Combat loads past vs present

Are there any info graphics or things like that comparing the weight carried by soldiers from 200 years ago, colonial wars, 20th century and gwot?
In every picture of soldiers until basically 30 years ago they were all skinny pissant weaklings who would fail SOI if they enlisted right now.
>inb4 boot I'm going on 6 years infantry now so not boot any more

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I read that book band of brothers and what struck me is how the low pt standards were. They were super proud at getting 40 pushups on their pt tests. In my unit if you wernt getting at least 60 you were weak as hell.

I bet their knees lasted a little longer back then

I read the book too and thought the same. I know guys in ww1 dug hundreds of miles of trenches by hand, pulled artillery pieces up mountains and shit but your average grunt from 1914 would probably get btfo by a marine pog any day of the week.

Yeah.

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At least during the Napoleonic eras, it was estimated that 15-20kg was the absolute maximum a soldier could march with, covering 20 miles a day, for an extended period of time without issues.
In the period before ww2, a bit of gear creep came in, with people carrying unnecessary and heavy kit. However that quickly changed, as blokes quickly realised they had to be light on their feet, and so would often go into an attack with literally just ammo and grenades, nothing else.

Obviously nowadays on operations it is ridiculous; blokes regularly patrolling with 45-60kg depending on their role. Even on exercises, without body armour, youll regularly be patrolling with 15kg worth of stuff purely just due to ammo, water, section kit, radio batteries etc.

There was a study conducted in the late 2000's that found that 40kg was the point at which soldiers became nothing more than pack mules, i.e not concentrating on soldiering and simply focusing on keeping moving or when they can next rest. The British Army is massively involved in this area of research at the minute, as their seems to be two options; reduce the amount of kit blokes are carrying, or regard the previous standards as obsolete. Hence why theres a massive push now for 'fight light', as well as the new fitness tests emphasising overall muscular/skeletal strength, alongside the various iterations of Virtus that have come about to try and make load carrying easier.

Does anyone have the funny picture of soldiers using rocket launchers for CQB?

As an MS section it sucks huge dick carrying a 12kg MAG, tripod, CES gear and thousands of rounds. I legit can't hold a decent sight picture when firing from the shoulder, at least not after 2 bursts. Back in Malaya 1950s-60s you had another guy to carry half the gear for GPMGs.

>At least during the Napoleonic eras, it was estimated that 15-20kg was the absolute maximum a soldier could march with, covering 20 miles a day, for an extended period of time without issues.

Napoleonic soldier had to walk everywhere he went and carry all his shit with him.
A modern soldier gets his base and supplies flown in by a cargo plane or a truck. He can get somewhere in a vehicle and rarely actually gets out of it most of the time.

Unfortunately real pack mules (i.e those kit carrying robots) will never matter in the British Army because they'll just match the weight that the bloke is no longer carrying with more ammo/radio batteries/mortar bombs.

How I envy the American doctrine sometimes

t. Mattis

those men rotated out they didn't soldier everyday like modern ones

That might be true for you yanks with your fancy mechanised units but us old fashioned brits just love fucking walking everywhere carrying tonnes of useless shite

I'm not sure how our doctrine would differ, in that regard. It will likely end up being the same scenario here.
>"We've now begun deploying robotic packmules at the squad level"
>"Fantastic! We can now start issuing real fucking NATO, because our boys can carry it. And call that mad bastard Robinson. I'm thinking we can deploy man portable 50s at the platoon level now instead of those wimpy GPMGs."

Unfortunately im Light Role Infantry, and our doctrine very much is still centred around getting dropped off (hopefully) by a vehicle and then tabbing it in for several kilometres onto the objective. A lot of the time you tab it in with your bergen, set up a harbour and conduct operations from there, meaning you carry all your kit in with you. Realistically we do have vehicles for resupply but the core need is that we are able to carry all our kit in with us on foot if needed.

