The Overloaded Soldier: Why U.S. Infantry Now Carry More Weight Than Ever
popularmechanics.com
popularmechanics.com
This is a pretty well done article. Here's some general ideas to keep in mind.
- Most dismounted missions are run from trucks or an established forward operating base, so you don't carry a huge rucksack most of the time because you can just go back to your base.
- Like the article states, even a day pack with body armor gets you up to 70lbs quickly.
- Ammo is really heavy, it being made of lead and all. 100rds of 7.62mm ammo weighs about 7lb. You want at least 800rds per M240B.
- Rucksack weights are sometimes inflated because it's a way to brag.
- The Marine infantry officer course requirement for 152lb load is excessive. At that weight, you can only do an admin movement on a road. All the anecdotes I found about combat loads that heavy were for an initial, short infil followed by a stationary mission.
I think the article nails the root cause towards heavier protective equipment. Public perception and the news cycle makes the death of American service member a bigger deal than in past conflicts.
It will be a long time before we get electronic mules in the Infantry. Adopting the mules adds a huge complexity budget to a simple movement. The Army decided some years ago to give every Company (~140 people) a Raven drone for recon. However, it's a huge deal if it gets lost (if the GPS guidance were to suddenly fail), so no one ever uses them to avoid the fallout associated with losing Army equipment.
https://archive.org/details/UsmcSmallWarsManual1940Reprinted...
SF have been using horses in places like Afghanistan for the past 2 decades and while DARPA is working on a robotic mule the DoD has brought in consultants to advise them about actual mules.
You'd be surprised what the military still does with animals, the Army even still has the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps with 700 something veterinarians for dogs, ceremony horses, working animals etc.
[0] https://www.forces.net/services/tri-service/leading-charge-t...
Also a related BBC article with more background: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-22951...
"The figures don't necessarily mean we have got too many horses, it's more likely the figures mean we don't have enough tanks."
Edit: Mind you, on reflection, 485 horses does seem rather a lot.
I'm not vouching for the authenticity of this story, but it is a good story none the less.
How does this compare to say Vietnam? It feels to me like the populace is worse divided, it’s disaffected. It seems like the new normal to have some god forsaken outpost where a few dozen soldiers die a year (not to mention thousands of local population - they’re even less of a consideration).
> “People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.)
Thing is there were also a lot of contractors in Vietnam just not the Blackwater type that gets a lot of the press in this era.
<snark> Please tell that to the kids that are enlisting so they can actually afford to go to college in the US. </snark>
I know there is a difference between drafting and enlistment, but I know there are a lot of people in the military because it was "the way out" of their situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanics_in_the_United_States...
The Army decided some years ago to give every Company (~140 people) a Raven drone for recon. However, it's a huge deal if it gets lost (if the GPS guidance were to suddenly fail), so no one ever uses them to avoid the fallout associated with losing Army equipment.
- At most Army schools you will fail if you lose any equipment. Ranger school does a 100% equipment check at the end of every mission and will fail you if any equipment is missing.
- One of the more common ways for an officer to get "fired" (moved out of command early with a neutral or negative rating) is to lose property. This is harder than it sounds since even a Rifle company commander you might have a few million dollars of equipment. For mechanized units (tanks), it's much harder.
Not all of that is just physical conditioning, there's a sizable mental component to it that helps condition you to less than ideal situations so you don't go "welp, I'm tired, fuck it, I'm sitting down to die" when you're in a bad situation and instead you're like "I got this, I've done worse, this is nothing, just a little farther" as well as equipping you to know what your body is capable of and that the burning in your calves and quads isn't that bad yet and you know you've got to slow down for the next few minutes or that you've still got this much left in your tank and should be able to complete task without any rests.
There's a reason we readopted some of these conditioning practices from ancient militaries.
I'm curious, could you expand on this, or post a link for further reading?
Also look into the history of Special Forces in the United States. WWI was in large part trench warfare, the Civil War was largely fought in open fields in lines not unlike trench warfare. Marching was something you did for parades and pageantry.
