Instead, U.S. Army leadership utilized pixelated patterns of Canadian CADPAT and U.S. Marine Corps MARPAT, then recolored them based on three universal colors developed in the Army's 2002 to 2004 tests, to be called UCP with significantly less disruptive capability than either of its prior familial patterns.

[7] In response, the U.S. Army conducted several studies to find a modification or replacement for the standard issue pattern.

[14] In July 2014,[15][16] the Army announced that Operational Camouflage Pattern would replace all UCP-patterned ACU uniforms by the end of September 2019.

[17][18] However, UCP remains in service in limited capacities, such as on some cold weather overgear and older body armor.

[8][9][10] The disadvantage of an all-in-one pattern is that it has to account for too many factors at once, such as amount of visual clutter[19] (disruptiveness–Woodland dark and high contrast, dense foliage branches,[20][21] Desert sparse, bright and low contrast terrain and Urban close-range geometric straight-edge terrain of buildings and houses[22]), and at nighttime specifically, high reflectance variation when viewed through night vision devices (Woodland environment's leaves extremely high reflectance versus Desert's grains of sand and rocks' lower reflectance).

Due to the more time efficient and cost-effective method of printing via inkjet sprayers, colors of the patterns were adjusted to how they would be viewed when under NIR conditions.

[27] Pure black viewed through night vision goggles can appear extremely dark and create an undesirable high-contrast image.

[7] In later tests conducted by the Natick Soldier Center, results indicated that UCP did not fare well against other multi-environment patterns.

"[31][32][29] In the interim, the Army conducted a brief in-country test of replacements for use in Afghanistan that included "UCP Delta", a variant of UCP that added coyote brown, and the commercial pattern MultiCam,[33] which had been created by Crye Associates and was based on their original Scorpion pattern from 2002.

Authorization of UCP uniforms ended on 1 October 2019,[17][18][35] though still sees some limited usage on other gear such as some body armor and cold weather overgear.