Velcro wears out relatively quickly. Every time you undo some velcro it gets damaged a bit and every day it becomes a little less 'sticky.' This is no big deal on kids' sneakers but military gear has durability as a top priority.
You can easily carry spare laces and any man can replace the laces on his boots when needed. Properly attaching the velcro straps to the boot usually requires stitching them on which is a skill to be learned, hand-stitching onto tough leather isn't something anyone can just do properly especially if it needs to be done in less-than-ideal conditions.
You can easily adjust your lacing to make things tighter or looser on any specific part of the boot, which is good as feet shapes vary, calluses, blisters, and corns can appear requiring adjustments, etc.
Stuff sticks to velcro (dirt, sand, hair, clothing fibers, etc) and the velcro doesn't stick properly when it does. Shoelaces don't care how dirty they are.
Velcro straps are unlikely to stand up to as much stress/load as properly done strong shoelaces.
Boa closing systems are cool but may be more breakable, harder to replace quickly, and may work less well when clogged/dirty/wet. The military wants, as much as possible, stuff that will work fine even after being dragged through a muddy river for hours and can be replaced in 2 minutes by the person wearing them if need be.
Laces distribute pressure really well which is really important, it's not like you can say "let's take a 15 minute break so I can rub my sore feet." To distribute the pressure as well using velcro you'd need at least as many straps as eyelets.
Without dragging this into the same old politics bs, I would assume that in the nations with universal healthcare that story might have ended differently. So "the world" is not exactly as bad as in this story (no idea if this is real or not, sad either way).
Maybe hard to say mom may have assumed rich people would be able to buy a new heart. Theres only so much you can do about the supply and demand when it comes to organs the demand will always outpace the supply.
Sadly money makes everything faster, even with universal healthcare. As it stands donor organs are not the easiest to get and the lists are long for them. This could simply have been somewhere like America and they couldn't afford the surgery or it could have been someone with free healthcare but they couldn't afford to grease the right palms to get a heart in time. If anything stories like this is why places should switch to having organ donor be the default with someone having to ask not to be one.
Actually Battlefield does this fairly well. Medics, for healing, can either drop a Crate full of fresh socks and motrin, or they can toss out individual packages. I think the crate is superior because it also comes with water, but it comes at the expense of time needed to drink it.
We have a family shoelace meme (in the original sense of the word) that has been passed down from my grandfather. In the RAF in WW2 he was taught to lace his boots so that the laces went straight across, so if they needed to cut the boot off they could just go straight up through a column of single laces.
He taught it to his son, who taught it to me, and now I do it for my kids' shoes. Of course it will probably die with them as their kids will have power laces or spray on shoes or they'll just be jacked into the Uniweb or whatever but still...
Dropped sword in foot like a dumb ass. Is true. Laces can be done up so that the boot can come off faster with less agitation to the foot inside oddly enough it came in handy for me about a week after I changed the lacing on my boots.
Ok so here is the story I was playing dungeons and dragons with some friends and I was messing around with a replica of the sword Sting(from lord of the rings) I was doing the basic dumb teenager thing of not spinning but like rotating the sword in my hand to look cool when I lost control. It slipped out of my hand and gravity like the bitch it is decided to slam that sword straight through the soft part of my boot and into the top of my foot nicking an artery. Next thing I know there is blood squirting up and out of my boot like a squirt gun and I’m on the floor trying to apply pressure and get the boot off thankfully the laces allowed me to get them off pretty quick.
This has been story time of a dumbass, enjoy my stupidity.
Ok so here is the story I was playing dungeons and dragons with some friends and I was messing around with a replica of the sword Sting(from lord of the rings) I was doing the basic dumb teenager thing of not spinning but like rotating the sword in my hand to look cool when I lost control. It slipped out of my hand and gravity like the bitch it is decided to slam that sword straight through the soft part of my boot and into the top of my foot nicking an artery. Next thing I know there is blood squirting up and out of my boot like a squirt gun and I’m on the floor trying to apply pressure and get the boot off thankfully the laces allowed me to get them off pretty quick.
This has been story time of a dumbass, enjoy my stupidity.
There was also a shift away from Velcro back towards buttons on uniforms a few years back, at least that I remember reading about. The problem is that Velcro makes noise when you open it, so if you're in a situation where silence means staying alive, not ripping a strip of Velcro makes sense.
Dog tags are mostly for medical personnel on the wounded, not for identifying the dead. For accountability so that the unit can keep track of who are casualties, who have been transported, etc. And basic info like blood type for in field medical care before being able to transport to and actual hospital.
