British MTP: the Multi-Terrain Pattern that ended 40 years of DPM

In December 2009, the British Ministry of Defence unveiled a new camouflage pattern. It was the first change to the British combat uniform in over forty years, the result of a six-month, £250,000 urgent project for Afghanistan — and it was based on an American pattern the US Army had already turned down. This is the story of MTP, the pattern that replaced DPM, the trials behind it, and the controversies that followed it into service.

A pattern problem in Helmand

By the late 2000s, British soldiers in Afghanistan were fighting in a landscape that no single uniform could match. Helmand Province is a mosaic: open desert, the irrigated farmland of the “green zone” along the Helmand river, compounds of dust and mud, scrub and woodland. The British Army entered the theatre with two very different camouflages — the four-colour temperate DPM (Disruptive Pattern Material) worn since the late 1960s, and the two-colour Desert DPM adopted after the 1991 Gulf War. Troops switched between them depending on the area, a “mix-and-match” approach that soldiers said made units stand out, especially in the green zone.

The problem was not only practical, it was conceptual. DPM had been designed for the temperate landscapes of north-west Europe; Desert DPM was built for open arid ground. Afghanistan offered both at once, often within a single patrol. As Dstl military adviser Lieutenant Colonel Toby Evans put it in December 2009: “We’ve realised that Afghanistan is more complex — especially Helmand — than, say Iraq, which was predominantly a desert background or north-west Europe, which was predominantly green.”

Six months and £250,000

The solution was funded as an Urgent Operational Requirement (UOR) — the fast-track procurement route used for urgent operational needs. Research began about six months before the announcement, with a budget of £250,000.

The work was led by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), the Ministry of Defence’s civilian scientists, working with the MOD Defence Clothing Project Team. Dstl sent cameras to Helmand with soldiers, who took scientific photographs of the backgrounds they actually operated in. Teams at Fort Halstead in Kent and Portsdown West in Hampshire measured the colour properties of every image and identified seven major background types across the province. Those colours were fed into computer models of the green zone, desert and transition terrain, and used to generate new multi-terrain camouflage designs “based partly on the shapes and patterns of the existing UK woodland DPM”.

The result was a compressed, evidence-driven programme: computer modelling, laboratory colour analysis, and field trials with soldiers. George Philpott of Dstl stressed that this was about more than colour: “It is not just a question of colours; we looked at texture and tone of patterns, how the light reflects and how well it disguises the wearer when observed both close up and at a distance.”

The trials: ten suits, five tests, seven backgrounds

The trials were substantial for a project of this speed. Dstl and the Army’s Infantry Trials and Development Unit (ITDU) tested a range of designs in the UK, Cyprus, Kenya and Afghanistan. Ten camouflage suits went through five separate tests, with pilot trials before the main programme.

In the UK, live observer trials were run at Stanford Training Area in Norfolk and RAF Donna Nook in Lincolnshire — chosen because their colours and backgrounds resembled Helmand — with military observers judging the suits at 50, 100 and 150 metres, including night-time low-light assessments. At Catterick Garrison, large numbers of soldiers took part in three further trials: ranking close-up images of the suits against the seven Afghan backgrounds; a computer-based “time to detect” test; and a personal-preference exercise in which soldiers picked their favourite three patterns and the ones they would not want to wear. A statistical assessment used a computer model of how camouflaged objects are detected, testing each suit’s match to the seven backgrounds.

The baseline designs were the two in-service uniforms — Woodland DPM and Desert DPM — plus an off-the-shelf commercial pattern from the American company Crye Precision: MultiCam.

The results were unambiguous. “The results showed the Crye Precision Multicam performed the best, on average, across all the trials,” Dstl reported. MultiCam won not by excelling in any single terrain, but by being the best compromise across all of them — which is precisely what the operational problem demanded.

The pattern that was never tested

Here the story takes an interesting turn. The final British pattern was not MultiCam itself, but a new hybrid: MTP, the Multi-Terrain Pattern. Crye Precision designed it for the MOD, using MultiCam’s colour palette but with shapes closer to the traditional British DPM. The MOD held the licence to print the pattern and secured intellectual property rights over it. The design was later registered as a US design patent.

