The Army recently awarded a $35.6 million contract to HWI Gear to produce the service’s legacy Army Combat Glove. It has been hard to keep track of how many different styles of fire-resistant gloves have hit the battlefield over the last decade of war. Soldiers wear coyote brown, foliage green, sage green, black and combinations of those shades.
HWI Gear’s ACG isn’t replacing any other combat gloves, but it will be the Army’s go-to combat glove through 2017. The service could buy as many as 800,000 pairs Para-Aramid and goatskin gloves in an effort to maintain a single, sustainable design. Eight vendors competed in the competition which began in early 2011.
The Ojai, Calif.-based company has produced about 500,000 pairs of this glove for the Army over the past five years. They feature high-density foam padding over the knuckle and palm covered in goatskin leather. The FR material is 10.5 ounce Para-Aramid.
HWI Gear makes similar styles of combat gloves, but they aren’t made with the PTFE thread that goes into the ACGs.
The contract designates that the ACG will be a sage color, said Clinton Hatch of HWI. They look darker to me, but what do I know.
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This is the length the Army specified in their general specifications at the time of development, the sleeve goes well over the edge of the cuff.
The color on this is specified by the Army and supplied solution dyed by DuPont, tested to match their standard shade sample and certified by government QAR’s.The solution Nomex (Meta Aramid) material supplied by DuPont is lighter or “greener” than the Kevlar (Para Aramid), and probably more familiar looking, but the Nomex is a bad match for the Government Sage Green shade standards. I think commercially there are color versions that become well known do to popular brands that do not match government color standards, like all the tans and “Coyote Browns” that vary from supplier to supplier and usually dont match established color chips.