New Production SADF Pattern 83 Battle Jacket

  The Birth of Pattern 83 The Cold War was not cold for South Africa. While most of Europe was playing an elaborate game of ‘who-has-the-most-nukes’, the South African Defense Force (SADF) was hard at work fighting the counter insurgency battles of the future. In the process, they developed and refined much of the tactics, weapons, and equipment used today. In the 1960s and 1970s South Africans were involved in three major counterinsurgency wars in Sub Saharan Africa: The Congo Crisis (‘60-65), the Rhodesian Bush War (‘64-79), and the Border War (‘66-90). Throughout the early years of these conflicts, the SADF (and various South African mercenary groups) relied on domestically produced Pattern 61/64 and Pattern 70 load bearing systems. Descended from the British Pattern 58, this family of web gear is broadly similar to the US ALICE system—and they all worked well with the FN FAL (R1).Despite incremental improvement, heavy use of the Pattern 61/64/70 family revealed inadequacies. They