 Can we just be honest that when you're all plated up, there's a large amount of security and comfort in knowing that you're wearing a bunch of armor and you have all of your tools accessible right where you need them. Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense. Welcome back to the Minuteman Gear series and today we're going to go in a slightly tangential direction here because I've been experimenting recently with getting everything off my webbing and putting it onto my plate carrier for kind of my patrol plate carrier setup. I put that in heavy quotes right but my thought here is there is this niche right where you're going to want to wear armor and you might want to pair it with like your battle belt right and it'd be good to have a setup for a kind of a short-term duration mission you know again eight to twelve hours kind of in that area where you're going to want to wear all of your armor because for whatever reason you want to do that. I think maybe the best example I could think of historically would be like the Black Hawk Down mission right in the Battle of Mogadishu where you're going to go out you're going to go on this raid you're going to get dropped off by helicopter you're going to do some stuff and you're going to come back. Now you could say aha Dylan but there I got you because that mission went to shit and everything went downhill and so you know you should have brought more stuff that your webbing would have been better. Well you're in an urban environment so urban to me probably always means armor and I have enough stuff on here food, water, whatever that I could sustain myself for about eight to twelve hours. So this kind of setup to be able to go do a general purpose raid or attack like that and I'll still be able to sustain myself if things go wrong. So I'm going to put this on the table top let's go through this remember that this plate carrier is designed to be paired with your battle belt right and on here you've seen this before but I just have my pistol gloves dump pouch two pistol bags for the pistol obviously and then two rifle mags right and that's it back slick I mean that's that's all there is on there. So pairing this with that I can get all the benefits of my webbing meaning I have all the sustainment gear however of course we're adding weight right and that's the huge major downside you could probably do I don't know depending on your fitness level whatever six ish miles in this I wouldn't want to start doing double digit miles in this this whole setup probably weighs around 30 ish pounds give or take I mean it's not light like it's once you get it in place it's not so bad but getting it on and off can be kind of arduous just because it's it's heavy and I don't know about you but I always start to get like cramps up here in my traps when I wear armor for a while so anyways let's put it on the table top let's go through it and let's see if this might be an option for some kind of mission set that you would consider. Okay so let's start at the front and work our way around right so up front I just have three rifle mags I remember there are two on the belt right there so you're carrying a total of five plus one in the gun that's kind of my general minimum if you want to carry more bullets of course knock yourself out and here is just a set of handcuffs because I had those on here originally and I haven't taken them out in this big central pocket here you have a compass I have dummy quartered that compass to this little elastic bungee right here so that you know can't drop it lose it whatever but that all just gets kind of stuffed in that main center pouch again if maybe a foot patrol maybe a vehicle patrol whatever but if I'm out on foot I'm going to want my compass for fairly obvious reasons there's nothing in this pocket except extra cordage so I stuffed my radio cord in here and then my dummy cord that I have dummy corded with my radio in here which we'll talk about I have all stuffed in there so there's nothing in there right now except just extra cords to keep them out of the way so those three mags I have my radio here because of course you're going to need that and then I run it up to a push to talk up here a little poor man's shoulder mic I have a little cool paint man key in here haven't tried this out yet at all but you know that's kind of the latest rage right there right to have the paint key so I'm curious to see if that works or not up top I have a notebook because you know you need a notebook to write stuff down I have a right in the rain pen that I have up here and then also up here I have a blue permanent marker blue just because that's the color I happen to have but you need to have a permanent marker in order to mark stuff if you need to do that going around the front here this is my iFAC with a tourniquet I need to find a place to put a second tourniquet on here I need one of those cool little flap sleeves that has a velcro sleeve that they can like put behind the plate or the placard and stuff to be all cool guy that's what I need honestly it solved my problem but this is my iFAC down here I have some electrical tape just kind of dummy corded in because you never know when you might need tape so that's where that goes moving around here here's my night vision in this pouch that's fairly accessible it's kind of right on the side of your body so you can get it it's a little tricky to get in and out but you know you're probably only going to be accessing that once or twice in a 12-hour period right depending on time of day if you're either getting your nods out or putting your nods in you might need a buddy to help you get this in and out um you might have to take your plate carrier off if you don't have a buddy available but you know that's that's mostly accessible and and you can kind of figure it out with a plate carrier still staying on to be able to connect it up to your helmet and stuff this is a GP pouch right now I just have a canteen of water in here that's the only thing that's in here that of course is just to meet my personal two liters of water minimum requirement