Item: Best Tactical Pants
Rating: 4.5
Author: Aaron Ross

The best tactical pants are useful for everything from shooting to civilian errand running to hardcore physical activity, including self defense and hand to hand combat. It’s a lifestyle choice to have a pair of pants on at all times that are ready for action. In the case of the contemporary tactical pants offerings online, the level of comfort has always been high; the functionality is extreme comparative to fashion brands and the style is improving day by day.

What you get now instead of 100% cotton cargo style pants pushed off on consumers as tactical pants, is a higher quality of performance capabilities and a better fit. You also get smarter design of functional aspects of the pants and you get extreme material options. For those that have gotten into the EDC (everyday carry) concept, having a pair of these so-called “tactical pants” is a next step in being able to easily carry all your gear.

It’s simply a philosophy of better built products, that extends into everyday fashion for your legs. These aren’t the cotton jeans that make you cold in the rain, these are purpose built, very useful pieces of gear that enable you to have access to gadgets and tools more easily than other pieces of clothing and they allow for higher flexibility and better comfort.

The following article is made to help you understand what you are actually getting with tactical pants as buying clothing online can be somewhat difficult and having a good base of understanding as to what each offering actually promises, is important.

Quick Pick – Top 3 Tactical Pants

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Why Do you Need Shooting Pants?

Not all pants that are labeled as tactical pants are specifically built for shooting, but the features in the pants labeled as “tactical pants” are generally well suited for the shooter. The extra pockets and the quality construction, as well as the flexibility of the fabric and the low staining fabrics offer you a good set of pants to keep for many years if your waistline doesn’t grow too much to necessitate a new pair.

Shooting requires a lot of sitting and standing; moving and then remaining stationary. The tools you usually need are able to be carried in a range bag but having pockets that can bring tools for you out to reset a target or change something on the fly makes these types of pants much more efficient than your single side pocket jeans.

The comfort level of the performance fabrics (which we will touch on later) is second to none. The toughness on these pants is second to none. And while you can wear some simple denim jeans to shoot, having more options is always a good plan.

Why do you need Tactical Pants as a Civilian?

You don’t NEED tactical pants as a civilian, but you also don’t NEED a Mercedes or a Porsche. You buy tactical pants for much the same reasons you pay a premium for a car like a Porsche or a Mercedes: performance and creature comforts. You can get by with a pair of cotton khakis or jeans, but you can really accomplish more with performance fabrics, better architecture and build quality and the enhanced functional capabilities of the tactical pant offerings on the market.

As a civilian you never know what you’re going to get into. But these pants weren’t built originally for civilians, so they didn’t cater to the things you normally get into as a civilian, quite the opposite. They were made for those who have to have the best functionality for real world situations that are on the border of “extreme” for most people. That’s why they make such good pants for “civilians”.

When you know you can go for a hike and get the cooling and breathability that you need, without the staining, and durability issues of a standard fabric like cotton, then the pants make a bit more sense, given their premium price tag.

When you know you can carry more things with you; a pen, a knife, your phone in a front pocket; any number of tools, then you start to see the capability of these types of pants better.

When you see the heavy duty triple stitched stress points and the heavy duty, wide belt loops, you start to get the reason why these pants are so popular.

When your normal jeans just cannot cut it with a heavy concealed carry IWB (inside waistband) holster for your gun, these pants start to look very good.

When you realize that the average pair of jeans might last a couple years, but these pants can last 5-6-7 or more years, then the price point seems to be more “on-point”.

There are a ton of reasons why these pants make sense, the least of which is stylishness. That’s not to say there aren’t stylish options for tactical pants, but they aren’t going to win any fashion awards any time soon.

With the improving market potential, more stylish options have come onto the scene recently, allowing a hybridized approach to the style and functional aspects of these types of pants. A hybridized form and function harmonization for a pair of pants that can easily be used to carry a weapon, but also looks good on a dinner date with your spouse.

