The BLS is a joint project between MATBOCK and MAS Special Ops Training. Its a patent pending Bench, Ladder, Stretcher designed for Wing and Zodiac inflatable boats. The BLS is sold as a pair (bottom and upper sections) and designed to deploy as a unit. For the inflatables, it sits across the side tubes and can be secured to the floor with either ratchet straps or line (not included in the kit) giving space for 4 operators to sit forward facing during transit. When reaching the landing site or ship to be boarded, the sections can be attached together to create a 12 foot ladder with integrated shepherds hooks and offset ladder rungs. Additionally, the ladder rungs are coated on the top surface with nonslip to help prevent falls due to wet surfaces. If there is a casualty, a single section can be used as a stretcher to evacuate the individual as well. Four handles protrude from the sides to aid in transport as well as for positioning the ladder.
Each section is 69″ tall, 17.5″ wide, weighs 20.5lbs and made of aluminum with welded connections throughout the system.
Additionally, the BLS comes with grip feet on the lower section to help prevent the bottom from kicking out while being used as a ladder.
Finally, add-on floatation for each section will be available in the coming weeks.
The unit can be purchased from either MATBOCK or MAS Special Ops Training in the links below.
As long as US service members have worn Salomon shoes, there have been complaints that they can’t wear them in garrison. Almost two years ago, Salomon began working on a new high leg boot that would answer these concerns. The new Guardian was designed from the ground up to be in compliance with the US Army’s regulation concerning the wear and appearance of uniforms, AR 670-1.
Offered in US sizes 5-15, the Guardian is 8″ tall and made from Coyote Brown rough out leather. It’s a lightweight shoe, at just 25 oz for a US 9. It features the Salomon Contagrip outsole features larger lugs designed to provide more penetrating grip as well as more contact with the ground to prevent slippage. The base of the boot is constructed with an EVA Molded Midsole and a protective cup-sole. A strong break in the heel of the sole should also help with climbing.
While the styling is definitely Salomon, it’s not so much that it would be considered faddish. For instance, they’ve utilized traditional eyelets and barrel lacing and toned down the side markings.
Additionally, the Guardian is TAA compliant. That means, although it wasn’t made in the US, it was manufactured in a Trade Act compliant country. This opens new options for procurement. What’s more, Salomon tells me this is the first boot in what will be a series of AR 670-1 compliant boots.
Summary
The selectee for this position will serve as a DIRECTOR OF REQUIREMENTS ASSESSMENTS AND COMBAT DEVELOPMENT in the REQUIREMENTS ASSESSMENTS AND COMBAT DEVELOPMENT (N8 DEPARTMENT HEAD) of COMNAVSPECWARGRU THREE. You will serve as the primary advisor to the Commander, NSWG-3, for the current year program execution as the primary operator/user of numerous undersea mobility platforms.
Responsibilities
The successful selectee will perform the following duties:
Create strategic plans to meet long term goals.
Develop long range plans related to the use of manpower and equipment to verify resources are available for future work.
Engage with counterparts in support of mission priorities, requirements, and resources.
Develop program objective memorandum (POM) issues to capture program needs for funds (e.g., procurement, operations and maintenance, research development testing and evaluation (RDT & E), manpower resources).
Oversee the development of a requirements generation and capabilities process.
This job is open to
Permanent Competitive Service Internal Employees (within the DoD), Former Federal Employees, VEOA, ICTAP eligibles
In this installment of the Team MultiCam video series we meet Army SOF Veteran Luie Zendejas. Zendejas joined the military at the age of 17, knowing that he wanted to serve his country, be challenged and excel at everything the military threw at him. With assignments in the 75th Ranger Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) and an Army special missions unit, Zendejas made the most out of his military career.
In his spare time, Zendejas performs as a highly skilled professional motorcycle racer, competing in the WERA Motorcycle Roadracing series and applying the same tireless ambition to raise money for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. “Giving back to my military family is imperative,” stated Zendejas. “The goals of the SOWF are to provide for veterans and their families. I know first hand how important the Special Operations Forces are for our military, and I want nothing more than to help in any way possible.”
Please help Luie raise as much money as possible for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation by donating HERE.
This blog post was originally featured on Max Velocity Tactical, and is published here with permission from the author.
“Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.” – Heraclitus
“Warrior Mindset is more than aggressiveness and determination, it is about over coming challenge and adversity. It’s about possessing, understanding, and being able to utilize a set of psychological and physical skills that allow someone to be effective, adaptive, and persistent. It also allows someone to use optimal decision-making, psychological techniques, physical and tactical skills learned in training and by experience.”
