‘Ironman’ ammo system game-changer on battlefield

By Bob Reinert
ARNEWS

October 27, 2011

FORWARD OPERATING BASE MEHTAR Lam, Afghanistan — It all began during an intense 2 and 1/2-hour firefight with the enemy earlier this year in Afghanistan.

As members of the 1st Battalion, 133rd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division, Iowa National Guard, sat around later at Forward Operating Base Mehtar Lam and discussed the engagement, they talked about how three-man teams, manning crew-served weapons struggled to stay together over difficult terrain in fluid battles.

Someone mentioned actor Jesse Ventura in the movie “Predator.” His character brandished an M134 mini-gun fed by an ammo box on his back. After the Soldiers had a good laugh over that thought, Staff Sgt. Vincent Winkowski asked why a gunner couldn’t carry a combat load of ammo. He decided to pursue the idea.

So Winkowski grabbed an old ALICE (all-purpose lightweight individual carrying equipment) frame, welded two ammunition cans together — one atop the other after cutting the bottom out of the top can — and strapped the fused cans to the frame. To that he added a MOLLE (modular, lightweight load-carrying equipment) pouch to carry other equipment.

After attaching pictures of the prototype to a request for information, Winkowski gave it to forward-deployed science advisers from the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command.

The request landed on the desk of Dave Roy, a current operations analyst in the quick reaction cell of the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center.

Roy knew that there was no time to waste, because Soldiers on the ground needed a solution as quickly as NSRDEC could get it to them.

Forty-eight days after the request was received, QRC had a prototype of the “high-capacity ammunition carriage system” back in theater.

“We pretty much took their design and just reverse-engineered it and improved upon it,” said Laura Winters, who headed up the fabrication effort. “Considering where we started from and what we got to, I think it worked very well. It was a very good collaborative effort. Everybody knew there was (an) end goal.

“To allow the gunner himself to be able to have this kind of firepower increases his lethality,” Roy said.

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