British DPM: The 50-Year Camouflage That Dressed the British Army — and the Four-Colour Desert DPM It Never Wore

For close to half a century, one camouflage dressed the British soldier. Disruptive Pattern Material — DPM — is the four-colour pattern that clothed the British Army through the Cold War, the Falklands, Northern Ireland and the Gulf, and its desert twin became one of the most widely copied camouflage patterns in the world. This is the story of both: the temperate woodlands pattern, and the desert DPM its own army never wore on operations.

What DPM actually is

DPM stands for Disruptive Pattern Material. It is a four-colour camouflage built from soft-edged, overlapping shapes — black, dark brown, mid green and dark sand — printed on a light background. It is designed for the temperate landscapes of north-west Europe: the broken woodland, hedgerows and light scrub where the British Army expected to fight.

The important thing to say up front is that DPM is not a brushed-up version of the earlier British brushstroke camouflage. It is an original pattern in its own right, developed in the early 1960s. Its family resemblance to the Denison smock that came before it is real — they are both British and both disruptive — but no source establishes a direct graphic line from one to the other. What is documented is continuity of tradition: Britain had been printing disruptive camouflage since the 1930s, and DPM is the direct descendant of that school, not a redraw of the Denison.

Before DPM: the brushstroke years

To understand DPM you have to look at the camouflage it replaced, because Britain was a pioneer of disruptive pattern long before the Second World War. The 1930s anti-gas cape used a disruptive print; the 1941–42 Denison smock clothed British airborne troops in a distinctive brushstroke pattern — broad, partly opaque strokes of bluey-grey-green and dark brown over a khaki base; the 1942 Windproof smock and the SOE operating suits used similar brushstroke designs.

These were not DPM. They were a separate branch of the camouflage tree — the brushstroke tradition that survives today in the Rhodesian pattern and its descendants. When the Denison smock was finally retired in the 1970s — its last version being the 1959 pattern, handed over to the DPM combat smock from about 1977 — the British Army did not refine the brushstroke. It built something new. That new thing was DPM.

The 1960s: a new pattern, a debated date

The history of DPM begins quietly. The British Ministry of Defence developed the pattern at the start of the 1960s, and no individual designer has ever been publicly credited — the standard account is that it was a departmental development. The Pattern 1960 Combat Dress — an olive cut — existed from 1960, and it was this cut that was first produced in the new disruptive cloth.

Here the dating gets genuinely murky, and it is worth being honest about it. Different authoritative sources disagree:

• The National Army Museum places the universal introduction of the Pattern 1968 uniform — and describes the British Army as “the first force to universally adopt a camouflage uniform”.
• The Imperial War Museum, in the label to an object it holds, states that DPM “was not produced until 1968 (issued in 1969)”, and was first made in the “1960 pattern” cut — hence “1960 pattern DPM Combat Dress”.
• The collector blog Tales from the Supply Depot dates the first universal DPM uniform to 1966, with uniform contracts placed that year.

The most defensible version of events, and the one this article adopts, is: the pattern was developed in the very early 1960s; the first DPM uniforms appeared around 1966-68; and full generalisation came with the Pattern 1968, issued from 1969. That 1966-1969 “band”, rather than any single year, is the honest answer to the question “when did DPM begin?”. The 1960-pattern DPM garments are rare collectors’ items.

The four-colour formula and its evolutions

For thirty years the temperate pattern stayed recognisably itself, but it was never static. It went through several distinct generations, and collectors tell them apart by colour, cloth and cut:

• 1960 pattern — rare; the DPM-bearing early uniforms.
• Pattern 1968 — the general issue that followed.
• Late 1970s darkening — the dark sand and brown were darkened, because the light ground became too visible under night illumination.
• Pattern 84 (P84, 1984/85) — new colours with a darker brown, but an unpopular uniform (the pockets sagged).
• Pattern 92 (1992) — an intermediate issue, pre-dyed tan so the whole garment sat in the tan range.
• Soldier 95 (CS95, 1995) — the biggest change: one system for all environments, with a ventilated smock, shirt and light trousers. The cloth is woven sand and overprinted with three colours, which loses contrast with washing. This is the DPM most people remember.

