Well, we used to carry way too much weight. It's hard to be certain from the footage I've seen, but I can generalize my observations thus far: Mounted troops seem to carry a modest amount of gear when dismounted and light fighters seem to be toting their houses on their backs. That was my experience, so it looks like nothing has changed... I can explain it, but it was a bad idea to be overloaded then and I reckon its a bad idea now.

I was a light fighter and later a motorized (not mechanized) fighter. Keep in mind that a lot of the weight carried individually is directly related to ones duties (and sometimes indirectly - like spare ammo for certain crew-served weapons). Strip that away and most regular guys used to carry less gear than a weekend backpacker (but more weight - mil-spec stuff for the foot soldier is not light duty stuff). There are serious trade-offs in all of this, and I'm not being critical.

I suspect (but don't know) that looking at non-mission gear carried by Army Special Forces soldiers operating for short periods away from support vehicles (2 - 5 days) would be more useful to examine.

For the past several months I've been tinkering with using much more of my (retired) military gear and one of the things that strikes me right off the bat is how my weight jumped up - it adds up quickly. But - it also strikes me how much more robust and reliable much of that gear is (go figure). I'm coming to some conclusions for my applications, but these sorts of things are certainly personalized. To generalize: military gear for serious bugout stuff is really worth looking at. Most of it is too dang heavy for recreational gear unless that's all you can get your hands on / can afford. YMMV.