Slovak vz 2007 “Kocky” and vz 25: The Cube Pattern and Its Successor

Two Slovak Patterns, One Decade Apart

In December 2025 the Slovak Ministry of Defence presented a new combat uniform for the professional armed forces, designated Personal Clothing System – Combat Uniform (PCS-CU), also called the M25 Combat Uniform. The pattern inside that uniform is what most readers will have seen first in press photographs: soft, irregular, organic shapes in browns and greens, with no straight edges visible at all.

The pattern it is meant to replace is the opposite kind of surface. Since 2007 Slovak soldiers have worn a print built from quadrilaterals, blocks, patches, stretched rectangles, on an olive-green field, a family of patterns that soldiers, collectors and journalists almost always call Kocky: “cubes”. The nickname is memorable and slightly wrong, and the gap between the nickname and the actual print is what makes the subject worth examining. A pattern that is habitually described as cubic contains, on inspection, relatively few true cubes, and it became the standard national print of a small NATO member’s army, was worn on exercises in Latvia, Germany and Slovakia, on operations in Afghanistan, and on a long-running United Nations mission in Cyprus.

This is a history of two patterns and the years that separate them: the blocky print adopted from 2007, its desert variant, and the design the Ministry of Defence intends to replace it with. It is written around what the record contains, so it leans on descriptions that can be checked against photographs rather than on the tidy origin story in circulation.

What the 2007 Patterns Replaced

Slovak camouflage did not begin in 2007. When Czechoslovakia split on 1 January 1993, Slovak units inherited Czechoslovak clothing and the patterns that went with it, and for more than a decade the Slovak army’s field clothing was a mixture of inherited and locally produced prints.

The oldest of the relevant prints is the vz 85, a variant of the American ERDL pattern of 1948 executed in different colours. According to Camopedia’s country entry for Slovakia, it was worn by Slovak personnel around 1992–1994, and a version printed on heavier cloth was produced by Slovak mills after the split and used almost exclusively by the 5th Special Forces Regiment. That heavier version appears to have carried no official designation of its own, which is why it circulates under several labels at once, vz 85 PV, vz. 92, and “Slovak vz. 95”, none of which the surviving record establishes as official.

Alongside it came the Czech vz 95 “leaf” pattern, worn from around 1995 and retained for a while by the 5th Special Forces Group in Žilina before becoming obsolete, and the Slovak vz 97 woodland, introduced in 1995 and gradually taking over from the leaf print. The vz 97 has an official designation and a specific appearance: black, brown and foliage-green shapes over a khaki ground, laid out differently from the widely copied US M81 woodland. Collectors often call it “bright woodland”; the collector name is not the official one. A Slovak desert pattern also dates from 1995, described by Camopedia as a copy of the 1985 Czech desert pattern with slightly different colouring.

The change of 2007 replaced the Slovak equivalents of the Czechoslovak vz 95 and vz 85 patterns. Two new patterns were introduced together: vz 2007 Les for temperate terrain and vz 2007 Púšť for desert and arid ground. No published account gives a precise first-issue date for either, which is why the safe formulation throughout is “from 2007”.

A photograph dated 2011 shows a Slovak soldier in the opposing force role wearing the new uniform, rifle in hand. Four years after its introduction the print was already being worn in the field, which is what a transition looks like from the inside of an army.

Anatomy of a Block: Why “Cubes” Overstates the Case

The fullest short description of the temperate pattern in the sources is Camopedia’s: square and rectangular shapes in brown, dark green and khaki, in various sizes, on an olive-green field, for the forest (Les) variant. Slovak press coverage of the 2025 replacement described the outgoing print in the same terms when reporting that the new uniform “completely detaches itself from the pixel pattern of the predecessor”.

The most concrete technical reading of the family comes from the camouflage journalist Bob Morrison, writing in Joint Forces about the desert variant. His observation is that the Slovak shapes are larger than those of most contemporary digital patterns, and that the family is built not only from squares of different sizes but also from rectangles, some of them long and thin. On that basis he argues it is inaccurate to describe the pattern as purely cubic. He makes the point by comparison with another digital desert print of the period, the Kuwaiti pattern of 2006, noting that the Slovak forms are considerably larger and that the Slovak desert design runs to three colours where the Kuwaiti print runs to four.