Basically though if you look at ancient armies like the Romans had you needed to be able to march 15-20 miles in full kit over most terrains and this is how you trained.
If you want to dive into the current Special Forces community you need to start with the First Special Service Force where you first start seeing long marches (on a 60 mile course) as well as learning things like hand to hand combat, skiing, mountain climbing, parachuting. Then go look at Darby's Rangers and Merrill's Marauders. From there jump to to Vietnam and the 5th SFG[A] and look at some of their feats.
Today you have stuff like Robin Sage and Operator Training Course which, special tactics aside, some ancient soldiers would felt right at home with the long range marches and covering unimproved terrain as well as handling shelter and meeting their basic needs.
If you really dive into the history of special forces and the backgrounds of the original trainers/leaders, you'll see men with well rounded knowledge of ancient tactics/warfare as well as knowledge/training in more modern, yet primitive, tactics like guerrilla warfare and taking on much larger forces (again, something that there are great examples of in ancient warfare like the Battle of Marathon, Battle of Julu, Battle of Badr) as well as ancient units/groups (Medjay, Akkadian, Spartan, Sacred Band of Thebes, Dacian, Varangian Guard etc).
The Civil War actually looks like it was a low point in historical military kit weights. (see The History of the Soldiers Load by Lieutenant Rob Orr Volume 7, Number 2, Winter 2010 https://www.army.gov.au/our-future/australian-army-research-... )
No end of scenarios where helicopter / jeep isn't going to work, or are being shot up, or can't fly. Yomping 50 miles across rough terrain, over 3 days with 100lbs and capability to fight when they arrive probably isn't a capability you want to scale back. It's used too often.
There's good reason it's a usual part of the combat fitness test for recruits.
I guess the endgame is remote drones and similar with the controllers sitting in a safe building miles away?
Wouldn't it be possible to carry the same amount of kinetic energy with lighter ammunition? One inherent limitation of firearms is that all the energy is released inside the weapon, which has, then, to dissipate the heat and remaining gases and particles. If bullets are self-propelled, a larger part of that output can be released outside the weapon, allowing it to be faster and impart more energy on impact. Unfortunately, it may make following the source of the bullet easier.
> avoid the fallout associated with losing Army equipment.
That a combatant needs to worry about paperwork is the cruelest thing I heard in a long time.
Welcome to 1944.
This is exactly why full power rifle cartridges were replaced with intermediate cartridges like 7.62x39 and 5.56x45.
Kinetic energy is only loosely associated with effectiveness, terminal ballistics matters just as much if not more. In the real world intermediate calibers kill people dead enough reliably enough that it's a non-issue and marginal decreased effectiveness is outweighed by increased capacity. The overwhelming majority of shots fired will hit nothing useful anyway.
Case-less ammo was tried (read up on the H&K G11) for slightly different reasons (weight saving was a goal but not the primary goal) but the cold war ended before it could make it into service.
You are basically describing this[1][2][3] and it's not really that great at anything in particular (especially not military use) and are primarily used by people who want to shoot a trophy buck that's 400yd away. IMO they're kind of the hipster beer of the rifle world. They do little a boring old Bud won't do but they sure put a bigger hole in your wallet.
Read up on the history of intermediate cartridges[4] and assault rifles (not "assault weapons", the former is a technical term, the latter is anything but). Earlier intermediate cartridges (were a standard size .30-ish cal bullet on top of a 30-40mm case instead of a 50-70mm case of a traditional full power rifle round. Later intermediate cartridges such as 5.56x45 and 5.45x39 (the Russians stuck a smaller bullet on top of the 7.62x39 cartridge) stick an even smaller bullet on top of an intermediate size case because the smaller bullet going faster does the job just as well with less weight (I'm painting with a really broad brush here). These 2nd gen intermediate cartridges are what I think you're getting at but you're hung up on the rifle cartridge. For simply killing people 0-350yd away you don't need that much bang, it's actually detrimental because it's extra weight and makes the firearm harder to handle.
