Yeah the big problem with the Navy has always been that they used to have way too many uniforms. They had dress blues, AND they had dress whites, AND they had service whites, AND service khakis, AND they had the blue-and-light-blue work uniforms, AND some of them had overalls, AND the land-based units had BDUs....it was all "because tradition" but at the same time really kind of ridiculous and at some point the Navy had the (very good) idea of saying you know what, tradition is forcing a silly situation, we need like just two or three uniforms at most that we're going to make sailors lug everywhere.
The weird blue-camo uniform was part of that. It was a good intention - it was supposed to be the one work uniform that sailors could wear, land or sea. They decided it had to be some kind of camo probably MOSTLY because the work uniforms of all the other services are camo - but that made for a problem because normal land-camo would just look weird on a ship. Plus it's the Navy and they can't go dressing like landlubbers. So they invented a "Navy-specific" camo pattern. On a ship it was supposed to be great for working, because on a greasy ship uniforms tend to get stained a lot and so that would look less noticeable on clothing that's all splotchy by design which makes a certain amount of sense. But they screwed it up because the designers forgot to make the uniforms fire-retardant, meaning the blue-camo couldn't be worn on ships at all, it was actually banned from use on ships. Why couldn't they have just....made a fire-retardant version of it? I don't know, but Because Reasons they never did. Meanwhile on land, the blue-camo was just pointless because just like you said, what on Earth is it supposed to blend in with? Unless you're hiding at the bottom of one of those micro-tiled swimming pools maybe I guess. But anyways, they tried to make a uniform that could be used on both aboard AND ashore, and they ended up creating a uniform that was impractical to use in EITHER place, lol. So yeah eventually they realized that at least in the matter of working uniforms, the shipboard one had to be different from the land one, there was just no getting around that.
