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From Popular Mechanics:
The Overloaded Soldier: Why U.S. Infantry Now Carry More Weight Than Ever
Technology was supposed to be the solution. Instead, it added to the problem.By David Hambling, Dec 26, 2018
… even official documents describe carrying a 100 lbs. as standard. In the ensuing debate about whether this was realistic, one marine infantryman described carrying more than 200 lbs. during missions in Afghanistan.
The why of the weight starts with body armor. Standard Interceptor body armor plus helmet weighs more than 20 lbs., and the total rises if additional elements are added to protect the neck, arms, groin, and shoulders. “The lesson in operations in the Middle East has been that body armor saves lives, so the default is to put it all on,” says Jack Watling of UK defense think tank RUSI. Watling was embedded in Iraq and has direct experience of operations in several other theaters.
A M4 carbine and ammunition add another 15 lbs. or so. Then there are grenades, food, and water, a poncho, and liner, plus personal items such as a flashlight, night vision gear, and medical kit. This personal equipment along can easily run to 70 lbs.
We haven’t even mentioned squad and platoon weapons, and let’s face it: Someone has to carry the ammunition. A single 60mm mortar round weighs four .lbs, as does a rocket for the AT-4 launcher. A belt of ammunition for the squad’s M249 machine gun weighs six lbs, and soldiers tend to carry all they can. “There’s direct correlation between how much fire you can put down and who wins,” says Watling. “The requirement for ammunition is not going to go down.”
And then there is the bane of every technology user: batteries. “Almost everything a soldier carries today requires batteries,” notes James King in a piece for the Modern War Institute. Batteries for the platoon’s AN/PRC-117 radio weigh four lbs. each, and the radio burns through them rapidly. King estimates that the average soldier goes into action with a hefty 20 lbs of batteries.
With its weight problem seemingly multiplying, the military is trying to find lighter solutions. The Pentagon already makes everything from Kevlar, carbon fiber, and other lightweight materials, though this trend has led to a widespread joke: A soldier carries 100 lbs. of the lightest kit imaginable.
What fraction of modern infantrymen lift weights in their spare time?
But why infant?
the infantas.
Popular Mechanics forgot to subtract the weight of White Male Privilege from the pack of your average soldier or Marine. That has to amount t0 an 80 or 90 lbs savings, right?
No, they have foreseen this: the girl gets to ride in the humvee, especially if she’s “injured.” Her pack doesn’t. It goes neatly onto the back of a man already carrying his own. When I first heard this I didn’t believe it, and then I thought it was some dirty trick to generate mysogyny. It is really the logical conclusion of a victim society where men are never victims. If Democrats take power and really want a female combat infantry unit, they’ll have one. It’ll just happen to have three male ones nearby at all times.
But compare recent footage of people (heh) at outposts: they aren’t wearing everything. They don’t need to because they’re not going anywhere. And, for prolonged patrols, recall the first scene in Platoon with Willem Dafoe: you don’t need this, you don’t need that. And Ellsberg found that people weren’t even wearing their helmets.
Military comm equipment is notoriously overbuilt and overweight, while being only a little tougher than standard Motorola business/police gear.
I mean I listen to my AN/GRR-5 all the time, but it is really, really heavy.
Blame the French, whom iSteve commenters have recently determined were never white. It came from prioritizing cavalry in the middle ages — nobody wanted to be on foot, so if you were, you had either failed to qualify for or afford a horse (or were a “lance corporal,” an unhorsed rider temporarily fighting on foot), or (most of the time) were relatively “new.”
Nonsense. Lots of women have proven they can carry an extra 100lb every day, and they lack nothing in martial spirit either:
Freda Payne had the answer years ago:
I climbed Glacier Peak in Washington state with a friend who’s a minimalist. Instead of an ice axe he used a stick he found on the trail on the way to the foot of the glacier. The first time he climbed Glacier as a teen he did it in tennis shoes. This peak has crevasses, ice bridges, and very steep ice slopes. Everyone else, including me, was armed with ice axe and crampons.
I look forward to hearing from the military veterans on this site. What are the trade offs of equipment versus relying on skill? Does a Viet Cong in the jungle have some advantages over a too-heavily equipped infantryman?
Yes, the loss of mobility was a major problem, especially for light infantry that did not have vehicles in which to dump their rucks.
Can't imagine carrying 150 lbs or more for any length of time. On the other hand, we had only 4 months training before deployment. Today's professionals have many months to prepare. Still brutal though.
We "dressed for mission" and were named "Light Infantry" as much of what we did, even in Company strength, often included 10 kilometer+ moves. At 90 degrees F and 90% humidity and ground to cover you travel light except for ammo. It was not always that hot but we stayed "light" so that we could move quickly several k's and we did often. No chopper noise.
Skill? "Good judgement comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgement". Some men are just better than others in war. Home court advantage makes an average man equal to the invader's best. I have heard the term "Pindo" used to describe an American soldier when he is geared up because he walks like a Penguin.
I hate war. "War is a Racket" as Marine General Smedley Butler told us in the 1930's. Nothing has changed. Central Banking funds all sides, determines what and who gets destroyed and who buys up the remains at pennies on the dollar.
I have hope that change is coming, but I have heard that there are "missing nukes" in bad hands.
I'm a Trump guy and am amazed that he is still alive. He told Mark Cuban during the 16' campaign that he (Cuban) was not smart enough to understand what he (Trump) was doing. I think I do.
We "dressed for mission" and were named "Light Infantry" as much of what we did, even in Company strength, often included 10 kilometer+ moves. At 90 degrees F and 90% humidity and ground to cover you travel light except for ammo. It was not always that hot but we stayed "light" so that we could move quickly several k's and we did often. No chopper noise.
Skill? "Good judgement comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgement". Some men are just better than others in war. Home court advantage makes an average man equal to the invader's best. I have heard the term "Pindo" used to describe an American soldier when he is geared up because he walks like a Penguin.
I hate war. "War is a Racket" as Marine General Smedley Butler told us in the 1930's. Nothing has changed. Central Banking funds all sides, determines what and who gets destroyed and who buys up the remains at pennies on the dollar.
I have hope that change is coming, but I have heard that there are "missing nukes" in bad hands.
I'm a Trump guy and am amazed that he is still alive. He told Mark Cuban during the 16' campaign that he (Cuban) was not smart enough to understand what he (Trump) was doing. I think I do.
https://youtu.be/ZIpkdusnIkE
This video clip is the gift that keeps on giving…
The first Spanish arquebus regiments in the 16th century were named after the children of the Royal family;
the infantas.
I look forward to hearing from the military veterans on this site. What are the trade offs of equipment versus relying on skill? Does a Viet Cong in the jungle have some advantages over a too-heavily equipped infantryman?
Seth Largo alert.
So long as the US is an expeditionary force the heavy loads will continue. When you play on the road you have to take your equipment with you. Of course the alternative is to fight on your home turf which is not really nice since you destroy your own country.
One thing to keep in mind is that an infantry squad is listed on paper as possessing a certain amount of equipment. So when the commanders above you deploy units to the field, they do so with the knowledge that a certain amount of firepower will be deployed as well. What this means is that your squad is going to take the the required ammunition whether all 9 members are present, or if you are down to 5.
I never served in combat. But in my time as an infantryman we used to frown upon the few weak sisters who always seemed to manage to get out of deploying. Or they feigned an injury to get pulled from the field. What happened to the rest of us is that we then had to increase our load. So if I was carrying the radio,my personal weapon and gear, I would now get to carry the extra boxes of machine gun ammunition (6 lbs per box) that they pulled from the injured guy’s rucksack and distributed to the remaining squad members. In other words if a guy was pulled from the field, his load stayed and was redistributed making everyone else’s task that much harder.
I imagine women are going to cause a similar problem. They will fill a slot in the squad, but will be unable to carry a lot of weight. But those extra boxes of ammo or mortar rounds will still need to be carried by the squad. The men will just have to carry more weight.
I shared this before, but this is a great column written by a female reporter in 2003 who tried to hang with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq. But she ended up giving her load to soldiers already bogged down by their own equipment.
Of course, in the current political climate (read brass career - casualties) impossible.
You must have command assignments to advance in the Army, preferably combat arms and first among these is infantry
The girl 11 Bushes will be officers. They will somehow get through infantry officer basic and ranger. Then they will get administrative commands such as headquarters or training units where they won’t have to Ruck up
Their combat assignments will not require heavy lifting or ground pounding. You will see them serving as S1-4 staff where their housekeeping and presentation skills will be valuable
After that they can go on to be national security advisors to lispy graham. Ben sassy Kamealot Harris or Speedo Beto
But compare recent footage of people (heh) at outposts: they aren't wearing everything. They don't need to because they're not going anywhere. And, for prolonged patrols, recall the first scene in Platoon with Willem Dafoe: you don't need this, you don't need that. And Ellsberg found that people weren't even wearing their helmets.
They said that Bill Clinton was the victim, so he must not be a man.
I look forward to hearing from the military veterans on this site. What are the trade offs of equipment versus relying on skill? Does a Viet Cong in the jungle have some advantages over a too-heavily equipped infantryman?
I was an 11B grunt in Vietnam. Our loads usually ran 70-80 pounds.
Yes, the loss of mobility was a major problem, especially for light infantry that did not have vehicles in which to dump their rucks.
Can’t imagine carrying 150 lbs or more for any length of time. On the other hand, we had only 4 months training before deployment. Today’s professionals have many months to prepare. Still brutal though.
So they are noobs.
Yes, the loss of mobility was a major problem, especially for light infantry that did not have vehicles in which to dump their rucks.
Can't imagine carrying 150 lbs or more for any length of time. On the other hand, we had only 4 months training before deployment. Today's professionals have many months to prepare. Still brutal though.
Today’s soldiers often lift weights in their spare time, so maybe they really can carry an extra 20 pounds?
That got me thinking that maybe the types of deployments the troops are doing now is promoting the bigger body type. I don't think huge guys that are well over 200 pounds could do what @RickinJax did in Vietnam. I just don't see big guys like that going on extended, cross country hikes through thick jungle with all that weight. I think smaller, leaner guys would have the advantage there.
But if your mission is occupation duty where you make unannounced raids on homes, maybe you need the large-bodied guys. Cops in the US seem a lot bigger today too.
If you follow the latter you will likely not be "huge" but will have good cardiovascular fitness. Then again, "chicks can't see your big lungs so best to get down the gym and add some muscle mass." Also, pull-ups and press-ups and sit-ups are functionally important for getting up walls, getting up from the prone position and just getting up respectively. If you can do 12, 60 and 70 in a row then you're more than strong enough.
My observation is that the most He-Man looking soldiers in the US tended to work in the stores and so on, and therefore had easy access to the gym, protein and injectables. They also did the least cardio and therefore were able to be huge. Some had legs so big they struggled to run properly. This is extremely counter-productive.
(Try) to visialize:
An enemy MG is at, say, 800 metres from the road->a patrol, 8 men, is trudging along it->gunner aims at the pointman and squeezes short, misses->the pointman (and the rest but let's focus on him) RUNS for cover.
Hehe...try running with that load one day, over uneven terrain, already tired.
And the next burst, longer one, is just about to crack around....
Say, you don't get hit, but hitting the ground behind that rock with that load...oh my.
What's next...?
Ah, wait, "observe".
Try to observe with that load on your back.
At least, "speculate fire" on ...that ridge. Try to fire, behind a rock, with that load aimed shots.
Etc.....
No amount of physical fitness will help there. Especially in that first sprint.
Anyway.
Yyyy- errr no. If you compare weight of ultralight hiking kit to weight of comparable military gear, mil gear is usually way heavier. Part of this is down to durability – ultralight hiking kit sacrifices it for lower weight, whereas the military keeps it because infantry don’t do long marches away from resupply and, well, the idea is they’re going into a warzone, where durable is good. Part of it is also just design. Military packs etc have MOLLE webbing draping everywhere – the weight adds up much faster than you’d think.
E.g., here are the weights for the top 5 ultralight backpacks @ outdoor gear lab:
30.5 oz 31.5 oz 31.4 oz 24 oz 18.5 oz
IIRC, the last gen Marine pack (ILBE) weighs north of 7 lbs (112 oz).
IME it’s the same deal with shelters, bivvies, sleeping bags, clothing, footwear, etc.
True, but from what I read it’s often twice as much, I.e., 150 lbs plus.
Yes, the loss of mobility was a major problem, especially for light infantry that did not have vehicles in which to dump their rucks.
Can't imagine carrying 150 lbs or more for any length of time. On the other hand, we had only 4 months training before deployment. Today's professionals have many months to prepare. Still brutal though.
I can’t imagine carrying those loads in a jungle environment. Trying to carry such heavy loads through thick jungle where the branches are constantly grabbing at you and retarding your progress all while the heat and humidity are beating you up must have been a bear. Add to that fact that you had to focus on keeping watch for an ambush or booby trap that could appear at any time.
Imagine that mess playing out now, it would be very different.
All military terminology started as a joke. And, like any joke told around a toiletless sandbag-filling free hotel with unannounced fireworks, it just never died.
The thing is, yes you could absolutely do without a lot of this stuff, but on the day you get hit without your flak jacket, everyone higher in rank (and any congresscritters that get interested) will demand to know why you were not forced to wear it at all times. It’s a nightmare of committee reasoning. What Ellsberg found was that soldiers would leave their helmets off until they heard the distinctive snap of a round coming straight to you (as opposed to the pop of an irrelevant one). The soldiers were right that the helmet (which didn’t protect against bullets anyway, neither does a flak jacket) is a heat-trapping burden until you need it. They were wrong to expect to be able to put it on just in time for getting shot.
Then, one expression: distance/penetration power---shape of helmet/slide/bounce.
Think about if, if you wish.At least that's how I remember it. Or so I say.
The big difference I notice today is that soldiers seem to be on the big side. I imagine some juice to get that big. I recall the army used to believe the ideal infantryman was someone who was around 150 to 160 pounds and was lean and fit. But since the post 9-11 period the guys seem to be huge. I think the big difference is the body armor that they carry. Also a guy I know who served told me that the extra bulk came in handy when he was kicking in doors. He said smaller guys would have had a much harder time kicking in doors.
That got me thinking that maybe the types of deployments the troops are doing now is promoting the bigger body type. I don’t think huge guys that are well over 200 pounds could do what did in Vietnam. I just don’t see big guys like that going on extended, cross country hikes through thick jungle with all that weight. I think smaller, leaner guys would have the advantage there.
But if your mission is occupation duty where you make unannounced raids on homes, maybe you need the large-bodied guys. Cops in the US seem a lot bigger today too.
Women have weak joints and brittle bones. Even the ones who can lift a decent amount of weight in training, can't carry it far without getting hurt. When you march across rugged terrain with a heavy load, you can't rely on muscle. You have to rely on your skeletal structure (preferably with good posture) that is held together by joints. Women suck at that.
Yeah. #MeToo would be shut down in a heartbeat. Hillary and Carville would see to it.
Yeah guy in this thread said his ILBE weighed in @ 8 lbs 10 oz (138 oz). Lightest kit imaginable, it sure as Hell ain’t. ILBE’s replacement, FILBE, weighs in @ 9 lbs 4oz (148 oz) according to this thread.
Also, ultralight = expensive (though I suspect that the lion’s share of the expense is due to the niche nature of the products). I’ve never gotten the impression that light weight was a priority in infantry gear, generally speaking.
Clearly overseas military expeditions in the ME where you have to carry heaps of gear are biased against women. And that figure probably doesn’t include female equipment like moisturizer and sanitary products. Classic Neo-con sexism. A pro-female military should focus on border enforcement. You don’t need to be a 200 pound muscle man to drive an ATV along a border fence in Arizona.
As a Trump parody man once said “American jobs for American lesbians.”
That got me thinking that maybe the types of deployments the troops are doing now is promoting the bigger body type. I don't think huge guys that are well over 200 pounds could do what @RickinJax did in Vietnam. I just don't see big guys like that going on extended, cross country hikes through thick jungle with all that weight. I think smaller, leaner guys would have the advantage there.
But if your mission is occupation duty where you make unannounced raids on homes, maybe you need the large-bodied guys. Cops in the US seem a lot bigger today too.
Gotta countersignal that one. Cops were called “bulls” back in the day for good reason. They don’t seem to live up to the term anymore, probably owed to easing of size restrictions because equality. On the other hand, they are almost certainly more jacked for their size.
I suppose it depends on where you live, too. Blue state cops are Nazis because well-paid. Where I live they’re really underpaid, relatively speaking, so you see much less impressive specimens doing the job.
I look forward to hearing from the military veterans on this site. What are the trade offs of equipment versus relying on skill? Does a Viet Cong in the jungle have some advantages over a too-heavily equipped infantryman?
Aside from mobility, a Viet Cong’s advantage is that his life is cheaper than an American infantryman. We are an extremely casualty-averse nation.
That got me thinking that maybe the types of deployments the troops are doing now is promoting the bigger body type. I don't think huge guys that are well over 200 pounds could do what @RickinJax did in Vietnam. I just don't see big guys like that going on extended, cross country hikes through thick jungle with all that weight. I think smaller, leaner guys would have the advantage there.
But if your mission is occupation duty where you make unannounced raids on homes, maybe you need the large-bodied guys. Cops in the US seem a lot bigger today too.
The U.S. Army always had more rides than even other industrialized rivals. Our soldiers have always had the reputation of having soft feet. Our military is even more mechanized now than ever, and our ordinary soldiers have become bigger (and frankly fatter) and even more averse to having to walk with a load. But our elite soldiers are far more athletic than those from the past. And they increasingly do most of the close quarter fighting (which is increasingly scarce since we rely so much on standoff weapons now).
Women have weak joints and brittle bones. Even the ones who can lift a decent amount of weight in training, can’t carry it far without getting hurt. When you march across rugged terrain with a heavy load, you can’t rely on muscle. You have to rely on your skeletal structure (preferably with good posture) that is held together by joints. Women suck at that.
