Danish M84 Pletsløring
Three Colours, One Woodland
The Danish M/84 — Kampuniform, combat uniform, Pletsløring (“spot camouflage”) — entered service in 1984 after a six-year trial process that began in 1978, replacing the plain olive-grey moleskin uniforms that had equipped the Danish Armed Forces for the previous quarter century. Its origins are German: the pattern is a direct derivative of the five-colour Flecktarn B produced by Marquardt & Schulz, using the same shapes and spot geometry. The Danes made precise changes to arrive at their own palette — retaining a similar but not identical light green base fabric, swapping the German mid-green secondary for a darker green, swapping the German russet tertiary for black, and dropping the remaining two colour rollers entirely. The result is a three-colour pattern with no browns whatsoever, its spot-based geometry creating a dithering effect that eliminates hard boundaries between colours — functioning on similar principles to later digital patterns — and optimised for the temperate forests of northern Europe.
When Danish commitments to the Balkans in the early 1990s made a lighter option necessary, the Let Kampuniform M/01 followed in 2001, with a desert variant appearing the same year for operations in Africa and Afghanistan. For years the Danish government treated surplus M/84 as a restricted item and prohibited reproduction outside the authorised supply chain — which only deepened collector demand. When controls eventually relaxed, and when M/84 was formally replaced by MultiCam M/11 around 2013, the pattern’s legacy was already well established: it had influenced CADPAT’s development and spawned the Russian Flectar-D.
