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Downside of full combat load examined

No doubt about it, the Corps’ full combat load is making sure grunts live up to the name. But relief is in sight for Marines tired of humping the heft of full “battle rattle,” as the Corps looks to refine its stance on how much body armor and gear must be worn into combat.

According to a Naval Research Advisory Committee report, the average Marine carries 97 to 135 pounds in combat loads — far above the recommended weight of 50 pounds. The bulk of the weight carried is protective equipment.

“Considerable anecdotal information based on current combat operations indicates heavier loads severely reduce Marine or soldier effectiveness, especially on long-duration patrols, close-in urban combat and other adverse situations,” said a NRAC study, released in September.

“Common sense tells you that if you put more weight on a Marine, obviously he’s going to be slowed down,” said Capt. Jose Vengoechea, project officer for the Lighten the Load initiative at the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab in Quantico, Va., in a phone interview. “We break the rules. No one should have to carry more than 30 percent of their weight in combat.”

Combat loads vary from Marine to Marine. Machine gunners, squad leaders and Navy corpsmen, for example, all carry more weight than the average rifleman, Vengoechea said.

Every pound counts, no matter what the job.

“You can believe if you have a guy who is 170 pounds and you put 80 pounds on him, he’s not going to last very long,” Vengoechea said.

“As a society, we’re into surviving the hit, not avoiding the hit,” Vengoechea said. If, for example, a Marine spotted an insurgent who shot at him, how fast could the Marine run wearing 130 pounds of gear and expect to catch him?

“Maybe you don’t have to be fully protected in all situations,” he said.

That’s exactly what the lab intends to find out.

The goal is to quantify how weight affects Marines in combat. In addition to diminished performance, some are seeing more non-combat-related stress injuries they believe stem from gear requirements, Vengoechea said.

“Most [Marines] aren’t going to admit ‘this stuff is too tough for me and I can’t handle it,’” Vengoechea said. “When it comes down to it, Marines are going to tough it out.”

Live-action experiments for the weight study will be conducted by Marine Corps Systems Command’s program manager for the Marine Expeditionary Rifle Squad at the Gruntworks Squad Integration Facility in Stafford, Va., said SysCom spokesperson Bill Johnson-Miles.

The six-month study, which will begin in April, is based on the gear and the physical tasks conducted by Marines in August and September, he said.

“The tests will baseline a Marine’s performance in both fatigued and non-fatigued states, with no equipment and incrementally to full equipment,” Johnson-Miles said. “The end state is to determine what equipment affects a Marine’s performance, and when and how that occurs.”

The group will look for ways to mitigate the effects, and ways to measure the performance drain.

The lab will then crunch the numbers, and quantify just how much a dismounted infantryman’s performance degrades with each added pound.

There’s no cut and dried, formulaic way to tell commanders where to cut the weight, Vengoechea said.

“You can’t plug in the temperature, terrain and a Marine’s [physical fitness test],” he said. “It’s more of a subjective formula for that Marine commander to do in his head, but we’re trying to add some objectivity to it.”

The lab’s anticipated product will be a reference database — perhaps in the form of a chart — that will help illustrate how performance drops beyond specific weights, Vengoechea said. The chart would be quantified in increments of pounds, not by individual pieces of gear, he added.

Still, even with a chart and the Corps’ blessing, the decision to pare back gear would continue to rest with commanders.

“We’re not trying to do their thinking for them,” he said. “This has huge implications. If this goes through, there would have to be some changes in policy.”

Promoting ‘ninja tactics’

A policy change in gear requirements would prompt realignment of modern-day battlefield values, much in the same way the Corps is attempting to reconcile its expeditionary mission with super-heavy combat vehicles.

“Our job isn’t to protect ourselves, it’s to kill the enemy,” Vengoechea said.

Marines deployed to Iraq will soon see changes in body armor regulations, however, as security gains continue to take root in Anbar province.

“[Multi-National Force-West] leadership is considering options to the current force protection regulations, which could include granting commanders options for reducing personal protective equipment requirements,” said Maj. Jeff Pool, MNF-W spokesman, in an e-mail.

“The reason they’re starting to decrease requirements is because you’re seeing fewer incidents of the enemy,” Vengoechea said.

The lab’s work, however, aims to lighten the dismounted infantryman’s load not as a reaction to decreased combat, but as a way to increase battlefield effectiveness, he said.

Wearing every bit of personal protective gear could hinder certain “ninja tactics,” such as jumping over a wall or a roof, he explained. “Just adding 20 pounds for a guy, that will create difficulty for him to do a pull-up.”

But there are limits to how far a policy shift could go.

“Will it ever get to a point where a commander makes a decision to go slick [without any body armor]? I don’t know that it will ever get to that,” Vengoechea said.