PS. Here is a press release from 1984 in the NY Times when the army announced it was bringing back the light infantry.
This reminded me of the two extremes in Himalayan mountaineering.
Starting with the English attempts on Mount Everest in the 1920s by WWI vets, assaults on major peaks got bigger and bigger, with up to 500 people. Sherpas set up a base camp and several camps leading up to the summit, and teams would rotate in and out to acclimatize.
In 1975 Pakistan reopened the Karakoram after twenty years, and an American team made an attempt on K2 using a slimmed down version of this kind of expeditionary model led by Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Everest. Tagging along was big-wall climber/photographer Galen Rowell, who wrote a book on the experience, In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods. He described meeting two scraggly Europeans coming in as the Americans were leaving in defeat, German-speaking Italian Reinhold Messner and the Austrian Peter Habeler.
Rowell was flabbergasted by what they told him. They were planning on climbing one of the other 8,000 meter mountains in the range, Gasherbrum I, and they were going to do it in one push, no porters, no rope, no tent, no oxygen tanks, jusgt a bivouac bag that covered only up to their waist and a camera to prove they were successful. They called it Alpine Style Mountaineering. Rowell got a postcard from them in the U.S. a couple of months later confirming the ascent.
The way that Messner and Habeler explained it, their technique was safer, and they would prove it later on Everest and all the 14 8,000 meter peaks. At first glance it seemed more dangerous:
— Unroped, so a slip or fall would be deadly, with no way to be arrested
— No supplies for a camp if delayed
— In sufficient acclimatization, so risk of altitude sickness (dangerous brain swelling)
The way they explained it:
— Faster, no necessity to cross dangerous glaciers with crevasses multiple times.
— No risking of sherpa lives; sherpas would dump a small load at base camp and return two weeks later for the trip out
— Biggest risk to expeditions is weather: they go in in good weather (spike the trip if bad) and then are in and out before the weather has time to change
— Ropes are most necessary for unskilled climbers like sherpas; for skilled mountaineers the odds of a slips are low and outweighed by dangers associated with setting up ropes, which include time for weather to change, time for altitude sickness to develop, etc.
— Big teams need to carry supplies to support people who carry supplies for people who carry supplies to people who rope routes for people who rope routes to use, ad infinitum: expeditionary forces grow exponentially and create risks from weather and avalanches and crevasses
And so on. Messner and Habeler later climbed Everest without oxygen, and Messner solo’d Everest’s North Face without oxygen. A French guy later did the same in one day.
Similarly, in backpacking another big-wall climber who turned Appalachian Trai hiker, Ray Jardine, developed a system called ultralight backpacking, no tent, just a tarp, no sleeping back, just a down quilt, no backpack, just a daypack, no hiking boots, just cheap running shoes you treat as disposible, etc.
I’m sure the military special forces are closer to alpine style than to expeditionary style, but they could possibly be even more so. I wonder what the trade off would in dumping the armor, as just one example? If you get hit you die (if you slip on Gasherbrum I you die), but the armor slows you down and tires you out. And so on. Would the risks really be higher in going alpine style in the military, in the number of casualities? Is it a case of “nobody can blame you if you buy IBM?”: “Nobody can blame you for a sniper casualty if you require head to toe armor from the leading maker. What more could you have done?” It would take real courage for a commander to strip down the infantry to be quick and agile, and it would take really well trained troops. But in the end it might save lives, who knows?
Counterinsurgency
Starting with the English attempts on Mount Everest in the 1920s by WWI vets, assaults on major peaks got bigger and bigger, with up to 500 people. Sherpas set up a base camp and several camps leading up to the summit, and teams would rotate in and out to acclimatize.
In 1975 Pakistan reopened the Karakoram after twenty years, and an American team made an attempt on K2 using a slimmed down version of this kind of expeditionary model led by Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Everest. Tagging along was big-wall climber/photographer Galen Rowell, who wrote a book on the experience, In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods. He described meeting two scraggly Europeans coming in as the Americans were leaving in defeat, German-speaking Italian Reinhold Messner and the Austrian Peter Habeler.
Rowell was flabbergasted by what they told him. They were planning on climbing one of the other 8,000 meter mountains in the range, Gasherbrum I, and they were going to do it in one push, no porters, no rope, no tent, no oxygen tanks, jusgt a bivouac bag that covered only up to their waist and a camera to prove they were successful. They called it Alpine Style Mountaineering. Rowell got a postcard from them in the U.S. a couple of months later confirming the ascent.
The way that Messner and Habeler explained it, their technique was safer, and they would prove it later on Everest and all the 14 8,000 meter peaks. At first glance it seemed more dangerous:
-- Unroped, so a slip or fall would be deadly, with no way to be arrested
-- No supplies for a camp if delayed
-- In sufficient acclimatization, so risk of altitude sickness (dangerous brain swelling)
The way they explained it:
-- Faster, no necessity to cross dangerous glaciers with crevasses multiple times.
-- No risking of sherpa lives; sherpas would dump a small load at base camp and return two weeks later for the trip out
-- Biggest risk to expeditions is weather: they go in in good weather (spike the trip if bad) and then are in and out before the weather has time to change
-- Ropes are most necessary for unskilled climbers like sherpas; for skilled mountaineers the odds of a slips are low and outweighed by dangers associated with setting up ropes, which include time for weather to change, time for altitude sickness to develop, etc.
-- Big teams need to carry supplies to support people who carry supplies for people who carry supplies to people who rope routes for people who rope routes to use, ad infinitum: expeditionary forces grow exponentially and create risks from weather and avalanches and crevasses
And so on. Messner and Habeler later climbed Everest without oxygen, and Messner solo'd Everest's North Face without oxygen. A French guy later did the same in one day.
Similarly, in backpacking another big-wall climber who turned Appalachian Trai hiker, Ray Jardine, developed a system called ultralight backpacking, no tent, just a tarp, no sleeping back, just a down quilt, no backpack, just a daypack, no hiking boots, just cheap running shoes you treat as disposible, etc.
I'm sure the military special forces are closer to alpine style than to expeditionary style, but they could possibly be even more so. I wonder what the trade off would in dumping the armor, as just one example? If you get hit you die (if you slip on Gasherbrum I you die), but the armor slows you down and tires you out. And so on. Would the risks really be higher in going alpine style in the military, in the number of casualities? Is it a case of "nobody can blame you if you buy IBM?": "Nobody can blame you for a sniper casualty if you require head to toe armor from the leading maker. What more could you have done?" It would take real courage for a commander to strip down the infantry to be quick and agile, and it would take really well trained troops. But in the end it might save lives, who knows?
I read a book when I was a kid by some American alpinist who tried to climb Everest from the north side (Tibet) by sneaking into Red China with a small group. He didn’t make it to the top but he got in and out of Red China without spending 20 years in a prison camp, so he had a lot of fun.
He referred to the typical expedition, such as the successful 1963 US assault on Everest that had 800 porters, as a “mass migration.”
Starting with the English attempts on Mount Everest in the 1920s by WWI vets, assaults on major peaks got bigger and bigger, with up to 500 people. Sherpas set up a base camp and several camps leading up to the summit, and teams would rotate in and out to acclimatize.
In 1975 Pakistan reopened the Karakoram after twenty years, and an American team made an attempt on K2 using a slimmed down version of this kind of expeditionary model led by Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Everest. Tagging along was big-wall climber/photographer Galen Rowell, who wrote a book on the experience, In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods. He described meeting two scraggly Europeans coming in as the Americans were leaving in defeat, German-speaking Italian Reinhold Messner and the Austrian Peter Habeler.
Rowell was flabbergasted by what they told him. They were planning on climbing one of the other 8,000 meter mountains in the range, Gasherbrum I, and they were going to do it in one push, no porters, no rope, no tent, no oxygen tanks, jusgt a bivouac bag that covered only up to their waist and a camera to prove they were successful. They called it Alpine Style Mountaineering. Rowell got a postcard from them in the U.S. a couple of months later confirming the ascent.
The way that Messner and Habeler explained it, their technique was safer, and they would prove it later on Everest and all the 14 8,000 meter peaks. At first glance it seemed more dangerous:
-- Unroped, so a slip or fall would be deadly, with no way to be arrested
-- No supplies for a camp if delayed
-- In sufficient acclimatization, so risk of altitude sickness (dangerous brain swelling)
The way they explained it:
-- Faster, no necessity to cross dangerous glaciers with crevasses multiple times.
-- No risking of sherpa lives; sherpas would dump a small load at base camp and return two weeks later for the trip out
-- Biggest risk to expeditions is weather: they go in in good weather (spike the trip if bad) and then are in and out before the weather has time to change
-- Ropes are most necessary for unskilled climbers like sherpas; for skilled mountaineers the odds of a slips are low and outweighed by dangers associated with setting up ropes, which include time for weather to change, time for altitude sickness to develop, etc.
-- Big teams need to carry supplies to support people who carry supplies for people who carry supplies to people who rope routes for people who rope routes to use, ad infinitum: expeditionary forces grow exponentially and create risks from weather and avalanches and crevasses
And so on. Messner and Habeler later climbed Everest without oxygen, and Messner solo'd Everest's North Face without oxygen. A French guy later did the same in one day.
Similarly, in backpacking another big-wall climber who turned Appalachian Trai hiker, Ray Jardine, developed a system called ultralight backpacking, no tent, just a tarp, no sleeping back, just a down quilt, no backpack, just a daypack, no hiking boots, just cheap running shoes you treat as disposible, etc.
I'm sure the military special forces are closer to alpine style than to expeditionary style, but they could possibly be even more so. I wonder what the trade off would in dumping the armor, as just one example? If you get hit you die (if you slip on Gasherbrum I you die), but the armor slows you down and tires you out. And so on. Would the risks really be higher in going alpine style in the military, in the number of casualities? Is it a case of "nobody can blame you if you buy IBM?": "Nobody can blame you for a sniper casualty if you require head to toe armor from the leading maker. What more could you have done?" It would take real courage for a commander to strip down the infantry to be quick and agile, and it would take really well trained troops. But in the end it might save lives, who knows?
Interesting idea. Of course, Messner always had a very distinct mission — e.g., go climb Mt. Everest. Occasionally, American soldiers get a simple, distinct mission — e.g., go kill bin Laden. But a lot of times, not so much.
It begins in school now…
The New American Career Path:
For a man who’s lifted weights (correctly) for a while, 135lbs on a barbell on his back doesn’t feel heavy at all. Of course, he’s not walking with it for miles. But are today’s troops walking that far with full packs? Aren’t most of today’s infantry units mechanized?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/army-women-infantry-soldiers-one-up-men/
C'mon, Dave, when's the last time you had only 135 on the squat rack?
Within a squad, as described above by istevefan, you also distributed the crew-served weapon ammo amongst the squad members; back in the era I described this was either the M249 SAW (5.56 mm ammo) or the M60 (7.62mm ammo), since some units still had the M60s (they were in the process of phasing them out for the M249). I recall about a 90-95% pass rate for the infantry unit I served in; I was not an infantry officer; I was another specialty, but I also had to complete this as well, since it was an all personnel requirement within the unit. In the Airborne Corps, the standards were higher (I believe it was 2.5 hours to complete and the requirement was semi-annual). Not sure what the standards are now, but probably something pretty close to that.
At Fort Benning, the first sergeant of my basic training company used to call the grunts on profile/restricted duty “Jerry’s Kids”. When everyone else was marching, they’d ride in a deuce-and-half he called “the cream puff truck”.
IIRC, the move from 7.62mm ammo to 5.56mm was made in part due to weight concerns.
Anyhow, why should we have light infantry deployed in the field anywhere now?
Roughly speaking, heavy infantry can destroy a lot more than light infantry, but (a) can't go everywhere and (b) doesn't have the infantry to search an area in detail. So, the opposition lives where (a) heavy infantry can't go, because of its equipment, or (b) hide in inhabited areas where heavy infantry can't search effectively enough to find them.
On the other hand, light infantry eats troops, both during and after combat. If we're in an attrition war (as tactics indicate), why use light infantry? The answer to that has been obvious since the Port Arthur attack by Japanese forces in the early AD 1900s. Light infantry eats troops, don't use light infantry in attrition wars. If you have an attrition war and you can't stand attrition, you've lost. Make the best of it, try to win the peace negotiations, lose your table stakes, and rebuild. Don't throw your society into the furnace. Simple as that, and as hard to face.
Disguising light infantry casualties by over-use of body armor, which produces joint injuries that aren't attributed to actual combat, is an attempt to deceive the public, as is the "They serve so you won't have to" advertising slogan of a few years ago was. "We have casualties, but they don't count because . . .". But they do. Each is a member of your society, as are that person's relatives. You need them.
Counterinsurgency
Women have weak joints and brittle bones. Even the ones who can lift a decent amount of weight in training, can't carry it far without getting hurt. When you march across rugged terrain with a heavy load, you can't rely on muscle. You have to rely on your skeletal structure (preferably with good posture) that is held together by joints. Women suck at that.
Keep in mind my experience was in a light infantry unit in Alaska. So we did walk pretty much everywhere with heavy packs, especially during winter. Our unit had SUSVs to bring in supplies. But we still pretty much walked. So most of the guys in our unit were not large. At least not like the guys I see today.
PS. Here is a press release from 1984 in the NY Times when the army announced it was bringing back the light infantry.
But the pack is well camouflaged since it’s invisible.
Were you an 11 Bravo?
The visible knapsack of male privilege.
Strangely enough, the general trend from at least the dawn of the Iron Age to the introduction of gunpowder in Europe sometime in the 15th century, a span of many thousands of years and many many wars, was of a steady increase in body armor, the apogee being reached right at the end of that period.
Apparently, gunpowder rendered armor superfluous, thus we see the ‘ideal’ of the ‘lightly armored infantryman’ of the first world war – British troops still wore cloth caps in battle up to 1916 – and the American civil war.
The sneaky use of IEDs – anti personnel explosives, ironically, by ‘Wiley Oriental Gentlemen’ has caused the the resurgence of personal army after a long hiatus.
Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but Chelonians, (turtles and tortoises), are perhaps the most ancient and conserved order or terrestrial vertebrates.
No matter how physically fit you are at the start of a deployment, your strength and muscle endurance will begin to go down during the back half of a year long deployment. Combat troops don’t have the time for the same level of physical training while they are down range.
In November 2017, the good folks at CBS News had an objective no-fake online piece about females in the infantry. Just a few tweaks …
… and everything will be hunky dory so we shouldn’t give it another thought. As iSteve often points out nutritional supplements and advanced training methods make women totally equal to men except better.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/army-women-infantry-soldiers-one-up-men/
https://twitter.com/MorlockP/status/1062402485883731968
I’m guessing it’s because there are lots of Mexican woman who enlist. 120 pounds at 5’0 is more believable.
Many soldiers also ruin their backs and even lose an inch in height due to the weight of the packs.
The Pentagon did demo a robotic mule several years ago. It is a marvel of engineering.
Drawbacks are it is very loud and very fuel consuming.
Of course, the robotic mule begs the question: how about regular mules? Or, why not have indigenous sherpas help carry stuff? It might be racist and bad optics.
https://goo.gl/images/5Mktkz
The Pentagon did demo a robotic mule several years ago. It is a marvel of engineering.
https://youtu.be/arIJm2lAfR8
Drawbacks are it is very loud and very fuel consuming.
Of course, the robotic mule begs the question: how about regular mules? Or, why not have indigenous sherpas help carry stuff? It might be racist and bad optics.
Mules are pretty great.
http://mulography.co.uk/mules-in-ancient-rome/
I used to work with a woman whose surname was Recuero = Muleteer.
There have been a bunch of comments about ligament and stress injuries. If you've ever seen inside a beast of burden's joints, you'll know why they are so great. You could make a dozen men's ligaments out of a single mule ligament.
I forget which historian said this, I read it decades ago. He stated that in WWII, in a questionable situation facing US troops, they would expend shells rather than risk a GI’s life. In the Wehrmacht, a similar situation would result in soldiers being deployed, in order to conserve ammunition considered more important.
Now the Russians... lots of people AND stuff. They bleed both in wars.
The thing that seemed totally crazy to me about the Germans during World War II (among others) is that they let their star aces (fighter pilots) stay on the front lines until they inevitably died on an unlucky day... instead of, say, rotating them back home and imparting that hard-earned experience on a new crop of fighter pilots.
This "Let's make our Army into community organizers (armed)" stuff, which started under J.F. Kennedy, has proven to be quite the loser. Remember the first days of the Afghanistan invasion, when the US tried, as a first move, to tell the Afghan women how to dress and break up the Afghan family structure? That with few numbers of lightly armed troops who relied on local allies and service personnel for much of their effectiveness. Wonder why that didn't convert the Afghan civil population. What it did do, however, was to leave the troops hanging. IEDs, suicide attacks, ambushes. Attrition, in the sterilized name for it.
Once upon a time psychologists conducted "despair research" on rats. Really research, apparently, widely publicized at the time. They would literally drop rats into a stainless steel basin, water deeper than the rat's length, unclimbable walls, and let the rats drown. They found out that some rats kept going until exhausted, others just gave up and sank. Not much of a finding, actually, _but the researchers killed a lot of rats_, and were (IMHO) given publication credit for that. Comparison with recent US attrition strategy is up to the reader.
Counterinsurgency
More important until they were all out of soldiers at the end and had to field grandfathers and boys.
Yes.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/army-women-infantry-soldiers-one-up-men/
In Travis Corcoran’s Heinlein-esque novel The Powers Of The Earth, set ~30 years in the future, special forces units include handicapped troops. They raid a cargo ship, and the able-bodied troops have to winch up the handicapped ones.
They have to drink and eat.
Plus, worst case scenario, pack animals can literally live off the land, eating grass, brush and leaves. Can men do that?
Then surely you scaled a few walls.
Women have weak joints and brittle bones. Even the ones who can lift a decent amount of weight in training, can't carry it far without getting hurt. When you march across rugged terrain with a heavy load, you can't rely on muscle. You have to rely on your skeletal structure (preferably with good posture) that is held together by joints. Women suck at that.
