[HaplessOperator]

When I was in Iraq, most of our MTVRs were solid green. Some had camo hoods, but all the armor panels were solid green, and if we had a truck get smacked by something, the replacement parts were usually green. Humvees, most were tan, but you had some camo and green ones sneak in every now and then, especially if you were just replacing parts from old stocks that didn't really need to be painted for any particular reason.

Stateside, I saw a mix of green, tan, and camo Humvees in the motor pool, with the most common camo item usually being the soft covers for enclosing the cab, or the troop covers in the bigger 7-tons.

We didn't usually worry too much about the paint job for them, unless they were getting sent off to be used as part of a force-on-force exercise, or somebody got a bug up their ass about bootshine stuff on the vehicles immediately prior to a deployment.

It matters in a conventional fight, but if you're worrying about readiness and spending unit budget on training and good, high-volume of fire range exercises and individual courses, there's more important shit to spend money on than mismatched vehicle paint for a fight where you want to be as visible as possible when you're outside the wire.

These days, there's more important yet to spend it on, since you can slap-job a paint scheme as long as the vehicle's clean and dry a week or two before your unit steps off. That said, when you're refurbing a vehicle it's getting more common to see more greed woodland camo or green coloration on something as the default state.

As far as I can tell, most of the tan stuff we've seen since the onset of GWOT has been stuff either freshly manufactured or temporarily repainted for use in those specific AOs. As time goes on, you just see them cycling back to green and MERDC patterns.

Parades specifically, you just pick the vehicles that have a uniform appearance, clean them up, and shine the tires. This one, it's not unlikely that they picked vehicles they wanted repainted anyway, or that needed a fresh coat, and had them done up.