A piece of sci-fi military gear worn by Jesse Ventura in the 1987 action hit “Predator” has inspired an ammunition pack that real-life Army machine gunners are finding essential in Afghanistan.
Returning from a recent firefight in the country’s mountainous southeast, members of the Iowa Army National Guard remarked upon how tough it was for infantrymen armed with a belt-fed machine gun to stay supplied with ammunition during running battles on steep terrain, Army’s Soldiers magazine reported.
One of the soldiers jokingly suggested a Jesse Ventura-style rig as a solution. In the movie “Predator,” Ventura’s character carried a massive, multi-barreled gun fed by ammunition belts that snaked from a box hauled on the action star’s beefy back.
Some laughed at the idea, but Staff Sgt. Vincent Winkowski wondered whether a “Predator”-style ammunition pack might not be just the fix needed for men carrying the battalion’s newly issued Mk 48 7.62 mm machine gun.
“The ammunition sacks that came with it made it too cumbersome and heavy to carry over long, dismounted patrols and especially when climbing mountains,” Winkowski told Soldiers. “Initially we came up with using 50-round belts and just reloading constantly, which led to lulls of fire and inefficiency.”
Letting his Mk 48 gunners periodically go silent during firefights with the Taliban wasn’t just inefficient, it was dangerous. So the members of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division, Iowa National Guard — or “Taskforce Ironman” — got their MacGyver on.
Winkowski welded together two metal ammunition canisters and attached them to a modified Army-issue ALICE pack frame. To make the ammo belts unspool from the pack smoothly, he borrowed a flexible feed-chute assembly from a vehicle-mounted machine gun, affixed it to the top of the pack and – voilà! Winkowski’s gunners had a Hollywood-worthy bullet-hauler.
Winkowski told the magazine: “On Feb. 26, 2011, our prototype ‘Ironman’ pack even saw its first combat use when our squad was ambushed by up to 50 fighters in a river valley, and it worked great!”
The design also attracted the interest of the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center – a research and development facility the Army runs in Massachusetts. After an operations analyst at the center named Dave Roy received pictures of Winkowski’s prototype, he got to work on one of his own.
The latest version uses an updated MOLLE medium pack frame and polycarbonate ammo boxes instead of metal. Even loaded with 500 rounds, the pack can still accommodate 17 pounds of extra gear without overloading the frame, Roy said. The head of the fabrication effort, Laura Winters, told the magazine, ”We pretty much took their design and just reverse-engineered it and improved upon it.”
Roy told the magazine he hopes the Army can have the device in its acquisition pipeline by early next year.
But, when it came time to name the new ammo pack, Roy went real-world rather than Hollywood. He calls it the “Ironman.”
Returning from a recent firefight in the country’s mountainous southeast, members of the Iowa Army National Guard remarked upon how tough it was for infantrymen armed with a belt-fed machine gun to stay supplied with ammunition during running battles on steep terrain, Army’s Soldiers magazine reported.
One of the soldiers jokingly suggested a Jesse Ventura-style rig as a solution. In the movie “Predator,” Ventura’s character carried a massive, multi-barreled gun fed by ammunition belts that snaked from a box hauled on the action star’s beefy back.
Some laughed at the idea, but Staff Sgt. Vincent Winkowski wondered whether a “Predator”-style ammunition pack might not be just the fix needed for men carrying the battalion’s newly issued Mk 48 7.62 mm machine gun.
“The ammunition sacks that came with it made it too cumbersome and heavy to carry over long, dismounted patrols and especially when climbing mountains,” Winkowski told Soldiers. “Initially we came up with using 50-round belts and just reloading constantly, which led to lulls of fire and inefficiency.”
Letting his Mk 48 gunners periodically go silent during firefights with the Taliban wasn’t just inefficient, it was dangerous. So the members of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division, Iowa National Guard — or “Taskforce Ironman” — got their MacGyver on.
Winkowski welded together two metal ammunition canisters and attached them to a modified Army-issue ALICE pack frame. To make the ammo belts unspool from the pack smoothly, he borrowed a flexible feed-chute assembly from a vehicle-mounted machine gun, affixed it to the top of the pack and – voilà! Winkowski’s gunners had a Hollywood-worthy bullet-hauler.
Winkowski told the magazine: “On Feb. 26, 2011, our prototype ‘Ironman’ pack even saw its first combat use when our squad was ambushed by up to 50 fighters in a river valley, and it worked great!”
The design also attracted the interest of the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center – a research and development facility the Army runs in Massachusetts. After an operations analyst at the center named Dave Roy received pictures of Winkowski’s prototype, he got to work on one of his own.
The latest version uses an updated MOLLE medium pack frame and polycarbonate ammo boxes instead of metal. Even loaded with 500 rounds, the pack can still accommodate 17 pounds of extra gear without overloading the frame, Roy said. The head of the fabrication effort, Laura Winters, told the magazine, ”We pretty much took their design and just reverse-engineered it and improved upon it.”
Roy told the magazine he hopes the Army can have the device in its acquisition pipeline by early next year.
But, when it came time to name the new ammo pack, Roy went real-world rather than Hollywood. He calls it the “Ironman.”
