Video – The History and Components of The US Military’s ALICE and LINCLOE LCE Systems

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A rather dry but informative video about the history and development of the old ALICE gear system used by the US military.

Older and wiser heads than I, who actually used this stuff, will have their own opinions, no doubt, and thats as it should be. ALICE gear is another bit of legacy gear that is fairly common in survivalist circles. The stuff was so ubiquitous and abundant that I doubt there’s anyone who doesnt have an ALICE pack, mag pouch, our other component sitting in their gear. It may not be ‘Tier 1’ stuff these days, but for the price it’s not a bad choice for certain usages. I find the ALICE packs, with an upgrade to the shoulder straps, to be a fairly competent piece of kit for an emergency bag. Since the market abhors a vacuum, there are several companies that make bags to go on the ALICE pack frame. My emergency gear in the truck is in a Spec-Ops Brand bag on an ALICE frame and I like it alot. Theyre stupid expensive these days but I think I got mine on closeout a few years back for around $75 each. I love Spec-Ops Brand gear but they seem to be perpetually on the brink of going out of business. They used to have all sortsa cool, well-thought out, and well-made gear. Now it seems they just have a few items and not much else. A shame, I really like their products.

Back in the day, ALICE gear was pretty much what every survivalist started with. Nowadays its more MOLLE/PAL webbing and gear. Good stuff, no doubt, but sometimes I like the nostalgia of the old green ALICE gear.

Because of the huge amount of ALICE gear out there, there is a thriving industry in upgrades and accessories for the ALICE system…adapters to let you use MOLLE pouches and vice versa. Replacement packs for the ALICE frames. Things like that. I personally think much of the ALICE gear is inferior to what we have now with the MOLLE stuff, but I really do like the upgraded bags, like the Spec-Ops, on the ALICE frame. The newer plastic MOLLE pack frames are alright, I suppose, and I do have some, but for ruggedness and versatility I really like the ALICE frames…especially when combined with the cargo shelf for carrying things like fuel/water cans and cases of ammo.

Anyway, an interesting bit of history about some legacy gear that many of us still have in our stockpiles.

 

Pony/JAKL hybrid

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I had mentioned, a few posts back, that I impulse picked up a Poverty Pony lower that had been registered as an SBR by the Iron Mountain guys out in Potomac. Since I had a ‘wrist braced’ JAKL ‘pistol’, and the the JAKL uses a 95% (have to use a slightly modified bolt release paddle) standard AR lower, this seemed like a good opportunity to turn the wrist-braced-pistol into what nature and man intended it to be – a stubby carbine with a real stock. And thus, this happened:

Pretty cunning, innit?

The JAKL (and the AR-180) [and by extension the Sig MCX] are interesting guns from a survivalists perspective because the have almost all of the AR’s ergonomic benefits and modularity, while removing one of the AR’s (questionable) liabilities – the buffer tube making folding stocks impractical.*

Unless youre driving around in a GMC van with three of your war buddies, dodging the military police for a crime you didnt commit, the utility of being able to fire your carbine with the stock folded is something that doesn’t seem like a frequent need. Not saying it won’t happen…hallways and stairwells exist, but as a general sort of thing…not a frequent need. However, being able to reduce your carbine to a compact, easily storable, portable package…well thats a different story. This particular package will just barely fit, assembled and ready to shoot, in my Bag O’ Tricks ™ (admittedly not leaving me room for much else).

I'[ve become rather fond of SBR/SBS’s in the last year or two. Their compactness and handling of a short barrel, combined with the steadiness and rigidity of a ‘real’ stock (as opposed to wrist brace), just feels quite good in the hands. Obviously there’s a tradeoff with a shorter barrel, but for the distances at which such an arm could reasonably be expected to be employed the differences in exterior and terminal ballistics will be niggling.

First choice for running out the door when Der Tag kicks off? Nope. But when that time does come its a nice choice for keeping in the truck when quick handling goes from ‘nice to have’ to ‘best practices’.

And, as you can see form the picture, I’m starting to drop red dots on pretty much everything, although iron sights for backup are a non-negotiable.

*= Keywords here: impractical and practical.

Tubes of silver

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My buddy at the coin shop made a massive buy today and offered me Krugerrands at spot…but I was in no position to take him up on it since I kinda shot my wad with those Swiss francs last week. But, he did have something of interest. I walked in and he reached under the counter and handsed me what certainly looked like a pipe bomb. But, no, it was something else entirely:

It was a PVC pipe made to fit 100 1-oz silver rounds. Tell me youre a survivalist without telling me youre a survivalist. The backstory is that with gold and silver being pretty up these days, this guy decided to come in and sell some of departed dad’s stuff. When a guy packs his silver away like this you can sorta get the impression that he’s on the same page you are.

I had to take a pass…..need to recover from the gold purchase. But it was still pretty cool to see. And seeing tubes full of krugerrands is always a nice reminder of Life Goals.

For those who havent been keeping up, gold has passed the $3000 mark. Infer from that what you will.

