We posted a story a while back on a new com-bat pant the Army was spin-ning off as part of its look into bet-ter fire resis-tant ACUs. Thanks to our friends at Soldier Systems we got some good gouge on the devel-op-ment, but I’m here to update you on the lat-est field-ing schedule.

In our long con-ver-sa-tion Dec. 18, Lt. Col. Mike Sloane of PEO Soldier told Defense Tech that the lucky testers will be a brigade from the 101st Airborne head-ing to Afghanistan next month. PEO plans to issue 7,000 pairs of the com-bat pant, which incor-po-rates stretchy fab-ric, inte-grated knee pads and FR fab-ric that’s more durable than the FR Rayon in today’s FR-ACU.

And it’s made by guess who? The Army’s new uni-form dar-lings (and the Brits), Crye Precision. The above photo is from Crye’s Web site.

I went ahead and made an audio clip of this part of our inter-view for your lis-ten-ing plea-sure. Mike Sloane can explain the whole evo-lu-tion bet-ter than I can. But suf-fice it to say, some very happy air-borne troop-ers are going into the zone with some pretty high-tech duds.