I inherited a few uniform pieces that my father bought during the Korean conflict. He bought them himself in order to have warmer things to wear.
Your father was wise.
Poorly configured standard issue uniforms and boots cost at least hundreds, possibly thousands of good lives in Korea in the winter of 1950. Lives lost not at the end of a bayonet, or bullet, or shell fragments... but from clothing that failed to keep the soldiers and marines from freezing to death. Actually the Nazi's had made that same mistake on the Eastern front as well in 1943. One would have thought that the lessons learned on the Eastern front, and from Korea would translate to a procurement system that keeps up with civilian gear used for equivalent purposes... boots especially, but also backpacks, IED resistant vehicles, thermal gear, watches, knives, etc.
I first learned about the lesser quality of gov't issued gear when shopping for a 2-3 day hiking backpack about three years ago. My brother's son had just graduated USNA, was home for a few days prior to going off to MIT for two years for a camping trip. They were in the front yard cleaning out some backpacks. I checked it out, and asked, ignorantly, if their equipment were as good as the equipment issued to soldiers in Iraq. They both sort of laughed at me, and basically said that while Gov't issued equipment isn't "crap", it is below the midpoint in quality of what most people would invest in for equipment they plan to use a lot. In particular to a backpack, the strength, weight, lumbar support, and water resistance of the materials used to build the backpack, I wondered then why that was, and I still wonder it. Is procuring a below midpoint quality backpack for $50 vs. a higher quality backpack for $100 really worth the lives put at risk on active duty by poor quality gear? Same for boots. If a soldier is hobbled by foot injuries (tendon, arch, blisters, shin splits, etc.) caused by last generation technology, then that soldier is at risk, as is his unit that depends on him to be at X point at Y hour.
In this day and age of technological innovation, there is no reason boots should be issued to cadets at USMA and ROTC, and soldiers in Active Duty or Reserves, that require the soldier to know how to liberally apply moleskin to the areas of the foot that the poorly designed boots rub to rawness and blisters. And no reason why high quality inserts costing $50 should have to be purchased by soldiers in an attempt to upgrade the standard issue boots into boots that don't injure their feet. And guess what... most active duty soldiers DON'T use the issued boots. Check out reviews online for all these tactical type boots, and you'll see most of the reviews coming from active duty soldiers (and I assume Marines) who bought them time and again with their own money.