Obviously light mobility/protected infantry, mech inf or armoured inf work more around the vehicle, mainly debussing just before the objective or once they take contact moving on tbe objective, so they have a lot less stuff to carry and worry about, but even just with body armour, webbing and ammo you could be looking at more weight than the average Napoleonic soldier marched with.

Yep, I mean there's no doubt that your survivability just as a modern infantryman is 100x greater than that of a napoleonic soldier, and there are certain things you can't sack off on Ops in ME for example (like ECM or Valen) so yeah I'm alive but that doesn't mean I'm enjoying it, and after a certain point your situational awareness evapourates and your entire focus is on your feet, shoulders and lower back

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>Conscripts from the early 20th century aren't as fit as modern professional soldiers
Even if we overlook the difference between the standards for a wartime conscript army and a modern professional "peacetime" army, the changes in nutrition and understanding of the body means you can train more efficiently. Pic related was the peak of physical fitness at the turn of the century.

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>that sweet half-second of release when you jump up a little bit and all the weight of the Bergen comes off your shoulders

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Protip; become a PTI and then all you have to carry is a pillow and some balloons

Oh god that brings back memories

>Tfw you finally take your pack off after a 20k.

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>when your hip-strap has a broken clip that fails after 5k of a 20k so now 100% in on your shoulder.

> when you decide to be sneaky and steal a 10kg plate from the gym to make up weight for an AFT but it ends up rubbing your back raw

>t. fobbit / neverserved

What is Afghanistan?

There are at least half a dozen separate studies from the US alone. The optimum combat load cap is 30lb, the in practice load about 50lb. The 'optimum' carrying-about load (not in the midst of combat) is capped at 30% of bodyweight, and soldiers with trucks can usually do this; but purely dismounted forces have loads over 50%. This image is from Lightening the Load in 2007.

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>Tfw when it doesn't matter cuase you have an Alice pack

My guess is there were more men to throw at a problem back then. Also that men in those days were just used to tougher conditions on aberage. Lots of naturally hard working farm boys already used to harsh-ish conditions.

Based yeah poster

Is 100lbs really the least soldiers carry around?
Imagine joining the military and crippling yourself for life lmao.

On operations such as those in Iraq and Afghan, that was pretty standard. On exercise you can get away with quite a lot less.

my back, shoulders and knees thank me for my service

ik that feel

>when you half squat bend forward and push all the weight up onto you back, off you hips and shoulders

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> when you take a knee during a halt and realise you wont be able to stand up again

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>when you've just climbed a big fuck-off hill and you see the boss looking at the map and shaking his head

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>when you're fucking hanging out and the DS points at you and says "right...you're a casualty fella"

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>when you're a tanker and heviest load you ever carried was the standard combat load + 24h backbag during basic

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>when you're a track-mounted mechanic in CS but its the yearly "lets pretend to be LRRP's for a week with -25, 60 kg packs and snowshoes"-exercise

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> when youre finally doing the re-org after a sweaty platoon attack and the DS starts pulling out chorleys and looking around

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>when it's already 1hr into the next bloke's piquet and no one has come to replace you

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> when you know for a fact the bloke you just replaced on stag hasnt/wont wake the next bloke up

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> when the boss says 'I thought I gave you the map' at the end of a night nav and then makes everyone go back and look for it

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>Fighting with cif to size you a petite. For smol plates.

If you cant haul 50+ kgs over 100 kilometers youre a fucking pussy.

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it just goes to show you that having a lot of physical strength doesn't mean shit if your mental and emotional abilities are weak. based on this metric, modern soldiers are total pussies by comparison. when was the last time you saw a modern soldier do anything even remotely as heroic or tough as the things soldiers did every single day in WW2? soldiers today literally have air conditioned tents and cry if their truck breaks down.

this is why it's taken the modern US military over 16 years to *not* win two shitty wars against people who actually live in mud huts, whereas the generation in the 40's wiped out two of the world's most technologically and militarily advanced nations on earth, at the same time, in three years.

