But, with all of the safety requirements imposed nowadays.....that was a LIGHT combat load for operations.
That was what I carried in every clearing operation. That was the requirement.
My comments are more pointed at others less familiar with what combat ops are actually like and how much this crap actually weighs.
As a light infantry company commander, I personally inspected every ruck before we got on the birds. Every ounce counted and since we stayed in the woods for 30-40 days, we could not afford to take anything that we couldn’t hump over the long haul. I don’t think that we could have done that with the current set of kit - the body can support only so much.
The tough part was the ammo. The mountains were frequently socked in, so you had to be prepared for a gun fight with no possibility of resupply. Nothing sucks so much as running out of ammo before you run out of bad guys. I’m just glad that I had draftees backing me up and not girls. The draftees were damn good soldiers.
I have never been in combat. But those who have been in REAL combat say that it is one of the most exhausting and physically draining things they ever experienced in their entire lives.
Furthermore, the realistic, extremely demanding and difficult training DID prepare them and help them.
We are not only putting people into this situation who are not physically constructed to perform under those conditions, we are emasculating and hollowing out the difficult training (to make it so women can pass it) to the point that the benefits of training will not prepare the trainees for actual combat.
We live in a time where the general public sees films like “GI Jane” or some other such crap where a 110 lb. beautiful woman is kicking the tar out of muscular athletic men, sometimes two or three of them simultaneously, and think “Women can do anything physically that men do, to exclude women is pure sexism to keep them out of the boy’s club”
They rationalize that in this age of push-button warfare, women can fit the bill just as well as men can. It is worst of all in the Navy (I am embarrassed to say) but the the USN is not that far ahead of the Air Force, which is only slightly ahead of the Army, and the USMC is going to succumb to it as well. Eventually.
But today’s Navy has not had to wage war as they did in the Solomon Islands, where there were three sailors dead for every death on Guadalcanal, and damage control took every ounce of strength from every man involved. The Marines did brutal house to house combat in Fallujah, descriptions I have read (particularly Bing West’s book “No True Glory”) make me extremely skeptical of how this would work with women integrated.
When we go to war again against a well equipped, dedicated and well trained opponent (as we most certainly will again someday) and we don’t have complete control of the air or our supply lines, and our troops have to depend on the sheer brawn and brains they have on hand, the brains might be fine, but in a death struggle against an equally determined foe who has us outmatched in brawn, that is going to make the difference. If a nail in a horse’s shoe can make the difference in a war, having women integrated into combat units going head to head with an opponent who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about political correctness or sensitivity training, well, that is going to end badly for us.
And the people who are responsible for making it happen will scream the loudest looking for someone to blame. And nobody will take them to task for what they will have wrought. Mark my words, down the road, we are going to pay for this folly in blood.