“The goal of a Warrior Mindset is to integrate the psychological with physical and tactical training to add a dimension that is often overlooked, but necessary to achieve maximal performance of a skill. If you only talk about mental toughness, but don’t actively train it, you haven’t developed into a complete warrior….regardless of what physical skills you have developed. You’ll find, with proper training, that you can possess the power to overcome any obstacle and change your outcomes if you train yourself mentally. This is the point in which you will truly bring out the Warrior Mindset within yourself.”
This post is about having the right warrior mindset, and how to action that in your life. It is also about all that is wrong out there in gun and ‘tactical’ training culture. These two things are opposites: on the one side you have those conducting training that will develop the warrior mindset, and on the other you have a world full of gun ‘derp.’
Firstly, to focus on the positive. If you consider yourself a self-reliant and capable individual, then you need to action the warrior mindset. By your thoughts, actions, training and capabilities, you are working to become an embodiment of the warrior mindset. This is not something that you need to be concerned about only if you are in a martial profession, because in the great American tradition of individual self-reliance, we should all be capable self-reliant individuals. Thus, you are a protector of yourself, your family and your children. However, what is mostly missed is the fact that the utility of developing the warrior mindset and associated tactical skills, is not simply tactical capability. No, development of an effective warrior mindset is a positive character building process and will filter across and benefit all areas of your professional and personal life.
If we dedicate ourselves to the pursuit of tactical training in order to develop a warrior mindset, then we are directly concerned with developing:
Physical Fitness and Strength.
Hand to Hand Self-Defense Skills.
Skill at Arms.
Tactical Skills & Knowledge.
Physical & Moral Courage.
What is often missed, but is essential to a true warrior mindset, is talked about in the quotes at the top of the page:
Problem Solving & Decision Making Ability.
Performance Under Stress.
Psychological Resilience.
‘Will to Win.’
Teamwork.
Leadership Qualities.
Situational Awareness.
Communication Skills.
These are the character building qualities that are essential to a warrior mindset and which will bleed across into your personal and professional life.
I am not writing this post to make you feel good. This is part of the problem – those who think they can develop these qualities by reading about them or watching videos. You are deluding yourself, You need to be actually pursuing these skills, training and qualities in order to invest in yourself. Those of us who developed these qualities by joining the military and serving had to do so by hard work. There are other professions that will also develop these qualities, perhaps in a less directly tactical method. If you have not had the benefit of training offered as part of a relevant profession, then you can still partake in it, but all I can offer you is hard work. Those of us in relevant professions may have been pushed to develop these qualities, but we will not maintain the mindset without continued hard work. No one can rest on their laurels. All I can offer you is training, hard work, and continual striving to do better by yourself and your family. Anything less than a commitment to that, and you are wasting your time.
This is where we get to the less than savory side. Most people are weak, want instant gratification, and are not prepared to do the work. They are sheep, and not worth the time. The internet is a horrible place full of idiots with unfounded opinions. We have a problem in the USA, and that problem is the fact that everyone has, or can have, a firearm and a stupid opinion, with no real experience or training to back it up. The result is a lot of people who are ‘gun owners’ but are less than a waste of time in terms of warrior mindset. Yes, that is fine, it is everyone’s right to be as much of a waste of oxygen as they want to be, it is not my job to fix that, and I will not attempt to. My job is to train those who are willing to do the work to invest in themselves.
So looking around out there we have a bunch of guys who constantly ‘build’ rifles which is a hobby much like adult lego, and has nothing to do with tactical training. We have collectors, which is also a non-tactical gun hobby. We have plinkers. We have all sorts of gun owning types, that have nothing to do with the warrior mindset. Many have fantasies of tactical ability, simply because they own a firearm. Most are obese, incompetent and weak minded.
The next issue is one of ‘tactical training’ and the current trends in American ‘tactical’ instruction. There are many instructors out there with real training and operational experience who should know better. But much of the current trend in rapid firearms manipulation and gaming, if left at that, will get you killed in a real tactical scenario. Does it have training worth? Yes. Does competition have training worth? Yes, in context. But if you wish to progress to a full warrior mindset you must see firearms manipulation and ‘gaming’ as simply a progression to more complex tactical range training. In essence, most of these students are stuck in a training zone that is going to be detrimental to them, and also does not allow them to develop the skills and qualities mentioned as part of the warrior mindset.
