Hello, everybody,
I like reading military books about survival experience of military people. I recently purchased book of Ken Connor "Ghosts: An Illustrated Story of the SAS" and read there quite interesting comments about survival kits (page 14): "The notional SAS escape kit. In practice soldiers in the Regiment only carried the escape compass. Living off the land is a full time occupation and escaping from the enemy means you must travel fast and far, not spend time searching for food." I also read some books of some ex-SAS guys who also wrote that they found not practical to use survival kits because they can be used efficiently only if you stay in one place for a long time. During my military training (I am from the former USSR) we were trained such things as finding north and south using stars, trees, churches and similar, but never been trained using survival kits. I remember asking one special forces guy why we are not taught how to survive if we, for example, get lost, and he said:" If you get lost you will bin most of your staff and run! This is the best survival technique". And I remember that when we had to run long distances even extra magazine seemed to be too heavy. Don’t you think that having too much of survival equipment may slow you down or give false feeling of security?
Regards,