Contemporary reporting noted a striking detail: the MTP pattern itself was not run through the comparative trials — its adoption rested on its similarity to MultiCam, which had been tested and had won. The Dstl record is more nuanced: the trial set included ten suits, among them new multi-terrain designs generated partly from DPM shapes, and the press release describing the final result stressed that the chosen look kept “a pattern that is similar to the current woodland DPM”, partly so that soldiers could be easily identified. So MTP’s family of designs was trialled, but the pattern as finally produced — a synthesis of the two winners, MultiCam’s colours and DPM-like forms — was selected by design logic and similarity rather than by its own head-to-head trial score.

In other words, the British Army bought a pattern it had effectively designed around a test result, not a pattern that had itself been tested. It was, in the words of Lt Col Toby Evans, a deliberate compromise: “It may not be quite perfect, but it’s good enough for everything.”

What MTP actually is

MTP is frequently described as “just MultiCam”, but that is not quite right. The official print specification comprises seven colours — Pincroft, the British textile company licensed to print MTP for the MOD, lists cream, khaki, light green, green, light brown, mid brown and dark brown. The exact shades were not publicly released by the MOD, which made no secret of wanting to make the pattern hard to reproduce.

What distinguishes MTP from MultiCam is the structure of the shapes. MultiCam is built around small, elongated “twiglet”-style elements; MTP uses larger, rounder disruptive shapes closer to British DPM, with MultiCam-family colours. Pincroft’s colourist notes that MTP “was one of the first camouflage designs to incorporate tone work” — subtle tonal variation within colour areas that helps the pattern blend at different distances.

MTP fabric also has to meet a demanding technical standard: UK/SC/6600, which covers colour fastness, physical performance and IRR — infrared reflectance, the property that reduces visibility under night vision. Pincroft prints MTP on a wide range of materials, from 1000D and 500D nylon for equipment to Nomex for aircrew and cotton/NYCO blends for clothing.

Rollout: from 4 Mechanised Brigade to the whole force

The new uniform was unveiled on 20 December 2009. The MOD’s announcement framed it as the first change to the British camouflage pattern since 1968. Troops of 4 Mechanised Brigade, deploying to Afghanistan in March 2010, were the first to be issued MTP; from 2011 it was introduced across all three services. British personnel in Afghanistan began wearing it in April 2010.

The rollout then became part of a wider change of clothing. In February 2011 the MOD announced the Personal Clothing System (PCS), replacing the Combat Soldier 95 (CS95) system that had served since the mid-1990s. PCS included a new combat uniform, ancillary items and waterproofs — all camouflage items in MTP. Issue began in 2011, with new recruits from October 2011 and the changeover complete for most personnel by April 2013. The initial 2009 plan had been for the whole army to be in MTP by 2011, and an official 2010 release said it would be issued to all military personnel by 2012; in practice the full PCS rollout ran into 2013.

Both legacy patterns were eventually withdrawn: Woodland DPM and Desert DPM, including the Soldier 95 variants, were fully replaced by MTP by 2013.

There is a pleasing irony in the transatlantic history. The Telegraph’s coverage of the 2009 announcement was headlined “British Army to get new uniforms — turned down by the US and made in China”. The US Army had rejected MultiCam in 2004 in favour of its universal UCP pattern — a decision it later came to regret — and in February 2010, weeks after Britain’s announcement, the US Department of Defense selected MultiCam as the Operation Enduring Freedom Camouflage Pattern for troops in Afghanistan. A senior British officer claimed some credit: “We have presented the new designs to the US Department of Defense and, following our recommendations, the US Army are about to adopt the same technology for their uniform in Afghanistan.” The pattern the US had turned down in 2004, Britain had adopted in 2009, and the US then adopted in 2010.