But there is often an unwillingness to progress to true tactical training, due to misunderstanding / ignorance, and also a lack of willingness, skill or facility on the part of schools to teach it. There are many ‘prepper’ types out there who are not averse to tactical training, but that is full of its own issues. Why? The majority of ‘prepper’ types are motivated by fear and are looking for band-aids to make them feel less anxious about their worries. Fear is not a good basis to develop the warrior mindset. For example, at MVT we have a cadre of returning alumni who train not only to be prepared, but also because it is part of their character, they have a warrior mindset, and they are truly investing in themselves. These students, if you like, come from the ten that Heraclitus refers to, the nine fighters and one warrior. The rest are sheep. ‘Preppers’ have many motivations, and if it is fear rather than genuine self-reliance then it is a problem. These types of students are fair-weather (or foul weather, really) and will often attend tactical training much in the way they will purchase an item of gear and put it on the shelf. They think they are ticking a box. They will not invest in more than one or two training events, and they are not doing the ancillary personal and physical investment to become capable as a warrior (which is why we now have fitness prerequisites for tactical classes – many were deluding themselves). When it seems fair weather, these types will let it go; they live in the hope that it will ‘be alright on the day.’ They are deluded. You can see this phenomenon recently with the political-fear motivated types, after Trump was elected and their fears of Obama/Hillary went away – they have relaxed and let it all go. This is cyclical depending on how doomsday the news is. That is not the warrior mindset.
One of the huge problems, and why many instructors and flat range gamer types will not progress to real tactical training, is the ‘militia’ elephant in the room. These are the politically or ideologically motivated types who have given camouflage clothing and tactical training a really bad name. As has been told to some MVT students by other prospective students “why would I want militia training” – thus entirely missing the point of training to develop the warrior mindset. True development of the warrior mindset should not actually be politically motivated, other than having ideological roots in true American values of the self-reliant individual and individual liberty (which yes, I know are under attack). But you should not be attending tactical training because the guv’mint is coming to get you in black helicopters (they probably are, I can hear them approaching my house now LOL). In fact, despite pretensions to being a ‘militia’, many such self-described groups are in reality politically motivated groups who are in terrible physical shape and have either none or very little actual tactical training or competence. They are far from approaching the warrior mindset.
Thus, due to the prevalence of firearms, we have a lot of people who are involved in one way or another in the shooting sports. Sadly, the ability to shoot a firearm gives some the delusion that this will impart tactical competence. Speed shooting gamers for one. Another sub-set is precision long gun. This is an admirable skill and a great sport. But do not delude yourself that the ability to hit targets at long range imbues you with any martial qualities. They may well have those qualities from some other area of their life, or training, but long range shooting in itself does not make you a sniper. This is a common misapprehension. Granted, I know that if I went downrange and stood in front of any of the speed shooting gamers or the long range precision types, they could shoot me with a higher hit probability than a totally untrained person. I don’t plan to be stood downrange if I was ever in a gunfight with any of these people – and this is where the checkers versus chess approach of ‘YDKWYDK’ (You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know) applies. Granted, anyone could shoot anyone if they went and stood downrange, but that is missing the point of training progression to develop the qualities of the warrior mindset.
It is due to misunderstandings of the nature of the warrior mindset, its development, the true tactical training progression, along with issues such as the ever present ‘militia,’ that we developed the concept of ‘TacGun’ here at MVT. The TacGun concept has been to a large extent a hard sell, due to problems with getting people to understand the benefits of it in personal investment and the development of the positive qualities of the warrior mindset. Character building, with benefits in your day to day life now, not just in some potential disaster situation. TacGun is designed to help you persuade other potential team mates and training buddies of why you do this training, and divest it from any militia or black helicopter connotations. The hard sell is often related to the reason why students are here in the MVT Universe – what are their motivations and why are they here? Those here due to a pursuit of personal improvement and development of the warrior mindset get it. Those who are simply comfortable with tactical training don’t see the need for it, because they are already there – even though it would help them to bring in others. Some are here just to get the training they want and disappear.
The primary misunderstanding among those that ‘shoot’ is not realizing the ability to ‘shoot’ is necessary but not sufficient to develop the warrior mindset and real tactical ability. Shooting in itself is not hard to teach or learn; you can spend a lifetime getting better, but it does not take long to teach it well enough to be tactically competent. In very simple terms, what is really needed is to be able to shoot, move and communicate in a tactical environment. Those are very simple words to write, and are glibly thrown around on the internet, but they describe in essence the complexity of tactical training. When we put you in a live fire environment and have you shoot, move and communicate, it is not easy to do at first. When we put you in a force on force environment with UTM rounds zipping past, it is also not easy to do. That is why this training develops those qualities referred to above. To those internet readers, commentators, and perhaps those who were in some branch of the military some time a long time ago, these are glib words to refer to. People can read the Ranger Handbook (for example) and think they can execute it. This is all so much crap. To be able to even execute these skills effectively at a very basic level, with others, requires training and practice. The more, the better. It is a process. To think you ‘know’ how to do this by reading and theoretical study is the height of hubris. And if you are just reading and sitting in front of your computer screen, how are you developing those other essential, practical, skills that make up the entirety of the warrior mindset?
