The Infantryman’s Burden
Posted 01 Mar 10
It’s no secret that US soldiers go into combat with a LOT more personal equipment than they used to. Consider two photos, forty years apart:
It’s mostly armor, of course. And in Iraq, water. Still, even as some items have become lighter — consider the Vietnam field radios, carried by a dedicated radioman, vs. modern electronics — there seem to be more of them.
DefenseTech has an interesting article on this point today. In Afghanistan, where firefights take place across wide ground and at high elevations, the infantryman’s load has become a tactical problem. Moreover, the Taliban figured this out, and have adapted their tactics accordingly: firing at a distance, and moving more rapidly and easily than western forces.
After a description of the Soviets’ response to this same problem in the 80′s, the author makes another point: the US military has been focused on a “platform” response. That means rather than providing soldiers with a lighter, more effective grenade launcher — the Soviets’ solution — we’ve concentrated on big expensive machinery like the Bradley fighting vehicle, or various mounted weapon systems.
This strikes me as an excellent example of why the military-industrial iron triangle is such a problem. Defense companies sell ruinously expensive, overbuilt, wastefully ineffective equipment to an overfunded Pentagon so inefficient it has lost a trillion dollars. At the same time, soldiers on the ground don’t have the cheap, simple tools they need to do their jobs.
This post indexed as: Military, Technology