That argument is an expert interpretation, not a measurement, and is presented as such. It also applies directly to the desert variant in the source, while the blocks visible on the temperate pattern in the photographs of it, oversized plates on jackets, stretched bars running across shoulders and trouser legs, small chips of colour wedged between larger shapes, are consistent with the same quadrilateral architecture rather than with a uniform grid of equal squares. Nothing in the published record gives a block size in millimetres or a stated repeat dimension for either 2007 pattern.

No studio swatch of the pattern is in the public record; the available references are field photographs. It shows the property that breaks the “cube” nickname, quadrilaterals of at least three orders of size, near-squares mixed with elongated rectangles, over an olive-green ground that is itself a colour in the scheme rather than empty space.

The Les Pattern in Service

A blocky print of this kind poses an obvious question: how does it read at the distances where camouflage is supposed to work? The available photographs, all from official US Army, US National Guard and US Army Europe files, give partial answers rather than measurements.

In May 2023, during Exercise Combined Resolve 18 at Hohenfels Training Area in Germany, Slovak soldiers of the 22nd Mechanized Infantry Battalion were photographed in the Les print in woodland: one patrolling on foot with jacket, trousers, helmet cover and load-bearing equipment all cut from the same print, another pair working around an anti-armour launcher. The print is easier to test where a garment fills the frame: blocks that look geometric in a close-up read as broken patches at a distance, and the olive ground merges with the mid-tones of the undergrowth while the dark blocks break the line of the shoulder and the arm.

Formation-scale photographs add a second kind of information. At the opening ceremony of Exercise Slovak Shield 2018 at the Lešť Military Training Centre, a group of Slovak soldiers was photographed in the Les print with matching helmet covers: the same print on every figure in the frame, which is what a national standard looks like rather than a unit-level variant. By 2018 the blocky print was the uniform of an army on its own training ground.

The Púšť Variant: Three Colours for Arid Ground

Slovakia introduced two patterns in 2007, and the desert one has been described in two slightly different ways that are worth keeping apart rather than merging.

Camopedia describes vz 2007 Púšť as khaki and medium brown shapes on a background of a sand tone with a slight pink hue. Bob Morrison, writing about a photograph of the pattern in Cyprus, describes it as a three-colour design: a light stone base carrying light green and reddish-brown blocks. The two descriptions agree on the architecture, on a pale ground and on a brown component, and they diverge on the secondary hues, Camopedia’s khaki against Morrison’s light green. Both values are reported, because both were published by sources with direct access to the garment and neither can be shown to be wrong on the sample the other saw.

Morrison’s judgement of the pattern in use is a working assessment rather than a test result. The pinkish ground, he notes, suits arid environments and turns greyish at distance in urban ones; he rated the print effective in the Cypriot summer, though less so than MultiCam in spring. That is one observer’s view of one island in one season, and it is not generalised here into a verdict on the pattern.

Cyprus, 2014: Kocky on a UN Mission

The desert variant’s most fully documented public appearance is not in a desert at all, but on a divided island in the eastern Mediterranean. In 2014 a member of the Slovak contingent of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, SLOVCON, was photographed on the island wearing vz.2007 Púšť. The soldier belonged to the mission’s Mobile Force Reserve, and the Slovak contingent was responsible for Sector 4 of the buffer zone. Ten Slovaks were serving within the Mobile Force Reserve at the time of the mission’s 50th anniversary.

The same source explains the small typographic detail in the name: in Slovak military usage, “vz.” is short for verze, version, so vz 2007 Les and vz 2007 Púšť are “version 2007, forest” and “version 2007, desert”, designations of a model year, not proper names invented for collectors.

No photograph of the Púšť pattern is documented in the free record.

Why the Blocky Print Was Retired

The reasons Slovak officials gave in December 2025 for changing the pattern are the clearest official statement in the record about what was judged wrong with the print introduced in 2007, and they are worth reading closely because they are claims about function rather than taste.

