XBradTC

By

XBradTC

·

Thoughts on the Infantry Load

I was discussing women in combat arms on Facebook, and since I went to all the trouble of actually writing something, I thought I’d share with you. You simply have no idea what the infantry’s burden is like. If you took the personal and unit equipment of a WWII infantry platoon, and divided its weight…

I was discussing women in combat arms on Facebook, and since I went to all the trouble of actually writing something, I thought I’d share with you.

You simply have no idea what the infantry’s burden is like.
If you took the personal and unit equipment of a WWII infantry platoon, and divided its weight by the number of men in the platoon, you’d come up with an average weight of about 70 pounds.

If you did the same with an infantry platoon deployed in Afghanistan today, you’d come out with an average weight of about 120 pounds, with some individual loads topping 135 pounds.

To be sure, today the average infantryman is taller and heavier than his WWII counterpart, and has a greater bone density, greater skeletal mass, and greater muscle mass. But not proportionally. That is, the burden is still proportionately greater.

Worse, the average woman today in the Army *still* has less height, weight, skeletal mass and muscle mass than a WWII grunt. No matter how physically fit women are, they’re going to suffer debilitating sports injuries at about double the rate of men. Where’s the upside to an infantry platoon in that?

A loaded M4A1 carbine with the usual optics weighs 7.9 pounds. That’s about a pound and a half lighter than a WWII M1 Garand. But our grunt today also carries a much greater ammo load. While the 5.56mm round weighs a lot less per round than the M1 .30cal round, today’s grunt actually tends to carry a greater weight of ammo. That’s not including carrying extra ammo for other weapons (though that certainly happened to WWII grunts as well). Add on an M230 grenade launcher, and its grenades, well it adds up quick. Or get stuck humping an M249 and 600 rounds, or the delightful M240 and a couple hundred rounds (7.9pounds per hundred rounds) or worst of all, the 60mm mortar.

Tags:

  1. TrT

    “Worse, the average woman today in the Army still has less height, weight, skeletal mass and muscle mass than a WWII grunt. No matter how physically fit women are, they’re going to suffer debilitating sports injuries at about double the rate of men. Where’s the upside to an infantry platoon in that?”

    The British Army created a “common standard” and women suffered 8x as many medical discharges, not 2x.
    If it were only twice as many!

    Liked by 1 person

  2. Mike Burke

    Interesting point–two issues–why do we carry so much stuff? Second, I doubt the average Army male is up to average infantryman standards, especially since most men in the Army are not infantrymen. I do think, based on my experience with women in divisional support units, some–a very few, but some–women can handle these kinds of loads–they handle them now with ammo and some repair parts, but of course they do not carry them all day. It’s a question of best use of people–volunteer soldiers are very expensive to recruit, train, and retain, so basing assignments on ability rather than on chromosomes would let the service make the best use of everyone.

    Like

  3. David Navarre

    There is a slight mitigation for better load-bearing gear than was issued in WWII. Of course, that would only make a difference if the weight hadn’t nearly doubled.

    Like

  4. Esli

    The load is debilitating. It is crazy. My armor, M9 with 45 round and M4 with 210 rounds weighed more than 70 lbs. That’s before I added water, or any sort of mission-specific gear. (This is why I soon dropped the pistol.) I don’t care who you are, carrying that load day after day crushes your neck and shoulders. It’s got to be much worse if you are statistically lighter, smaller and weaker.

    Liked by 1 person

  5. Stacy0311

    120lbs of the world’s finest light weight gear!!
    But it’s beer drinking knuckle draggers like you (to paraphrase SecNav) that are holding back women.
    Don’t you realize that diversity is strength? Maybe it’s that diversity that will allow women to carry the load.
    ok-I’m done being sarcastic

    Liked by 1 person

  6. Pave Low John

    It ain’t just walking with that load. It’s going prone with it, crawling with it, climbing over walls with it, jumping out of trucks with it, dragging skedco’s while wearing it, fast-roping out of a helo with it, climbing a rope-ladder back into a helo with it, etc… I only got a month-long taste of it in aviation advisor training, which is nothing compared to doing it, year after year, for two decades.

    By the way, that gal over on Facebook is an idiot. Probably a nice person, from what I can tell, but she’s a dumb-ass when it comes to military history and modern combat operations. Seriously, it’s really painful to watch someone babble on about something they quite literally haven’t the first clue about. I’m almost embarrassed, knowing that this is the level of awareness that is driving military personnel policy these days. God help us when we fight our next “real” war, because it’s going to be bloody…

    Liked by 1 person

  7. Tarl

    This kind of stupid has been around for a looooong time. I had a female high school history teacher in the 1980s who said there is no reason not to allow women in combat “because we don’t fight with broadswords any more”.