Here is a 2002 piece in the British Spectator where the author is surprised by the large size of the American troops compared to the Royal Marines:
Brits are surprised that American soldiers are so big? They should see Israelis. Down right puny by American standards. They look like our sixteen year-old boys.
An American soldier once told me that a key requirement of all infantry since at least Roman times is to be able to march at four miles per hour for IIRC at least 20 miles in full gear and then fight if necessary.
The legionnaire's combination of armour, shield, throwing spears and sword etc. must have weighed quite a lot.
When the U.S. wins wars it usually does it by overwhelming the enemy materially. Ulysses S. Grant was brilliant at Vicksburg, but later he wasn’t brilliant, he was just ruthless about using his advantage in men and arms. The Navy was brilliant at Midway but later on in the Pacific War it was just colossal.
It’s nice to be brilliant (like the German army often was in WWI and WWII), but it’s better to be colossal.
- Source: various
Women have weak joints and brittle bones. Even the ones who can lift a decent amount of weight in training, can't carry it far without getting hurt. When you march across rugged terrain with a heavy load, you can't rely on muscle. You have to rely on your skeletal structure (preferably with good posture) that is held together by joints. Women suck at that.
I thought the soldiers Trump visited looked fat, although I assume most are support rather than combat infantrymen.
That’s because being brilliant is a bit like being a criminal – you have to hit 100% all the time, otherwise you lose. Being colossal is the other way – unless things go spectacularly badly, you win by default.
Yup. 10th Mountain actually did pretty poorly in the early part of GWOT.
Brits are surprised that American soldiers are so big? They should see Israelis. Down right puny by American standards. They look like our sixteen year-old boys.
You need to read JFC Fuller’s book on Grant. He was a master strategist, something Lee lacked, as well as a superb tactician, like Lee. You still need to have the ability to use your superior numbers, as McClellan didn’t in the Peninsular Campaign.
My father’s favorite general was Grant. Best general in the war.
I mention that because almost everyone else goes gaga over Lee. You and my late father were the only ones who thought Grant to be the best.
One side note, to show the sad state of history knowledge. There was a food cart vendor in the East Village in NYC who would give away food to people who answered a trivia question correctly. The only time I saw the cart he had a picture of Lincoln with a general, and the trivia question was to name the general, hint being he was Grant’s predecessor for the Army of the Patomic. The guy was happy when I answered McClellan, but very upset that I was the only correct answer that day.
Former infantryman here – answer is yes, they do lift, but in my experience the big lifting craze started after 2001 and all the deployments. Very likely had something to do with lugging all that armor around, but coincided with the crossfit / free-weight renaissance. The lifting is a good thing, but I’m less certain about the armor.
20 lbs doesn’t sound like much, but it matters when you’re trying to run, jump or dive. The ballistic plates especially really bounce up and down, seriously impacting the body’s natural motion. Add weapon and everything else (I was almost always carrying at least one radio in my one Iraq tour) and the struggle is real. It slows you down significantly. The experience gave me sympathy for breast-reduction patients. Also – and this isn’t much discussed – it affected my marksmanship. It’s just harder to tuck the stock into your shoulder and draw a sight picture with all that bulk.
If the conflict had involved lots of movement and close combat, maybe the armor wouldn’t have been worth it. In an environment where most casualties are caused by unexpected explosions and sniper fire, armor is probably worth it. But it’s miserable to wear.
Here’s a classic on exactly this phenomenon, but discussing WWII equipment: https://www.amazon.com/Soldiers-Load-Mobility-Nation-Marshall/dp/B00FXA04YO
Reminds me of the old Hellcat vs. Jap Zero airplane design philosophies: Armor vs. speed and agility. I think the Americans had lighter quicker tanks than the Germans, though. If soldiers aren’t making the long treks that they were in WW2 or Vietnam (due to advancements in personnel carrier technology…or a change in the nature of conflicts) maybe the added weight matters less. Just guessing.
Starting with the English attempts on Mount Everest in the 1920s by WWI vets, assaults on major peaks got bigger and bigger, with up to 500 people. Sherpas set up a base camp and several camps leading up to the summit, and teams would rotate in and out to acclimatize.
In 1975 Pakistan reopened the Karakoram after twenty years, and an American team made an attempt on K2 using a slimmed down version of this kind of expeditionary model led by Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Everest. Tagging along was big-wall climber/photographer Galen Rowell, who wrote a book on the experience, In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods. He described meeting two scraggly Europeans coming in as the Americans were leaving in defeat, German-speaking Italian Reinhold Messner and the Austrian Peter Habeler.
Rowell was flabbergasted by what they told him. They were planning on climbing one of the other 8,000 meter mountains in the range, Gasherbrum I, and they were going to do it in one push, no porters, no rope, no tent, no oxygen tanks, jusgt a bivouac bag that covered only up to their waist and a camera to prove they were successful. They called it Alpine Style Mountaineering. Rowell got a postcard from them in the U.S. a couple of months later confirming the ascent.
The way that Messner and Habeler explained it, their technique was safer, and they would prove it later on Everest and all the 14 8,000 meter peaks. At first glance it seemed more dangerous:
-- Unroped, so a slip or fall would be deadly, with no way to be arrested
-- No supplies for a camp if delayed
-- In sufficient acclimatization, so risk of altitude sickness (dangerous brain swelling)
The way they explained it:
-- Faster, no necessity to cross dangerous glaciers with crevasses multiple times.
-- No risking of sherpa lives; sherpas would dump a small load at base camp and return two weeks later for the trip out
-- Biggest risk to expeditions is weather: they go in in good weather (spike the trip if bad) and then are in and out before the weather has time to change
-- Ropes are most necessary for unskilled climbers like sherpas; for skilled mountaineers the odds of a slips are low and outweighed by dangers associated with setting up ropes, which include time for weather to change, time for altitude sickness to develop, etc.
-- Big teams need to carry supplies to support people who carry supplies for people who carry supplies to people who rope routes for people who rope routes to use, ad infinitum: expeditionary forces grow exponentially and create risks from weather and avalanches and crevasses
And so on. Messner and Habeler later climbed Everest without oxygen, and Messner solo'd Everest's North Face without oxygen. A French guy later did the same in one day.
Similarly, in backpacking another big-wall climber who turned Appalachian Trai hiker, Ray Jardine, developed a system called ultralight backpacking, no tent, just a tarp, no sleeping back, just a down quilt, no backpack, just a daypack, no hiking boots, just cheap running shoes you treat as disposible, etc.
I'm sure the military special forces are closer to alpine style than to expeditionary style, but they could possibly be even more so. I wonder what the trade off would in dumping the armor, as just one example? If you get hit you die (if you slip on Gasherbrum I you die), but the armor slows you down and tires you out. And so on. Would the risks really be higher in going alpine style in the military, in the number of casualities? Is it a case of "nobody can blame you if you buy IBM?": "Nobody can blame you for a sniper casualty if you require head to toe armor from the leading maker. What more could you have done?" It would take real courage for a commander to strip down the infantry to be quick and agile, and it would take really well trained troops. But in the end it might save lives, who knows?
Current high coverage body armor was required by US C0ngress, not the Army, during the early stages of the current round of Middle Eastern warfare. Congress didn’t want large casualty numbers, and required more coverage than the Army wanted. Current loads minimize combat casualties, but cause joint injuries that manifest in later life — injuries Congress doesn’t much care about as they don’t affect the next election.
Counterinsurgency
As someone posted on another site about this topic, “If the whole company gets medically discharged for bad joints and backs, that’s less of a problem than one man getting killed because they weren’t wearing all their armor”. Or words to that effect. Like Twinkie said, we’re a casualty-adverse nation.
So there’s a bunch of robotic technology that’s making this problem moot you do realize?
https://www.bostondynamics.com/robots
In the UK Territorial Army of the late 1990s we only carried about 50 lb and no body armour. It still felt a lot. The best training for it seemed to be just lots of practice in carrying it, rather than lifting weights.
You carry weight for a long time, you do so with structure/posture, by relying on your bones. While some of it is learned, the rest is sort of genetic. Some people just have brittle bones and weak joints/ligaments. Tough luck.
Of course all those electronics and battery dependent gear would be useless should tactical or widespread EMP be used. Then it’s back to hand to hand or maybe just call it a day and declare peace.
America may have a suspicion that without superior gear they wouldn’t ever win anything.
Anyhow, why should we have light infantry deployed in the field anywhere now?
Wikipedia gives a fair answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_infantry
Roughly speaking, heavy infantry can destroy a lot more than light infantry, but (a) can’t go everywhere and (b) doesn’t have the infantry to search an area in detail. So, the opposition lives where (a) heavy infantry can’t go, because of its equipment, or (b) hide in inhabited areas where heavy infantry can’t search effectively enough to find them.
On the other hand, light infantry eats troops, both during and after combat. If we’re in an attrition war (as tactics indicate), why use light infantry? The answer to that has been obvious since the Port Arthur attack by Japanese forces in the early AD 1900s. Light infantry eats troops, don’t use light infantry in attrition wars. If you have an attrition war and you can’t stand attrition, you’ve lost. Make the best of it, try to win the peace negotiations, lose your table stakes, and rebuild. Don’t throw your society into the furnace. Simple as that, and as hard to face.
Disguising light infantry casualties by over-use of body armor, which produces joint injuries that aren’t attributed to actual combat, is an attempt to deceive the public, as is the “They serve so you won’t have to” advertising slogan of a few years ago was. “We have casualties, but they don’t count because . . .”. But they do. Each is a member of your society, as are that person’s relatives. You need them.
Counterinsurgency
I recently read somewhere maybe it was here that in WW2 if you were advancing and were met with some rapid well aimed rifle fire you had encountered UK troops , a storm om of machine gunfire indicated Germans . If nothing happened and after 5 min. an air strike and/or artillery barrage hit you it was Americans .
Thanks to our industrial base being huge and safely out of our expeditionary war zones, we have more stuff than people. Germans always fought contiguous enemies and, due to limited natural resources, had more people than stuff. So priorities aligned the way they did for a reason.
Now the Russians… lots of people AND stuff. They bleed both in wars.
The thing that seemed totally crazy to me about the Germans during World War II (among others) is that they let their star aces (fighter pilots) stay on the front lines until they inevitably died on an unlucky day… instead of, say, rotating them back home and imparting that hard-earned experience on a new crop of fighter pilots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_flying_aces
As Richard Bong's experience showed, flying new planes kills good pilots much more often than old planes flown by enemies.
I saw the the “shells vs. troops” comment in a book by Maudlin. It was probably common wisdom back then. Later on the idea showed up in Pournelle’s _Strategy of Technology_ and the US reliance on standoff weapons rather than large infantry armies during the Cold War. Winning strategy, too. The Korean war pretty much took out what was left of the independent middle class by taking them from their businesses, and maintaining a large Army would have eaten up the human capital needed to make US prosperity (rather as the welfare state has eaten up the human and monetary capital needed for American prosperity), and lost the Cold War by making Western society too much like that of the USSR’s block.
This “Let’s make our Army into community organizers (armed)” stuff, which started under J.F. Kennedy, has proven to be quite the loser. Remember the first days of the Afghanistan invasion, when the US tried, as a first move, to tell the Afghan women how to dress and break up the Afghan family structure? That with few numbers of lightly armed troops who relied on local allies and service personnel for much of their effectiveness. Wonder why that didn’t convert the Afghan civil population. What it did do, however, was to leave the troops hanging. IEDs, suicide attacks, ambushes. Attrition, in the sterilized name for it.
Once upon a time psychologists conducted “despair research” on rats. Really research, apparently, widely publicized at the time. They would literally drop rats into a stainless steel basin, water deeper than the rat’s length, unclimbable walls, and let the rats drown. They found out that some rats kept going until exhausted, others just gave up and sank. Not much of a finding, actually, _but the researchers killed a lot of rats_, and were (IMHO) given publication credit for that. Comparison with recent US attrition strategy is up to the reader.
Counterinsurgency
I was in Bangkok in 2010 during a quite serious attempted overthrow of the government by the exiled former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The army would defend roadblocks from civilian protestors with regular rifle fire. They told me they had to do this to keep the crowd at a distance for fear of M-79 grenades and pistol shots. The Thai conscripts I saw did not have body armour and were clearly not prepared to take chances.
(The Thaksin side certainly used agent provocateurs to try to provoke a military overreaction.)
20 lbs doesn't sound like much, but it matters when you're trying to run, jump or dive. The ballistic plates especially really bounce up and down, seriously impacting the body's natural motion. Add weapon and everything else (I was almost always carrying at least one radio in my one Iraq tour) and the struggle is real. It slows you down significantly. The experience gave me sympathy for breast-reduction patients. Also - and this isn't much discussed - it affected my marksmanship. It's just harder to tuck the stock into your shoulder and draw a sight picture with all that bulk.
If the conflict had involved lots of movement and close combat, maybe the armor wouldn't have been worth it. In an environment where most casualties are caused by unexpected explosions and sniper fire, armor is probably worth it. But it's miserable to wear.
Here's a classic on exactly this phenomenon, but discussing WWII equipment: https://www.amazon.com/Soldiers-Load-Mobility-Nation-Marshall/dp/B00FXA04YO
Screw 20 lbs. Even 2 lbs. begin to weigh on you like lead after marching through rugged terrain for an extended period of time. And every blister and scrape cries out to your brain to stop. I am a big believer in going light.
Concisely- and well-put.
Muscle strength is FINITE. It will fail dramatically eventually.
You carry weight for a long time, you do so with structure/posture, by relying on your bones. While some of it is learned, the rest is sort of genetic. Some people just have brittle bones and weak joints/ligaments. Tough luck.
Guys on the Tour Day France -- that's how it should be spelled -- develop brittle bones because pushing a pedal ain't got nothing to do with gravity.
You overlook the biggest reason our guys carry so much weight into their battles for Israel: (((Somebody))) gets to manufacture and sell all that nifty gear!
You carry weight for a long time, you do so with structure/posture, by relying on your bones. While some of it is learned, the rest is sort of genetic. Some people just have brittle bones and weak joints/ligaments. Tough luck.
Yeah, turns out I had weak ligaments – now I have a wrecked pelvis and permanent back pain, *sigh*
Less invasive is dry needling but it seems to help for my accumulation of f lifting climbing and ju jitsu injuries
Sorry to hear that. Were you in my area, I’d recommend you a good pain management doc/anesthesiologist. He helped me out when I came home wrecked.
In Soviet Russia, Katyusha barrage comes to you, you don’t come to the Katyusha barrage.
I have a good osteopath and a daily exercise & swim routine, usually can avoid painkillers.
They’ve been writing about this issue forever. S.L.A Marshall wrote a book all the way back in 1950 about how the infantry is overloaded.
Of course, nobody ever does anything about it. It’s just one of those perennial issues that gives military talking heads something to go on about.
Not as casualty averse as the nation you are doing the fighting for.
Have spent 20 years in the military (much of that deployed), I’ve always thought that the idea of women in combat units was an illusion, that developed into a delusion (that is, people started believing their illusions) … and then the illusionists began sharing their delusions among themselves as organizational hallucinations. PC, thank you for suspending reality!
Data point: At the Air Force Academy in the 1970s, cadets and officers took pride in running in their combat boots … because, if their survival ever depended on it, they would be in their combat boots. Then, women were admitted to the Academy. The female cadets quickly started suffering shin splints from running in formation in combat boots. Solution: Moving forward, the Academy forced all cadets to run in formation in tennis shoes.
Data point: We had a number of females in our tactical unit in Germany. We were put on alert to deploy to the Middle East. The first deployment order transferred all of the women out of our unit.
Data point: The son of a family acquaintance had a son who deployed to Bosnia. He was a heavy machine gunner. He was a strapping young man, yet post-Bosnia he was medically retired for physical issues associated with lugging around his machine gun and ammunition. From this, I take it that there are no female heavy machine gunners in the Army.
Data point: Females have recently started graduating from Army Ranger School. What was not noticed is that the Army first quietly lowered the standards for graduation to make that possible. However, the storyline was too many males were dropping out of ranger training. Therefore, the standards were lowered to ameliorate the high male dropout rate.
I recently watched a documentary about Canadian troops operating in Helmut Province in Afghanistan. The clue light went on regarding how PC unfolds in practice:
A Canadian tactical unit (male only) hit the field, marching across rough terrain with heavy packs in search of the Taliban. No vehicles. The camera shunted back and forth between the tactical unit and its headquarters. The headquarters was manned by senior officers (all male), supported by coveys of female troops watching screens, doing paperwork, and running coffee. The females evidently deployed to the war zone (hence hazard pay and pokemon credits for deploying to a war zone), but they did not deploy into the field. They did not carry heavy packs; there was no need for them to wear body armor; they did not maneuver against the enemy; they did not hazard enemy fire.
Welcome to the PC world of fantasy, illusion, delusion, and hallucination (and a great deal of hypocrisy) as the services mandate the equality of the sexes in Western military structures and organizations.
Most infantrymen lift, but that’s not the hard part. Civilians aren’t used to carrying those loads on their backs, there are all sorts of muscles and callouses you have to build and nerves you have to kill in your shoulders and feet to be able to do it. This is why Infantry units ruck march weekly. My first ruck in basic was only with a forty pound pack, rifle and water for five miles. One of the worst days of my life. Within a year, I was running twenty miles in full battle kit with an eighty pound ruck. In country, 120-150 lb was common, but we didn’t march nearly as far.
“Former infantryman here”
So how much did you really carry?
I ask because I, a former armorman, suspect what is really going on. All soldiers are issued the same basic stuff. But in my experience (training, and, as I said, on tanks), we don’t carry it. Or at most, we carry it in our duffel bags once from the airport to the bus and then leave it in lockers.
