The British Army has had similar problems. With weapon, body armor, and pack his gear weighs in at over 130 pounds. In the video below, a soldier steps up on a scale to illustrate how much he carries on a two-day mission. The story hasn’t changed much since then. After a few rushes, I was physically unable to move and I am in great shape.” I’d rest for 10 or 15 minutes, struggle to get up, go 10 more yards, and collapse. I would get up and rush for 10 yards, throw myself down and couldn’t get up. In their paper Load Carriage in Military Operations, Joseph Knapik and Katy Reynolds quoted one soldier in Grenada: “My rucksack weighed 120 pounds. During the operation in Grenada soldier loads went unchecked by leaders, resulting in soldiers carrying over 120 pounds. In the last thirty years, however, loads have skyrocketed. Soldier loads stayed pretty constant from World War II through Vietnam. World War II saw those loads increase again, to 80–100 pounds, depending on the type of weapon system the soldier carried. During World War I infantry loads increased by 50 percent, up to over sixty pounds. Infantrymen didn’t see a significant jump in their load until the beginning of the twentieth century. Ferencik writes that he was required to carry almost 200 pounds of gear, armor, and weapons.ĭespite the robust back-and-forth argument related to the 152-pound Marine Corps standard that was spawned by Haring’s piece, one fundamental question was never answered: What is the right amount of weight an infantryman should be reasonably asked to carry? And how do we get these loads down to a reasonable weight that allows the infantry to be a flexible and agile force?įrom the ancient Greek hoplite all the way up through the American Civil War infantryman, the overall weight carried by a foot soldier changed very little, holding steady at about forty pounds. Many of the rebuttal articles, including one on Tom Ricks Best Defense blog by former Marine infantryman Aaron Ferencik, state that not only is this a realistic requirement, it happens regularly in Afghanistan. At first glance this may seem like a reasonable argument: 152 pounds seems like more than most humans can carry. Ellen Haring wrote an opinion piece for the Marine Corps Times in which she was critical of the requirement for Marine Corps infantry officers to carry a load of up to 152 pounds for more than nine miles, at a twenty-minute-per-mile pace-a standard that Haring argues is unrealistic and prevents women from successfully completing the Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course. This issue was brought to the forefront recently when retired Army Col. The amount of weight soldiers or Marines are asked to carry has grown exponentially while their ability to carry that load has not.

Where do space marines keep their ammo