There are plenty of ways to reduce a soldier’s load. Remove body armor and all the protective inserts – there goes 35 pounds. Take away tactical radios and batteries – there goes another five pounds. No more night vision – a few pounds there. Suddenly you’ve reduced about a third of a soldier’s weight, and only sacrificed his ability to survive, communicate, and operate at night. Those aren’t very important things, are they?
For what it’s worth, a knight of the late middle ages didn’t have to carry anything but weapons and armor because there would have been a baggage train behind him that by custom was more or less sacrosanct.
Things work rather differently now. If you leave everything but your weapons in an unguarded column of trucks, you’ll soon have nothing left but your weapons.
Well, soldiers can live off wild berries. Just avoid the ones that taste like burning.
Hence the e.g. … you could apply the same logic to having to take a fixed position without heavy weapons, or winding up in backcountry with insufficient provisions, or not having a backup radio, etc. It’s always a tradeoff; if you choose to not carry a given bit of gear, in the interests of being light and speedy, sooner or later you will find yourself in the position of wishing you had it at some moment.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t necessarily go light. I’m not a soldier, but I backpack as a hobby. For a six-day hike, I keep my pack weight down to around 30 pounds, because I want to be comfortable and move quickly if I need to. But I still inevitably end up having moments where I think it’d be nice to have brought my pipe, or a book, or more food or rope or another pair of socks, or whatever. Some people carry heavier packs because they like to be prepared for anything – and then they grunt under 45 pounds of gear. Some people go ultralight, and venture into wilderness carrying only 10 pounds – and then toss and turn because they’re sleeping in their clothes on the hard ground. Everybody has their preferences as to what they’ll live with and what tradeoff they want to make. The military faces the same issue, just with much higher stakes – and with the major differences that lot of those tradeoff decisions have to be made by officers on behalf of the men, and their incentives are very different.
Take first aid and water: I carry minimal first aid gear and often drink untreated water from springs and creeks. That’s a choice I make based in part on the desire to keep weight down, and the risks I am willing to run. But if I was equipping you for a backpacking trip, and I was going to be accountable for what happened to you, I’d damn well issue you a full first-aid kit, covering any remotely possible accident, and a top-of-the-line water filter. Yeah, it’s three more pounds you gotta shlep up a mountain, but my ass is covered.
Continue that thought process for every single piece of gear in the pack, and it’s very easy to wind up with a 50-pound bag … and that’s civilian. Start adding weapons, and you can see where it winds up.
The Chindits were also able to operate deep in the jungle behind Japanese lines not because they could off the land but rather because Allied air superiority allowed them to be resupplied by airdrops and call in air strikes to replace artillery support.
Who said run full force into the enemy? If they shoot at us from afar, we have to go and get them so they do not do it again.
On the othe hand (bolding mine)
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2011/02/ap-report-soldiers-carry-too-much-weight-021411/
Presumably not counting the number of combat injuries that excessive loading contributed to.
Mistaking speed as maneuverability on the battlefield for tanks or ships and sacrificing armor for speed has a bad history. It’s the armor protection that allows maneuvering on the battlefield; all the speed in the world won’t let you to maneuver on the battlefield if the armor is too thin. See for example the Soviet BT series fast tanks. They were very fast and well armed but achieved this by having armor so thin that it could be penetrated with ease by the lightest of anti-tank weapons or even a .50 round. Its successor was the very successful T-34 which was very heavily armored for its day. Then there was the battlecruiser, which was armed like a battleship but sacrificed armor for speed with the assumption that speed would give safety to compensate for the lack of armor. This proved not to be the case at all, leading to Admiral David Beatty’s comment that “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today” when 3 British battlecruisers were lost at Jutland in very short order and a 4th narrowly avoided being lost only by rapid flooding of the ammunition magazine.
On the other hand, there are probably plenty of non-combat musculoskeletal injuries that don’t have anything to do with load carrying. People injure themselves that way all the time, even when not running/jumping/climbing trees.
Though that did not always work out as planned … see Out of the Blue for a rather trenchant critique of the Chindit’s use of air support by Terence O’Brien, a pilot who marched with the Chindits.
For example … air support was supposed to operate as “flying artillery”, but bombing in a jungle environment did not, in fact, replace artillery in effect; even with radio linked observers on the ground, the bombers rarely found their targets …
True, and not just in the jungle. Close tactical air support was rather dangerous until very late in the war and resulted in a great deal of friendly fire.
That’s the sort of mentality that gets you drawn into an ambush. You do not run pell-mell at a retreating enemy; you let them withdraw to a position they think is safe, while tracking, flanking, and calling in overwhelming fire support. The idea that the loadout means that soliders “can’t catch” their opponents is either misunderstood or taken out of context.
Stranger
Does the American military really have soldiers go on long marches anymore? I realize they obviously go on patrols and the like, but I can’t imagine the Iraq invasion had any units starting at the Kuwati border and marching to Baghdad. I kinda presume that when they need to get from A to B they ride in helicopters, trucks, tanks, etc.
Well, that’s how they get from A to Z. To get from S to T they might have to hoof it.
That’s just the armor. It doesn’t include weapons, consumables, servicing tools, or the most important feature of a fully armored knight of the middle ages – the horse he rode in on. And then add the horse’s consumables and servicing tools. It took a lot of logistics to support (literally!) a knight in heavy plate.
This is a great use of “There’s no kill like overkill.” Standoff weapons like the Spooky are a great way to make those poor bastards die for their side.