You also need thinking in terms of energy. All the energy in the world is useless if you can't transfer it to the target properly. It doesn't take much energy dissipated in a human torso to immediately incapacitate and kill. Better understanding of the needs of combat troops and nature of engagements and terminal ballistics is what led to the switch from intermediate cartridges starting in the 1940s.
Of course you have to remember that everything is still a trade-off in cartridge design and the nature of the engagements you expect still plays a large role in what the "best" tool for the job is and often the difference is only marginal at best.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.270_Winchester_Short_Magnum
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.270_Weatherby_Magnum
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.223_Winchester_Super_Short_Ma...
If you look at the size of a common rifle projectile vs. a conventional cartridge, you’ll recognize that you’d need enormous energy density for any such booster system to do anything noticeable at all besides screwing with the reliably, safety, and stability of the round. A
Caseless ammunition is maybe a closer thing, but also tricky (heat dissipation is harder, difficulties in making ammunition robust enough). H&K made a military variant once, but no military adopted it (Germany almost did, but with the end of the cold war it wasn't considered worth the cost)
Even adopting improved versions of existing systems is a big process for militaries, switching to something entirely new for something as fundamental as the standard rifles needs to have really big and obvious benefits to be considered.
There have been ongoing efforts for years, but there are significant technical obstacles to producing reliable, effective ammunition with reduced weight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Small_Arms_Technol...
The whole concept of .223 is to put more propellent behind a smaller projectile. This gives the projectile more speed which makes it exceptionally lethal and accurate at very long distance. Unlike handguns that basically poke a hole, .223 generates a shockwave when it strikes at a multiple of the speed of sound.
Running just on the math, it seems the answer would be "of course":
E_k = 1/2 m \* v ^ 2
But we're not only concerned with kinetic energy. Momentum also matters. Or, in shooting parlance, "power factor", measured in grains (1/7000th of a pound) x velocity in feet per second. Momentum has a much closer correlation to recoil than kinetic energy. It also affects ballistics - a hypersonic lightweight round will have a different curve than a dense, merely supersonic traditional round.
Other practical concerns are also relevant: lead is an excellent lubricant/bearing material and aluminum oxide being an extremely abrasive cutting material...lead, bronze, cast iron, and other dense metals are more amenable to firing out of an interference fit with a barrel than light metals (of which aluminum is just one example, but a fairly representative one). Lead is highly ductile and mushrooms on impact, but aluminum is brittle and shatters on impact. A round fired at higher velocity spends less time in the barrel, so you need more powder, faster powder, and longer barrels to accelerate it more quickly. And the bullet is not the only thing ejected from the barrel: There's a supersonic jet of propellant gasses that contributes to both recoil and noise.
500 years of (un)natural selection in the field of ammunition materials science has left lead at the top of the charts for a good reason. Most lightweighting efforts have focused on reducing weight in the brass case, which is just packaging and becomes extra mass.
Finally, a combatant worrying about paperwork says something about the one-sided nature of recent wars: Million-dollar soliders applying overwhelming force and unimaginable funds against desperate guerillas. I wonder how quickly the slow-changing military will be able to respond if there's a war between superpowers.
Modern projectiles are jacketed so lead never touches anything.
If bullets are self-propelled, they are slower and less stable in the initial portion of their flight, which makes them much less accurate and gives longer time of flight assuming same top speed (which, for a similar quantity of propellant, isn't reasonable anyway; having a gun barrel is an advantage here), rocket and rocket-assisted projectiles work well enough when you can afford less inherent ballistic accuracy because of large targets or self-guidance, but neither of those is really practical for infantry smallarms.
I agree with everything else though.
Good point. This is a big deal because load carried in your hands or, to a lesser degree, on a shoulder strap is more taxing than load carried on a vest.
sa46 addresses it a little bit above that there are different loadouts depending on how you're operating. It wasn't uncommon to move from one place to another with 100 pounds, then drop gear and patrol with a far smaller loadout.
