Identify these guys, then caption the photo. It is the work of Vadim Veedoff. You can see more of his work at www.veedoff.com.
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Door Kickers
The Load Trainer by Innovative Performance
Road marching with weights instead of gear in your ruck isn’t new, but a North Carolina-based company is now producing a pack frame specifically designed to carry steel weights from the gym. Just think of it — miles and miles of convenient, self-torture.
Before you make a judgement, please read this review of the Load Trainer by Stew Smith, former Navy SEAL and Associate Fitness Editor at Military.com.
Check it out:
During the NSCA Tactical Strength and Conditioning Conference this year, I met a special operator who created what he calls the Load Trainer. It’s basically an ALICE pack frame specially designed to be an Olympic plate holder. It makes it simple to get the weight perfectly right for a long ruck march.
Yes – now someone has invented a gift for the masochist in your life. At a cost of $45, this souped-up pack frame is a convenient and cost-effective solution for training for ruck marches.
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YATES COBRA CQB BELTS – THE NEW STANDARD. NOT FOR HIPPIES.
You may have heard already that a couple of our flunkies attended Warrior South. This is true. If you heard they went to jail, you heard wrong, though two of them were thrown out of an upscale San Antonio club called XTC about 0400 the first night of the show.
But we digress.
As we were leaving the Yates booth at Warrior South to look for the beer cart, we saw a wall of cobra rigger’s belts that caught our eye. We see belts all the time, and there are a lot of rigger’s belts and cobra belts out there. Mr. Yates, however, does things a little bit different than everyone else. He does not f#(& around. He puts his equipment through extremely harsh and extensive testing phases before allowing pipe-hitting mofos like us to strap one on and go to work. All of his lanyards, rigs and belts are put through rigorous torture tests to measure strength, breaking points and overall capacity of what each piece of gear can withstand before shitting the bed.
That said, there’s might be one Tuesday afternoon B Squad 300+ lb. stripper on the road somewhere Slim took for the team sometime who could snap one of these babies. Probably not, but as we try to remember, we’ll give you the rundown on these monsters.
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PARIS — Marom Dolphin Ltd.’s new Formission tactical pack frame features a flexible aluminum hinge that connects to the back of the kidney belt and the lower part of the frame. The design allows the frame to adjust to the movements of a soldier wearing a body armor vest.
I don’t know if it’s the future of humping heavy loads, but it looked like it has a lot of promise when I checked it out at Eurosatory 12. Jonathan Shriker, the frame’s designer, said he set out to combine the load-carrying ability of an external frame with the flexibility of an internal frame.
“I wanted something simple because if it’s not simple, the soldier won’t like,” he said. The Formission weighs about four pounds with shoulder straps, frame and kidney belt. It’s design to support loads up to 200 pounds – WTF??! – and ride comfortably on a body-armored soldier.
This concept is obviously not for fast-moving urban combat, but it does seem like a good option for Recce troops on extended field missions. The frame’s aluminum construction looks every bit as durable as the old ALICE frame, but it’s taller to handle more modern expedition rucks.
The Formission is currently being tested in small numbers by military units in England, Ireland and the U.S., Shriker said. Marom Dolphin is based in Israel but hopes to start marketing to the U.S. soon, he said.
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PARIS – Eurosatory, the world’s largest land warfare trade show, kicked off today with an array of international defense companies displaying everything from armored tactical vehicles to reversible camouflage. It’s the best opportunity to see what sits in the rest of the world’s sandbox.
We will be covering everything on the floor for Military.com and its other blogs: Defense Tech and DoD BUZZ, but I will be looking for down-in-the weeds gear and weapons for KitUp.
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This isn’t about kit of any kind, though this poster shows the Gruntworks appreciation for the finer things in life.
Gruntworks is a relatively new Facebook page with a great perspective on things. They’re laying the groundwork for some kick a$$ apparel, decals and morale patches in the future and they have an obvious love of country all mixed in with a suitably gungy sense of humor. You’re cleared hot to check ‘em out. Tell them the Mad Duo sent you. Don’t use a lot of big words.
Meanwhile, here are a few public service announcements from Gruntworks. With your help Gruntworks will…
Honor the Fallen | Continue the Mission
CHARLIE MIKE!
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Kit Up! The D27 Tourniquet Admin Pouch from Legion Firearms and First-Spear. Photos by 21ST Century Gunfighter.
Legion Firearms is about to release a new of kit that promises to be both extremely effective in the field and one of the most impressive examples of cross-branding in the industry to date. It was designed by Jason Crosby for Legion Firearms, built to their specs by First Spear, additional T&E provided by 21ST Century Gunfighter and approved for use by Pocket Doc of Dark Angel Medical. Now all they need is marketing by Weyland-Yutani and the peerage would be complete.
The item in question is called the D27 (as in Delta-Two-Seven) Tourniquet Admin Pouch. It’s was designed to work from the center line on a wide array of body armors and plate carriers (carrying a primary tourniquet on the center line where it can be reached by either the left or right hand of the individual operator is becoming an increasingly frequent SOP in some tactical circles). It’s snag-free, protects from the elements and has a quick-pull tab do you can deploy it quickly (the tab tucks away so it doesn’t deploy accidentally). In addition to the tourniquet, there is ample space for small general purpose type items and references (9-line cards, rescue blade, etc.)
The D27 was developed by Sgt. Crosby, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, based on a preliminary design he stitched together himself while deployed. The pouch is the genuine result of an evolving requirement they had in his former platoon (he’s now teaching mounted gunnery at Ft. Hood as a battalion master gunner advisor).
His platoon had, like most others, adopted SOPs to the location of aid items, standardizing the location of their IFAK and bleeder kits with a TQ located centerline on their armor. He advises that for his individual needs, when they were in the built up environment of eastern Baghdad in ’08 and ’09, that having a TQ mounted horizontally high on his chest worked best. They were encountering lots of EFPs and suffering catastrophic amputations and were going through lots of TQs. Because of that, and the dictates of the AO, they preferred an assaulter type configuration, with open top mag pouches and the like. He made a few hook panels with shock cord attached to the pile field found on most admin pouches and it worked out well.
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