ve only ever worn mine for about 3-4 hours at most in one sitting. There are lots of other PCs out there with minimal to zero padding between the hard plate and the wearer’s chest, so eliminating the zip can certainly be a positive in some situations.

Pricing is a bit more than the Crye option even with CPs price hike recently, however the very frequent sales on LEAF gear at Tactical Distributors (and other stores) bring the price at retail much closer to even and when you take in to account the positive aspects of the Assault AR, that makes it the all around superior choice to my mind. A much clearer cut winner for Arc compared to the swing-and-a-miss that is the Recce AR.

Oh dear.

So, this is the Arc’teryx LEAF Recce Shirt AR, in MultiCam. Now obviously you can see the pattern and I don’t actually need to tell you that information, yet in the case of the current LEAF offerings you’ll find yourself paying a not-inconsiderable amount more money to get the camouflage item versus the solid colours, so the specific variant is more relevant than it would be usually.

If you’ve not looked up this shirt online, I’ll just get the shocker out of the way now, because the standard retail price… is $350. Must be a fancy FR fabric right? Top end softshell? Must be? Nope. NYCO. Three hundred and fifty dollarinos for a field cut shirt (to use CP’s parlance) made primarily of basically the same fabric archetype that can be found in some US surplus uniforms shirts that sell for ~$15 in various places.

Would you ever pay full price? Of course not you wait for the inevitable Arc’teryx sale that comes around every few months like clockwork at every store that stocks Arc’teryx. Then, as I did, you do your best to play the system andintegrate your work discount and/or other coupon codes in there on top of the sale that’s already going on. The other issue with acquisition is that production quantities and the amount of examples in circulation are so low compared to, say, Crye stuff in multicam, you’re just not at all likely to find those sweet 2nd hand deals as you will with more prevalent kit (let alone in your size/good nick).

I picked up this example from Tactical Distributors, who as I’ve posted about in the past, have genuinely legendary levels of customer service. They also bring in all the latest LEAF gear and do have sales with a high frequency which you should keep an eye out for. TacticalGear.com do stock the Recce as well and when it’s on sale the MC version comes down in line with what you’ll pay for a pair of G3 combat trousers from Crye – bargain… ?

I’ll say now that I’m not even going to attempt to go in to all the details in this post. To fully review this shirt would be an incredibly long blog post with many dozens of pictures. You can’t go spending that much money without seriously delving in to the how and why Arc’teryx have managed to reach this price point on such a garment. I actually really struggled to start writing this post at all because this shirt is such an incredible anomaly, even within the upper echelons of the market and it was hard to decide where to even begin the discussion.

What I do find interesting is that the Recce AR costs more than the Assault AR, which is the equivalent NYCO shirt in the combat cut. When you look at it, it does make absolute sense because there has been far, far more sew time put in to the Recce with the chest pockets, covered buttons down the front and highly sculpted patterning throughout the chest/abdomen. A far more complicated construction overall compared to the wicking torso area on a combat shirt. But as far as the pricing goes it’s not what we’ve all become accustomed to in the commercial market place, because usually the combat shirt from any given company is the more expensive product when put next to X company’s field shirt.

For myself I will say that this shirt does tick the box of being the objective best option for the given style/pattern, purely because I deliberately exclude cost considerations in my deciding what is best for my own collection. The reason I reviewed the SKD Tac enhanced BDU shirt so favourably a little while ago is that that item specifically becomes the best multicam field pattern shirt I’ve ever seen as soon as you factor in the ratios of cost to quality. The Recce on the other hand is truly a perfect example of the uppermost end of the chart when you’re talking about the principle of ever diminishing returns for ever increasing costs. The manufacturing skill and time that has been put in here is substantial (to massively under-exaggerate), yet I cannot imagine the gains in usage versus a G3 Field shirt or the SKD being anywhere remotely close to proportional to the price increase. When you get down to brass tacks – it just doesn’t really make sense.