You may have noticed that comments are off for blog posts. That is because I have no wish to discus this with the entirety of the internet. This is why we have the MVT Forum, which has a deliberate $25 per year membership fee, which joyously keeps it sane, rational and free of trolls. If you wish to ask questions and partake of genuine professional tactical knowledge and discussion, I suggest you join.
Below are a couple of example videos of the type of training that is included in TacGun, from weapons manipulation all the way up to full Small Unit Tactics:
Max Velocity Tactical operates the Velocity Training Center (VTC) tactical and leadership training facility near to Romney, West Virginia, where we provide training for US Special Operations Forces and Responsible Citizens. We have established a reputation on the leading edge of tactical live fire and force on force training. At MVT we are dedicated to developing and training tactical excellence at the individual and team level.
I don’t do this a lot, but I’ve known Duane Liptak professionally for several years and when I found out he was running for the National Rifle Association Board Of Directors, I knew that he was the kind of representative we need as gun owners.
He’s a man who takes the Constitution seriously, and is committed to civil rights. A Marine Veteran, Duane currently serves as the Executive Vice President Of Magpul Industries.
He was instrumental in Magpul’s efforts to oppose Colorado’s magazine ban and their subsequent move from Colorado in response to anti-gun legislation.
In our discussions regarding gun rights, I have yet to disagree with him. Furthermore, he defends his positions with well reasoned arguments.
Duane Liptak is precisely the caliber of man I want representing my interests on the NRA BoD.
Zulu Nylon Gear is almost an insider tip, as we’re familiar with a lot of stuff from them – Zulu sews on behalf for ITS Tactical. Today we’re presenting the RSCR Chest Rig – this is the link to our review. We talked to Joel Zaruba about what he does otherwise.
SPARTANAT: Zulu Nylon Gear is a small gear manufacturer from USA. What are you specialized in?
Zulu Nylon Gear: We primarily specialize in private label manufacturing and design work for other companies. We also have our own product line.
SPARTANAT: For how long have you manufactured gear?
Zulu Nylon Gear: We’ve been manufacturing tactical gear since 2007.
SPARTANAT: The first of your products we were familiar with is your Visor panels. What else is typical for you?
Zulu Nylon Gear: The MOLLE Visor Panel is a very popular item from our line. The Mega Admin Pouch is also very popular.The new RSCR Chest Rig is our latest product and I hope people like it! It has gone through several years of evolution before I felt it was ready. My goal was to build a minimalist rig that carries only the essentials in a slim, comfortable format but still works well in a “tactical” environment beyond just the flat range.
SPARTANAT: Maybe more people know your work under the name ITS Tactical. You produce their tactical nylon? How did this come?
Zulu Nylon Gear: We’ve done worked on the design and manufacturing for many of the ITS Tactical nylon products – look here at ITS Shop . I knew Bryan from ITS from the very beginning of the blog and the work on nylon products naturally came from that.
Zulu Nylon Gear has been providing high quality custom tactical nylon to military, law enforcement, and civilian customers from all around the globe since 2007. By relying on common sense practicality and critical user feedback, Zulu Nylon Gear will help you complete your mission with unique, specially tailored equipment. All Zulu Nylon Gear products are proudly sewn in the USA. You can find their tacticool Patch here.
The Composites and Defence Systems business of Morgan Advanced Materials will be showcasing its latest ultra-lightweight composite CAMAC® platform armour technology at the upcoming International Armoured Vehicles conference, taking place at Twickenham Stadium in London from the 23rd-24th January.
Delegates at the conference will be able to learn more about Morgan’s range of vehicle survivability solutions, including applique armour and spall liner. Morgan’s applique armour, available for STANAG 4569 Levels 2-5 has been designed to deliver outstanding multi-hit protection against theatre threats at a considerable weight reduction in comparison to steel alternatives. Furthermore Morgan has specific expertise to form spall liner to meet specific platform requirements including shaping to complex geometries and integrating with existing fixtures.
As well as platform armour, Morgan will also be exhibiting its LASA® portfolio of solider protection, including advanced hybrid composite ballistic helmets, ultra-lightweight ballistic shields and a range of modular hard body armour plates for covert operations, NIJ 0101.06 level III and armour piecing special threats.
James Kempston, Business Development Director of Morgan’s Composites and Defence Systems business, commented “following a successful show in 2017, we are excited to be supporting the prestigious International Armoured Vehicles conference in 2018. This year we will be showcasing our range of high-performance and lightweight armoured vehicle survivability solutions which have been fielded on over 2,000 vehicles globally and most recently have been selected and fielded by SAIC for their ACV1.1 bid to the United States Marine Corps as well as FFG for their Wiesel 1 upgrade for the German Bundeswehr.”
The Morgan stand at International Armoured Vehicles will be located at C11 in the Rose Room and further information about Morgan’s range of CAMAC platform armour is available here.
