What Happened to FRACU, page-38

The two main issues of importance to the uniform trials appear to be (1) wear and tear, and (2) comfort for the wearer.

(1) The higher the cotton content the more susceptible the uniform is to tearing. The current uniforms are 88% cotton 12% nylon. For durability reasons the army wants the fabric to be 50:50 nylon:cotton. Alexium is the only company capable of making the 50:50 fabric flame retardant.

(2) Apparently marines have already had some involvement with FR treated uniforms and have expressed the opinion that they are more comfortable in the tropics because they dry faster.

Th a above is my interpretation of comments made by Gavin Rezos during his July interview with Alan Kohler. Extracted below.

GR: So here’s the classic scenario is this that we said to the Department of Defence you keep telling us how much you like this – and the marines say that when they have the fire retardant treatment on their uniforms in tropical weather that that dries faster as an extra benefit – and you tell us it works. Why aren’t you buying it? And they said well, we need a budget and we don’t take risks, so we need to have someone in Washington tell us that we have to have it and to give us the money to buy it, but we’ll help you do that.

So the reason why this is important for the military is that currently a fire retardant uniform is between $135 and $270 dollars per uniform for a combat soldier. And an officer might have two and an enlisted person might have one. And they’ll have other uniforms as well. They don’t last very long. They said at three months to four months they’re getting rips and tears in them because the material is 88 [per cent cotton] and 12 [per cent nylon], not the 50/50 nylon cotton. We can do a uniform for the military at, say, $75 which is fire retardant which will last a lot longer, 50 wash durable, and that means they can then cover all the soldiers and…