Bearing in mind there are a lot of people who slam Arc any time it’s mentioned on popular outlets like Soldier Systems and usually I disagree with their conclusions on the pricing being excessive, because the inclement weather items (Gore-tex, insulation, softshell etc) are absolute world leaders in materials and quality of construction. You also *always* make sure to wait for a sale. As an example; my non-LEAF Atom LT hoody gets worn almost daily from roughly October to March and that has been the case for over 4 years now. I bought it for $160 on sale from SKD in 2014 and I’m not joking at all when I say it still looks brand new. I’m not putting it through harsh outdoor use I’ll say that, it’s an everyday on base/informal socialising/gym time jacket, but it’s still done an amazing job for me in hundreds of hours worth of wear and continues to look pristine. If I continued to reserve it for ‘gentle’ use and perhaps took advantage of Arc’teryx’s globally legendary warranty service at some point in many years, it’s the sort of garment that might well out last me.

So while the Recce is quite outstandingly impressive in a myriad of ways that I’ve not even mentioned yet and I do like owning it, that sentiment is coming from the mindset of being an avid collector of such uniform pieces. Plus of course being in a place where I’ve tried all the more economical options over a decade+ and sold them on to be replaced with gradually better and better alternatives. I’d certainly not dive right in to the Lamborghini option when my speed limit is 70 and a basic diesel VW Golf will fulfill the exact same transport functionality in the real world.

If I get sufficient time wearing the shirt I may go in to the details on a video at some point, but that would, again, have to be an extremely long video to have even a sliver of hope of just maybe covering the reasons why this shirt costs as much as it costs.

Welcome back to the euro zone, where the gear is stranger than that one ‘burger’ you got in Berlin after not quite translating the menu properly.

Clothing that’s specifically offered in Coyote Brown and other darker khaki variants, instead of lighter tans, is comparatively unusual as things go. However I think CB is a far more versatile colourway than your conventional tan and when you look at the pouches and other LBE that most quality manufacturers offer, that theory is fairly well backed up. After ordering a set of the PLATATAC Tac Dax MkII combat trousers in CB for a steal of a price in a sale some years ago, I was left without the accompanying shirt (out of stock) and spent quite while searching around for a good alternative option.

In order to try and kill 2 birds with one stone I went for the Clawgear MkIII Combat Shirt; it came in Coyote NYCO and ClawGear represented both a brand I’d not yet tried and one I also felt might offer a high quality product at a fairly middling price. Certainly a whole lot less than Crye or Arc’teryx. The number of brands that actually fall in to this commercial kit middle ground that I often recommend are pretty small, so I do like to feature them whenever I can. Doubly so when the majority of media seems to either cover only the most expensive or only the very cheapest manufacturers. Not to imply these mid-range names are necessarily the best deal overall when you take in to account 2nd hand sales, but the fact is a lot of people do prefer to just buy straight new from retail. Warranties, ease of sourcing etc.

The keen eyed will have noticed some unusual features with the shirt quite quickly and it certainly had me furrowing my brow when it came out of the packet. In the first instance, it’s not symmetrical. The left upper arm pocket is pretty much in the conventional vein of a Crye Gen 2 combat shirt with velcro top flap and 2 areas of loop, but then the right arm pocket is a single piece of exterior loop on a pocket that is accessed via inboard zip. Both are entirely valid and well proven designs for a shirt sleeve pocket at this point, however the MkIII is the only product I’ve seen that blends in both.

On the cuffs you’ve got an unusual cut pattern that extends over the outer surfaces of the hand by default, along with an extendable strip of edging tape with velcro interface to cinch things up and a short zip that’s intended to facilitate ease of sleeve rolling. Also, the features around the collar allow for fitment of a NYCO hood if so desired.