According to reporting of the ministry’s press conference carried by the Austrian defence outlet Militär Aktuell, the Chief of the General Staff, General Daniel Zmeko, said that the new pattern detaches itself completely from the pixel pattern of its predecessor, vzor 2007 Les. The same reporting states that the 2007 print, often shortened simply to “digital”, was no longer considered contemporary, and that a pixel pattern built from brown, dark green and khaki forms no longer met the requirements for breaking up a soldier’s silhouette and reducing visibility. Those are reported words attributed to the Chief of the General Staff, not the results of a published trial, and no test data comparing the two patterns has been located.

Zmeko also framed the change in terms of soldier experience, saying the new uniform was based on personal experience during training and on lessons from ongoing conflicts, and that an important function of a uniform is enabling soldiers to survive in the field in the long term, a function he said the previous uniform could not deliver. The quotation is a translation of a reported statement and is evidence of the official rationale for the change, nothing more.

Whatever officials meant by the pattern no longer being contemporary in 2025, it was still the working uniform of Slovak mechanised infantry on a NATO exercise two years earlier.

vz. 25: The Design That Replaces It

The replacement was presented at the Ministry of Defence in Bratislava in December 2025 by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, Robert Kaliňák, and the Chief of the General Staff, General Daniel Zmeko, at a joint press conference. The ministry’s own English-language announcement names the system Personal Clothing System – Combat Uniform, abbreviated PCS-CU, and also refers to an M25 Combat Uniform; Slovak and international press write “Vzor 25” or vz 25.

The date deserves a note because the primary document contradicts itself. The ministry’s English text refers to a presentation on Friday 9 December 2025, but 9 December 2025 was a Tuesday; the page itself is dated 18 December 2025; and Slovak coverage dates the event to 12 December 2025, which was a Friday. The discrepancy is recorded here rather than smoothed over, and the article therefore uses “in December 2025” whenever the month is sufficient.

The pattern was developed by the Armed Forces Academy in Liptovský Mikuláš, named after General Milan Rastislav Štefánik, in cooperation with the General Staff. That is the only attribution of authorship the sources support, and it names an institution rather than a person: no individual is credited with the design in any published source, for the 2025 pattern or for the print it replaces.

Two points of discipline belong here. First, the ministry presents the new uniform as the intended replacement for the digital camouflage adopted in 2007, and Slovak reporting in March 2026 describes deliveries still under way: the pattern has not been fully fielded, so the succession is still under way rather than completed. Second, the naming is unsettled: PCS-CU is the official system name, M25 and vz 25 are shorter forms in circulation, and no published source states that “vz 25” has been formally gazetted as a designation.

Colours Kept, Shapes Abandoned

What changed between the two patterns is easier to state than what stayed. On shape, both the ministry’s own framing and specialist description agree that the new print abandons the pixel construction and returns to organic, disruptive forms of the kind that dominated camouflage design before the digital wave, the same broad direction taken by the MultiCam family and its many relatives.

On colour, the new pattern retains the palette associated with vz 2007 Les: brown, dark green, light green and khaki are the base colours identified in reporting of the presentation. Camopedia’s entry adds a detail on top of that, stating that the new design keeps essentially the palette of the 2007 forest pattern with one additional shade of olive green. The additional shade is Camopedia’s observation and is presented as such, not as a ministry specification.

The most tempting and least supportable comparison is with MultiCam itself. Camopedia’s characterisation is that the resemblance is rudimentary and that the forms do not appear to have been directly copied. That is a specialist assessment of similarity, not a finding of derivation, and it is the strongest statement the sources justify. Nothing in the available record establishes a lineage between the Slovak pattern and any specific commercial design, and no manufacturer or designer is named in connection with it. The honest formulation is one of design relation rather than repeat identity: the new Slovak print sits in the same broad family as other contemporary multi-environment patterns, and the documentary record does not go further.

What can be said with confidence is that the Slovak case runs against the usual digital transition story: a blocky pixel-family print adopted from 2007, kept for close to two decades across two variants and several theatres, then retired in favour of organic shapes.

