Thread 64123704

Here's an extract from from the official South African special forces site:

>Firstly, one would have to infiltrate. This would entail walking to the target area –
>In enemy territory all the way.
>In a war situation, with enemy soldiers and forces (very good and highly trained ones) all along the route – constantly searching for us (enemy presence).
>With potentially hostile local population all over the place, who would instantly inform the enemy soldiers if we were detected.
>With the enemy having complete air superiority and having helicopter and helicopter gunship patrols frequently.
>With no possibility of any support, resupply or evacuation by ground or air.
>Carrying all food, water, sleeping equipment, military equipment, and ammunition – of a quantity that could last for weeks.
>Meaning that the weight of one’s rucksack – excluding webbing and weapon/s – would be 60kg to 80kg – or in some cases 100kg. (As an educational exercise, just try to walk normally – or lift – a rucksack weighing 80 kg).
>Walking in over 300km to 400km or more – inside enemy territory.

What percent of the human population is actually capable of meeting these requirements?

Carrying more than 50% of your bodyweight for any extended amount of time destroys your body, no matter how fit you are; this has been studied and documented for over a century

The ideal marching load is 60lb and a fighting load of 30lb

>>64123704 (OP)
we wuz spec ops n shiet

>>64123739
Ok, regardless of the long term health effects on your body, how many people could do it?

>>64123752
These gents were pulling of MACV-SOG tier shit over the border.

>>64123761
>These gents were pulling of MACV-SOG tier shit over the border.
not with that load they weren't

and the "people" (using that term advisedly) who wrote that are not those gents and nowhere near the calibre of those gents

>>64123763
I have no idea the current standards of recces in the SANDF and I can only assume they're atrocious and I do agree that a lot of old servicemen do tend to let their mouths run, but can you present any evidence that they did not carry those kinds of loads on long range reconnaissance missions?

>>64123776
can you present any evidence they did?
>inb4 the blacks running SA today wrote in a website that they did
mmhmm
very trustworthy

>>64124084
This section was written about recce deployments in Angola, the ANC actively tries to downplay and demonize the SADF in the border war. Highschool history textbooks write about le ebil Apartheid forces and their stunning defeat at Cuito Cuanavale. So why would they boast about the recces in angola?

Furthermore, if you want more solid evidence about SADF special forces that back this information up, you can read Koos Stadler and Jan Breytenbach's accounts on the war.

>>64124109
>Koos Stadler and Jan Breytenbach
100% sure they didn't carry those amounts that distance

>>64124707
This is from Koos Stadlers book Recce: Small Team Missions behind Enemy Lines. Also intersting that these guys had access to MP5SD's.

>>64123704 (OP)
Lost to literal subhumans award

>>64123704 (OP)
This story is complete and utter bullshit.
>uh yeah i carried 220 lbs on my back for weeks while sneaking through enemy territory totally unseen sure i rucked at least 20 gallons of water and 50k calories with me along with everything else

>>64125297
>autobiographical book written by a veteran
yeah

>>64125297
An Afrikaner? Lying????

>>64125522
They often carried 60 liters of water
>>64125538
>>64125725
The guy did win an honoris crux

>>64123704 (OP)
I knew a guy who was a recce in the border war and he told me they would cache water and supplies. So some of the missions were just walking like 20 km and hiding a cache for future missions. He didn't mention 100kg packs and I kinda doubt it, having hiked in that area myself.
t. saffa

>>64123704 (OP)
Pretty much all of these guys are alive right now OP, you can literally send them personal emails and ask them specific questions. There are also active forums in South Africa about the war, a big one is called Gunsite South Africa. There’s a YouTube channel called Legacy Conversations which has dozens of interviews of guys from the Border War, everything from random infantrymen doing national service, 32 battalion, recces, koevoet, police special task force, Cuban and Soviet Army soldiers who served on the other side in Angola.

