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Since I had to do my draft here in Holland
(almost two decades ago) until now I never ever did find that simple
solution to the 'boots problems' that are in most 'professional armies'
around the world.
To me it is very surprising that the oldest
branch of the armed forces, the infantry, still has to walk on
confection boots while it is clear that infantry could gain a few percent
more 'combat power' when that stupid confection stuff would replaced with
good stuff.
So what does the WarTribunal want? The war
tribunal wants some good 'boot making machines' for the soldiers that want
to fight the lite version of warfare in a controlled battlefield
environment. The boot making machine is rather simple to explain, it makes
a 3-dim scan of the bare foots of a soldier and a day later you have the
best fitting boots possible... (Ok a good shoe maker around might be handy
to, but the process must be atomized as far as possible with mobile
machinery that can be stored outside the actual battlefield).
There are lots of words more to share on battlefield equipment for
soldiers, I need lots of high tech stuff more but that is not at the order
right now.
Title:
Is this high technology or is this crap?
Now I want to proceed with a few anecdotes
that I have gone through myself when I was a draftee, here we go:
| My first months on the
draft were in the Southern Dutch city of Venlo, there was a driver
school and our platoon all had to get a truck driver license.
Beside learning how to drive a truck we also got basic military
lessons and of course unavoidable we had to do a bit of marching.
Only one or two marches in the first
two months, only 10 or 12 kilometers (7 or 8 miles). Who could
have any problem with that? Not even all gear had to be taken
with, only the 4 kilo gun and a bit of other stuff. What could be
the problem? Peanuts!
Well I still remember the last
kilometers of the first march, horrible the pains in my feet. Brr,
back at the kazerne I could finally inspect my feet and luckily my
feet were not bleeding but I had big big blisters at the back of
my feet. Even now, a full 20 years later, there are still those
callous spots at the back of my feet and I need to 'shave that
stuff' every week.
I also remember that I felt insulted,
just not able to walk a lousy 10 to 12 kilometers and what would
happen if 40 to 50 kilometers were to be done (my body could take
those kind of distances but my feet didn't).
But this anecdote is more than
frustration, I estimated that gear I had to take care of was worth
something like a 1000 pair of boots (a truck, a telex, radio
equipment, telephones and a noisy aggregate that turned diesel in
electricity).
Our boots came in the standard sizes
and we could even choose from 3 different width; small, medium or
wide. The price was something like 45 Euro (when you lost your
stuff it was withdrawn from your salary, the price is without 20
years inflation).
But my own problems were not that big,
I sometimes spoke with officers upon these gear problems and they
painted me a far more strange past: Our present boots were heaven
compared to the stuff from the past, lots of older professional
officers had to leave the army simply because of the back pain
problems emerging from the previous boots... |
To me it was all madness, of course the army has to have a uniform and
also the boots must look the same and have the same specifications. But
given the fact that soldiers simply need to be able to travel large
distances by foot day in day out it is clear that the optimization is
still not there after all those years...
Ha, the Americans even took with them into
Iraq mobile crematories when they had to deal with dead US soldiers from
bio-chemical warfare. So they take along with them mobile crematories but
good boots for the infantry are too much... It has some strange kind of
arrogance in it, but infantry is still not optimized after all these
centuries. May be the old roman armies were better in this, I do not
know.
But I want the boot problem solved before the
first 'lite wars' are there, the fact that it is very reasonable that at
first the US army has to be crushed is not that relevant right now. May be
it is enough to crunch their mindset first, may be that is enough...
To show you that until this very day there is
no significant progress on the 'boot problem' whatsoever you can read the
next quote and look at the 'model advertised':
Now a quote from that company that produces
boots like the advertised one:
Grampian FootWear
is a supplier to European Armed Forces
-
NEED NEW DESERT COMBAT BOOTS? - GIVE US A CALL....
we can outfit an entire army in a few weeks.. -
Our manufacturing capacity is 72,000 pairs per day - to the highest quality standards.
We would welcome an opportunity to further supply
coalition forces. In the last few days of March 2003,
we received orders for 45,000 pairs. - followed by supply negotiations for UK Ministry of Defense, Spanish Army, Cyprus Government +++ |
You see it is still like those old days when
Djengiz Khan and his Monguls attacked the Europeans, in those old European
armies it was considered a 'waste of money' to equip the 'peasants' that
did the fighting with swords... It is well known what the armies of
Djengiz did to the 'peasant armies' from the Europeans; they were crushed.
Title: Just
a little greeting card to future soldier feet.
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to Part 36
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