The specific example I remember is night vision devices. Yes, we are all issued it, and have to sign for it, and are financially responsible for it. It stays locked up (presumably unless you go on a night mission) until it is time to clean or turn back in. I suspect alot of that gear is similar-yes, the infantryman’s load is technically 150 or 400 lbs or whatever it officially is: but much of it (NVG’s when not on night duty, MOPP-or chemical-suits, field jacket liners, and so on and so on) stays back in the hootch, as clean as possible.
I think everyone on this board could use a bit of ‘common sense test’ thinking. If infantryman are really walking around with 150 lbs on their backs: that is effectively walking around with another person on their backs all day. Can that actually be done?
I just googled the CPAT (a fireman’s physical test). It involves tests with either 50 lbs or 75 lbs (simulating gear plus carrying a hose), and lasts a total of about 11 minutes. Not twice that weight for eight hours.
I am by no means a top athlete. But I’ve done crossfit with very good athletes. Those exercises may involve lifting weights (squats, etc) in the 100+ lbs range (squats in the 300+ lb range for the strong guys). For a few minutes. There are other exercise that involve carrying weight (farmer’s carry for instance). They involve carrying appropriate weight while walking-again for a few minutes. I’ve never seen anyone do it with 100+ lbs. Suggesting any of those people would or could spend eight hours walking with 150 lbs is preposterous.
I’ve also backpacked when I was younger-at altitude, with gear necessary to camp and stay alive for several days. A 60 lb backpack is alot of weight (though do-able for a young twenty something male). 150 lbs is utterly preposterous, and I doubt if any backpacker has ever carried that much in human history. A few hundred yards, shuttling gear? Sure. Unloading from transportation for half an hour? Sure. All day? No way.
Again-apply the common sense ‘what are my life experiences with this type of thing’ test.
joe
I don't know what "night duty" means, but as a former infantryman I sure as shit always had my NODs. My "day duty" could always turn into "night duty", and the laser on my rifle isn't doing me much good without NODs. Field jacket liners? One of the last things I'd ever think about leaving behind.
MOPP suits are not included in a basic load so are irrelevant to this discussion. We're talking about what you carry on your person on every patrol.
A ruck with nothing but the cold weather gear, ammo, field-stripped MREs, bivvy sack and other necessary gear easily can run over 90 lbs dry. Add 8 qts water = 16 lbs, FLC or whatever harness you're using with 7 mags, maybe armor and a helmet... it adds up.
The Pentagon did demo a robotic mule several years ago. It is a marvel of engineering.
https://youtu.be/arIJm2lAfR8
Drawbacks are it is very loud and very fuel consuming.
Of course, the robotic mule begs the question: how about regular mules? Or, why not have indigenous sherpas help carry stuff? It might be racist and bad optics.
Er, it says right on the contraption that it’s a mastiff.
https://goo.gl/images/5Mktkz
My father was a bit of a Civil War history buff. Not a fanatic, but knowledgeable.
My father’s favorite general was Grant. Best general in the war.
I mention that because almost everyone else goes gaga over Lee. You and my late father were the only ones who thought Grant to be the best.
One side note, to show the sad state of history knowledge. There was a food cart vendor in the East Village in NYC who would give away food to people who answered a trivia question correctly. The only time I saw the cart he had a picture of Lincoln with a general, and the trivia question was to name the general, hint being he was Grant’s predecessor for the Army of the Patomic. The guy was happy when I answered McClellan, but very upset that I was the only correct answer that day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_the_Potomac#Commanders
Incidentally, Lee said McClellan was the most formidable of all his opponents.
Until the kevlar helmet, helmet’s were never designed with the dual primary purpose of slowing/stopping high velocity small arms fire and artillery shrapnel. The original purpose of the metal helmet was to protect against shrapnel from artillery fire (the biggest injury/death risk to infantrymen). Aside from lethal proximity range of exploding artillery (which no protection can really help against due to blast over-pressure and instant kinetic effects of high-velocity sharp-edged metal), proximity-fuse artillery fire that detonates in trees or other canopy can rain down debilitating shrapnel and wood pieces that can cause severe/fatal head wounds, even at lower kinetic velocities; metal helmets can protect against a lot of these potential injuries, which is why all the European powers (except the Russians) quickly developed and distributed them to their Soldiers after August 1914. Helmets never were intended as a panacea of protection, but good enough to provide some protection against the most common injury/death vectors in mass industrial combat as it evolved in the early to mid 20th century.
Nice piece on their place in Rome:
http://mulography.co.uk/mules-in-ancient-rome/
I used to work with a woman whose surname was Recuero = Muleteer.
Women have weak joints and brittle bones. Even the ones who can lift a decent amount of weight in training, can't carry it far without getting hurt. When you march across rugged terrain with a heavy load, you can't rely on muscle. You have to rely on your skeletal structure (preferably with good posture) that is held together by joints. Women suck at that.
Its been over 30 years since I was in a line infantry unit (Bradley mech battalion), and over 20 since I was with the Airborne, but that’s generally my impression too, as I still work among Soldiers and Marines. Back then, almost all the Soldiers were lean, but not bulky. Today’s average grunt is definitely larger and in poorer shape, but I see that all around American society, among my kids’ high school peers.
Pack animals are a great boon to mankind that modernity in general and the military in particular unjustly neglect, perhaps because they appear old fashioned. But they are quiet, cheap, sturdy, need no spare parts, and carry punishing loads without complaint. They’re also kinda fun. Maybe that’s why bureaucracies hate ’em.
There have been a bunch of comments about ligament and stress injuries. If you’ve ever seen inside a beast of burden’s joints, you’ll know why they are so great. You could make a dozen men’s ligaments out of a single mule ligament.
Soldiers have to eat and drink too, no? The difference is mules can carry their own feed and a lot more.
Plus, worst case scenario, pack animals can literally live off the land, eating grass, brush and leaves. Can men do that?
The first rep, anyway!
C’mon, Dave, when’s the last time you had only 135 on the squat rack?
Standard conventional tactical force requirement (in late 1980’s) for a mech infantry Soldier was to complete a 12 mile road march in full combat basic load in 3 hours once a year (not including the training marches leading up to that annual test). Full combat basic load was defined as: helmet, load bearing equipment (ammo pouches with basic load – 200 rounds of 5.56mm for the M16A2), two full canteens, two first aid bandages, and 2 dummy grenades (inert with no charge inside but the full weight of the metal); a field pack of at least 30 pounds of equipment/supplies (typically three MRE rations, one change of uniform, 3 changes of underwear/socks), additional ammunition (100 rounds), additional first aid items and additional canteen of water.
Within a squad, as described above by istevefan, you also distributed the crew-served weapon ammo amongst the squad members; back in the era I described this was either the M249 SAW (5.56 mm ammo) or the M60 (7.62mm ammo), since some units still had the M60s (they were in the process of phasing them out for the M249). I recall about a 90-95% pass rate for the infantry unit I served in; I was not an infantry officer; I was another specialty, but I also had to complete this as well, since it was an all personnel requirement within the unit. In the Airborne Corps, the standards were higher (I believe it was 2.5 hours to complete and the requirement was semi-annual). Not sure what the standards are now, but probably something pretty close to that.
“Quantity has a quality all its own”.
– Source: various
Now the Russians... lots of people AND stuff. They bleed both in wars.
The thing that seemed totally crazy to me about the Germans during World War II (among others) is that they let their star aces (fighter pilots) stay on the front lines until they inevitably died on an unlucky day... instead of, say, rotating them back home and imparting that hard-earned experience on a new crop of fighter pilots.
When the struggle is existential, you’ve got to use everything to depletion. This list is instructive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_flying_aces
As Richard Bong’s experience showed, flying new planes kills good pilots much more often than old planes flown by enemies.
The Pentagon did demo a robotic mule several years ago. It is a marvel of engineering.
https://youtu.be/arIJm2lAfR8
Drawbacks are it is very loud and very fuel consuming.
Of course, the robotic mule begs the question: how about regular mules? Or, why not have indigenous sherpas help carry stuff? It might be racist and bad optics.
Apparently, Roman legionaries were so overburdened with kit that they nicknamed themselves Marius’ Mules – whatever that phrase is in Latin – due to ‘reforms’ made by one Marius, a Roman senator.
Agree that both generals were competent with what they were given. Lee did have a good strategy, which he consistently conveyed to Davis. The difference is, Lee was never going to have access to the manpower/logistics/material support infrastructure Grant did. In a certain sense the war’s outcome was baked in before it ever started, given the population distribution and the lop-sided distribution of dual-purpose (i.e. peacetime and wartime) manufacturing between the two sides. The South’s real only hope was to strike hard and devastatingly enough at the beginning or in the early part of the war, to sow enough doubt in the mid of the population of the North to vote out Lincoln and put in a President/Congress amenable to peaceful break-up. After Gettysburg, that wasn’t going to happen.
That got me thinking that maybe the types of deployments the troops are doing now is promoting the bigger body type. I don't think huge guys that are well over 200 pounds could do what @RickinJax did in Vietnam. I just don't see big guys like that going on extended, cross country hikes through thick jungle with all that weight. I think smaller, leaner guys would have the advantage there.
But if your mission is occupation duty where you make unannounced raids on homes, maybe you need the large-bodied guys. Cops in the US seem a lot bigger today too.
Agree. The contrast is really pronounced if you compare special forces operators over time or across contexts. For example, members of units like the Rhodesian SAS, Selous Scouts, South African reconnaissance units, etc were extremely fit, but they were not huge gym bunnies. The nature of the job those units did back then ruled this out: small teams moving around on their own for long periods in hostile territory obviously didn’t have access to gyms, nor to the type of food you need to eat to get and stay big. If you’re running across Angola with a lot of quite fit terrs in pursuit, being really big is not an obvious advantage.
They’ll get compensated for it on the back end by the VA. The price we pay for asking young Americans to take that risk/bear that burden to spend 20-30 years humping 150 lb packs day in and day out.
Now the Russians... lots of people AND stuff. They bleed both in wars.
The thing that seemed totally crazy to me about the Germans during World War II (among others) is that they let their star aces (fighter pilots) stay on the front lines until they inevitably died on an unlucky day... instead of, say, rotating them back home and imparting that hard-earned experience on a new crop of fighter pilots.
Same with the Japanese.
You carry weight for a long time, you do so with structure/posture, by relying on your bones. While some of it is learned, the rest is sort of genetic. Some people just have brittle bones and weak joints/ligaments. Tough luck.
Gravity and calcium builds and maintains solid, strong bones.
Guys on the Tour Day France — that’s how it should be spelled — develop brittle bones because pushing a pedal ain’t got nothing to do with gravity.
My father’s favorite general was Grant. Best general in the war.
I mention that because almost everyone else goes gaga over Lee. You and my late father were the only ones who thought Grant to be the best.
One side note, to show the sad state of history knowledge. There was a food cart vendor in the East Village in NYC who would give away food to people who answered a trivia question correctly. The only time I saw the cart he had a picture of Lincoln with a general, and the trivia question was to name the general, hint being he was Grant’s predecessor for the Army of the Patomic. The guy was happy when I answered McClellan, but very upset that I was the only correct answer that day.
Yeah, but you were both wrong, Grant did not succeed McClellan as Commander of the Army of the Potomac. That would have been Burnside. By the time Grant showed up in the Eastern Theater, George Meade was commander of the AOP. Grant was overall General of the Army by that time, Meade still commanding the AOP. Apologize for being such a pedant…at least both of you knew who McClellan was (a martinet… :-))
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_the_Potomac#Commanders
So Dave P., see my reply below about annual pack march requirement for tactical unit infantry Soldiers; what was the requirement when you were in (and the time frame), out of curiosity?
My father’s favorite general was Grant. Best general in the war.
I mention that because almost everyone else goes gaga over Lee. You and my late father were the only ones who thought Grant to be the best.
One side note, to show the sad state of history knowledge. There was a food cart vendor in the East Village in NYC who would give away food to people who answered a trivia question correctly. The only time I saw the cart he had a picture of Lincoln with a general, and the trivia question was to name the general, hint being he was Grant’s predecessor for the Army of the Patomic. The guy was happy when I answered McClellan, but very upset that I was the only correct answer that day.
Not to be a pedant, but you and the hot dog seller were both wrong. USG never commanded the Army of the Potomac. He commanded all US armies but located his HQ with the Army of the Potomac with George Meade (victor of Gettysburg) in command who succeeded to that post eight months after McClellan had been given the boot and command went to Burnside and then Hooker before landing with Meade.
Incidentally, Lee said McClellan was the most formidable of all his opponents.
It doesn’t take a West Point graduate to understand what our fighting men are up against – each soldier has to be a one-man logistics system while his enemy can instantly disappear down the nearest rat hole – or back into the [non-existent] “civilian” populace. We shouldn’t be in half of these crap holes in the 1st place. Glad our POTUS decided to get our soldiers [I refuse to use the dumb term “troops” – every man is a “soldier” in the service of his country, regardless of branch of service] out of Syria; Afghanistan should be the next on the withdrawal list. That crap hole was the downfall of the USSR and several armies failed there much earlier. The only way to “win” a war in that wasteland would be an Iwo Jima style campaign carrying flamethrowers from one rat hole to the next.
C'mon, Dave, when's the last time you had only 135 on the squat rack?
Wednesday (warming up).
President Trump pays attention to the solution – do not “invade the world”.
The next part of the solution is, do not “invite the world” so that we have no more “Major Hassan” mass murderers living among us and living off of us White Taxpayers, and so that we do not import even worse enemies.
This is not complicated.
Roughly speaking, heavy infantry can destroy a lot more than light infantry, but (a) can't go everywhere and (b) doesn't have the infantry to search an area in detail. So, the opposition lives where (a) heavy infantry can't go, because of its equipment, or (b) hide in inhabited areas where heavy infantry can't search effectively enough to find them.
On the other hand, light infantry eats troops, both during and after combat. If we're in an attrition war (as tactics indicate), why use light infantry? The answer to that has been obvious since the Port Arthur attack by Japanese forces in the early AD 1900s. Light infantry eats troops, don't use light infantry in attrition wars. If you have an attrition war and you can't stand attrition, you've lost. Make the best of it, try to win the peace negotiations, lose your table stakes, and rebuild. Don't throw your society into the furnace. Simple as that, and as hard to face.
Disguising light infantry casualties by over-use of body armor, which produces joint injuries that aren't attributed to actual combat, is an attempt to deceive the public, as is the "They serve so you won't have to" advertising slogan of a few years ago was. "We have casualties, but they don't count because . . .". But they do. Each is a member of your society, as are that person's relatives. You need them.
Counterinsurgency
I wasn’t asking what the purpose of light infantry is but why we should have any of it deployed in combat now. Take counterinsurgency, for example. Isn’t the presence of a stubborn insurgency a sign we shouldn’t be there? Maybe if we were in a titanic struggle with another great power and had to hold Afghanistan so we didn’t run out of rocks or poppies, but that’s not the case.
So, to paraphrase myself in a couple of other posts, don't get into an arse kicking contest with a porcupine. If attrition is the only way you can win, then lose and save what you can. That or use area weapons and disintegrate the opponent's society (that was the threat of the Cold War that prevented most attrition contests with Russia). Either is better than disintegrating your own society.
Of course, if you're ruling leftists, well, neither is better. You need to disintegrate your present society to integrate a replacement. Both alternatives will be criticized: "they call it impiety, and impropriaty, and quite a variety, of unpleasant names" (from T. Lehrer, "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY
Or better yet, live in peace and fight wars only in video games. If possible.
Counterinsurgency
Counterinsurgency
"Insurgencies" are usually supported by outside powers and are rarely organic. The Viet Cong didn't really exist - it was all NVA. The Taliban exists as a creature of the Pakistani ISI. Hezbollah exists as a creation of Iran. Don't fall for enemy propaganda which loves to portray opposition as being patriotic, local and organic when it is really all being organized and funded from Moscow or Berlin or Beijing or Islamabad or Teheran, as the case may be.
I happened to be browsing a book about, of all things, JRR Tolkien, which mentions the British army in the battle of the Somme.
“…and every soldier who went ‘over the top’ would carry at least fifty pounds of ammunition, supplies, rations, trench-digging equipment, and other materials that would eliminiate the necessity for immediately establishing time-consuming supply lines…
…All the ministers, field marshalls, and generals had been dead wrong. For one thing, the wrong kind of artillery shells were generally used (shrapnel rather than high explosive), and so failed to destroy the German bunkers or cut the barbed wire. The sustained barrage on no man’s land was too intense, and only served to create more mud, which rendered the tanks completely useless. The German gun emplacements behind the line were virtually untouched, and reserves and reinforcements could be rapidly transported by rail to the sector. But the worst miscalculation was in loading down each soldier with too much equipment…”
fifty pounds.
joe
Pumping iron is not going to do much for you lugging a lot of weight on your back over a long distance. Perhaps weighted squats will help standing up and kneeling down but nothing beats getting a heavy pack and running then walking then running then walking etc.
If you follow the latter you will likely not be “huge” but will have good cardiovascular fitness. Then again, “chicks can’t see your big lungs so best to get down the gym and add some muscle mass.” Also, pull-ups and press-ups and sit-ups are functionally important for getting up walls, getting up from the prone position and just getting up respectively. If you can do 12, 60 and 70 in a row then you’re more than strong enough.
My observation is that the most He-Man looking soldiers in the US tended to work in the stores and so on, and therefore had easy access to the gym, protein and injectables. They also did the least cardio and therefore were able to be huge. Some had legs so big they struggled to run properly. This is extremely counter-productive.
I recommend “Five Years, Four Fronts: A German Officer’s World War II Memoir”, by Georg Grossjohann. He was contemptuous of American troops, and he defends his views well, not just sour grapes.
C'mon, Dave, when's the last time you had only 135 on the squat rack?
You always start with 135 as the first warmup set. Dave is right – after a while, 135 feels like nothing, though I haven’t tried to walk a mile with it, let alone twenty.
I was an 0331 (Machinegunner) in the USMC. A funny MOS “choice” the Corps gave considering I had to get a medical waiver, because of early childhood hearing loss, just to enlist.