Multiple people from those special units described carrying 60-100kg on those deep infiltration missions, most of it being water, food, and a fuckhuge radio. I recall one guy saying they would split the load into two backpacks with one being entirely water and food. They would walk a few km, cache the backpack, walk back and get the water backpack, then repeat.
As for infiltration, they all spoke Portuguese and often had black Angolans in their ranks who would be pointmen or it would be the white guys in literal blackface dressed in enemy uniforms

>>64123704 (OP)
>>Meaning that the weight of one’s rucksack – excluding webbing and weapon/s – would be 60kg to 80kg – or in some cases 100kg. (As an educational exercise, just try to walk normally – or lift – a rucksack weighing 80 kg).
>>Walking in over 300km to 400km or more – inside enemy territory.
No they didn't lmao
PROTIP for the neverserved population of /k/: Most people are full of shit and stories grow in the telling. Soldiers are more prone to bullshit than most and the more mythical the unit or conflict in question, the more prone to bullshit the story will be. Now consider the units in questions were extremely mythologized in publications like Soldier of Fortune, which could be generously described as a creative writing literary journal for Dale Gribble types, and do a little math on the odds of those numbers being anywhere close to reality.
If you're sitting there thinking "It seems impossible for a 140lb stringbean to have humped 220lbs of gear 300 miles"
That's because they didn't do that.

Now, before anybody shits their pants here, I'm not saying those guys didn't hump heavy rucks a long ways. That's the whole deal. But as somebody who has humped some very heavy rucks a very long way, I promise you, nobody was carrying 100kg 400kms.
Hope this helps!

>>64126436
>prior to the invention of the car nobody ever walked more than 5km from where they were born
How did they get 400km behind enemy lines then?
>plane/helicopter
Modern 1980s Soviet Army air defence
>truck
Impassable bush and no roads
>bicycle
on sand?
>animals carried everything
leaves obvious tracks

>>64126635
>>prior to the invention of the car nobody ever walked more than 5km from where they were born
Who are you quoting, retard-kun?

>>64125522
While evading very good and highly trained patrol teams, gunships with air superiority and hostile villagers who instantly rat you out because apparently they can turn invisible carrying twice their body weight.

>>64126635
>How did they get 400km behind enemy lines then?
Carrying substantially less weight.

>>64123739
>a century
I mean even the roman legions knew this
their gear plus provisions was like 60 lbs and their marching pace was 4 mph

>>64126125
right, so what they actually did was carry half the weight they claimed

>>64126754
objection: recursive reasoning
although I agree that romans probably carried 60lbs, however, that figure came out because that's the modern soldier limit. the contents of the roman pack are estimated based on descriptions and Trajan's column, but using this figure as a guideline

>>64126797
>consistently, our guys can't fight for shit if we load them with more than X amount of stuff or march faster than Y pace or farther than Z distance in a day
even a moderately observant commander would notice this

I really hate how exaggerated accounts of war get over time.
>but it felt like 85kg in my mind

>>64127043
Yeah sure
like I said, the arguments that the Romans carried about this much make a lot of sense; and those findings that can be discovered through sheer empiricism would have been relatively easy for ancient civilisations to independently discover

I've lived out of a 70+lb ruck for weeks and it made me want to end my life. I cannot imagine 175lb (80kg) being possible. 70lb is possible for a one day sporting event, but wearing it for a couple of weeks is agony. Your strength saps very quickly.

I call cap

>>64127238
I'm 5'10", ~215lbs at ~15% body fat. By most people's reckonings I'm a fucking specimen.
I have humped 70lbs of gear and sustainment 5000' up a mountain, I've hauled that much 30 miles in a day (exactly one time, never again lol)
It's fucking awful. To try and say these guys who all look like they weighed a buck fifty TOPS were routinely doing 300 mile patrols with 200lbs of shit on their backs in addition to their combat load is fucking ludicrous if you've ever done any activity even remotely related to carrying weight over terrain for long distances.
I have lived out of a 45lb ruck for 2 weeks in the wilderness covering roughly 10-20 miles a day. That's extremely doable but even then the bulk of your weight is food, you aren't eating enough calories for maintenance, and you're filtering your water as needed. Typically I would carry 4L of water between a bladder and a cantine and reup whenever I could.

Most of these guys were not built the way I'm built. They were built like cross-country runners. Which makes a lot of sense.

Realistically they traveled very light, operated by either resupplying off of caches or living off the land/stealing as needed, and moved as fast as possible.
The idea that they just carried enough water to cover 400 kilometers overland is, on its own, ludicrous. And based on that alone I have a feeling OP has no idea how much water a person covering that kind of ground needs to drink in a day or how much weight that alone would take up.

>>64127387
Maybe they have weird biologically? Short torso, long legs, long arms, short neck, wide build & thick joints could do it. Especially if you have some mutations useful for aerobic fitness, recover quickly from exercise, and need less sleep.

The training for these units seems like it's designed to find these types much more than train a normie up. Maybe if you worked from childhood on a farm at high elevation you could adapt.

