Belleville Wins Mountain Combat Boot Competition

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While it looked for a while as if the Army might have been stalling its mountain combat boot program in favor of keeping things as is with the much-liked militarized Danner Combat Hiker, the service has picked Belleville to produce an Army-wide version of the boot.

It was a close call, the top officer in charge of Soldier equipment told Kit Up! during a Pentagon meeting, but Joe liked the Belleville boot a smidgeon better.

Soldiers found the Belleville version slightly more comfortable, slightly better grip, slightly better fitting and, it turns out, they're just a bit cheaper. It was really close, but that's why we went with the Belleville design.

The boot pictured above is an earlier version of the Belleville submission, with the final version incorporating a rand that runs uniformly around the boot, rather than in two pieces. One thing that's interesting is that the Belleville boot uses the exact same Vibram sole design as the Danner, but colored it in tan olive.

So pretty soon, look for the new (tan olive) Mountain Combat Boots to be issued for deployments to Afghanistan and for all Joes to wear in CONUS mountain environments after that.

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