11-15-2011, 08:23 PM
We have a much more limited logistics system when compared to the scope of the WWII effort on two fronts, and people are always looking for ways to save on the cost of fuel, even to the point where the current administration has been tinkering with fuel capacities used on C-17's. We don't enjoy the price of gas we did in WWII, even when adjusted for inflation. All that aside, we still have to look at the soldier's load, and the load at the battlefield logistics level. Would it make that huge of a difference at the Mule/MRE case, speedball drop, helo resupply? Maybe not huge, but enough for planners to consider.
As far as my vest, I'm constantly looking for ways to lighten the soldier's load, while maintaining or increasing the basic load. We actually had these brainchildren from one of our sister brigades who just got back from A-stan in 2002 tell us that they cut the basic load of a rifleman significantly to accommodate the Interceptor Armor, even going down to 4 mags for a rifleman...? They were trying to pass lessons learned from the Afghan AOR to us, before we went into the Iraqi theater, which was a mistake from the command-level. At the end of the day, it was a bunch of NCO's who had been raised in the 82nd passing on all this "wealth" of knowledge to us, when they conducted a lot of mounted operations, and had little to no dismounted contact in A-Stan...basically an uneventful deployment.
As far as my vest, I'm constantly looking for ways to lighten the soldier's load, while maintaining or increasing the basic load. We actually had these brainchildren from one of our sister brigades who just got back from A-stan in 2002 tell us that they cut the basic load of a rifleman significantly to accommodate the Interceptor Armor, even going down to 4 mags for a rifleman...? They were trying to pass lessons learned from the Afghan AOR to us, before we went into the Iraqi theater, which was a mistake from the command-level. At the end of the day, it was a bunch of NCO's who had been raised in the 82nd passing on all this "wealth" of knowledge to us, when they conducted a lot of mounted operations, and had little to no dismounted contact in A-Stan...basically an uneventful deployment.