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.

So what happened was, for a while I thought the NYCO G3s in the AOR patterns would be impossible to get hold of, as at the time I was looking around for AOR G3s it was only the DRIFIRE pieces that that would pop up.

Theoretically, it only makes sense for me to pick up FR material items in Multicam because then it can have some application for my work. Standard NYCO holds its’ colours far better than the Drifire fabrics and is more likely to resist getting torn, so anything I’d add to the collection just for collecting sake, or for running about playing airsoft, is better off being NYCO.

However when you’re scouring ever corner of the net for items like these and trying to put together a set, it’s bloody difficult getting what you want in your actual size. Since I had the impression I’d never assemble the standard Crye NYCO sets, I snapped up the FR equivalents whenever they surfaced, and in fairness the Drifire variants have since become comparatively scarce around the classifieds, whereas the NYCOs have been in such great supply the prices have dropped down to retail G3 levels. I’m much more an AOR2 fan anyway, partly for the pure aesthetics of it, partly because greens and browns just makes far more sense in the UK overall and also because AOR1 looks so damn similar to arid MARPAT. For a long time I actually didn’t plan to add any AOR1 to the collection due to that fact alone.

For those interested, these G3 combat sets are manufactured by Crye, I’d imagine Drifire just send them the FR fabric and have CP put the Phoenix style tag on everything. I’ve not seen much information on who actually uses them, since NSW are apparently in a mixture of multicam and Patagonia AOR these days and I’ve only come across a very small number of pictures of the AOR G3 sets (FR or not). The fact so many of the NYCO items crop up for sale (usually brand new in packaging) could either mean that tons are being made and leaking out, or that loads were manufactured then just never made issued and hence disposed of.

Either way I am personally far more of a fan of the G3 cut than AC, despite the collector community always losing their minds over the discontinued styles. The addition of the stretch panel in the groin alone is a gigantic step forward in my opinion. It’ll certainly be interesting to see which colourways are made in G4 outside the usual commercial offerings that have already been shown in the Crye catalogue. Since the VTX fabric is a new venture with only Crye adopting it so far, it’s unlikely we’ll see all the random stuff like Flecktarn, US Woodland, M84 etc cropping up as happened in Gen 2 and 3. AOR fabric may well get printed I’d imagine if the right people request it, which I expect they will, but the reality is everyone is using sort-of Multicam these days. The US Army and Air Force, the UK, Germany, Australia, the list goes on. So there’s much less demand for other patterns and very slim chances that the VTX will be printed in any colourway that’s not got a proven history of being in high demand; special requests from units with deep pockets excluded that is.

This Crye Precision/DRIFIRE set right here is what I’d call the current pinnacle of the combat uniform concept for deployed personnel in arid environments. This is what every man and woman who puts on a uniform should be putting on in places like Afghanistan if they’re going outside the wire and it’s a bloody shame that isn’t the reality.

While I’ve long been a critic of the cut of the G3 combat shirt, that is very much the nit picking side of me. The Arc’teryx Assault Shirt FR is roughly level pegging overall in that is has arm pit mesh, a far more anatomical shape to the sleeves and better pockets (just like Crye G4 funnily enough), however the collar design is bonkers and I frankly despise it.

There are guys out there who’re very knowledgeable when it comes to which SF guys (especially SEALs) used what gear and when. I am not that guy. Some folks might well get the impression in the coming months that I’m building some kind of NSW kit, but personally I’ve no specific interest in them or what they do. I just like to have the best quality kit that’s available in a combat cut and it happens that not only do NSW get a lot of that made for them, they also have the AOR patterns that haven’t been used by many other folks.