I went to what the USMC calls CAAT Platoons. Combined Anti-Armor Teams, “mechanized” on Humvees (non-up armored at the start of the war by the way) with half the platoon being 0331 machinegunners like me and the other half as 0352 TOW gunners. We were more of a tip of the spear recon type unit, the TOW was/is a formidable tank/armor busting missile.
While as machinegunner we fired the .50 cal mounted or the MK-19 which is a 40MM automatic grenade launcher firing HEDP (High Explosive Dual Purpose) rounds at a sustained rate of about 40-60 rounds per minute. Max range upwards of 2,000 yards and effective on point targets at about 1,500 yards. Two very effective and powerful guns utilize in combat.
I was a lot older (enlisted at aged 27) so was relieved to be able to ride in the Humvees. But, much to my chagrin, we still participated in a lot of humping (road marches). We always brought along the completed .50 cal system when we humped. For my unit, our basic combat load was 55lbs consisting mostly of our Alice/Molle packs, plus whatever weapon we were assigned (most issued M-16, squad leaders or gunners issued an M-9). Which by itself was a lot, but then you add in the .50 cal and it was a bit much. The receiver of the .50 cal weighs about 50lbs. The tripod was 44lbs and the barrel was 24lbs. We would distribute the system among each other. With one Marine starting out with the receiver, one with the tripod, and two Marines each with one barrel (spare). Put them up front and the rest of the Marines fell in behind them (we typically went on humps with two complete systems) and as they tired they would yell “Barrel Right!” or “Receiver Left!” and the next Marine in line would run up to them and take over carrying duties. We would do this the whole hump. So, depending on what piece you were carrying our weight was as low as 55lbs, then would jump to 79lbs with the barrel, 99 with the tripod and 105lbs when carrying the receiver. The tripod’s were later replaced with a better/lighter version. The barrel was fine to carry lighter weight and could sling across the pack quite comfortably, but the tripod and receiver were nasty.
The Marines value physical fitness. We had a lot of PFT studs who could kill it on the PFT test. I was fine with fitness always more athletic than strong. Always scored a first class PFT score (not that hard to do really and I got the old man discount). But in my platoon (and many other CAAT platoons) the real mark was what you carried on the humps. We “conditioned” up to 25 miles so we would do about 1-2 humps per month, culminating in the 25 miles hump. I never fell out. Always there at the end, never ignored the calls from my brothers when they could no longer carry their piece. The was the true test of toughness in my platoon. Not PFT scores, not book knowledge, but what you did on the humps.
We had some strong fellas. It was about the back and more importantly your heart. I only did 7 years in the Corps but it wore me down a bit.
Women might be able to do what I did, and what I did was not that remarkable compared to what everyone else went through. My experience with women in the Corps, while slight, was that they used their female’ness to get out of a lot of shit and I had some resentment about it. No doubt some can do it…but not many. 2 examples. First was during rifle qual. We shared the range this time with some pogues, and there were a couple of females. We were at the 300 yd line and I was firing from the kneeling postion. The guy next to me accidentally fired on my target so it went down while I was sighted in. I raised my hand to the range NCO’s could come over and give me the alibi. They were nowhere to be found. You had a couple up and down the line during qual to help out with this type of stuff. The four of them were all down at the other end crowded around the female (to be fair she was attractive…not just lack of other women around attractive) “assisting” her with whatever problem she was expreriencing. Finally the range WO saw me with my hand up and got someone over. The other experience was at Camp Fuji. I was tagged to work the chow hall (always volunteer for the scullery) and the one female from the motorpool on base got out of chow hall duty because of “female problems”. Never came back either.
Sorry for the long winded post, heading down amnesia lane. Just one Marine’s experience.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/army-women-infantry-soldiers-one-up-men/
I find it downright hard to believe that half the female troops weigh less than 120 pounds, especially with the obesity epidemic today. That’s an extremely slight build for any woman over 5’5. That’s thinner than most high school female soccer players, about the same size as professional middle distance runners like Shalane Flanagan.
I’m guessing it’s because there are lots of Mexican woman who enlist. 120 pounds at 5’0 is more believable.
I look forward to hearing from the military veterans on this site. What are the trade offs of equipment versus relying on skill? Does a Viet Cong in the jungle have some advantages over a too-heavily equipped infantryman?
Among other things the VC were often operating close to home.
As I’ve said in other posts, our side isn’t good at attrition warfare. That’s a consequence of having a K society, one that invests a lot in its members and relies on competent citizens. Each infantryman that dies means an important function not performed. Other societies have many completely non-functional citizens, crunches they can lose in war and never miss them. The West used to be like that as recently as the Napoleonic wars. People who could earn a living in society strongly tended to remain out of military service, and there was no legal conscription (barring press gangs and the like, small scale affairs mostly). Mass mobilization for WW I left participating societies without the people they needed to keep existing, and with considerable ill feeling from those people left sound after the conflict.
So, to paraphrase myself in a couple of other posts, don’t get into an arse kicking contest with a porcupine. If attrition is the only way you can win, then lose and save what you can. That or use area weapons and disintegrate the opponent’s society (that was the threat of the Cold War that prevented most attrition contests with Russia). Either is better than disintegrating your own society.
Of course, if you’re ruling leftists, well, neither is better. You need to disintegrate your present society to integrate a replacement. Both alternatives will be criticized: “they call it impiety, and impropriaty, and quite a variety, of unpleasant names” (from T. Lehrer, “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”,
Or better yet, live in peace and fight wars only in video games. If possible.
Counterinsurgency
Counterinsurgency
Brits are surprised that American soldiers are so big? They should see Israelis. Down right puny by American standards. They look like our sixteen year-old boys.
Good point with the Israelis. They are puny by modern US standards. But they look like the guys I served with, roughly 5’8″ to 5’10” and about 160 pounds.
Women have weak joints and brittle bones. Even the ones who can lift a decent amount of weight in training, can't carry it far without getting hurt. When you march across rugged terrain with a heavy load, you can't rely on muscle. You have to rely on your skeletal structure (preferably with good posture) that is held together by joints. Women suck at that.
In fact in 1939-40 the British army was the only fully mechanized force in the world. Of course the US soon got up to speed.
http://www.m274armymules.com/mule_history.htm
The SAS guys in Bravo Two Zero were carrying 200 lb packs.
My father’s favorite general was Grant. Best general in the war.
I mention that because almost everyone else goes gaga over Lee. You and my late father were the only ones who thought Grant to be the best.
One side note, to show the sad state of history knowledge. There was a food cart vendor in the East Village in NYC who would give away food to people who answered a trivia question correctly. The only time I saw the cart he had a picture of Lincoln with a general, and the trivia question was to name the general, hint being he was Grant’s predecessor for the Army of the Patomic. The guy was happy when I answered McClellan, but very upset that I was the only correct answer that day.
I always like to cite “Pickett’s” Charge or Malvern Hill for those who think Lee was any less prone to full frontal boneheadedness.
Not necessarily. If that was true, then all an enemy has to do is mount an insurgency and we have to leave. You can’t let the enemy dictate the terms that way. If being somewhere serves a vital national interest then we should do it even if they are shooting at us from every rooftop. If it is not in our interest we should get the hell out even if they are welcoming us with flowers and candy.
“Insurgencies” are usually supported by outside powers and are rarely organic. The Viet Cong didn’t really exist – it was all NVA. The Taliban exists as a creature of the Pakistani ISI. Hezbollah exists as a creation of Iran. Don’t fall for enemy propaganda which loves to portray opposition as being patriotic, local and organic when it is really all being organized and funded from Moscow or Berlin or Beijing or Islamabad or Teheran, as the case may be.
The Taliban represents the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan though. It’s impossible to defeat that kind of broad based insurgency without using imperial methods (mass reprisal executions, etc.). And Afghanistan is not anywhere near to being in our national interest.
Oral tradition maintains that the Joseph Stalin of history once remarked that “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
Hitler was pissed at the Russians for having turned over their entire economy toward making lots and lots of tanks and other military goods while German factories were still putting out toasters and Mercedes. Unsportsmanlike or something, in his view. Then America turned its gigantic auto industry (and most other civilian industries) over to 100% war production – the amount of stuff that they produced was just overwhelming by European standards where even factory production was more artisanal. German stuff was usually nicer – like a fine Swiss watch vs. a mass produced Timex. At least until late in the war when they got desperate. But quantity has its own quality.
--------------------------------------
Correct. The German soldier was the finest fighting man of WW2 but lost to sheer numbers.
My father’s favorite general was Grant. Best general in the war.
I mention that because almost everyone else goes gaga over Lee. You and my late father were the only ones who thought Grant to be the best.
One side note, to show the sad state of history knowledge. There was a food cart vendor in the East Village in NYC who would give away food to people who answered a trivia question correctly. The only time I saw the cart he had a picture of Lincoln with a general, and the trivia question was to name the general, hint being he was Grant’s predecessor for the Army of the Patomic. The guy was happy when I answered McClellan, but very upset that I was the only correct answer that day.
I think Meade was in charge of the Army of the Potomac from Gettysburg to the end of the war. McClellan had a spell as general-in-chief before Halleck replaced him. And then Grant replaced him after Vicksburg.
Wrong question.
Reducing load and improving individual skills, fieldcraft and marksmanship in particular, is the key.
Add to it teamwork and small unit tactics…no problem with overload.
A lot of lifters have similar injuries. They use some stuff called bpc 157 and tb 500 that isnt fda approved but doesnt seem t9 have side effects. Hgh is almost guaranteed to help but expensive.
Less invasive is dry needling but it seems to help for my accumulation of f lifting climbing and ju jitsu injuries
SAW gunners have it rough. A basic load is 800 rounds (each belt is 100 rounds), and often they carry a double basic load. The 249 itself weighs 15 lbs and is awkward to carry, even with a short barrel and collapsible buttstock. At least a 240 gunner has an ammo bearer (who carries most of the ammo as well as the tripod), and the 28 lb 240 is more comfortable to walk with than the 249.
My squad was weighing rucks once and the lightest came in at a little over 80 lbs. An ammo bearer broke the scale with his ruck, so we didn’t get them all weighed.
Loadout varies with the mission. If you’re in a city, riding around in vehicles you’re going to wear more armor than if you’re doing a 10-day foot patrol in the mountains. Hopefully, anyways, if your leadership isn’t too stupid. Long rucks with body armor on were a major contributing factor to the sorry state my shoulders are in. Not exactly ergonomic.
Answer to problem, perhaps: squad/section/patrol leader in charge of who’s carrying what and how much. Stops at that level.
Of course, in the current political climate (read brass career – casualties) impossible.
Now, here is a guy who has no familiarity with our military traditions; in fact, he sounds like he could be a Gerry. He's the sort of wild-eyed free spirit who would permit guards at a guard post in a terrorist-infested area to let rounds into the chambers of their rifles without first making a few sensible phone calls.
Haha…they can.
(Try) to visialize:
An enemy MG is at, say, 800 metres from the road->a patrol, 8 men, is trudging along it->gunner aims at the pointman and squeezes short, misses->the pointman (and the rest but let’s focus on him) RUNS for cover.
Hehe…try running with that load one day, over uneven terrain, already tired.
And the next burst, longer one, is just about to crack around….
Say, you don’t get hit, but hitting the ground behind that rock with that load…oh my.
What’s next…?
Ah, wait, “observe”.
Try to observe with that load on your back.
At least, “speculate fire” on …that ridge. Try to fire, behind a rock, with that load aimed shots.
Etc…..
No amount of physical fitness will help there. Especially in that first sprint.
Anyway.
That.
As for:
Idiotic statement. Apologies if sound rude, but the topic is heavy. Some nice guys could follow on that idiocy. Say, an Alt-right guy about to get into a firefight somewhere.
First, those sounds aren’t quite correct, but let’s leave it there. Youtube can help inexperienced there. Some of those videos that is.
As for helmet, one word: ricochets.
Then, one expression: distance/penetration power—shape of helmet/slide/bounce.
Think about if, if you wish.
At least that’s how I remember it. Or so I say.
Okay, maybe I'm lying and completely deaf, and so are all the guys I was in the butts with, and Daniel Ellsberg, which must be a huge relief to some people. But ditching helmets was a bad idea based on incomplete reasoning, so yeah.
"The huge number of lethal head wounds that modern artillery weapons inflicted upon the French Army led them to introduce the first modern steel helmets in the summer of 1915.[3][4] The first French helmets were bowl-shaped steel "skullcaps" worn under the cloth caps. These rudimentary helmets were soon replaced by the Model 1915 Adrian helmet, designed by August-Louis Adrian.[5] The idea was later adopted by most other combatant nations.
"John Leopold Brodie (1873–1945), born Leopold Janno Braude[6] in Riga, was an entrepreneur and inventor who had made a fortune in the gold and diamond mines of South Africa, but was working in London at that time.[7] A design patented by him in August 1915 offered advantages over the French helmet. It was constructed in one piece that could be pressed from a single thick sheet of steel, giving it added strength and making it simple to manufacture. Brodie's patent deals mainly with the innovative lining arrangements; an engineer called Alfred Bates of the firm of Willis & Bates of Halifax, Yorkshire, manufacturer of Vapalux paraffin pressure lamps, claimed that he was asked by the War Office to find a method of manufacturing an anti-shrapnel helmet and that it was he who had devised the basic shape of the steel shell. Aside from some newspaper articles, there is nothing to substantiate Bates's claim.[8]
"Brodie's design resembled the medieval infantry kettle hat or chapel-de-fer, unlike the German Stahlhelm, which resembled the medieval sallet.[9] The Brodie had a shallow circular crown with a wide brim around the edge, a leather liner and a leather chinstrap. The helmet's "soup bowl" shape was designed to protect the wearer's head and shoulders from shrapnel shell projectiles bursting from above the trenches. The design allowed the use of relatively thick steel that could be formed in a single pressing while maintaining the helmet's thickness. This made it more resistant to projectiles but it offered less protection to the lower head and neck than other helmets.
"The original design (Type A) was made of mild steel with a brim 1.5–2 inches (38–51 mm) wide. The Type A was in production for just a few weeks before the specification was changed and the Type B was introduced in October 1915. The specification was altered at the suggestion of Sir Robert Hadfield to a harder steel with 12% manganese content, which became known as "Hadfield steel", which was virtually impervious to shrapnel hitting from above.[10] Ballistically this increased protection for the wearer by 10 per cent. It could withstand a .45 caliber pistol bullet traveling at 600 feet (180 m) per second fired at a distance of 10 feet (3.0 m).[11] It also had a narrower brim and a more domed crown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brodie_helmet
"Insurgencies" are usually supported by outside powers and are rarely organic. The Viet Cong didn't really exist - it was all NVA. The Taliban exists as a creature of the Pakistani ISI. Hezbollah exists as a creation of Iran. Don't fall for enemy propaganda which loves to portray opposition as being patriotic, local and organic when it is really all being organized and funded from Moscow or Berlin or Beijing or Islamabad or Teheran, as the case may be.
The Viet Cong existed. It was replaced by the NVA after the V.C. were defeated by the U.S. military.
The Taliban represents the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan though. It’s impossible to defeat that kind of broad based insurgency without using imperial methods (mass reprisal executions, etc.). And Afghanistan is not anywhere near to being in our national interest.
Time to leave Afghanistan, because better late than never.
Counterinsurgency
Correct.
Women have less bone density (about 20% less than men). Also women are far more prone to knee injury because their pelvis is wider and their femur is at a less suitable angle to their knees.
Upper body ?
Then, one expression: distance/penetration power---shape of helmet/slide/bounce.
Think about if, if you wish.At least that's how I remember it. Or so I say.
First, those sounds aren’t quite correct, but let’s leave it there.
Okay, maybe I’m lying and completely deaf, and so are all the guys I was in the butts with, and Daniel Ellsberg, which must be a huge relief to some people. But ditching helmets was a bad idea based on incomplete reasoning, so yeah.
Never in "real"? You know, a close miss, close to your head?
O.K.Try this:
Put a rock, or any obstacle capable of stopping the round on top of a foxhole. Big enough to cover your head, but not too big. Good enough to cover your head. Just in case. Careful...hehe...very careful.
Get a guy you TRUST to shot as close as possible to the rock. Vary ranges and weapon. A round over the top, at left, than at right.Oh, btw, be very careful about those over the top re ballistics (chart, ranges, bullet DROP, you know that I guess).
Compare with the sound(s) heard in a properly built butt. Try with helmet on and off.As for helmets, again, a tool (very good) in a toolbox. Most of the time, invaluable. Not so much for rounds (but, oh yes, can make all the difference) but, as already said in the thread, about splinters or flying debris caused by explosion.
Sometimes a hindrance, though. Depends on a "job" and environment, time of day/night, where/when a job is being done. We don't want to do too much of "online training" here, so leave it there.
"...and every soldier who went 'over the top' would carry at least fifty pounds of ammunition, supplies, rations, trench-digging equipment, and other materials that would eliminiate the necessity for immediately establishing time-consuming supply lines...
...All the ministers, field marshalls, and generals had been dead wrong. For one thing, the wrong kind of artillery shells were generally used (shrapnel rather than high explosive), and so failed to destroy the German bunkers or cut the barbed wire. The sustained barrage on no man's land was too intense, and only served to create more mud, which rendered the tanks completely useless. The German gun emplacements behind the line were virtually untouched, and reserves and reinforcements could be rapidly transported by rail to the sector. But the worst miscalculation was in loading down each soldier with too much equipment..."
fifty pounds.
joe
Right, because they’re storming: cf in Saving Private Ryan where they’re about to take a lone machine gun position in a field, so they’re crouching in a ditch taking off all their stuff. They come back and retrieve it when they’re done. If those same guys were on patrol or moving to a new position, they’d carry a lot more than fifty pounds. But notice the crucial factor: guys in a committee who are not going to have to make the charge, obviating possibilities with weight.
You are absolutely correct to reject the irritating, brainless, pseudo-chummy and incorrect term “troops.” It’s a misused group word, of which the individual unit is “trooper.”
Of course, in the current political climate (read brass career - casualties) impossible.
