 Sometimes, less really is more. Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and welcome back to our series on American Minuteman gear. And before we get into today's gear, there's a little bit of philosophy and importance that drives why this gear is laid out the way it is. If you don't care about that and you want to just, you know, skip ahead, well, I guess you're missing out, but go ahead. For the rest of you who actually care about what we do and why we do it, here we go. So I've been thinking a lot recently. And I've been thinking that as an American Minuteman, without being part of the military industrial complex, we tend to model our gear after those who are a part of the American military industrial complex, right? Well, soldiers in the Marines or the Army carry seven mags, so, you know, that's kind of a good starting place to go and you should carry seven mags. And I think that we need to ask ourselves things like, why? Why do they have their gear set up the way they do? If we always need to remember that mission drives the gear train, mission drives the gear train. I didn't come up with that, but I think it's brilliant. Meaning that whatever it is you're doing, of course, then necessitates what the tools are that you use. That seems fairly common sense when you say it like that, I hope. So as an American Minuteman, your mission, most likely, is going to be different than someone who is part of a huge, state-sponsored army. So in our fantasy land, if China invades tomorrow or some other random communist force where to somehow control the American government or something like that, I mean it's completely impossible and never going to happen, but you know, if. Well then, your mission probably isn't going to be the kind of mission that a state-sponsored army would go after. So as I've been thinking about this, I thought, you know, a hundred years ago, or maybe a hundred and fifty years ago, when it snowed in the winter and they didn't have plow trucks to plow the roads, what did you do? Well, you had a sleigh, probably, and you hooked your horses up to the sleigh, or you had snowshoes, or you had skis, or whatever. You adapted to the environment. Rather than forcing the environment to adapt to you and impressing your will on the environment, a.k.a. plowed roads, you adapted to the environment, right? So you rode in your sleigh, or you used some snowshoes, or some skis, or whatever, but you adapted to the environment. And if we can take that as kind of a model, right? State-sponsored militaries tend to adapt the environment to them. They're going to come in with power and resources and overwhelming force, and they're just, they're going to do what they want. And their tactics express that, and their gear is a permeation of that, and they come out and they're just going to do whatever it is they want. Gorilla forces, by contrast, don't have those resources. So they're forced to adapt to the environment and adapt their tactics and gear and whatever accordingly, right? So for example, Vietnam is a good example, right? Versus the Viet Cong. They didn't have all these resources. They're not calling in airstrikes or artillery bombardments. It's not happening. They're sneaking around in tunnels and they're popping up here and dropping a satchel charge off and then leaving, right? They're adapting to their environment. They're using low-tech solutions in order to solve defeat, ultimately, a high-tech opponent, right? And they're able to use tactics and thinking to outdo brute force and firepower, right? Took them a long time. A lot of people died. They certainly had more casualties than we did in Vietnam, so we could argue about that. But I'm just letting you know, at the end of the day, we left Vietnam and Vietnam's a communist country. So I think there are some lessons to learn there. So as I've been thinking about that, and I've been thinking about gear setups, I'm thinking, well, do I need to carry seven mags? Now one argument says, well, of course you do, because the people you are facing carry seven mags. So you don't want to have less ammo than they do, do you? And the other part of me says, you should carry less because how debilitating would it be to have an armor and a pack and a helmet and all this ammo and have walked for five, seven miles, and now you're in a firefight? And those other guys in the firefight, man, they're sure are running around fast and they sure have no problem moving and I'm just tired and I'm having a tough time keeping up. If that sounds miserable, you should maybe talk to and ask some Afghanistan veterans if that was their experience. If they were getting outmaneuvered in gunfights often because the infantry they were fighting against was a light infantry, right? Was some Afghan goat herder with his AK and maybe an extra mag. And that's it. That no sustainment gear, no water, no 24-hour pack load out, right? Just a guy with a gun and some bullets and there's a bunch of them and they're able to outmaneuver and move faster than you and get better position on you. And your resource as heavy infantry is to shoot them a lot and then call and attack helicopters, right? Now, you don't have attack helicopters as an American minute, man. You don't have all these other resources. So burdening yourself with lots of extra gear might be to your disadvantage. Getting in a stand-up knockdown drag out fight with someone who's stronger than you usually isn't advisable. And so therefore, rather than trying to match the strength and prowess and equipment of the opponent, maybe it would be smarter to purposely way undershoot them, stay light, stay maneuverable and win the local gunfights. Win the local gunfights because you can move faster. And they are burdened with state-sponsored, state-mandated equipment that they have to carry for