As I understand it, MERDC camo was applied at the unit level, which leads to my question:
If a vehicle, an M60 for example, were to receive the "Gray Desert" scheme, how much wouldn't get painted?
In other words, would hard-to-reach places like the underside and behind the road wheels & suspension arms be left in the factory basecoat or would they have gotten painted by whatever method?

hey Floyd,

I can only reply from a Mech InF perspective. When we painted/repainted M113s, etc, we only painted easily accessible areas. No one crawled under the vehicle to paint the belly, nor did we break the track to get behind the track or road wheels. You've got to remember, the enemy did not (hopefully) get under the vehicle or behind the tracks.

The MERDC camo was designed to breakup the silhouette from a distance. If the enemy was close enough to see behind road wheels, etc, we would be more worried about other things.

Dave B

A belated thanks... got myself a little sidetracked with other things for a while.
What you said makes a lot of sense.

This reminds me of a story my father told me years ago about an incident during one of his cruises aboard the USS Staten Island (GB-5), back before the Navy gave all its icebreakers to the Coast Guard.

They'd encountered a Soviet ship, and had put up their helicopter to fly by taking pictures, including one of their air-search radar (by the description one of the Head Net series); the photograph was perfectly framed, with the two opposing horns reaching almost to the edges of the photograph.

They put it on the fax uplink to send it back to the States, and got back the standard response "Can you get a better picture?". They replied "We can go back and ask them if we can take a rubbing of the data plate." No reply was forthcoming.