Then again, sometimes your vehicle breaks down and you're now "man packable", which means you do need to be ready to carry a lot. This is really one of the sticking points for women in the military. It's nice to imagine that a specific job will always have a vehicle, but it is doctrine to be prepared to step into the role of infantryman.
The Army doesn't use the M249 as a crew served weapon (unlike the Marines) so the automatic rifleman on each team usually has 600 rounds of 5.56mm linked ammo to carry around.
I'd be curious to see standard ammo load-out by conflict and country.
Anyway, with 10 kg pack a trip is extremely physically challenging, but overall pleasant. I can actually enjoy the view, as opposed to just wanting to throw my backpack on the ground (I didn't get to my low weight immediately, I used to carry much more before).
Hiking like I do, but with 100 lbs of gear sounds like a nightmare. A soldier may not care about the views, but he should watch out for people who are trying to kill him. If my experience translates at all, the weight is interfering with that goal.
For some units, the amount of gear you have to carry can get bad, like carrying a 50 cal, or in the case of my unit, we had a lot of M240Bs to carry because that's what we had on our LAVs.
Getting shot by enemy direct fire is actually quite rare. Infantrymen are killed by landmines, mortars, artillery, IEDs, grenades, cluster bombs, and all other various forms of shrapnel and explosive based weaponry at a much greater rate. The modern battlefield is an exceedingly hostile place to be a soft target of any kind, and that's what your armor is for. Wearing it demonstrably increases survivability over time in combat despite the increased weight load.
That's really dangerous advice for anyone inexperienced in a particular endurance activity away from contact.
The military have a phrase: one is none and two are one. For anything that is life-critical, having only one is too risky.
You do just get used to it quite quickly. 10kg is a light load for going for a run in the military community.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._O'Neill_(U.S._Navy_S...
[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Operator-Operative-Mission-Changed-...
"Okay, so who made entry on this building?" "Carl Gustav"
Ive done some work with specials. They dont carry as much because thier missions are different. If ambushed they arent expected to stand and fight every time.
One development that I heard about a couple of years ago, which should certainly ease the burden, is that the Corps dropped the M249 in favor of a heavy barrelled M16. That is a lot less weight, considering how every fireteam had previously been equipped with a belt fed machinegun (5.56, but still).
I got to use it as my fire team's machine gunner before getting discharged in what was an unwinnable bureaucracy loop. It was a near total win over the SAW - not only was it more accurate & lighter, but it didn't breakdown anywhere near as much. The interesting shift though is that it sounds like every Marine is going to get an IAR, and not just the machine gunner for a fire team. This could have some ramifications on infantry tactics, since the machine gunner in a traditional fire team (i.e. fulfilling the suppressing firepower role) could switch depending on the scenario and yield some formidable advantages.
So long as the tempo is kept up for flanking maneuvers, and everybody doesn't try to establish a fixing base of fire simultaneously, it sounds like a warrant officer had a really good idea in returning to something resembling the WWII pacific loadout (minus the flamethrowers).
It was rechambered in 6x45 and then 5.56x45 for the US SAW competition. It never seemed to adapt well to the smaller rounds, less power for the mechanism.
I think it was a poor idea in the first place to push a beltfed machinegun down to the fireteam level. People generally have a misconception about what machineguns are for - while volume of fire certainly figures into effective suppression, accuracy is more important. An effectively employed machinegun should be treated like some kind of sniper shotgun, where you can put 50% of your shots into a vehicle sized target a mile away. You aren't going to be doing that while playing the I'm-up-he-sees-me-I'm-down game.
It's not that the economics/efficiency argument isn't clear. It's that we now value human life more than we did eg during the battle of the somme. "Attrition" is not an acceptable battle plan in public.
I've never been in harm's way. I've never had to make decisions about people going into harm's way. I don't for a minute assume it's easy to make these decisions.
That more people die (D-Day landings, parachuteists drowning due to surplus weight added before launch) is not surprising either. It's lose-lose decision making.