Materials- Understanding How they look, How they fit & What they do

We’ve mentioned cotton pants a few times already. There is nothing wrong with cotton from a clothing perspective. It’s comfortable and it’s a staple. But it also doesn’t perform under adverse conditions or offer the same strength or stain resistance as some of the other materials available, specifically man made synthetic performance fabrics.

Polyester

A very simple fabric we’ve been using in fashion clothing for decades. This is a synthetic material that is now becoming more of a performance fabric base. The basic makeup of the fabric is a resin compound that links esters with polymer. The good wrinkle resistance and the flexibility of the material makes it a great blend option and a decent standalone fabric for most conditions. It is not the best for close proximity to flames and it is less breathable than other fabrics, but it does wear well and is very durable.

Spandex

A stretchy material that is usually used as part of blends when you need to have some durability and where movement and squatting is occurring often. Rather than just being used as a standalone now (like it was in the 1980’s and 1990’s), this is usually just added to fabric blends to make them semi-stretchy without losing the base qualities of the other blended fabric components.

Nylon

A thermoplastic that is used for high durability fabric needs. It is an artificially created fabric that is a polyamide (natural polyamide examples are silk and wool), which means it is chainlike in structure and has strength as a result.

Performance cotton variants

Cotton is a natural, short structure fiber that feels great against the skin. It is not particularly durable under high stress conditions, but it is very comfortable and breathable. Adding certain fabric architectures to the manufacturing process makes cotton much more durable and can enhance its performance qualities.

Blends

Most of the pants in this list are blends. That means before they are turned into pants, they are rolls of fabrics made from many types of materials, combined into a single fabric to get the best qualities from each fabric. This is important for performance and activewear clothing, because you cannot just rely on a single fabric to have all the best performance qualities for such a variable piece of clothing. Utilizing different percentages of threads to make an all-encompassing fabric that allows greater flexibility (in use cases) as well as sometimes, just greater flexibility, means you are getting a better value for your dollar for variable use case scenarios. If someone will be sitting in a climate-controlled apartment all day, cotton or linen are probably the preferred materials. If someone wants to roll around in the mud and be able to wash the clothes clean or hike and get breathability, flexibility and durability, they need blends.

Most tactical pants are performance fabric blends and most are heavy oriented towards synthetics, because they offer specific benefits that are more conducive to the types of situations that tactical pants are used in.

Other considerations:

Ripstop fabric profiles
High quality thread
Reinforced stress points
Heavier thread profiles
Reinforced pockets and plackets/edges

Additional Build Components

Built in knee pads? Ability to add in component knee pads into the prebuilt pockets? A dedicated pen pocket or a dedicated phone pocket? These are just a few of the clever ways these pants outdo most other pants on the market.

Some of the following are available on these tactical pants, and represent better design functionality than standard broad market pants:

Knee pads built in
Knee pad pocket
Pen pockets
Phone pockets
Velcro closures
Slim pocket profile
Deep pocket profiles
Cargo type pockets
Wider boot cut leg openings
Reinforced stitching to improve movement durability
Reinforced belt loops
Hammer loop
Reinforced knife clip pocket edge
High quality hook and loop or physical closure hardware
Heavy duty zippers
Flex points around crotch or knees
Zipper pulls

There are others that can be found on these tactical pants, but this is a good sampling of some of the extended functionality that these add-ons offer.

When it comes to tactical pants, each person will want to decide what’s best for their particular use case. Some will opt for more stylish, less overt pant styles, and some really want the extra obvious functionality traits. What you can be sure of is this: regardless which stylistic corner you are in, the durability and performance of the fabric and the build quality is much higher than broad market fashion pants. That’s a cold hard fact.

As you browse through the different options, we think you’ll find a pair that makes the most sense.

As a general matter of course, as the author is a man, the options reviewed in this article are men’s versions of these models and brands. The same pants are almost 100% across the board made in women’s sizing and cuts. The reviews extend to those women’s models as well, though the author has chosen not to opine on fit specific aspects for those models. Unreservedly, the author recommends the same things from a functionality perspective for women’s models as he does for the men’s versions.