    Liked by 1 person

  8. M1A1TrkTrror

    You miss the point that there are so many fewer women able to meet this standard, the process for selecting those able is a complete waste of time, money, and manpower compared to the product it produces. National Defense isn’t for people to bandy about gender equality because it is by nature not efficient to do so; women are on average smaller and physically weaker, and making exceptions to policy for the few amazon women (that everyone always seems to know when these things get talked about) is not how an efficient Army operates.

    When we have a manpower shortage, and it becomes more important to have a body holding a rifle than it is to have the most qualified body hold a rifle, then women can be infantry. And if your argument is “well then they should have the benefit of that training so they aren’t shortchanged,” we already have that, it’s called Basic Combat Training; everyone attends, and it lays the foundation for more advanced combat training, which can then happen when necessary.

    And we carry so much stuff so that we can get to the objective and then deal with what is at the objective. It isn’t as though we are strapping pre-filled sandbags to our gear for the approach march in order to save time digging at the patrol base.

    And finally, just as I am completely unqualified to speak about how to best run a -30 or -40 level shop based on my experience in Armor and Cavalry (where we tend to carry less than the Infantry due to the nature of mechanization, but have our own sets of physically demanding tasks), you are completely unqualified to make an assessment on Combat Arms needs based on time in divisional support units. I don’t mean for that or any of this to sound insulting or be an attack, so I apologize if tone comes off as unnecessarily harsh, but some level of harshness is intended as this is incredibly important and you are very, very wrong on some of the premises you advance.

    Like

  9. timactual

    It isn’t only the amount of weight, how it is distributed also makes a difference. One of the few good things about wearing a flak vest is that it spreads the weight of rucksack straps over a wider area so they don’t cut in so much. Some equipment, like an M60 or components of the 81 mm. mortar, just have no possible comfortable way to carry them. And with both hands occupied carrying stuff, coping with anything other than clear flat terrain is a real joy.

    PLJ mentioned jumping out of trucks. Amen. I have done my share of jumping out out of helicopters with a full load, and I am lucky to still be walking. The airborne evidently get to hit the dirt on relatively clear terrain without their rucks on. And get paid extra for it. I guarantee any woman that tries to “dismount” from a helicopter hovering unsteadily six or eight feet off the ground, wearing rucksack and the rest, onto an LZ cluttered with rocks and shattered tree stumps, is going to get hurt. Probably permanently.

    Liked by 1 person

  10. KenWats

    Stupid question re: helicopter dismounts – my only experience was when I went to Ranger school. We kept our rucks on our laps. Helicopter lands or hovers, you toss your ruck out in front of you and hop out. Take up a position behind your ruck, then wait for the SL to move you to the treeline before the next chalk hits. Is the typical procedure different for an actual unit?

    Like

  11. xbradtc

    It varies by unit. And indeed, by aircraft. When I was in 25thID, we lap carried on Blackhawks, but on Chinooks, we put our packs on before dismounting from Chinooks. Same with the age old muzzle up/muzzle down question. The last time I rode in a Blackhawk, unit SOP was muzzle up, because the floors were surprisingly fragile, and muzzles and blank adapters were damaging them.

    Like

  12. timactual

    In the olden days the first priority was to clear the LZ and form a perimeter to secure the LZ for the following helicopters, which were sometimes only seconds behind. I think it would probably be faster to move off the LZ with the thing on your back rather than try to drag it along through all the bushes, tree limbs, and tree trunks cluttering the LZ. LZs were frequently newly created by artillery and/or bombs. We were told prior to loading what sector of the perimeter to secure, so we didn’t need to wait for the SL.

    You didn’t damage the rucksacks or any equipment by throwing them out? Or damage any of the already exited troops? sometimes an LZ can be pretty small.

    Like

  13. KenWats

    @TimActual-
    That was pretty much how the RIs taught us, that I can remember anyway. You pretty much would only pause on the LZ, get one shoulder under your ruck, wait for your squad leader to get his head out of his butt and then head for the treeline to pull security for the next chalk or join up with the rest of the platoon.
    Never damaged anything (although it seemed like my ruck was always full of 7.62 link and the stupid PVS-5s that never worked to begin with).

    Like

  14. HalfEmpty

    steroids, I can say no more!

    Like

Leave a comment