The Army wants to reduce the amount of equipment that close combat soldiers, like the infantry, have to carry. The obvious perks are that a lighter soldier can move (and fight) faster, is less likely to injure themselves carrying everything and the kitchen sink, and has less gear to worry about getting in trouble for losing.
“No longer will we hang things on them like we hang things on a Christmas tree,” Brig. Gen. Phil Kiniery, commandant of the Army’s Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, told Task & Purpose in a statement. “In some cases, we’re giving our forces redundant capabilities at the squad level, the platoon level, and the company level. Is that necessary, effective, and efficient? In some cases, the answer will be yes, and in some cases no.”
The average infantry soldier carries or wears more than 80 items. The Army wants to reduce that weight to 55 pounds, or “no more than 30%” of their body weight, Kiniery told contractors at an event earlier this month.
The cuts would impact the Army’s close combat forces, which include infantry, scouts, combat medics, forward observers, combat engineers, and special operations forces.
The excess equipment amassed over two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined with the changing nature of warfare, has led Army leaders to rethink what their formations need to have on hand. Soldiers across the Army have seen their kit bags swell with excess batteries and cables over the years, Kiniery said. But on a future battlefield, the Army wants to have technology that uses modern software and less hardware.
“We’d like to see batteries and cables designed within the architecture to serve various parts of the system, and we want to reduce signatures across all spectrums. Ultimately, we want everything the squad employs to be compatible and synergistic,” he said.
Other programs asking troops to lighten their load have seen success. At the unit level, an Army Materiel Command initiative called Rapid Removal of Excess Equipment or R2E led to soldiers at Fort Stewart, Georgia and Fort Bragg, North Carolina turning in 37,000 pieces of gear in January 2024. Army officials said the gear cuts could save 309,000 man-hours across 15 units each year in inventory checks, maintenance, and repairs.
The re-think of soldier gear also matches the Army’s need for soldiers to move faster and farther to avoid enemy drones and sensing technology on the modern battlefield. At an August training event, the 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade dropped large brigade radios and instead gave soldiers small Android devices that could connect to cell towers or satellite networks.
The vision for light and leaner formations will also change what soldiers wear on their backs with “new and novel lightweight materials” coming from the private sector, Kiniery said.
The new gear focus even has its own new buzzwords: “Squad as a system,” a concept Kiniery introduced at an industry event in Alexandria, Virginia. Past ways of equipping soldiers lacked “integration,” according to Kiniery, but with “squad as a system,” the service wants to look at the equipment that infantry soldiers carry in a more systematic way, rather than designing individual items for a specific purpose.
“Squad as a System,” aims to address a problem that impacts soldiers directly: too much equipment to track and too much weight to carry. Kiniery argued that excess and redundant equipment causes “cognitive overload” for soldiers.
“I believe the application of Squad as a System is going to change all that,” said Kiniery. “Any time you continue to add weight to soldiers, you’re going to begin to impact their ability to think on their feet.”
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