Despite these funky quirks I’ve got no complaints with the overall construction and the NYCO sleeves with a very comfortable wicking+FR torso are very nice indeed. Given the many revisions they’ve gone through in their garments and the range of colours offered, I very much expect I’ll buy more from ClawGear. Especially when those colours include Flecktarn, CCE, Navy blue and RAL7013 (the latter being very high on my own personal list).

I may replace this specific shirt with the newer Operator Combat Shirt which is not asymmetrical and has a far more ‘normal’ cuff arrangement, but the MkIII here is still available in the outlet section of Claw’s site and I would not discourage anyone from making that saving if their size was available.

I DO NOT LIKE THE BLACK VARIANTS OF ANY GIVEN PATTERN. He says.

LA Police Gear had these VERTX Combat Shirts (which was the product name at the time) in Kryptek Outdoor Group Typhon on clearance a while back; something absurd like $20. Vertx are a good mid-range brand much like Leo Kohler and similarly priced to some Tru-Spec stuff, but definitely a step up in basically all departments compared to TS and I’d certainyl put them a rung above 5.11. I think they don’t get nearly the credit they deserve in terms of bringing a good few gear items to the commercial market which offer a fair bit for the money when compared to the higher end manufacturers. Certainly by comparison to the some of the clone junk that’s priced in the same mid range ballpark by distributors and retailers for no justifiable reason.

If you missed the lower half of this set from PLATATAC go ahead and rewizzle that bizzle. It’s well worth the scroll to see the combat cut trousers in Kryptek Outdoor Group Nomad.

Although they may not crop up so often these days, the P-Tac CUTS was pretty bloody popular a couple of years back and a lot of them were produced in Multicam in particular, as well as a good quantity in Mandrake, Highlander and Typhon. Not to mention a couple of the legacy Aussie patterns and the infamous SRR/Afghan sets in a weird proprietary looking pattern that I don’t even know the name of. Plus of course, a small handful of examples (possibly single digits) in Nomad, as seen here.

Interim generation Patagonia PCU Level 9 ‘Next To Skin’ combat shirt in AOR1. If you missed the post on the lower half of this set be sure to go scroll back here on the site and take a look.

I say interim as the earliest versions of this shirt had plain tan loop that fully covered the shoulder pockets, then later they manufactured the torso fabric in AOR for an entirely colour-matched end product along with the shown AOR loop sewn here. Comparing all 3 iterations against each other ‘in the flesh’ I’ve not found any differences in the cut, just the aesthetics.

Today’s post is the last bit of Crye Precision for just a little while, then I’ll be breaking it up with a few different bits and pieces. When we get back to it’ll finally just about be time for me to talk about the Generation 1 combat apparel.

An unusual thing about CP gear in the UK is that a very large proportion of it happens to be what is termed the ‘UKSF Custom’ as seen here. I’d imagine regular AC/Gen 2 stuff was issued somewhere or other within the MoD, but from what I’ve seen the beardy blokes must have ordered in an actual metric shit ton of these combat sets in multicam. Obviously they will have issued and used the majority of what was bought for themselves, then as with anything issued a certain percentage somehow seeps out in to the civilian market. But there’s so much floating around that the original quantity ordered was either monstrous, or they had a bulk disposal at some point. The latter seems unlikely though as any G3 adoption seemed to lag a fair bit behind the commercial release of the 3rd gen. Again probably because there was so much stock of 2nd gen hanging around.

Brief history on crye combats in Flecktarn and Tropentarn. During the Gen 2/AC production era, various sets were made in both patterns and issued in some numbers to German special forces units. Some were also available commercially in a roundabout fashion if you knew where to dig and e-mailed the right person at a specific German military gear supplier, but they ran out of stock many, many years ago I don’t think many were sold by that route. No field uniforms made to my knowledge. The combat shirt is the regular AC cut with no deviations but the trousers feature 2 very prominent slotted buttons CS95 style going through the main thigh cargo pockets. Something requested by the German military that’s pretty unique to the Fleck/Trop combat pants.