Fabrics, Cost and Scale

A pattern is a design decision; a uniform is an industrial one, and the ministry’s announcement is specific about how the two meet. Every component of the new system comes from companies in what the ministry calls the SVK Defence Supply Chain, and several variants are produced, including a flame-retardant version. The fabric is bought abroad, while cutting and finishing are commissioned from Slovak firms. Slovak reporting adds that the state holds the design of the pattern, press information, reported in the context of the domestic supplier reaction to the announcement.

Pricing is given at the level of the base set: roughly 300 euros for jacket, field trousers and cap, according to reporting of the presentation, with up to sixteen further items added according to the operational environment. That structure is the point of the system’s name: a “personal clothing system” is assembled per soldier and per task rather than issued as a fixed bundle, which is why the number of possible items is larger than the number worn at any one time.

Delivery is phased: the ministry states that the first deliveries are due in 2026 and the last in 2028, and the minister said during the presentation that all soldiers would receive the new uniforms during 2026. Slovak reporting in March 2026 describes deliveries arriving weekly from December 2025, which is consistent with a dotation in progress rather than a completed one. The same reporting says new ballistic vests should reach all combat units by the end of 2026 and the rest in 2027, single-source press information.

The Wider Programme: Vest, Helmet, Optics and Rifles

The uniform was not presented alone: the same announcement covers a new personal ballistic protection system, a new combat helmet and a night vision device, with reporting describing a lighter ballistic vest than the equipment previously in service. Clothing, armour and optics form one programme, which is worth noting because press coverage tends to split the uniform story from the small-arms story even though both were announced together.

The ministry names the Grand Power M4M1 as the future standard assault rifle. The naming is not consistent across sources, the ministry writes M4M1, specialist press writes M4M, and each form is used where the term is attributed to its source. In 5.56 × 45 mm and derived from the AR-15 family, the rifle is listed as the standard infantry weapon, with the GP R10 in 7,62 × 51 mm for precision work, the Stribog SP9 A3 in 9 × 19 mm for armoured vehicle crews, military police and special forces, and Grand Power pistols including the K100, designated KV-1, and the compact Q1.

The figures around the rifle programme need careful handling because three different numbers measure three different things. Reporting of the press conference gives a unit price of about 1,190 euros for the M4M, excluding accessories and without magazines, with slings, eight magazines per weapon, bayonets and sound moderators charged separately. The initial cost-effectiveness calculation was based on a requirement of about 21,000 weapons at roughly 7,600 euros each, a planning assumption, not a contract volume. Slovak reporting later refers to a volume of about 23,000 M4M rifles. The three figures are reported separately and not added together, because they are not components of one total.

Specialist press reporting attributes to the minister a figure of about 82 million euros for the rearmament programme, with deliveries running to 2028, and repeats the ministry’s line that the last tranche will serve as a strategic reserve, with obsolete vz. 58 rifles stored for the war force and a total stock of about 45,000 rifles, attributed figures throughout. Slovak press has also reported that investigative journalists raised questions about the minister’s earlier business links with Grand Power, and that Kaliňák rejected any conflict of interest, saying the cooperation concerned had ended before the selection procedure. Both the allegation and the response are reported; neither is presented as established.

What the Naming Tells You

Slovak pattern names reward a moment of attention, because three different registers are in play at once in every article written about them.

The first register is official: vz 2007 Les and vz 2007 Púšť are the designations of the two patterns introduced from 2007, and for the current programme the official system name is Personal Clothing System – Combat Uniform, or PCS-CU. The second is informal and far more successful in public usage: Kocky, “cubes”, a nickname Camopedia states is unofficial and that has attached itself to the forest pattern in particular. The third is journalistic shorthand, in which the same print becomes simply “the digital pattern” and the new one “the new camouflage”, accurate enough in a news story, and nearly useless for identifying a garment.

The Kocky nickname also has a small ambiguity worth recording, since it explains why collectors occasionally talk past each other. Camopedia applies the nickname to the forest pattern, vz 2007 Les. Joint Forces, discussing a desert-pattern photograph, notes that the print is sometimes nicknamed Kocky while being officially designated vz.2007 Púšť. Both usages exist in print. The nickname describes a visual impression and is not a designation, which is exactly why it has never been pinned to one variant.

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