The “made in China” line was also real: the Telegraph reported that the initial MTP kit was to be produced by a Northern Irish company but manufactured in China, part of a broader debate about the UK’s shrinking domestic garment industry.

Strengths, limits and criticism

Inside the MOD, MTP’s official position was stated plainly in the 2011 PCS announcement: it is the best-performing camouflage across the widest range of environments, while being “only marginally less effective than Woodland and Desert DPM in those areas” where those specialised patterns excel. In other words, the compromise was explicit — MTP would never be the best in any single terrain, only the least bad everywhere.

That trade-off has attracted criticism, mainly about dense woodland. Specialist camouflage testers have noted that MTP is “commonly a little too light in many natural terrains”, particularly in deciduous woodland in winter, where its sandy palette stands out against dark trunks and leaf litter. Field-test videos by enthusiasts reach similar conclusions: MTP performs well in arid and semi-arid scrub, and less well in dark forest. These are community and specialist assessments rather than official findings — the MOD’s trials optimised MTP for Afghanistan’s seven background types, not for the forests of north-west Europe — but they match the design logic: a pattern optimised for compromise will underperform specialists at the extremes.

Soldiers who wore it in Helmand, by contrast, were broadly positive. Sergeant Luke Cunningham of the Royal Dragoon Guards, who had deployed in 2008 in the old kit, said of MTP: “It’s definitely better for the conditions we face in the Green Zone of Helmand. It’s more comfortable and it is superior in terms of the operations we’re undertaking.”

Beyond the UK: MTP around the world

MTP has travelled well beyond Britain. Because the MOD controls the pattern tightly, its spread is a mix of licensed adoption, defence co-operation and surplus.

• New Zealand — The clearest success: in 2019 the New Zealand Defence Force selected a modified MTP variant, NZMTP, with a colour palette adjusted for New Zealand’s landscapes, to replace its New Zealand MCU pattern across all services.
• Malta — The Armed Forces of Malta adopted MTP as its standard uniform from 2014.
• Ukraine — British-donated and surplus MTP has been photographed on Ukrainian soldiers since the 2014 Donbas conflict, and UK military aid packages have continued to include clothing, including a winter package announced in November 2023.
• Bahrain — Bahraini special forces commandos have been reported in MTP.
• UK overseas territories — Units such as the Royal Bermuda Regiment, the Cayman Islands Regiment and the Falkland Islands Defence Force use MTP, as do the UK cadet forces.
• Reported, less certain — Pakistan’s Special Service Group (reported via official video), Denmark’s Frogman Corps (reported in TV documentaries) and Tonga’s armed forces have all been linked to MTP use, but documentation is thinner.

It is worth flagging the confidence levels here: the New Zealand, Malta, Ukraine and territories cases are well documented; the Pakistan, Denmark and Tonga cases rest on thinner or community evidence.

What came after

MTP is still the standard combat camouflage of the British Army, Royal Air Force and Royal Navy as of 2026 — the Army’s own equipment pages still describe MTP combat clothing as current. But the first crack in the monolith appeared in June 2020, when the Royal Marines announced they would leave MTP behind as part of the Future Commando Programme, adopting Crye Precision’s off-the-shelf G4 system in MultiCam. A detail explains why: Crye had sold the sole production rights for MTP to the UK, so the G4 was not available in MTP. The Marines, in effect, went back to the pattern MTP was derived from.

No replacement for the Army’s MTP has been announced. For now, the compromise pattern of 2009 remains the most widely seen British camouflage of the 21st century.

MTP in the MegaCamo catalogue

At MegaCamo, the MTP family is part of the catalogue: the UK MTP sports mesh T-shirt, the Arctic and Tropical MTP variants, the New Zealand MTP and Oman MTP tees are all made to order in MTP-style prints.

Conclusion

MTP is a study in what a camouflage pattern is actually for. It was not designed to be the best in any environment — it was designed to stop being wrong, everywhere, at once. Born from a six-month urgent programme for Helmand, it replaced a pattern that had served Britain for over forty years, was based on an American design the US had initially rejected, was never itself put through the trials that justified its adoption, and then quietly became the standard camouflage of a generation, worn from the green zone of Helmand to the forests of New Zealand and the front lines of Ukraine.