The most famous yomp of recent times was during the 1982 Falklands War. After disembarking from ships at San Carlos on East Falkland, on 21 May 1982, Royal Marines and members of the Parachute Regiment yomped (and tabbed) with their equipment across the islands, covering 56 miles (90 km) in three days carrying 80-pound (36 kg) loads.
Wonder what their kit was in comparison to the article.
Allegedly RM commandos deployed in Afghanistan are carrying roughly twice the load ...
First, some background. During my second deployment I was frequently traveling. If I wasn't traveling I wasn't working. I was based out of Bagram, Afghanistan in a two person team that visited the major US Army bases to asses the information security management position of the base, write a report, and recommend changes.
Secondly, you have to understand the nature of air travel in a conflict zone. Flag officers (generals and admirals) are on a list that allows them to schedule travel so that travel works for them. For everybody else there is a space available list. Grades E9, O6, and CW5 are considered VIPs and are automatically at the top of the space available list. There are some people who have special mission clearance so they just show up and bump other people off the flight. The rest of us have to wait for a flight, often for many days. That said, you have no idea how long a travel mission will take, so you bring extra gear. You also have to understand that there are primary travel hubs and relay locations, so often there isn't a direct flight.
I would pack double the number of extra under garments for the planned travel duration and one or two extra uniforms. It gets cold in Afghanistan, so I would pack my complete triple sleeping bag sleep system (which accounts for half my personal gear) and a tiny pillow. You also need your personal hygiene stuff. You were always sure to pack personal entertainment, which for me was two novels, my laptop, and all necessary laptop accessories. Finally you also packed survival gear, which for me were additional pens, spare boot laces, spare hearing protection, a multi-tool, and some other stuff.
So, that was just personal gear that filled my large rucksack. You also needed your combat gear: kevlar helmet, body armor with kevlar plates, weapon, ammo, magazines, and any additionally needed tactical gear. You rarely actually needed any of this, but it was absolutely necessary for riding on the bird should anything unfortunate happen during travel or should you have to take a land convoy.
We still haven't gotten to mission gear. I was the lower ranking member of our two person team so I carried the gear. I carried an assault pack (standard Army backpack but tougher and heavier) with three toughbooks. A toughbook was a heavy Panasonic laptop in a thick aluminum shell tested for advanced shock protection. These things were unnecessarily stupid tough and extremely heavy. My personal laptop at the time was a small plastic netbook that I treated far worse and it proved far more durable.
All this gear added up to about 120 pounds. I discovered that when visiting Kandahar, which at that time the air terminal was run by NATO and they weighed everybody before they let you hop on a bird. I remember wearing all this stuff and leaving my living area on Bagram late for a showtime at the rotary terminal (helicopter air terminal). I miscalculated how far away that terminal was from where I was living, because the fixed wing terminal was really close. I was trying to lightly jog that nearly 2 mile route with all that gear and its the closest I have ever come to feeling like a heart attack.
Just on the Toughbook topic, I've found similar to you (although 'only' in mining, not in a military context). They're heavy and clunky and slow, and it really doesn't make them any more durable. I just use a cheap laptop and replace it whenever it gets too beat up and it's far cheaper and far more pleasant than using a Toughbook. Everyone I've talked to who uses them says that the slight increase in durability doesn't justify the overall annoyingness of using one.
Fecal gravity. A lot times it could be fixed with better logistics, but the people making the decisions are not the ones who have to deal with the consequences of those decisions.
I don't have the book with me, maybe somebody else will remember and dig out the quote.
https://www.unrv.com/military/legionary-weapons-equipment.ph...
That seems insane. And to think that I don't even like to carry my 4 lb Macbook to the bus stop.
Visual cover maybe. Rounds are going to pass through it as if it isn't even there.
https://www.nhl.com/news/no-pull-ups-no-problem-for-top-nhl-...
So it's not just the soldiers struggling.
