FOA camouflage

The forerunner of the M90 uniform pattern was a vehicle camouflage known as the FOA camouflage, in reference to the military research institute that developed it.

The Swedish government had decided in the 1960s to fund and develop a domestic camouflage design, instead of copying a pattern used by another nation. This was in part to guarantee maximum effectiveness in Swedish terrain, but also to ensure that the Swedish Armed Forces would use a recognizably Swedish design. The intent was to establish the new pattern as national symbol, in the hope that it could be helpful in making citizens identify with the armed forces.^[1]

Work on the vehicle camouflage pattern was carried out in the 1970s by FOA scientists through a process of extensive testing and experimentation, including aerial photography missions and field trials. When the pattern was rolled out in the 1970s, it became known as "FOA camouflage," reflecting its origin.

Early use of the FOA camouflage on Swedish aircraft, especially the AJ-37 Viggen, also led to it being referred to as Viggenkamouflage. Swedish military doctrine at the time assumed a defensive war against the superior forces of the Soviet Union, which made it too risky for jets to remain on their peacetime bases. Instead, they would be dispersed across small rural landing strips and pre-positioned depots where they could be serviced by mobile teams, which required a camouflage designed for hiding in forested locations.

M90 Uniform Camouflage

For the ordinary soldier, Sweden retained its old single-colored field uniforms, the dark olive green M59 (summer) and the all-grey M58 (winter), long after other Western nations developed uniform camouflage. Only in the 1980s was a decision taken to readapt the vehicle-size FOA pattern, which had been designed to avoid detection by aerial and satellite photography, for use on personal uniforms, which would primarily aim to avoid detection by the naked eye and by binocular. This required a redesign of the pattern.

FOA scientists were again called on to lead the project, redesigning the pattern slightly and reducing its scale by a proportion of 1:66 to fit the entire pattern onto a human torso. Despite the downscaling, the process nevertheless produced a camouflage pattern with what remains an unusually large and "clean" set of colored fields, in comparison with other nations' camouflage designs. In part, this reflected Swedish operational concerns. According to Hans Kariis, an expert at FOI, which is the successor to FOA: "If you look at American or German patterns, they're very small. This has to do with the M90 pattern being adapted to the type of combat envisioned at the time. Our pattern works pretty well in forest and mixed [småbruten] terrain, where distances are at a scale of about one kilometer. The Americans are thinking about urban combat, in a city where distances are 10 to 100 meters."^[1]

The M90 uniform pattern was ultimately introduced in active service in the late 1980s, and had been adapted by the entire force by the late 1990s.

As Sweden had been a latecomer to camouflage uniforms, the system was considered to be quite advanced for its time and, according to the Swedish army, it remains effective three decades later. Among other things, M90 uniforms are treated to ensure a low visibility when faced with night-time detection gear such as near-infrared spectrum equipment.^[2]

However, while vehicle camouflage such as the FOA pattern had a proven value as a protection overhead and long-distance reconnaissance, the effectiveness of personal camouflage is in some dispute. According to experts, the old all-green M59 uniforms often provided similar levels of protection against detection as the camouflage-patterned M90. "It depends on the environment you're in," according to Kariis. "In some cases [the M90] is better: the pattern breaks up contours and makes it more difficult to spot the contour of a human being. In many other cases the pattern is of equal value to single-color."^[1]