such and such a reason to do such and such a thing. You don't have those restrictions. And so maybe when fighting the Chinese invasion, that you should stay really light so that you can hit and move, shoot and scoot, and you're able to flank faster, and you're able to engage and disengage easier. Now, are there inherent risks to that? Yeah, of course, sure, obviously. But that whole philosophy is what this gear loadout here is born out of. So I tried to strip everything down as light as I think I reasonably could to get something done within, I don't know, four to six hours. It's kind of a four to six hour, and then you're going to have to resupply because you'll need water, you'll need food, whatever. But I tried to strip everything down as light as I possibly could, and then I went out and I ran it, and I went out patrolling. And here's a picture of the morning that I was getting everything ready. So as you can see here, I got all my layers out. I got all my layers laid out, and we're not going to talk through that. But we're going to go through, we're going to talk about the rest of the stuff here. And we're going to talk about just a super stripped down, super light loadout. In the super stripped down loadout, I call it the ultra light loadout, right? Being as stripped down as you possibly can be. And the point there is that you preserve energy as you're moving over long distances, and then you have lots of energy for the fight when, if that should come. And that is the purpose of this loadout. This loadout is not to go out and look for trouble. This loadout is not to go out and pick a fight. This loadout is just when you're out doing your thing to be able to stay as light as humanly possible, so that you have plenty of gas in the tank to either disengage or flank or maneuver. So I hope that's helpful. I hope that gives us some background. I hope that gives you something to think about. And now let's go to the gear part. Okay, so with that philosophy in mind, here we go, right? So you need a rifle, okay? Whatever your rifle's fancy setup is. In this case, for medical, I still wanted to maintain two tourniquets, right? So I have one on the gun, and then I have one with an IFAC. This right here just went in my cargo pocket, and that stayed there, so that's where my medical was, okay? Again, you still want an IFAC. Again, we're trying to stay as light as possible, but if someone gets hit, you still want to be able to take care of that. So you got to carry an IFAC, right? For water, all I did was I took this camelback pack, which holds a camelback, and it was cold out that day. It was like five or six degrees. That's why I had all those layers. So all I did was take a canteen of water and throw it in this little pack, and that worked out just fine, and that was it. That was what rode on my back, okay? For PPE stuff, I mean, obviously I had ears, and then I had knee pads. I had gloves because, again, it was winter, and then I had my eyes on, as always. For carrying my gear and stuff, I really based a lot of it around this Arctis smock. Some of my friends got me this for my birthday. This is the Arctis smock. This is just their standard one. It's not like winter or waterproof or anything like that. It's just their standard smock. I highly recommend this sucker. I should do a video just on this, but I love this jacket. Warned it a ton. It's not labeled windproof, but it's pretty much windproof, and it is fantastic. I wore this with a couple of insulating layers. Great jacket. I'll do another video on that. Also, my loadout, I had a compass, and I had a map, which I forgot to grab, but I have my map, obviously, so that you can navigate. Always have your notebook and pen, right? That's what that is. It's right in the rain notepad with a pen. And then I only had a total of three mags. One of these was in my jacket pocket right here, and the other one was just in my front left pocket, and then I had one in the gun, right? So I only had 90 rounds. And if you're like, oh, that's not enough ammo, you're not gonna, well, you know, again, we're trying to stay as light as possible. And let me tell you, after being out in five degrees and struggling through some hip-high snow at points and running around and doing some live-fire drills, I still had plenty of gas in the tank. There was no chest rig, right? There's no, I mean, I guess you could count this as a pack, right? There's no pack. There's no, you know, I did happen to have my pistol on me, but that was just an accident. I kind of forgot that I had it. But there's no other stuff. This is it, super stripped down, again, to stay light, stay maneuverable. And I found this to be extremely successful. Now, am I gonna stay here? I don't know, probably not, right? You don't have much sustainment gear here, right? However, I thought this was extremely helpful as an experiment to think about when I scale back up, what's that gonna look like, right? So I would highly recommend you try a loadout like this. Go on a patrol, try a super light loadout. It doesn't have to be exactly this, but strip it down more than you're comfortable with. Strip it down about twice as much as you're comfortable with. So you feel uncomfortable, you feel naked. Strip it down past that. Go out patrolling it for a couple hours and then say, okay, what can I really live without? What don't I really need? Is this, was this enjoyable? Did I have more gas in the tank now? Do I have more energy now? And try it. Treat it like an experiment to see what do you really need? And do you think it gives you a tactical and maneuver advantage to be stripped down that much because you know you can't match someone in a fight? I hope that's helpful. I hope that gives you something to think about. I hope it helps you toy around with it more. Do brave deeds and endure.