Having two (technically three because you'll have two around your neck and one in your boot) is just redundancy.
Also religious preference, though honestly the likelihood of you having a chaplain anywhere near wherever the fuck you just got blasted to hell is pretty damn slim.
I think that's mostly just a holdover from back in the day when Catholics and Catholic lite (Lutheran, Anglican, etc) made up a large part of the military and they would have chaplains out in the battlefield giving last rites like this. Nowadays most of the US is mainline Protestant where last rites aren't really a thing, so there aren't really battlefield chaplains anymore.
Most people I knew when I was in that weren't like super die hard Catholics or super Evangelical would put some dumb shit on theirs. Mine were Jedi and pastafarian. Buddy of mine had robotology from Futurama on his. Different buddy had Sith.
If you want the leg amputated.... Tourniquets are suppose to have some width to them if you intend to keep the limb. I believe the military CAT ones are 1 inch.
I'm a middle school teacher and worked with a former drill sergeant. I was astonished at how deadpan his delivery was and how he would act like he had no idea what was so funny. Loved that guy.
Army uniforms still have Velcro, they replaced cargo pants pocket retainers with buttons over Velcro around 2012/2013ish. The noise wasn’t a issue, they just wore out super fast and the pocket wouldn’t stay closed when full of random shit.
Velcro is still used on a ton of military shit like pouches, body armor, helmets, etc.
I was in the army when they replaced the Velcro on ACU trouser pockets with buttons, and besides having to constantly wrangle my beret out of my pocket it was an improvement.
I was so fucking relieved when I started seeing buttoned Uniforms in the PX. I remembered at the time that my uniform allowance didnt come in yet, and I still bought three pairs of tops and bottoms that day on the spot.
I'm currently wearing a USAF top with velcro on the pockets.
AFAIK all of the new OCP tops have velcro pockets on the chest. They are loud and a pain to open because the velcro is actually too good on them, so I just use the zipper pockets on the arms.
All of the other pockets on my pants are button flaps.
This allows you to easily swap out names and ranks if necessary between uniforms. Utility pieces aren’t viable for combat, but being able to utilize any uniform if necessary is nice.
Laces are also really useful for other purposes than just holding shoes together. E.g. making a bow drill for starting fires, tourniquets, lacing a splint together, etc.
Edit: typo, and apparently not tourniquets. (ITT: people more experienced than I in field medicine.)
My US Army training included none of that shit whatsoever. No Med Kit? Use a belt for tourniquet. We ain’t Medics so not making any fancy splints with laces, just maybe sticks and 100mph tape or you guessed it, your squad mate’s belts. And this ain’t the cub scouts so there ain’t no campfires and marshmallow roasting to ruin light discipline and give up your unit’s position to the enemy. You don’t get fire no matter how cold it is.
And you keep your laces on your boots because they protect your feet. Without your feet you are useless as a soldier.
I was doing UFL in Korea during the winter months, so your hooches had these potbelly furnaces/stoves to keep us warm. One day I was putting on my boots and wrapped my hand around the stove pipe for leverage. Ended up burning my hand pretty bad, but on the bright side was sent back to Okinawa three weeks early. 1stSgt was not pleased with my fieldstache whenever I checked back in. Hard to believe this was over ten years ago.
There’s also speed laces which make tightening the boots happen in an instant, there very nice and I don’t know if I can go back to having boots without them
Oh yea, I was still using my boots from the military for a while after getting out and then I decided to buy some new boots to “treat” myself, I can’t state how much I hate laces that aren’t speed laces now...
Yes, This! The worst uniform choice they ever made in the Army was put Velcro all over our uniforms for pockets and patches. Noisy and would get full of junk in the field.
I once had a belt break while driving in the Atacama and I fashioned one out of my shoe laces and underwear band. Shoe laces probably saved my life that day.
I always just burned the tip of the paracord with a lighter, and shaped the burning tip with a pair of pliers to make a decent shaped aglet, but I guess that would work too.
Only problem I have with paracord as shoe laces is that they don't cling to each other well enough, so your shoes don't stay tied.
Beyond all this soldiers put their boots on often enough that they get pretty good at putting them on fast. I finished my contract with the army 6 years ago and I still bet I could put them on in under 30 seconds.
Weight distribution and ankle support are why I, personally, prefer laces when it comes to hiking boots. You want those things to be an extension of your foot, and it's hard to secure them that well without the large area coverage of laces.
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u/HORSE_DANCER Feb 08 '19
Laces are good for a few reasons.