>>64127387
Also the recons could be about finding water sources as much as caching.

>>64123739
Isn't it 30%?

>>64127762
....anon, which is more likely?
>1) in a couple centuries a population of inbred Dutch freaks developed Sherpa-tier hyper-specific evolutionary adaptations to moving nearly double their bodyweight for days at a time in a way that would end most elite endurance athletes' careers in a couple months
>2) they are exaggerating about how much weight they carried and how far they walked

If your hypothesis here was correct then Afrikaaner athletes would be dominating every intestinal endurance sport on the planet, dude.

>Maybe if you worked from childhood on a farm at high elevation you could adapt.
Well anon, I grew up doing manual labor in a mountain state with significantly higher average elevation than South Africa and I'm telling you: there are not very many people on the planet who can do what's claimed in OP, and of those almost 0 could sustain it for any real amount of time.

>>64127764
I think to do the kinds of missions talked about here on foot, you'd have to have every damn water source on the route mapped on addition to food and water caches for sure. That kind of trek is gonna take months of preparation and recces for the recce if you expect your scouts to come back alive. Hiking hundreds of miles is no joke even if you're in great shape and have your resupplies arranged.

>>64127387
OP here, my rucking experience is extremely limited, the most extreme I did were 3, 1 week treks when I was 14/15 and I only carried about 2L of water per day cause there were plenty of water sources. I did think what was required in the extract I used was extremely unlikely, but i didnt think it was impossible.

>>64126125
I do know 2 guys who were recces, one of them was 4 recce in the late 80s- mid 90s so he mainly did underwater shit. The other guy was in in the late 70s - early 80s and doesnt talk about his service. I will check out the online communities cause I am very interested in what our security forces were doing back in the day.
>>64125538
>>64125725
>>64127822
I did read further into Koos's story and it seems they did use caches so my bad, I fucked up.

>>64128036
>OP here
>I fucked up
cheers

>>64127387
>buck fifty TOPS
I've seen tall and lithe builds like the one in your pic weigh in at 180, just sayin

>I have lived out of a 45lb ruck for 2 weeks in the wilderness covering roughly 10-20 miles a day. That's extremely doable but even then the bulk of your weight is food, you aren't eating enough calories for maintenance, and you're filtering your water as needed. Typically I would carry 4L of water
done this too
even with the most freezedried of modern rations (we didn't have those back then) one is consuming about 5lb of food and water a day minimum
we planned everything around the availability of water sources.

>>64128058
80kgs with caches is still fucking hardcore man.

>>64128082
My cousin was some sort of Navy coastal radar operator (unrelated to any and all countries mentioned in this thread) and they had to ruck 100+ kg each to move the radar about, but only for a kilometre or two after disembarking the boat

>>64125844
>caches
I said it here and you all fucking ignored it. Fok jou.

>>64126785
I’m not arguing for any side, I’ve just watched some YouTube interviews with Recces and heard one guy talk about setting off on a deep infiltration mission carrying 100kg worth of shit. The SAS patrol Bravo Two Zero in Iraq in 1990 carried a similar amount of stores on foot and they described making a chain carrying jerrycans of water a few hundred metres and stopping and swapping.

>>64128372
You can hump crazy amounts, just not for very long without crippling yourself. And with chronically heavy loads the damage accumulates. The muscles can recover but the joints will not. At some point it becomes degenerative and it gets worse over time even after you've stopped doing it.

Trying to prove how tough you are by pushing through the pain is one of the worst habits elite units have. A lot of unnecessary damage.

>>64128372
mate, if you carry 50kg of stuff in leapfrog relays, even totalling up to 100kg per person, that's vastly different from carrying 100kg in one go, you understand that?

it's like saying me unloading the groceries from the car in two trips is the same as me carrying everything in one trip

lol no

>>64123704 (OP)

kino

>>64128723
>>64128763
Holy fuck how are you two seething this hard over some shit a special forces website wrote? I’m not OP. I’m not defending some Recce who may have lied in a book about how heavy his pack was 45 years ago. All I’m saying is think of the logistics involved in moving long distances on foot. You need at least 4 litres per day, and food. The weight adds up very quickly if you’re having to carry water for x amount of days because there’s nowhere to fill up your canteens.

>>64132459
honey, I haven't begun to seethe
>think of the logistics involved in moving long distances on foot. You need at least 4 litres per day, and food
I know. I've done it