uh we'll get to where the rest of the water is later but I could take that out and put something else in there if I thought that that's what was needed coming around to the back here so first thing I have a water bladder in here I have a liter and a half of water that sits in the back that just runs up front uh that's a lot easier of course to drink from rather than having to reach back here right this water pouch is not accessible right so my plan is to drink the water out of the pack and then use this to refill as needed again you have to take the plate carrier off to do that but again at least you have water right or you could just straight drink this if you couldn't put in your your uh camelback but hopefully you're running it off your camelback that's just going to make your life a lot easier this is an empty mag pouch nothing in here right now uh again I try to keep empty pouches on my gear for flexibility right so if I needed to put another couple mags in there again you're going to need a buddy to help you with those right you can't access those but at least you got them so that that's this is for flexibility purposes in here this is a smoke grenade again you're going to need a buddy to help you get this out of here right but um that's what that is for I wouldn't probably throw that smoke grenade right I'd probably stay next to my buddy while I'm working and he would pull the smoke grenade out and he would be the one to toss it again this is where fighting in teams and having teams is helpful in the bottom of this little pack here by the way this pack is a spanker elite some cheap chinese knockoff brand on amazon it's actually a really good uh pack so I would probably recommend it to you in that sense but uh that's what the pack is in case you're wondering uh so down here I have a watch cap because you know it gets cold right so it's always good to carry a watch cap a baklava a little neck scarf thing here to keep the wind off you and or whatever uh AAA batteries because those are important in case your batteries go down uh cr123 batteries same thing a small boo boo kit right cut scrapes whatever uh lube and a lighter I don't know why I have a lighter in here but I have a lighter okay and that's it that's in this bottom one again if you're going to access all this stuff right you need a buddy to help you either get it or you're going to take your plate carrier off so I try to put stuff back here that I don't think I'm going to need on any kind of consistent basis right but just something that I'd like to have along in case I need to get it in the main portion of this pack that's attached to the plate carrier right so there's no extra straps or anything I have a semi stripped down MRE I have a rifle cleaning kit mostly to punch out casings and stuff like that in case that cool paint can trick doesn't work but rifle cleaning kit and then just two uh light sticks that I've duct taped together so that's all that's in there just some extra stuff that I thought would be good to have on hand in case right coming back around here this is a old iFAC pouch and all I have in here is my poncho this is just my poncho that I have set up kind of as a shelter kit as well so there's the poncho in here some paracord I need to put some tent stakes in there but that's all that is it's just a poncho that fits almost perfectly in this pouch here so that it carries well it can come out no problem that's what stays in there in general I try to maintain this gap so that drawing my pistol is easier I haven't put anything here I probably could because my pistol line of travel kind of comes more this direction rather than straight up through here but currently that's why there's not a whole lot there flashlight because it's good to have a white light on you and then a cold steel SRK blade that I've attached here so that's it that's my patrol plate carrier setup and again I use that with heavy quotes the one major downside here which you've probably seen already is that it's not scalable earlier in the series we talked about having a gear system and pieces that can interface with other pieces this kind of sits outside of that system because it's not scalable because you have this pack already on here I mean you could physically put another pack over it but that's not really going to be comfortable that's not really going to be an effective way to carry anything you're certainly not going to throw that three-day pack over this or anything like that you know if you had like a small 24-hour pack or something that you just wanted to you had to carry something else you could but this is not a scalable system this is pretty much you get what you get right like you're going to put the armor on whatever you can fit on the plate carrier and and then slap your battle belt on and that's it that's all you get so there's really no scalability to this system which is why I think it kind of sits outside of the system as more of a you know special mission set that you would say hey I want plates I want all the stuff for my webbing I'm planning on being gone you know four hours but I'm gonna plan for 8 to 12 just in case and this is this is what I'm taking with me so if that kind of tickles your fancy and you kind of like that setup these are some thoughts for you but again this is a way to kind of meld the idea of having armor having sustainability being able to meld together the major downsides of this kind of system is weight because like I said this thing is not light I mean it probably weighs 30 ish pounds I don't know it's heavy okay between the water and the plates and the ammo and everything else it's just not light so you gain weight which is a downside and then you lose scalability again because you have this pack attached here to carry some of the sustainment stuff that you're going to want to have on you you just you lose being able to scale this up and down with packs so hope that's helpful hope that gives you some thoughts and I hope you're able to set up your plate carrier more effectively for whatever it is that you want to do do brave deeds and endure