The DENSUS 88 AT camouflage pattern is worn by Indonesia’s elite police force Detasemen Khusus 88 Antiteror counterterrorism strike force, written Bob Morrison.

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indonesia Detasemen Khusus 88 Antiteror or DENSUS 88 AT is a counter-terrorism police force formed in direct response to the Bali bombings of 2002, which killed over two hundred people in over twenty countries. Two teams from this elite unit competed in the 12th ANNUAL WARRIOR COMPETITION at KASOTC (King Abdullah II Special Operations Training Center) last June, and while one of the teams waited to take their turn at the Airbus teardown event, one of them was volunteered by the team leader to quickly pose for our Kit & Camouflage section.

The camouflage pattern uniform worn by Detachment 88 is unique to them and features the unit’s Owl’s Head logo discreetly incorporated, although you have to look very closely to see it. During the WARRIOR COMPETITION, the teams only wore their distinctive camouflage-patterned combat shirts on the first day, unsurprisingly peeling off the long-sleeved t-shirts on the second day, as the thermometer rarely dipped below 35°C a day. once the sun was up, but they were wearing their camouflage pattern. combat pants for the rest of the week. It was a little disappointing not to have another chance to photograph the shirts, especially since I couldn’t break a back panel for the key photo, but at least I was able to photograph what I think be a reasonable representation of color variations in the plan showing each side of the side seam around the left pocket on a team member’s pants.

Some camo collector reviewers, perhaps working purely from photos rather than having seen the garments up close, have stated that the DENSUS 88 pattern is a derivative of MultiCam, but I disagree on that point. MultiCam is, after all, itself a derivative of the US Army’s experimental “Scorpion” pattern developed in the early 21st century and this prototype pattern relied on both lessons learned from the previous camouflage used in the second half of the 20th century, primarily derived from German WWII and American post-WWII ERDL designs, and the ability to introduce color mixing made possible by modern manufacturing processes. In my opinion, this six-color pattern, which is only the latest in a long line of effective camouflage patterns produced in Indonesia, may have more in common with the German Flecktarn than with the commercial MultiCam pattern of Crye Precision – not least because it doesn’t. have the blended/sprayed edges that are so evident on modern North American camouflage and its derivatives.

DENSUS 88 is a mostly horizontal model with no straight or nearly vertical elements, which are MultiCam’s identifiers to Scorpion or the newer Scorpion W3 model now in service as a US Army OCP, and although it has a light beige hue like aa tertiary color, it doesn’t have the almost white paint and candy speckle shapes found on MultiCam or OCP. Very much a verdant camo, which isn’t surprising considering it’s meant to be worn in The Tropics, it uses three shades of green with chocolate brown and almost black. Although clearly not a desert model, it did not fare too badly in areas of natural vegetation away from the stone quarries inside which most of KASOTC is built. There is actually a small ‘green zone’ on the firing ranges, but unfortunately I was unable to photograph the Indonesian teams there to see how their camouflage worked in that context.

For the next article in this series, I plan to take a very brief look at the green pixel camo worn by the Kosovo team in Jordan.

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