>letting people who have to actually deal with the consequences make decisions
Now, here is a guy who has no familiarity with our military traditions; in fact, he sounds like he could be a Gerry. He’s the sort of wild-eyed free spirit who would permit guards at a guard post in a terrorist-infested area to let rounds into the chambers of their rifles without first making a few sensible phone calls.
Well, free will brother. You work for The Empire, get paid by The Empire, well, you shall obey the rules of The Empire.
Let's be serious here. What you guys do isn't war. Isn't even combat. It's occupation and heavy police action. So, all PC BS and rules you must obey are hard, but not actually lethal.
Now.....the problem could become serious if/when you get to fight a serious opponent.
Ordinary guys, can't see that happening. Even if starts with Iran I don't think you'll need much of common sense soldiering. Overwhelming technological superiority will take care of it.
Now, the problem could be something serious starts in Eastern Europe, from Donbass to Bosnia/Kosovo and some of you get involved. Closer to Russian border, more dangerous.
I am sure that common sense will prevail: listening to "brass" orders/instructions vs what a squad/section leader believes is sensible.
Concepts of "skin in the game" and "what is there for me".
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/army-women-infantry-soldiers-one-up-men/
The average Vietcong soldier couldn’t have been even 120lb, and they did pretty well.
I don’t think this is true, I think the generals sincerely believed that a typewriter would help, and were not taking kickbacks from William Burrough’s relatives. Pentagon graft is a huge issue but it’s not causative here, here the issue is actually Fat Tony and the ZuZu Man.
I weigh about 250, and went up Half Dome over 2 days last June, when I was up around a 305 pound squat. (I’m back down to 185, in large part because it took me two months to be able to walk without pain again, much less start lifting again. Rim-to-Rim next October, and I’m a massive pain about doing exactly one of these vacations a year for this exact reason).
The first problem is going to be boots. You’re going to want ankle protection, so to get it, you’re going to slap 3 pounds around your ankles, right before you take 35,000 steps for 16 hours. As an extra bonus, the side effect of not being able to bend your ankles is not being able to bend your ankles, so you need to rework the entire way that you step. I really hope you did some treadmill work at high incline *while wearing the boots* before you went out, because otherwise your shins will start screaming at you by Mile 3 of 20.
My second problem is going to be water. Namely, that I drink like a sailor. That means I need both a filter and about 20 pounds of water. One 24 oz bottle per mile in the mountains, double that in the desert, firm understanding of where water sources are.
(My third problem is going to be photo gear, because these hikes are enough of a pain that I’m not doing them twice, so FF camera, 2 lenses, some filter kits, and a tripod or two, but that’s my choice).
If I’m doing more than 15 miles in a day, that means camping. That’s another solid ten pounds right there, plus of course a doubling of the food supplies since I eat 5000 calories a day doing serious hiking. On my Yosemite trip, once I woke up at 3AM, munched down an entire family-sized pack of Nutter Butters as a midnight snack, went back to sleep, and… lost ten pounds in a week and a half.
—–
So at the end of all of this, I’m looking at about 40 pounds of food, water, and gear (which will be 20 at the bottom, but) which I am then going to slap about 6 inches behind the small of my back massively throwing off my entire posture and dragging on my chest making it hard to breathe. I am then going to drag it 4000 feet straight up a mountain (Oh, did I mention there’s no air up here!), and need to maintain control of those 30 pounds or so on the way back down, which means I’m basically crushing my knees and spine repeatedly for 8-10 hours on the way back down 4400 feet of elevation gain. (Hiking poles are your friend).
And the reason I’m doing these things now is because I barely have the knees for it anymore, so once a year, I crawl into shape to do something crazy, crash and burn hard on the trip, and then spend a year in recovery.
—-
TLDR: It’s not that heavy, but you’re doing it for 35,000 reps over about 16 hours with minimal breaks. It sucks.
“The Pentagon already makes everything from Kevlar, carbon fiber, and other lightweight materials, though this trend has led to a widespread joke: A soldier carries 100 lbs. of the lightest kit imaginable.”
jevons paradox. the lighter that machinegun gets, the more other stuff they’ll carry.
the upper weight limit is all that matters, and will always be fully used. they’ll carry 100 pounds of whatever it is.
until they get exoskeletons or power armor. then it will be max weight rating for those too. they’ll carry a cannon instead of a machinegun, cannon rounds instead of bullets, and so forth.
The Taliban represents the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan though. It’s impossible to defeat that kind of broad based insurgency without using imperial methods (mass reprisal executions, etc.). And Afghanistan is not anywhere near to being in our national interest.
No truly independent power center can be allowed to exist in a Communist state. Communism is a type of fascism – everything within the state, nothing without the state. If the VC had not acted as a 100% puppet of Hanoi then the N. Vietnamese themselves would have eliminated them. In fact they did by using them as the tip of their spear against the US. Then when they won the war they ruled directly from Hanoi without having to take the VC into account because they were conveniently dead.
That’s the real question. An insurgency means that the price of our national interest will have to be repaid in blood and treasure (although not much American blood is being shed in Afghanistan now). Lack of insurgency just means a waste of treasure. Lives are certainly precious but a waste is a waste – the billions that go into some unnecessary foreign outpost could be used to improve highway safety or public health or to secure the border – ultimately money equals lives and vice versa. So the billions that we spend in insurgency free Italy 75 years after the end of WWII are almost as bad as the billions spent in Afghanistan.
“In the Wehrmacht, a similar situation would result in soldiers being deployed, in order to conserve ammunition considered more important.”
More important until they were all out of soldiers at the end and had to field grandfathers and boys.
If you wait until you hear the bullets zinging or buzzing around you’ve waited too long.
David Hackworth, who enlisted in the army as a buck private, spent some time in Korea and Vietnam fighting communists, and ended his career as a bird colonel, just short of his first star, wrote a book about his experiences entitled About Face. He always made sure the soldiers in his units wore every ounce of protection they were issued while in combat zones – helmets, flak jackets, the whole ball of wax. This emphasis is now basically second nature in today’s US military, to the point that Iraqi locals thought American body armor came with embedded air conditioning units, because it did not occur to them how any normal person could endure Iraq’s stifling summer heat with body armor on all the time without a special cooling mechanism. I seem to remember Pat Boyle, formerly albertosaurus, commenting that today’s ground troops seem to be the equivalent of Vietnam-era Green Berets in terms of their recruit quality, motivation and military proficiency.
I think neither “communism” nor fascism itself are necessarily really much different from absolute monarchy. They are simply different ways of legitimating the idea that a singular absolute ruler gets to call the shots. They are equally jealous of their prerogatives and wary of independent power centers. They are kings by another name. In North Korea’s case, calling Kim Jong-un a king would be a lot more appropriate than any other title. He certainly has more traditionally royal prerogatives than any other titular monarch on the planet.
It seems that if the US Army wanted to get more women in the field, they could just hire porters to carry the 100 pounds of gear for them. I’m sure there’s lots of men in the third world who would be more than willing to do this at a much lower rate of pay. Even better, why not hire mercenaries to fight “American” wars and then no Americans would need to get killed at all.
In the long run it would help if we didn’t torture the guys with excessive training for long road marches that never happen in combat. We spent a shitload of time getting good at moving by foot with everything we had for days at a time over miles and miles of terrain. That’s fucking stupid. All you get out of that is a bunch of guys who have blown out knees and backs by the time they hit thirty.
We almost never moved miles and miles at a time with full rucks in combat, that’s why god created blackhawks.
What we did do was a lot of patrols with half of our battle rattle and you trained so that when someone got hit you could handle all of your gear and theirs at the same time.
Oh and I can tell you guys something else that nobody wants to hear about women in combat. The fact is that by the third deployment they are no longer up against regular men, they are up against guys who have taken roids for the injuries they have and to get ready for the next deployment fast enough.
It’s not enough to be able to get your body in condition enough to get through Ranger School or something like that. That’s a one off situation where you put everything you have into it and that’s it. Either you have enough or not. That’s not how it works in real life. In real life it’s like getting ready for the next season of football. Do we really think that women’s recovery time is going to be good enough? Fat chance, that’s why roids are a secret now. Nobody wanted to admit that even the MEN couldn’t get the job done without them, but it was true. Sure some of the guys could hang without using them but the fact that a lot of guys felt they honestly needed them to survive should tell you a whole lot.
I’m not saying women don’t belong in combat either. I just don’t see the point when it comes to straight up infantry units. Now if they want to put together sniper teams with women, I’d be all for that. Some of them bitches can shoot, I’ll tell you what!
Now aside from all the whoa whoah crap the best bet would be to stop this nonsense and worry about our own country for a change.
2 observations:
1. In my day we had flaks they would barely stop pistol pullets. The modern armor for US military stops rifles bullets, and the plates weigh very little compared to the same amount of protection if they were metal.
2. My secretary’s guard unit got called up a few years ago, sent to Iraq. She got there, they found out she was a legal secretary, made her a sec in HQ. She still got sent to a requal range halfway through, where an idiot behind the firing line blew off a round and it hit another woman on the line. The woman thought she had gotten bumped into by a line coach, there was a bullet in her armor. That is quality weight if you are the person shot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x98dLVA2f1Q
That was back when they had skin in the game. They couldn’t care less anymore..
Then, one expression: distance/penetration power---shape of helmet/slide/bounce.
Think about if, if you wish.At least that's how I remember it. Or so I say.
“At the outbreak of World War I, none of the combatants provided steel helmets to their troops. Soldiers of most nations went into battle wearing cloth, felt, or leather headgear that offered no protection from modern weapons.
“The huge number of lethal head wounds that modern artillery weapons inflicted upon the French Army led them to introduce the first modern steel helmets in the summer of 1915.[3][4] The first French helmets were bowl-shaped steel “skullcaps” worn under the cloth caps. These rudimentary helmets were soon replaced by the Model 1915 Adrian helmet, designed by August-Louis Adrian.[5] The idea was later adopted by most other combatant nations.
“John Leopold Brodie (1873–1945), born Leopold Janno Braude[6] in Riga, was an entrepreneur and inventor who had made a fortune in the gold and diamond mines of South Africa, but was working in London at that time.[7] A design patented by him in August 1915 offered advantages over the French helmet. It was constructed in one piece that could be pressed from a single thick sheet of steel, giving it added strength and making it simple to manufacture. Brodie’s patent deals mainly with the innovative lining arrangements; an engineer called Alfred Bates of the firm of Willis & Bates of Halifax, Yorkshire, manufacturer of Vapalux paraffin pressure lamps, claimed that he was asked by the War Office to find a method of manufacturing an anti-shrapnel helmet and that it was he who had devised the basic shape of the steel shell. Aside from some newspaper articles, there is nothing to substantiate Bates’s claim.[8]
“Brodie’s design resembled the medieval infantry kettle hat or chapel-de-fer, unlike the German Stahlhelm, which resembled the medieval sallet.[9] The Brodie had a shallow circular crown with a wide brim around the edge, a leather liner and a leather chinstrap. The helmet’s “soup bowl” shape was designed to protect the wearer’s head and shoulders from shrapnel shell projectiles bursting from above the trenches. The design allowed the use of relatively thick steel that could be formed in a single pressing while maintaining the helmet’s thickness. This made it more resistant to projectiles but it offered less protection to the lower head and neck than other helmets.
“The original design (Type A) was made of mild steel with a brim 1.5–2 inches (38–51 mm) wide. The Type A was in production for just a few weeks before the specification was changed and the Type B was introduced in October 1915. The specification was altered at the suggestion of Sir Robert Hadfield to a harder steel with 12% manganese content, which became known as “Hadfield steel”, which was virtually impervious to shrapnel hitting from above.[10] Ballistically this increased protection for the wearer by 10 per cent. It could withstand a .45 caliber pistol bullet traveling at 600 feet (180 m) per second fired at a distance of 10 feet (3.0 m).[11] It also had a narrower brim and a more domed crown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brodie_helmet
A guy was in OP with a mate. He turned his head to whisper something to his mate and "whack".... got hit.
The round went through the helmet, pierced his skull and just barely touched his brain. Rifle round.
He survived, with metal plate there now, of course.
Now, without helmet that round would've gone that little fraction further, making the ultimate difference. For him, anyway.
And, I've seen a slight groove on a helmet in another case when the round slid along. Without helmet......
Or so I say.
First the IDF doesnt have to be good by European standards, it just needs to beat Arabs, and most times to hold a defensive position and any offensive they can conduct within a day’s march. This often results in discipline problems among non-professional units as a consequence. Having spoken with leaders in the IDF, anyone who sends their kid to join it should reconsider since they’re a meat-wall.
But a lot of idiots talking about overmechanicanition… what this has resulted in is you can disperse men further apart but still doesnt eliminate foot patrols, it might even encourage them more because the armored vehicles can take care of themselves most times while the infantry do infantry things. The positives is that there’s random roving groups of heavily armed logistics troops rolling around denying enemy freedom to move, who’d otherwise would be stuck at a few FOBs. Most combat troops are not at the mega FOBs, but at the small, motte and bailey style Combat Outoosts and nomadic patrol bases.
When I was in the Marines we were patrolling nearly everyday. Steve is right to point out weightlifting is more common than it was and it’s a response to modern warfare. Crossfit was big for a bit too.
Part of the problem with a true light infantry unit would require them to do only a few things well. Scout-Snipers is a good example of this at work. The modular notions of modern military organizations require generalization.
Lastly European militaries arent as mechanized because they’re cash strap. They also have US logistics trains to cover the difference, like France in Mali.
Rippetoe advocates starting with just the bar, but that just feels awkward for me.
Similar behavior in WWI (the artillery shell “with your name on it”).
As crazy as that sounds, it’s historically normative. One of the complaints about Chiang Kai Shek’s army was that its soldiers would enslave the people they were liberating and make them haul gear and scrub dishes. Despite Mao’s Dr Johnning about “not one stitch of thread,” his soldiers did the same. Locally-sourced bearers are staples of British colonial history and literature.
"Panay for example carried four officers and forty-nine enlisted men, along with a Chinese crew of porters."
http://www.usspanay.org/attacked.shtml
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WujTPNkjSeM
I was in infantry training in 1989. I think the packs weighed about 70lbs, but I don’t remember if there was a particular weight requirement. There was one long road march of 15 miles or something like required with the full packs.
Lightweight Plastic Level 3 Armor
https://www.ar500armor.com/ar500-armor-body-armor/level-iii-body-armor.html
"The huge number of lethal head wounds that modern artillery weapons inflicted upon the French Army led them to introduce the first modern steel helmets in the summer of 1915.[3][4] The first French helmets were bowl-shaped steel "skullcaps" worn under the cloth caps. These rudimentary helmets were soon replaced by the Model 1915 Adrian helmet, designed by August-Louis Adrian.[5] The idea was later adopted by most other combatant nations.
"John Leopold Brodie (1873–1945), born Leopold Janno Braude[6] in Riga, was an entrepreneur and inventor who had made a fortune in the gold and diamond mines of South Africa, but was working in London at that time.[7] A design patented by him in August 1915 offered advantages over the French helmet. It was constructed in one piece that could be pressed from a single thick sheet of steel, giving it added strength and making it simple to manufacture. Brodie's patent deals mainly with the innovative lining arrangements; an engineer called Alfred Bates of the firm of Willis & Bates of Halifax, Yorkshire, manufacturer of Vapalux paraffin pressure lamps, claimed that he was asked by the War Office to find a method of manufacturing an anti-shrapnel helmet and that it was he who had devised the basic shape of the steel shell. Aside from some newspaper articles, there is nothing to substantiate Bates's claim.[8]
"Brodie's design resembled the medieval infantry kettle hat or chapel-de-fer, unlike the German Stahlhelm, which resembled the medieval sallet.[9] The Brodie had a shallow circular crown with a wide brim around the edge, a leather liner and a leather chinstrap. The helmet's "soup bowl" shape was designed to protect the wearer's head and shoulders from shrapnel shell projectiles bursting from above the trenches. The design allowed the use of relatively thick steel that could be formed in a single pressing while maintaining the helmet's thickness. This made it more resistant to projectiles but it offered less protection to the lower head and neck than other helmets.
"The original design (Type A) was made of mild steel with a brim 1.5–2 inches (38–51 mm) wide. The Type A was in production for just a few weeks before the specification was changed and the Type B was introduced in October 1915. The specification was altered at the suggestion of Sir Robert Hadfield to a harder steel with 12% manganese content, which became known as "Hadfield steel", which was virtually impervious to shrapnel hitting from above.[10] Ballistically this increased protection for the wearer by 10 per cent. It could withstand a .45 caliber pistol bullet traveling at 600 feet (180 m) per second fired at a distance of 10 feet (3.0 m).[11] It also had a narrower brim and a more domed crown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brodie_helmet
Construction workers almost never used hard hats until Hoover Dam in the late 1920s, which had a lot of rock falls down the canyon sides. Guys working on the dam who had been WWI vets started buying their own helmets, and the huge publicity surrounding the building of the great dam helped spread the idea, so that now “hard hat” is a synonym for “construction worker.”
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/13/Lunch-atop-a-skyscraper-c1932.jpg
In the famous “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photo of 1932 (Rockefeller Center, NYC) the construction workers are not wearing hard hats or boots or any special clothing – they look like they just walked in off the street. A couple of them wear overalls – that’s as close as they get to special clothing.
Or U.S. Navy divers. Too bad hard hats don’t protect one from 1.25 ounce snap ties that fall 22 floors. RIP Rafa.
There were still 112 deaths in the construction of the Hoover Dam. The first death and the last death were 13 years apart to the day, and the dead workers were father and son.
This must be the over-equipped army guys, not the Marines. To get it done, Marines claim to need only a compass and the rudiments.
This is like the old complaint that innovation in household appliances increased housework by raising cleanliness standards while also increasing household expenses.
I went to what the USMC calls CAAT Platoons. Combined Anti-Armor Teams, "mechanized" on Humvees (non-up armored at the start of the war by the way) with half the platoon being 0331 machinegunners like me and the other half as 0352 TOW gunners. We were more of a tip of the spear recon type unit, the TOW was/is a formidable tank/armor busting missile.