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Because killing every single Afghan and Iraqi would be easier than maintaining a occupation of these two specific Nations while pretending to be moral

> in 3 years
Amazing what they teach in american schools nowadays.

So you're saying we should nuke the emperor of Afghanistan?

top lel

Sorry fella, not all of us can be Navy seals with over 300 confirmed kills like you


Eat my cock

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>Firing from the shoulder
Uhh... there's a reason that thing has a tripod.

some things are universal

I don’t recall seeing that study but I recall reading something like that on a “lessons learned from combat” type thing. Guys learned that units were better off over loading a couple guys as dedicated pack mules. They’d rotate out the heavy loads when they made stops. Found that with 8 guys it was better to have 6 with reasonable loads watching out and 2 that just suck it up than to have 8 guys all distracted by be overloaded.

Make the w*man carry it.

Why are they even carrying this shit? Does it really reduce our casualty rate? What more do you need to carry than ammo and an IFAK? Asking because I'm not infantry.

Yank here what the fuck is the mechanized shit you guys keep yammering on about? We fucking walked everywhere with all our shit

well you need a fuck ton of water, IED detectors, body armor, ammo for the 240 plus personal ammo, radios, extra batteries, NODs, litters... the list goes on. Yes they do drastically decrease casualty rates.

>When one of the guys realized he dropped his NVGs during a movement
That was fun. Miraculously we found the damn things in the middle of the night about 2 miles back

Can confirm. I was one of those weaklings that flunked SOI. After sucking ass in the humps, I eventually got sent to Lima company and got discharged with an uncharacterized discharge. Sucked because despite doing my research whenever I saw Marines complain about the hikes and asked them about it, it was always like "yeah hikes aren't that bad, just keep walking, anyways though don't worry about that, just concentrate on the PT and make sure your PFT score is high", that was the advice given, they never spent much time talking about hikes, I wonder why, probably because the ones who made it were tough dudes so to them it wasn't a big deal? I wish I would have been told about how shitty the hikes actually were so I could have prepared before joining. Then again, because 110lbs and a manlet doesn't help. Womp womp

Eh, but those infantryman are brainlets regardless. I guess, I wonder how much it affects combat effectiveness though. Seems that we're trading combat effectiveness and a body that still functions normally for less of a chance of dying and a higher chance of PTSD since you'll live.

What about the American doctrine? Americans have to carry all their shit too.

Ironically nobody told me how much running was involved and l focused on strength and did little to no cardio or conditioning. Rip my friend you can always try again

It's too late for me now, I'm in college now going to graduate soon. I'll just buy SBR's and other dream guns and take tacticool training classes. Also did you manage to pass SOI?

Eugene Sandow is the peak of physical fitness to this day, dude. He was an excellent gymnast and could press a 250lb dumbbell with one hand.

It's all well and good climbing a feature and setting up the gun + tripod for SBF.
Guess who still has to wield it like a rifle when doing fire and movement or in urban environments, or pretty much anywhere where the tactical situation won't permit you to lie down behind the weapon.

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The thing about the army, and infanteering in general, is that a lot of it sucks. Rucking/tabbing sucks, sitting in a shell scrape freezing your tits off at 4am sucks, doing casevacs sucks. However, regardless of how shit it was at the time, a while later youll look back on it and laugh like 'oh that wasnt that bad/that was a bit cheeky but we did it'. In your memory shit times become good times because you dont remember how shite you felt at the time.

Hence when youre asking about tabbing, theyll tell you it wasnt that bad even if it was, probably because they wont remember how arduous it was, theyll just remember the relief of finishing it and having completed it. Of course there are some superhuman people out there with amazing levels of fitness, but generally if youre suffering, everyone else is too.

We once got made to search a mile long and 500 metre wide shallow valley after a company attack in 45 degree heat because Rfn Fucknuts dropped the bracket for his HMNVS. Glorious. He eventually found it in his daysack after an hour of the entire company searching the place in extended line.

Im was a trucker