Comment by szopa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by szopa | Hacker News Reader

This sounds insane. My hobby is medium distance hiking in (say, 250 km/155 mi na week) in the Scandinavian Arctic, so I have to carry all my food. I'm a fan of ultralight hiking, so my whole summer baggage weights around 10 kg/20 lbs excluding water. I invested some money in lighter equipment, yes, but most of my weight savings is stuff I simply do not take with me, or things that serve in multiple roles (eg. my hiking poles double as tent poles). A common piece of advice in the ultralight community is "don't pack your fears" – take only what you know you're gonna need, avoid redundancy (and be careful not to lose your crap), and consider what you can do without (an example: you don't really need a big ass knife).

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.

>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.

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.

> avoid redundancy

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.

That advice might be why there is so many SOS-calls from the swedish mountains every year, from hikers getting stranded somewhere in the wilderness. The phone coverage isn't great everywhere either...

I can't tell what you're trying to say. Are you being snarky and agreeing? Are you claiming that people are stranded because of redundancy?

In my survival training, the instructor taught us about our "useless" water filter. He told us that he'd only ever had to use it for real once and that one time it made it worth it to carry for every time he didn't need it.

It's probably even worse than you think - it's not just about carrying a lot of weight. You're expected to carry it and still move pretty quickly on humps. In infantry in the USMC, going at 1-2 miles an hour with all this gear isn't unheard of, or 20 miles a day. If someone is faltering, it means one more person's gear that has to be split up for others to carry.

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.

Depending on what battalion you were in you also had to carry the scouts gear like the SMAWs, M36 grenade launcher, radios etc. Soft sand in 29 palms or the hills of Camp Pendleton.

It's also clothing. I bet you don't wear a thick long-sleeved shirt, a helmet and a headset digging into your ear while you're hiking.

You do just get used to it quite quickly. 10kg is a light load for going for a run in the military community.

A lot of the weight is armor and ammo, 2 things directly keeping soldiers alive. How is that interfering with the goal?

Agreed. I remember going hiking, and having my rucksack weighed at the airport. It was 11kg, but my friend's was 14kg. That difference meant he got worn out much quicker than me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com