They're soft-skinned light fast patrol vehicles, originally specced for use behind friendly lines and in Northern Ireland - up-armouring them for a modern battlefield, improving their radio gear and extending their range adds a lot of mass. It got to the point where the weight of the extra gear risked breaking an axle if they drove off-road at one point, iirc.
Thankfully the REME engineers are actually listened to when they say "this is provably unsafe, look", so they're getting new vehicles at long last.
"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."
"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."
"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. "
Why we use heavy infantry like this:
"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."
From the same commenter:
"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...
Or better yet, live in peace and fight wars only in video games. If possible."
A little more about body armor.
"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."
"Current high coverage body armor was required by US Congress, 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."
I’ve also led and conducted Lean StartUp focused sprints to work this specific problem, internal to defence
Weight carried by soldiers is a critical problem.
I’ve carried in excess of 50kg on Operations, verified.
During my Infantry Platoon Commander’s Course we carried in excess of 50kg for weeks, verified.
I’m 78kg and carry 25kg for 50-70km per week(in 10-20km increments, done for over 1 year) on the beach for fitness.
My own long term personal experience mimics the article linked Project Payne.
Carrying 1/3 body weight is easily trainable and sustainable.
Carrying 2/3 body weight, especially over undulating or complex terrain is a recipe for long-term joint/orthopaedic disaster.
I have peers in their 30’s who have had hip replacements due to injuries sustained from sustained carriage of too much weight in training.
The article mentions 2 things:
1)“Soldiers carry 100 pounds of the lightest kit possible”
2)UK Army Project Payne, too much weight carried “just in case”
New capabilities particularly around communication networks carried by all subunits(dismounted section/squid level) are increasing weight significantly. The “weight carried” modelling has been done, and their is no current solution.
In my experience, the ever increasing weight carried by dismounted Infantry is not risk aversion as stated in the article, but risk shift.
While it’s not a tortoise versus hare binary choice, it is a continuum of weight carried.
Turning dismounted Infantry soldiers into armoured tortoises not only shifts the risk towards increased long-term orthopedic/muscular/skeletal health risk of soldiers, but increased risk in lower operational capacity/capability due to reduced speed/range of operation.
In light of politicised efforts to nudge induction of more women in combat arms, the increased average weight carried combined with decreasing average stature and fitness levels of soldiers is a guarantee of increased long-term health consequences.
But the risk of crippling 100 soldiers tomorrow is viewed as acceptable over 1 soldier killed on Operations today.
I would suggest a machine learning system to log and analyze weight carried both in training and on operations that incorporates all known environmental and operational factors to recommend what is carried and what is left behind, to reduce the “just in case” factor, but I believe culture would have to change as well or risk a Patrol/Section/Platoon NCO filling the void again.
Personally, I’m for starting from scratch again and looking towards the highly effective RLI of the 1970’s, at least in terms of counter insurgency.
Rifle, 5 magazines, two water bottles, two grenades, wearing shorts and high top sneakers.
More hare, less tortoise. Much like current modern special operations direct action doctrine applied to conventional forces.
But as we shift from counter-insurgency focus back towards peer or near peer combined arms capable threats, this is not going to happen.
We will continue to carry more weight unless senior leadership, unit command, and subunit NCOs we can trust rapid “just in time” battlefield logistics.
2. There aren't many truly "It's OK to lose it" items, as they'd all have been lost by overburdened soldiers already.
Noise is a different issue of course, but the article mentions it only for the walking "big dog" mules, not for wheeled ones. And if the mule only carries stuff that's not immediately essential, it doesn't have to stay close to the squad. If it can follow them autonomously (which is probably a requirement anyway), it could trail them at some distance.
> Although quadruped robots like BigDog from Boston Dynamics is no longer in the running (it turned out to be a bit too noisy), there are numerous wheeled alternatives.
Regarding your second point the article seems to come to a different conclusion:
> A British army study, called Project Payne, found that far too much of what is carried is “just in case” and that the amount of ammunition carried by troops is excessive.