While as machinegunner we fired the .50 cal mounted or the MK-19 which is a 40MM automatic grenade launcher firing HEDP (High Explosive Dual Purpose) rounds at a sustained rate of about 40-60 rounds per minute. Max range upwards of 2,000 yards and effective on point targets at about 1,500 yards. Two very effective and powerful guns utilize in combat.
I was a lot older (enlisted at aged 27) so was relieved to be able to ride in the Humvees. But, much to my chagrin, we still participated in a lot of humping (road marches). We always brought along the completed .50 cal system when we humped. For my unit, our basic combat load was 55lbs consisting mostly of our Alice/Molle packs, plus whatever weapon we were assigned (most issued M-16, squad leaders or gunners issued an M-9). Which by itself was a lot, but then you add in the .50 cal and it was a bit much. The receiver of the .50 cal weighs about 50lbs. The tripod was 44lbs and the barrel was 24lbs. We would distribute the system among each other. With one Marine starting out with the receiver, one with the tripod, and two Marines each with one barrel (spare). Put them up front and the rest of the Marines fell in behind them (we typically went on humps with two complete systems) and as they tired they would yell "Barrel Right!" or "Receiver Left!" and the next Marine in line would run up to them and take over carrying duties. We would do this the whole hump. So, depending on what piece you were carrying our weight was as low as 55lbs, then would jump to 79lbs with the barrel, 99 with the tripod and 105lbs when carrying the receiver. The tripod's were later replaced with a better/lighter version. The barrel was fine to carry lighter weight and could sling across the pack quite comfortably, but the tripod and receiver were nasty.
The Marines value physical fitness. We had a lot of PFT studs who could kill it on the PFT test. I was fine with fitness always more athletic than strong. Always scored a first class PFT score (not that hard to do really and I got the old man discount). But in my platoon (and many other CAAT platoons) the real mark was what you carried on the humps. We "conditioned" up to 25 miles so we would do about 1-2 humps per month, culminating in the 25 miles hump. I never fell out. Always there at the end, never ignored the calls from my brothers when they could no longer carry their piece. The was the true test of toughness in my platoon. Not PFT scores, not book knowledge, but what you did on the humps.
We had some strong fellas. It was about the back and more importantly your heart. I only did 7 years in the Corps but it wore me down a bit.
Women might be able to do what I did, and what I did was not that remarkable compared to what everyone else went through. My experience with women in the Corps, while slight, was that they used their female'ness to get out of a lot of shit and I had some resentment about it. No doubt some can do it...but not many. 2 examples. First was during rifle qual. We shared the range this time with some pogues, and there were a couple of females. We were at the 300 yd line and I was firing from the kneeling postion. The guy next to me accidentally fired on my target so it went down while I was sighted in. I raised my hand to the range NCO's could come over and give me the alibi. They were nowhere to be found. You had a couple up and down the line during qual to help out with this type of stuff. The four of them were all down at the other end crowded around the female (to be fair she was attractive...not just lack of other women around attractive) "assisting" her with whatever problem she was expreriencing. Finally the range WO saw me with my hand up and got someone over. The other experience was at Camp Fuji. I was tagged to work the chow hall (always volunteer for the scullery) and the one female from the motorpool on base got out of chow hall duty because of "female problems". Never came back either.
Sorry for the long winded post, heading down amnesia lane. Just one Marine's experience.
SFMF.
Now the Russians... lots of people AND stuff. They bleed both in wars.
The thing that seemed totally crazy to me about the Germans during World War II (among others) is that they let their star aces (fighter pilots) stay on the front lines until they inevitably died on an unlucky day... instead of, say, rotating them back home and imparting that hard-earned experience on a new crop of fighter pilots.
I wonder how much the ace pilots could really teach the incoming group. There’s no substitute for experience. I think it was the Japanese ace Saburo Sakai who observed that you had to survive a few dogfights before you really began to understand aerial combat.
*Sakai was caught off-guard by a new American design, which looked familiar but for a backward-facing machine gun. With one eye, partially paralyzed, and in terrible pain he flew himself back to base (640 miles, over less than five hours) and insisted on reporting the new design before receiving aid, which, when it came, was without anaesthetic, and required him to maintain his remaining eye in a stare on a red bulb for hours of surgery. After that he became an instructor, and died in 2000.
https://youtu.be/ZIpkdusnIkE
Has this woman found any way to monetize her internet fame? She should get an agent working on it.
Incidentally, Lee said McClellan was the most formidable of all his opponents.
McClellan was like those football coaches nowadays are great at everything except winning the big game. He recruited and trained well, had an excellent strategy, just couldn’t win.
Okay, maybe I'm lying and completely deaf, and so are all the guys I was in the butts with, and Daniel Ellsberg, which must be a huge relief to some people. But ditching helmets was a bad idea based on incomplete reasoning, so yeah.
Butts?
Never in “real”? You know, a close miss, close to your head?
O.K.
Try this:
Put a rock, or any obstacle capable of stopping the round on top of a foxhole. Big enough to cover your head, but not too big. Good enough to cover your head. Just in case. Careful…hehe…very careful.
Get a guy you TRUST to shot as close as possible to the rock. Vary ranges and weapon. A round over the top, at left, than at right.Oh, btw, be very careful about those over the top re ballistics (chart, ranges, bullet DROP, you know that I guess).
Compare with the sound(s) heard in a properly built butt. Try with helmet on and off.
As for helmets, again, a tool (very good) in a toolbox. Most of the time, invaluable. Not so much for rounds (but, oh yes, can make all the difference) but, as already said in the thread, about splinters or flying debris caused by explosion.
Sometimes a hindrance, though. Depends on a “job” and environment, time of day/night, where/when a job is being done. We don’t want to do too much of “online training” here, so leave it there.
Truth.
So how much did you really carry?
I ask because I, a former armorman, suspect what is really going on. All soldiers are issued the same basic stuff. But in my experience (training, and, as I said, on tanks), we don't carry it. Or at most, we carry it in our duffel bags once from the airport to the bus and then leave it in lockers.
The specific example I remember is night vision devices. Yes, we are all issued it, and have to sign for it, and are financially responsible for it. It stays locked up (presumably unless you go on a night mission) until it is time to clean or turn back in. I suspect alot of that gear is similar-yes, the infantryman's load is technically 150 or 400 lbs or whatever it officially is: but much of it (NVG's when not on night duty, MOPP-or chemical-suits, field jacket liners, and so on and so on) stays back in the hootch, as clean as possible.
I think everyone on this board could use a bit of 'common sense test' thinking. If infantryman are really walking around with 150 lbs on their backs: that is effectively walking around with another person on their backs all day. Can that actually be done?
I just googled the CPAT (a fireman's physical test). It involves tests with either 50 lbs or 75 lbs (simulating gear plus carrying a hose), and lasts a total of about 11 minutes. Not twice that weight for eight hours.
I am by no means a top athlete. But I've done crossfit with very good athletes. Those exercises may involve lifting weights (squats, etc) in the 100+ lbs range (squats in the 300+ lb range for the strong guys). For a few minutes. There are other exercise that involve carrying weight (farmer's carry for instance). They involve carrying appropriate weight while walking-again for a few minutes. I've never seen anyone do it with 100+ lbs. Suggesting any of those people would or could spend eight hours walking with 150 lbs is preposterous.
I've also backpacked when I was younger-at altitude, with gear necessary to camp and stay alive for several days. A 60 lb backpack is alot of weight (though do-able for a young twenty something male). 150 lbs is utterly preposterous, and I doubt if any backpacker has ever carried that much in human history. A few hundred yards, shuttling gear? Sure. Unloading from transportation for half an hour? Sure. All day? No way.
Again-apply the common sense 'what are my life experiences with this type of thing' test.
joe
Worn vs. carried. Big difference between climbing stairs carrying 75 lbs of awkwardly-distributed weight in your arms and marching with 75 lbs of gear in a ruck, with the weight nicely distributed to your hips.
Now, here is a guy who has no familiarity with our military traditions; in fact, he sounds like he could be a Gerry. He's the sort of wild-eyed free spirit who would permit guards at a guard post in a terrorist-infested area to let rounds into the chambers of their rifles without first making a few sensible phone calls.
I hear you.
Well, free will brother. You work for The Empire, get paid by The Empire, well, you shall obey the rules of The Empire.
Let’s be serious here. What you guys do isn’t war. Isn’t even combat. It’s occupation and heavy police action. So, all PC BS and rules you must obey are hard, but not actually lethal.
Now…..the problem could become serious if/when you get to fight a serious opponent.
Ordinary guys, can’t see that happening. Even if starts with Iran I don’t think you’ll need much of common sense soldiering. Overwhelming technological superiority will take care of it.
Now, the problem could be something serious starts in Eastern Europe, from Donbass to Bosnia/Kosovo and some of you get involved. Closer to Russian border, more dangerous.
I am sure that common sense will prevail: listening to “brass” orders/instructions vs what a squad/section leader believes is sensible.
Concepts of “skin in the game” and “what is there for me”.
"The huge number of lethal head wounds that modern artillery weapons inflicted upon the French Army led them to introduce the first modern steel helmets in the summer of 1915.[3][4] The first French helmets were bowl-shaped steel "skullcaps" worn under the cloth caps. These rudimentary helmets were soon replaced by the Model 1915 Adrian helmet, designed by August-Louis Adrian.[5] The idea was later adopted by most other combatant nations.
"John Leopold Brodie (1873–1945), born Leopold Janno Braude[6] in Riga, was an entrepreneur and inventor who had made a fortune in the gold and diamond mines of South Africa, but was working in London at that time.[7] A design patented by him in August 1915 offered advantages over the French helmet. It was constructed in one piece that could be pressed from a single thick sheet of steel, giving it added strength and making it simple to manufacture. Brodie's patent deals mainly with the innovative lining arrangements; an engineer called Alfred Bates of the firm of Willis & Bates of Halifax, Yorkshire, manufacturer of Vapalux paraffin pressure lamps, claimed that he was asked by the War Office to find a method of manufacturing an anti-shrapnel helmet and that it was he who had devised the basic shape of the steel shell. Aside from some newspaper articles, there is nothing to substantiate Bates's claim.[8]
"Brodie's design resembled the medieval infantry kettle hat or chapel-de-fer, unlike the German Stahlhelm, which resembled the medieval sallet.[9] The Brodie had a shallow circular crown with a wide brim around the edge, a leather liner and a leather chinstrap. The helmet's "soup bowl" shape was designed to protect the wearer's head and shoulders from shrapnel shell projectiles bursting from above the trenches. The design allowed the use of relatively thick steel that could be formed in a single pressing while maintaining the helmet's thickness. This made it more resistant to projectiles but it offered less protection to the lower head and neck than other helmets.
"The original design (Type A) was made of mild steel with a brim 1.5–2 inches (38–51 mm) wide. The Type A was in production for just a few weeks before the specification was changed and the Type B was introduced in October 1915. The specification was altered at the suggestion of Sir Robert Hadfield to a harder steel with 12% manganese content, which became known as "Hadfield steel", which was virtually impervious to shrapnel hitting from above.[10] Ballistically this increased protection for the wearer by 10 per cent. It could withstand a .45 caliber pistol bullet traveling at 600 feet (180 m) per second fired at a distance of 10 feet (3.0 m).[11] It also had a narrower brim and a more domed crown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brodie_helmet
An example:
A guy was in OP with a mate. He turned his head to whisper something to his mate and “whack”…. got hit.
The round went through the helmet, pierced his skull and just barely touched his brain. Rifle round.
He survived, with metal plate there now, of course.
Now, without helmet that round would’ve gone that little fraction further, making the ultimate difference. For him, anyway.
And, I’ve seen a slight groove on a helmet in another case when the round slid along. Without helmet……
Or so I say.
Now the Russians... lots of people AND stuff. They bleed both in wars.
The thing that seemed totally crazy to me about the Germans during World War II (among others) is that they let their star aces (fighter pilots) stay on the front lines until they inevitably died on an unlucky day... instead of, say, rotating them back home and imparting that hard-earned experience on a new crop of fighter pilots.
Erich Hartman(sp?) shot down 352 planes and survived the war. He eventually became a high ranking officer in the postwar german air force and resigned because he hated the F 104 Starfighter and did everything in his power to stop West Germany from accepting it.
Carrying 100 lbs. of gear is the de facto antidote to skipping out on leg day at the gym.
A guy was in OP with a mate. He turned his head to whisper something to his mate and "whack".... got hit.
The round went through the helmet, pierced his skull and just barely touched his brain. Rifle round.
He survived, with metal plate there now, of course.
Now, without helmet that round would've gone that little fraction further, making the ultimate difference. For him, anyway.
And, I've seen a slight groove on a helmet in another case when the round slid along. Without helmet......
Or so I say.
There’s a story in William Manchester’s “Goodbye Darkness” where he mentions an incident during WWII in the Pacific where a US soldier was arguing AGAINST the utility of helmets when a Japanese round hits hits him in the helmet and knocks it off him. He picks up the helmet, dons it, and continues arguing against their utility.
In 1937 the US Navy was employing Chinamen as porters on board the USS Panay in China.
“Panay for example carried four officers and forty-nine enlisted men, along with a Chinese crew of porters.”
http://www.usspanay.org/attacked.shtml
And, on Wednesday, what was your max?
The Taliban represents the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan though. It’s impossible to defeat that kind of broad based insurgency without using imperial methods (mass reprisal executions, etc.). And Afghanistan is not anywhere near to being in our national interest.
Exactly. And the Left’s default posture is to ensure that imperial methods are not used. The only path for us is to exit as quickly as possible without jeopardizing our people.
True. And so even if we were to take the imperial path, it would not benefit us in Afghanistan.
Time to leave Afghanistan, because better late than never.
Nothing too crazy. I did 5 sets of 3 at 325lbs, alternating with sets of 3 of standing overhead press at 170lbs, I think (my notes are in my gym phone, which isn’t with me). Trying to slowly work back up to 4 plates on squats while maintaining below-parallel depth.
In Hong Kong in the 1980s I used to frequent a pub in Central called The Bull and Bear run by a huge, cantankerous English woman who confided to me that she was never intimidated by the marines and other American servicemen (the pub was always packed when the fleet was in) but that the resident, physically much smaller, Scottish soldiers often scared her. “A touch psychotic,” she claimed.
An American soldier once told me that a key requirement of all infantry since at least Roman times is to be able to march at four miles per hour for IIRC at least 20 miles in full gear and then fight if necessary.
The legionnaire’s combination of armour, shield, throwing spears and sword etc. must have weighed quite a lot.
20 lbs doesn't sound like much, but it matters when you're trying to run, jump or dive. The ballistic plates especially really bounce up and down, seriously impacting the body's natural motion. Add weapon and everything else (I was almost always carrying at least one radio in my one Iraq tour) and the struggle is real. It slows you down significantly. The experience gave me sympathy for breast-reduction patients. Also - and this isn't much discussed - it affected my marksmanship. It's just harder to tuck the stock into your shoulder and draw a sight picture with all that bulk.
If the conflict had involved lots of movement and close combat, maybe the armor wouldn't have been worth it. In an environment where most casualties are caused by unexpected explosions and sniper fire, armor is probably worth it. But it's miserable to wear.
Here's a classic on exactly this phenomenon, but discussing WWII equipment: https://www.amazon.com/Soldiers-Load-Mobility-Nation-Marshall/dp/B00FXA04YO
I’ve been reading Antony Beevor’s D-Day book over Christmas. He makes the point strongly that a large number of soldiers died because they were wildly overloaded going into (often deep) water and trying to get up the beach. It seems ludicrous that that wasn’t anticipated.
This "Let's make our Army into community organizers (armed)" stuff, which started under J.F. Kennedy, has proven to be quite the loser. Remember the first days of the Afghanistan invasion, when the US tried, as a first move, to tell the Afghan women how to dress and break up the Afghan family structure? That with few numbers of lightly armed troops who relied on local allies and service personnel for much of their effectiveness. Wonder why that didn't convert the Afghan civil population. What it did do, however, was to leave the troops hanging. IEDs, suicide attacks, ambushes. Attrition, in the sterilized name for it.
Once upon a time psychologists conducted "despair research" on rats. Really research, apparently, widely publicized at the time. They would literally drop rats into a stainless steel basin, water deeper than the rat's length, unclimbable walls, and let the rats drown. They found out that some rats kept going until exhausted, others just gave up and sank. Not much of a finding, actually, _but the researchers killed a lot of rats_, and were (IMHO) given publication credit for that. Comparison with recent US attrition strategy is up to the reader.
Counterinsurgency
I wonder if part of the reason for draping soldiers with body armour like giant beetles is not only to protect the soldiers but also enable them to risk being attacked in complex civil-military conflicts with a relatively restrained use of weapons?
I was in Bangkok in 2010 during a quite serious attempted overthrow of the government by the exiled former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The army would defend roadblocks from civilian protestors with regular rifle fire. They told me they had to do this to keep the crowd at a distance for fear of M-79 grenades and pistol shots. The Thai conscripts I saw did not have body armour and were clearly not prepared to take chances.
(The Thaksin side certainly used agent provocateurs to try to provoke a military overreaction.)
On a similar note, I have severe doubts about how effective concealed carry is without body armor, at least front and back armor with open sides, level 3, with stab resistance. I've been told by trainers that the odds of getting shot are about 1 in 2 for any civil fight when both are armed, and of course there is the 21 foot rule for effective use of firearms against a running knife attack if you see it coming, and the extensive use of surprise knife attacks. Makes me yearn for civil peace -- armor is heavy and hot.
Back in the late 1960s, Army recon units universally used no armor and soft caps. Armor produced heat stroke, and they weren't good artillery targets so the helmets didn't do much good even if worn. What they did do was rely on firepower, hiding, and immediate action drills. Worked until it didn't for the individual troop. Marines apparently still do that. Back then, Marine scouts were said to favor carrying side arms only, to help mobility and remind them that scouts don't fight infantry.