That is not a story of a perfect pattern. It is the story of a deliberate compromise that worked well enough to change the British military’s identity — and, briefly, the US Army’s too.

Sources

• Emery, D., “British Army to get new camouflage uniform”, BBC News, 20 December 2009 — http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8422942.stm
• “New Afghanistan camouflage design unveiled”, Ministry of Defence Defence News, 21 December 2009 (archived) — http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20121026065214/http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/DefenceNews/EquipmentAndLogistics/NewAfghanistanCamouflageDesignUnveiled.htm
• “Testing the new Multi-Terrain Camouflage”, Dstl press release, 20 December 2009 (archived PDF) — http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110405152054/http://www.dstl.gov.uk/news_events/press/pr2009/camouflage%20FINAL.pdf
• Copping, J., “British Army to get new uniforms – turned down by the US and made in China”, The Daily Telegraph, 20 December 2009 — https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/onthefrontline/6844734/British-Army-to-get-new-uniforms-turned-down-by-the-US-and-made-in-China.html
• “Multi-Terrain Pattern”, Wikipedia (orientation source; primary references cited within) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-Terrain_Pattern
• US design patent D659,406 S for Multi-Terrain Pattern (USPTO)
• “A guide to Multi Terrain Pattern and how we produce it”, Pincroft, December 2020 — https://pincroft.co.uk/2020/12/22/what-is-multi-terrain-pattern/
• “New camouflage arrives in Afghanistan”, GOV.UK / MOD, 21 May 2010 — https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-camouflage-arrives-in-afghanistan
• “Introduction of Personal Clothing System”, MOD announcement reproduced by Soldier Systems Daily, 8 February 2011 — http://soldiersystems.net/2011/02/08/introduction-of-personal-clothing-system/
• “Operation Enduring Freedom Camouflage Pattern” (OEF-CP), CIE Hub — https://ciehub.info/glossary/OEF-CP.html
• “Testing Camouflage”, camouflagepatterns.wordpress.com (specialist community testing) — https://camouflagepatterns.wordpress.com/testing-camouflage/
• Field tests of MTP in woodland, YouTube (anecdotal, e.g. “British Multi-Terrain Pattern Effectiveness”)
• “Army”, Army News No. 503, New Zealand Army, June 2019 — http://army.mil.nz/downloads/pdf/army-news/armynews503.pdf
• “New Combat Uniform for Armed Forces of Malta”, Combat & Survival, 1 August 2014 (archived)
• Photograph of Ukrainian soldier in British MTP, Sloviansk, July 2014 (Commons, CC BY 3.0) — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2014-07-09._Славянск_24.jpg
• “UK MoD Provides Helmets, Clothing, and Armor to Ukraine’s Armed Forces”, Militarnyi, 13 November 2023 — https://militarnyi.com/en/news/uk-mod-provides-helmets-clothing-and-armor-to-ukraine-s-armed-forces/
• “Bahrain Defence Force ~ Camo Special”, Joint Forces News, 30 October 2019 — https://www.joint-forces.com/features/kit-camo/27355-bahrain-defence-force-camo-special
• “Personal Clothing”, British Army (army.mod.uk), accessed August 2026 — https://www.army.mod.uk/learn-and-explore/equipment/personal-equipment/personal-clothing/
• “New commando uniform for Royal Marines”, Royal Navy, 27 June 2020 — https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news-and-latest-activity/news/2020/june/27/200626-royal-marines-new-uniform
• “Royal Marines Commandos Go MultiCam”, Joint Forces News, 26 June 2020 — https://www.joint-forces.com/features/kit-camo/33675-royal-marines-commandos-go-multicam
• MegaCamo MTP products — https://megacamo.com/shop/men/tee-shirts-men/uk-mtp-camouflage-sports-mesh-t-shirt-xs-to-5xl/ (and related MTP items in the catalogue)