Vol 6 • Issue 2

Warfighter Rx: RFID

U.S. Marine Corps Urges Industry to Lighten Up

Equipment Worsens for U.S. Warfighters as Costs Rise

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Aviation/Defense Standards Updates

U.S. Marine Corps Urges Industry to Lighten Up

At the Advanced Planning Briefing to Industry in Baltimore this April, Marine Corps Systems Command made a request of industry: Innovate now to lighten the load for America’s warfighters. As the U.S. military transforms itself to meet the challenges of 21st-century warfare, it must demand that technology advance at a swift pace. Increasingly, today’s warfighter will be deployed in an urban battlespace to confront adversaries who use adaptive techniques and asymmetric forms of attack. In these close quarters, small teams must be nimble, flexible, and self-contained. The military is morphing its forces into lighter, faster, and more agile units with greater lethality and survivability. And with that purpose in mind, the USMC let industry know that it doesn’t want any more new “old” equipment. It wants genuinely new thought—fresh solutions that will reduce by half the burden our warfighters carry.

Warfighters Carry Up to One Hundred Pounds
A typical Marine deployed in Iraq today carries 80 to 100 pounds of gear (and sometimes more when contact with the enemy is certain). The Marine is likely to need at a minimum

• Interceptor body armor, a helmet, kneepads, goggles, a chem./bio suit
• a rifle, 7 magazines or more of ammunition, a bayonet, a night sight, grenades, a pistol
• night vision equipment
• breeching tools
• a radio/GPS
• a flashlight, a first aid kit
• food and water

U.S. Marines are exceptionally well trained and conditioned. Nevertheless, these extreme loads cause significant stress on the musculoskeletal system and lead to injuries and the physiological deficits of physical and mental fatigue. Each warfighter must be provided the means to ensure self-protection, situational awareness, and precision lethality. But when the warfighter is exhausted by the demands of carrying heavy loads for extended periods, the result is decreased mobility and maneuverability, reduced reaction time, and overall performance degradation.

Metabolic Energy Cost and Water Weight
Another element of such burdens is metabolic energy cost. Average people need about 1,500 to 2,000 calories a day to maintain their body weight. A deployed Marine requires from 3,600 to 4,000 calories. The newly organized Special Operations Forces will need anywhere from 6,000 to 8,000 calories a day to guarantee metabolic balance. Therefore, the more weight a warfighter carries, the more food he must carry, thereby increasing his load. MREs (Meals, Ready-to-Eat) generally deliver 1,200 calories and weigh 1.5 pounds. Weighing in with greater heft by far is water. A fighter deployed in a hot, arid region like Iraq risks heat stroke and even death if water intake is not carefully regulated. At an ambient temperature of 90°F (the high in Baghdad on the day this article was written was 111°F), when expending 4,000 calories per 24 hours, a warfighter needs 7 gallons of water a day. A gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds. If a Marine were to carry all the water he needed, he would add 58 pounds to his cargo.

Technology Must Rise to the Occasion
The weight of water will never change, and warfighters must carry enough food to maintain metabolic balance in order to complete their tasks. Therefore, it is technology that must get lighter. As U.S. forces progress toward net-centricity, each warfighter will be a node in an enormous information architecture. He will instantaneously send and receive real-time data, relaying it to command and other warfighters. The equipment necessary for the military’s goal of transformation must be light enough to allow the warfighter to perform his duties. A Marine’s helmet may incorporate a heads-up display, night vision technology, sensors, GPS, and communications, but these additions can’t all be mounted on the front of the helmet without distorting the correct aspect of the head, and they shouldn’t weigh morethan 3.3 pounds to avoid risking neck injury. Today, fully loaded helmets weigh as much as 9 pounds.

Kevlar body armor with neck, shoulder, and groin protection weighs about 24 pounds, including two insertable high-velocity plates, known as ESAPIs, which add greater protection. Yet, an Armed Forces Institute of Pathology report found that, of the study sample, 80 percent of Marine deaths in Iraq could have been prevented with more armor protection. It is possible to outfit a warfighter from head to toe in body armor, but the total weight would be closer to 30 pounds. As it is, warfighters often remove some of the modular pieces of the armor so they can move quickly enough and endure long enough to accomplish the mission. Experts within the Corps working to reduce the warfighter’s load say that anything lighter is at least five years away.

Attendees at the Advanced Planning Briefing, many of whom are retired military personnel themselves, saw it as a wake up call. Current U.S. responsibilities are placing warfighters into growing situational complexity, and the military will meet those challenges with innovations that enable total dominance; but more than technologies, U.S. forces are made of people, and in order for them to be their most effective, it is imperative that industry lighten their burden now, not five years from now.

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