Still good rules. Life is starting to resemble a scouting patrol, the bedrock is still awareness and keeping out of seriously dangerous areas -- in the civil case, you're not there to fight, just to get to your destination. Armor is just to stop a round or two while you break contact and evade until the police show up.
Counterinsurgency
That pesky vanishing LOL button..
But quantity has its own quality.
————————————–
Correct. The German soldier was the finest fighting man of WW2 but lost to sheer numbers.
“Worn vs. carried. Big difference between climbing stairs carrying 75 lbs of awkwardly-distributed weight in your arms and marching with 75 lbs of gear in a ruck, with the weight nicely distributed to your hips.”
You ignored the second half of my statement.
“Not twice that weight for eight hours.”
I’m not comparing carrying 75 lbs with wearing 75 lbs. I’m comparing carrying 75 lbs for 11 minutes with wearing 150 lbs for 8 hours.
Again; use the common sense test. Wearing, or carrying, 150 lbs for 8 hours is virtually physically impossible.
joe
I look forward to hearing from the military veterans on this site. What are the trade offs of equipment versus relying on skill? Does a Viet Cong in the jungle have some advantages over a too-heavily equipped infantryman?
I was a 19 year old US Army E-4 11B2P Infantry, Jump Qual’d (Spec4/Corporal) in 1966-67 Vietnam. I have a damaged right arm and left leg and Purple Heart for my considerable efforts. My unit was A Company, 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division out of Schofield Barracks Hawaii. Oliver Stone (Platoon) was in the 3rd Battalion of the 22nd Infantry Regiment a couple hundred yards from mine at Cu Chi Basecamp. We weren’t there much as we moved a lot, mostly on foot. I arrived “in country” weighing 185, PT champion, Airborne etc. When I was wounded 5 months in, I weighed 155. Those “enemy” were small and wiry for a reason. The VC were local mostly so didn’t have to carry much into a fight. The NVA who we encountered coming into the Saigon River Valley from Cambodia were more conventional in gear but still light when time to fight.
We “dressed for mission” and were named “Light Infantry” as much of what we did, even in Company strength, often included 10 kilometer+ moves. At 90 degrees F and 90% humidity and ground to cover you travel light except for ammo. It was not always that hot but we stayed “light” so that we could move quickly several k’s and we did often. No chopper noise.
Skill? “Good judgement comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgement”. Some men are just better than others in war. Home court advantage makes an average man equal to the invader’s best. I have heard the term “Pindo” used to describe an American soldier when he is geared up because he walks like a Penguin.
I hate war. “War is a Racket” as Marine General Smedley Butler told us in the 1930’s. Nothing has changed. Central Banking funds all sides, determines what and who gets destroyed and who buys up the remains at pennies on the dollar.
I have hope that change is coming, but I have heard that there are “missing nukes” in bad hands.
I’m a Trump guy and am amazed that he is still alive. He told Mark Cuban during the 16′ campaign that he (Cuban) was not smart enough to understand what he (Trump) was doing. I think I do.
I look forward to hearing from the military veterans on this site. What are the trade offs of equipment versus relying on skill? Does a Viet Cong in the jungle have some advantages over a too-heavily equipped infantryman?
I was a 19 year old US Army E-4 11B2P Infantry, Jump Qual’d (Spec4/Corporal) in 1966-67 Vietnam. I have a damaged right arm and left leg and Purple Heart for my considerable efforts. My unit was A Company, 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division out of Schofield Barracks Hawaii. Oliver Stone (Platoon) was in the 3rd Battalion of the 22nd Infantry Regiment a couple hundred yards from mine at Cu Chi Basecamp. We weren’t there much as we moved a lot, mostly on foot. I arrived “in country” weighing 185, PT champion, Airborne etc. When I was wounded 5 months in, I weighed 155. Those “enemy” were small and wiry for a reason. The VC were local mostly so didn’t have to carry much into a fight. The NVA who we encountered coming into the Saigon River Valley from Cambodia were more conventional in gear but still light when time to fight.
We “dressed for mission” and were named “Light Infantry” as much of what we did, even in Company strength, often included 10 kilometer+ moves. At 90 degrees F and 90% humidity and ground to cover you travel light except for ammo. It was not always that hot but we stayed “light” so that we could move quickly several k’s and we did often. No chopper noise.
Skill? “Good judgement comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgement”. Some men are just better than others in war. Home court advantage makes an average man equal to the invader’s best. I have heard the term “Pindo” used to describe an American soldier when he is geared up because he walks like a Penguin.
I hate war. “War is a Racket” as Marine General Smedley Butler told us in the 1930’s. Nothing has changed. Central Banking funds all sides, determines what and who gets destroyed and who buys up the remains at pennies on the dollar.
I have hope that change is coming, but I have heard that there are “missing nukes” in bad hands.
I’m a Trump guy and am amazed that he is still alive. He told Mark Cuban during the 16′ campaign that he (Cuban) was not smart enough to understand what he (Trump) was doing. I think I do.
I look forward to hearing from the military veterans on this site. What are the trade offs of equipment versus relying on skill? Does a Viet Cong in the jungle have some advantages over a too-heavily equipped infantryman?
This is not military related but is pertinent to the question of minimalism vs equipped. I used to do some serious cave exploration. Heavily equipped cavers were MUCH slower than lightly equipped. A team of three guys with basic gear, water and a few snacks could go as far in an hour as a larger more extensively burdened group could get to in six hours. Go fast, go light, go far. On the other hand, we never had to plan on getting in a fight! 🙂
So how much did you really carry?
I ask because I, a former armorman, suspect what is really going on. All soldiers are issued the same basic stuff. But in my experience (training, and, as I said, on tanks), we don't carry it. Or at most, we carry it in our duffel bags once from the airport to the bus and then leave it in lockers.
The specific example I remember is night vision devices. Yes, we are all issued it, and have to sign for it, and are financially responsible for it. It stays locked up (presumably unless you go on a night mission) until it is time to clean or turn back in. I suspect alot of that gear is similar-yes, the infantryman's load is technically 150 or 400 lbs or whatever it officially is: but much of it (NVG's when not on night duty, MOPP-or chemical-suits, field jacket liners, and so on and so on) stays back in the hootch, as clean as possible.
I think everyone on this board could use a bit of 'common sense test' thinking. If infantryman are really walking around with 150 lbs on their backs: that is effectively walking around with another person on their backs all day. Can that actually be done?
I just googled the CPAT (a fireman's physical test). It involves tests with either 50 lbs or 75 lbs (simulating gear plus carrying a hose), and lasts a total of about 11 minutes. Not twice that weight for eight hours.
I am by no means a top athlete. But I've done crossfit with very good athletes. Those exercises may involve lifting weights (squats, etc) in the 100+ lbs range (squats in the 300+ lb range for the strong guys). For a few minutes. There are other exercise that involve carrying weight (farmer's carry for instance). They involve carrying appropriate weight while walking-again for a few minutes. I've never seen anyone do it with 100+ lbs. Suggesting any of those people would or could spend eight hours walking with 150 lbs is preposterous.
I've also backpacked when I was younger-at altitude, with gear necessary to camp and stay alive for several days. A 60 lb backpack is alot of weight (though do-able for a young twenty something male). 150 lbs is utterly preposterous, and I doubt if any backpacker has ever carried that much in human history. A few hundred yards, shuttling gear? Sure. Unloading from transportation for half an hour? Sure. All day? No way.
Again-apply the common sense 'what are my life experiences with this type of thing' test.
joe
Your life experiences test is failing you because you’re a former armorman, so the tank did the heavy lifting instead of you. 150 lbs would definitely be abnormally high but 100 – 120 lbs is very normal.
I don’t know what “night duty” means, but as a former infantryman I sure as shit always had my NODs. My “day duty” could always turn into “night duty”, and the laser on my rifle isn’t doing me much good without NODs. Field jacket liners? One of the last things I’d ever think about leaving behind.
MOPP suits are not included in a basic load so are irrelevant to this discussion. We’re talking about what you carry on your person on every patrol.
A ruck with nothing but the cold weather gear, ammo, field-stripped MREs, bivvy sack and other necessary gear easily can run over 90 lbs dry. Add 8 qts water = 16 lbs, FLC or whatever harness you’re using with 7 mags, maybe armor and a helmet… it adds up.
Sakai, besides having a completely incredible career,* illustrates the Japanese military culture’s deep aversion to success: despite being the best ace of the war he was not promoted or awarded because of a boneheaded morale policy. Japan’s literally medieval class structure meant that the world’s greatest fighter pilot had to get out of the way of new lieutenants and not go to the bathroom without permission. In any other military he would have been made an officer.
*Sakai was caught off-guard by a new American design, which looked familiar but for a backward-facing machine gun. With one eye, partially paralyzed, and in terrible pain he flew himself back to base (640 miles, over less than five hours) and insisted on reporting the new design before receiving aid, which, when it came, was without anaesthetic, and required him to maintain his remaining eye in a stare on a red bulb for hours of surgery. After that he became an instructor, and died in 2000.
You should check out Dan Gabriel’s account of the planning for the invasion of Grenada in Military Incompetence, which, despite being thirty-eight years later, still had some remarkable ideas of how to do an amphibious landing.
He was right, the only good thing to come from that plane was the film career of Congressman Bob Dornan.
Say what you like: this marine’s explanation rings true.
“Which by itself was a lot, but then you add in the .50 cal and it was a bit much. The receiver of the .50 cal weighs about 50lbs. The tripod was 44lbs and the barrel was 24lbs. We would distribute the system among each other. With one Marine starting out with the receiver, one with the tripod, and two Marines each with one barrel (spare). Put them up front and the rest of the Marines fell in behind them (we typically went on humps with two complete systems) and as they tired they would yell “Barrel Right!” or “Receiver Left!” and the next Marine in line would run up to them and take over carrying duties. We would do this the whole hump. So, depending on what piece you were carrying our weight was as low as 55lbs, then would jump to 79lbs with the barrel, 99 with the tripod and 105lbs when carrying the receiver.”
Note that the heaviest load was 105 lbs. And the marines relieved each other after a spell because it wasn’t doable all day. And frankly, manhandling a 50 caliber is unusual. I have marched with a 240 ( “…28 lb 240…”) machine gun, and its difficult but doable (it was a long time ago, I’d guess I went 4 or 6 miles or so).
joe
Plus, worst case scenario, pack animals can literally live off the land, eating grass, brush and leaves. Can men do that?
No, but they can eat the pack animals.
Without pack animals, men are left to eat ... each other.
You ignored the second half of my statement.
"Not twice that weight for eight hours."
I'm not comparing carrying 75 lbs with wearing 75 lbs. I'm comparing carrying 75 lbs for 11 minutes with wearing 150 lbs for 8 hours.
Again; use the common sense test. Wearing, or carrying, 150 lbs for 8 hours is virtually physically impossible.
joe
Terrain is an important factor. Steep ground with uncertain footing, windthrow, and brush is much, much different than mild ground with predictable footfall. I agree that 150 pounds is crazy for any man in steep ground, especially if it is heavily timbered or brushy. Maybe possible on groomed trail or road with 20% incline or less. I wasn’t in the service so I don’t know what these guys are talking about, but I’ve spent plenty of time in the western woods, with pack and without. Walking up a 70% slope in heavy brush or windthrow is difficult with a 30 lb. pack. You have to walk around or crawl under all but the smallest of downfall. If you could walk at all on that ground with a 150 lb. pack, any misstep would pitch you face first, maybe downhill, with the pack right on top of you. I can’t see an infantry unit making any progress at all under those conditions. Maybe 100 lbs. if the men were in stellar condition. It would be extremely trying.
In soldiering, (light) infantry in particular, it's all, always, about TACTICS. A situation. An estimate.If the possibility of contact is low a trooper can carry 150 lbs, no problem.
Say, there is a fixed front line and there is a small outpost on top of a hill. Your team is to relieve/reinforce the guys there. There is general lull in fighting. You, in essence, carry what you'll need for 3 days there (water, food, whatever).
Then, you have to patrol from that hill into no man's land. The threat changes, your reaction time etc, so, you carry 50 lbs, mostly ammunition and water.
Then, on that very patrol you organize an ambush, just in case. You take off some of that load (backpack) and have just a combat west so can crawl/blend better.
Hehe...and the last, but not the least, you have to run for your life....you ditch as much as possible, of course. Speed is essential.
Etc.It's all about experience, common sense, being sensible and having a competent small unit leadership.
witih
Hiker/hunter I presume. A excellent fundamentals for (light) infantry. I’ll try to help expand on it.
The author is civilian. Most of commentators haven’t gone into fine points of load/terrain/marching.
You mentioned terrain. Correct. Even more important is the threat, the Enemy. That drives TACTICS.
In soldiering, (light) infantry in particular, it’s all, always, about TACTICS. A situation. An estimate.
If the possibility of contact is low a trooper can carry 150 lbs, no problem.
Say, there is a fixed front line and there is a small outpost on top of a hill. Your team is to relieve/reinforce the guys there. There is general lull in fighting. You, in essence, carry what you’ll need for 3 days there (water, food, whatever).
Then, you have to patrol from that hill into no man’s land. The threat changes, your reaction time etc, so, you carry 50 lbs, mostly ammunition and water.
Then, on that very patrol you organize an ambush, just in case. You take off some of that load (backpack) and have just a combat west so can crawl/blend better.
Hehe…and the last, but not the least, you have to run for your life….you ditch as much as possible, of course. Speed is essential.
Etc.
It’s all about experience, common sense, being sensible and having a competent small unit leadership.
I’ve read that Grant very much regretted what he did at Cold Harbor. I’ve never read anything like that from Lee.
Another point in favor of pack animals!
Without pack animals, men are left to eat … each other.
Without pack animals, men are left to eat ... each other.
As the folks up north lecture, “You can eat dogs, but you can’t eat a snowmachine.”
The rand and file female enlisted soldier is not going 11 percent Bush. Rather the go gurl West Point grad will go combat arms as her ticket to crash the camo ceiling of promotion
You must have command assignments to advance in the Army, preferably combat arms and first among these is infantry
The girl 11 Bushes will be officers. They will somehow get through infantry officer basic and ranger. Then they will get administrative commands such as headquarters or training units where they won’t have to Ruck up
Their combat assignments will not require heavy lifting or ground pounding. You will see them serving as S1-4 staff where their housekeeping and presentation skills will be valuable
After that they can go on to be national security advisors to lispy graham. Ben sassy Kamealot Harris or Speedo Beto
BHO appointed some black woman to be a 4 star when her “command” experience was logistics ships. I’m sure she’s be great in the South China Sea.
I was in Bangkok in 2010 during a quite serious attempted overthrow of the government by the exiled former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The army would defend roadblocks from civilian protestors with regular rifle fire. They told me they had to do this to keep the crowd at a distance for fear of M-79 grenades and pistol shots. The Thai conscripts I saw did not have body armour and were clearly not prepared to take chances.
(The Thaksin side certainly used agent provocateurs to try to provoke a military overreaction.)
Probably a byproduct. Congress mandated armor considerably heavier than the US Army wanted.
On a similar note, I have severe doubts about how effective concealed carry is without body armor, at least front and back armor with open sides, level 3, with stab resistance. I’ve been told by trainers that the odds of getting shot are about 1 in 2 for any civil fight when both are armed, and of course there is the 21 foot rule for effective use of firearms against a running knife attack if you see it coming, and the extensive use of surprise knife attacks. Makes me yearn for civil peace — armor is heavy and hot.
Back in the late 1960s, Army recon units universally used no armor and soft caps. Armor produced heat stroke, and they weren’t good artillery targets so the helmets didn’t do much good even if worn. What they did do was rely on firepower, hiding, and immediate action drills. Worked until it didn’t for the individual troop. Marines apparently still do that. Back then, Marine scouts were said to favor carrying side arms only, to help mobility and remind them that scouts don’t fight infantry.
Still good rules. Life is starting to resemble a scouting patrol, the bedrock is still awareness and keeping out of seriously dangerous areas — in the civil case, you’re not there to fight, just to get to your destination. Armor is just to stop a round or two while you break contact and evade until the police show up.
Counterinsurgency
As for:True.
Armor for home defense then, perhaps ? "Home invasion" scenario. Family included. Kids in particular.
Reminds of VIPSs in CP/strong point. What a world.
New Knight Armament Light 5.56mm MG (8.5 lb) (and 7.62x51mm too!)
Especially:
On a similar note, I have severe doubts about how effective concealed carry is without body armor, at least front and back armor with open sides, level 3, with stab resistance. I've been told by trainers that the odds of getting shot are about 1 in 2 for any civil fight when both are armed, and of course there is the 21 foot rule for effective use of firearms against a running knife attack if you see it coming, and the extensive use of surprise knife attacks. Makes me yearn for civil peace -- armor is heavy and hot.
Back in the late 1960s, Army recon units universally used no armor and soft caps. Armor produced heat stroke, and they weren't good artillery targets so the helmets didn't do much good even if worn. What they did do was rely on firepower, hiding, and immediate action drills. Worked until it didn't for the individual troop. Marines apparently still do that. Back then, Marine scouts were said to favor carrying side arms only, to help mobility and remind them that scouts don't fight infantry.
Still good rules. Life is starting to resemble a scouting patrol, the bedrock is still awareness and keeping out of seriously dangerous areas -- in the civil case, you're not there to fight, just to get to your destination. Armor is just to stop a round or two while you break contact and evade until the police show up.
Counterinsurgency
METT-T.
Recon, not attack/defend. Different job, different tools.
Plus less chance to make sound. Plus better hearing.
What they did do was rely on field craft, concealment and immediate action drills. Firepower to break contact only, escape and evade. Recon I mean. The job. The mission.
As for:
True.
Armor for home defense then, perhaps ? “Home invasion” scenario. Family included. Kids in particular.
Reminds of VIPSs in CP/strong point. What a world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF9UThg7PkM
Nice hardware.
Especially: