Frag Out! Magazine
Issue link: https://fragout.uberflip.com/i/929822
army considered webbing a state-of- the-art technology). Still, it offers two unquestionable advantages – it is cheap and easy to make, which proved of great importance when a total war was around the corner, with several hundred thousand conscripts to be mobilized. Today, however, it is of no merit, especially in the case of a regular army and foreign missions. There were attempts to improve the situation in mid-1990s, which involved extending the available equipment by the said wz. 998 vests. It certainly was a step towards improving the wearing comfort – after all, it was a tactical vest, which distributed the load in a much different way than belt kit. The vest was also way more stable and convenient. But this model turned out to be also outdated when it was first offered to the army. It was based on the American ITLBV from IIFS (Integrated Individual Fighting System), which was included in the equipment in use in 1988, and in the second half of 1990s it was gradu- ally replaced with MOLE, whose subse- quent variants have been used till this day (in the meantime, LBV got modified and served as the basis for the devel- opment of CMVS – Combat Medic Vest System). Imitation is a difficult job, it seems. When the American solution was copied, a range of grave mistakes were made: the equipment was made of poor-quality fabrics, the pockets were badly designed and arranged, the suspend- ers were flawed (it tended to loosen spontaneously and fall of shoulders – a makeshift way to deal with the is- sue was to change the arrangement of straps on the back), everything "spiced up" with black trims and straps, which worked effectively against the intended function of the camouflage pattern. What's more, only ONE piece of the analysis