Desert DPM: the pattern Britain never wore

DPM’s other life — the desert version — is the more surprising story. In the late 1980s, the British developed a four-colour desert DPM. The twist is that the British Army never wore it on operations. It was instead sold to Iraq and adopted by Gulf states such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Then came the 1990-91 Gulf crisis. Britain’s own troops were about to fight in a desert alongside armies that were wearing the four-colour desert DPM. To avoid any risk of blue-on-blue confusion — of British soldiers being mistaken for Iraqi or Gulf-state troops at a distance — the British adopted a two-colour desert DPM in 1990-91: dark brown disruptive shapes on a sand ground. This was the No. 5 Desert Combat Dress.

The two-colour desert DPM was produced in several series: a “dense” first issue in 1991, a “sparse” second issue later that year, and then 1994, Soldier 95 and Soldier 2000 versions. It remained the British desert standard until the Multi-Terrain Pattern replaced it in 2010.

It is a small, telling irony: the temperate DPM and its desert twin were produced by the same design culture, but the desert DPM that the British soldier actually wore was the simpler two-colour one — and the four-colour desert DPM that was copied around the world its own army never wore on operations.

In the field: the Falklands, Northern Ireland and beyond

DPM was the dress of the British soldier for almost five decades, and it was worn on the operations that defined modern Britain. British troops wore temperate DPM during The Troubles in Northern Ireland. In 1982, soldiers — including the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards on Mount Tumbledown — fought in DPM during the Falklands War. The desert variant in its four-colour form went to the Middle East; the two-colour form was worn in the Gulf.

It was also a superb export. Because DPM is a reliably effective temperate woodland pattern, it became one of the most imitated camouflage designs in history, adopted — officially or in local copy — by dozens of armed forces and police forces: New Zealand, the Netherlands, Portugal, Indonesia, the Philippines, Iraq, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Oman, Cambodia and many more. DPM-family patterns were even produced in grey, urban and even blue-purple versions for opponent-forces (OPFOR) roles. Some of these foreign adaptations — Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Vanuatu, Georgia and others — rest on thinner or unconfirmed documentation, and we flag them as such rather than asserting a definitive list.

What DPM did next matters for the story’s ending. In the mid-2000s the British programme PECOC tested around twenty candidate patterns (including a hybrid DPM) as the Army searched for a successor. Then the urgent operational need in Afghanistan changed everything: the environment was neither pure temperate woodland nor pure desert — Helmand was both at once — and DPM, however good in the woods, was wrong for it.

The end of DPM: MTP and the Multi-Terrain transition

In December 2009 the British Ministry of Defence unveiled the Multi-Terrain Pattern (MTP) — the first change to the British camouflage in nearly forty years. The design drew on the MultiCam palette from Crye Precision (which won the comparative trials) but kept shapes closer to DPM, and the MOD held the print licence. MTP was issued in Afghanistan from 2010, generalised from 2011, and by around 2013 the PCS (Personal Clothing System) rollout had replaced both the temperate and desert DPM. The phase-out of the remaining DPM stock targeted 2016.

This article covers DPM, not MTP — the full story of the Multi-Terrain Pattern, its trials and its controversies, is told in our separate British MTP article. What matters here is what that change meant: the end of a fifty-year era. Because the MOD controls MTP tightly, DPM did not vanish from the world — it lives on in the enormous number of foreign copies and adaptations, and in the military-surplus and collector markets.

Why DPM still matters

DPM matters for three reasons that outlast its service life.

First, it was one of the most influential camouflage patterns ever printed, establishing the four-colour disruptive formula that dozens of armies copied. It is the ancestor of a whole family of patterns you can still buy today.

Second, it is a case study in honest dating. A pattern that everybody “knows” began in one year actually has a documented range of accounts — 1966, 1968 or 1969 — because the sources genuinely disagree. Being able to say that, rather than flattening it into a single confident date, is what a reliable history looks like.

Third, the desert DPM is a reminder that camouflage design is about more than hiding. Britain deliberately chose the weaker two-colour desert pattern over the four-colour one it had built, not because two colours were better in the sand, but to avoid looking like its enemies and its allies on the same battlefield. Identification, not concealment, drove that decision.

DPM in the MegaCamo catalogue

DPM’s reach is exactly why the pattern is still so present in the modern clothing world. At MegaCamo the DPM family and its many adaptations live on across the catalogue, made to order in a range of cuts. A few from the family:

• Irish DPM v1 camouflage cargo shorts
• Iraqi DPM v1 quilted bomber jacket
• Indonesian DPM quilted bomber jacket
• Dutch DPM v1 quilted bomber jacket

Browse the full MegaCamo camouflage list, the wider camouflage collection, or the pattern’s brushstroke relative in our Rhodesian Brushstroke article.