Scenes from CostCo

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First time I’d seen these at CostCo:

CostCo, I would think, doesn’t order things that it does’t see or anticipate a demand for. If that argument is valid, then when CostCo has things like Mountain House freeze drieds, water filters, solar panels, etc, it anticipates a need for them. So…whats the need? Is CostCo suddenly offering canning jars because they’re suddenly aware that people are growing food and might want to preserve it? I suppose, but why would CostCo suddenly come to that conclusion now? Or is CostCo anticipating an economic shift that will increase the demand for canning supplies as people try to squirrel away food against the upcoming Uncertain Future? Or did they just get a smoking deal from Ball? Beats me. Perhaps its a test market thing.

I haven’t checked prices on canning supplies this year because I’m pretty well set for jars and lids, but if this is a decent deal and you needs some jars…might wanna see if your local CostCo is carrying ’em.

Guns? Sure. But food…ah, thats another story

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Re-organizing my stuff, especially the long-term food, has me musing about the classic have vs. have-not conflict that we will see when the wheels fly off society…and that, to some degree, we are seeing now.

The apocalypse is going to come in several different flavors…civil war/disturbance, economic depression, huge natural disaster, pandemic, stray nukes…and it will, no doubt, at some point require that you be ready to maintain the safety and security of your loved ones and your home. But you know what happens far more often than the need to point a gun at someone? The need to eat.

I’m an old-school survivalist – being armed is right up there at the top of the list of things to be ready for. But I also have dang near thirtyfive years of being that old school survivalist behind me. In all that time, I have needed to eat far more times than I’ve needed to point a gun at someone. Not saying it wont happen…simply saying that, statistically, youll be more likely to be patting yourself on the back over your food stash than your gun and ammo stash.

In addition to keeping you from, y’know, dying, food has an excellent moral and motivational (Motivatory? Motivary?) effect – as the graphic on the MRE entree says: food is a force multiplier. Well-fed people are going to perform better than starving people. And starving people are desperate people who do desperate things..and doing desperate things is a great way to become someone who doesn’t need food at all…forever. So dont be a starving person who takes crazy risks out of desperation, and don’t be around starving people who are unpredictable and dangerous.

Having that resource of food also makes you a target. Truly desperate people…people who are cold, who are hungry, who are hopeless, who are watching their loved ones miss meals…are dangerous and unpredictable. Don’t be one of them and don’t let them know you’re there.

Right now we live in a world where people will literally kill you because they want your sneakers, think you cut them off in traffic, or simply want your cellphone. And thats in a world with 911, electricity, cops, and a somewhat-functioning society. Now imagine what it’ll be like when the only mechanism to keep the foot on the brake pedal of social chaos is whatever you’ve got in your holster or slung over your shoulder.

In a situation like that the person who can sit at home, safe and secure, and not have to venture out into the chaos looking for food and supplies has a tremendous advantage. Exponentially so if he’s there with his equally well-fed and well-armed family and friends.

It used to be that people first getting into preparedness/survivalism started off with a wild binge of gun and ammo buying, and everything that came after was done with far less rigor and enthusiasm. I have encountered quite a few people who had guns and ammo aplenty but put virtually no thought into food. A bunch of 2-liter pop bottles filled with rice and beans is better than starving…I guess. But you really should aspire for better than that.

And for the love of Crom, stock up on ‘regular’ food….the canned fruits, the jarred sauces and soups, the bags of pasta and rice, etc, etc. Expensive freeze drieds are awesome but when I suffer a small-scale EOTWAWKI like a job loss or 48-hour power failure, I’m going to be really reluctant to break into the $30 can of Mountain House Chicken and Rice and more likely to grab a $2 jar of spaghetti sauce and a $3 bag of pasta off the shelf.

Guns and radios and fuel and all the other sexy stuff is important, no doubt, but water and food are always going to get more use and demand than pretty much anything else you can store. It’s absolutely worth thinking about what youre stocking up on, how much of it you’re putting away, and how youre going to use it. Certainly thats where my mind is these days.

Diversification – a diversity plan I can support

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Ugh…the market is tanking like a Kamala Harris campaign. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, I’m taking about half my dividends and putting them somewhere else other than re-investing them for the foreseeable future. (In times like this when the market is down, it also means that stocks are on sale.) My original plan was to pick up a few tubes of silver rounds. That was the plan. The reality changed when, out of the blue, my buddy at the coin shop texted….

So, when my buddy at the gold shop sent me a text asking if I wanted some Swiss 20-francs at spot, I said …yes.

Can’t eat it, can’t shoot it, can’t burn it as fuel…but it seems to do a fabulous job as money, even if no one knows why.

Missed it by THIS much

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I was thiiiiiiiiiis close. And someone snaked it out from under me about a half hour before I called the gun shop to say “Hey, do you still have this?”. What was it? Why, a 4″ Ruger GP-100 .357.

What is so special about that, you might ask? After all, aren’t there scads of 4″ GP-100s out there? Well, yes but…

I have long thought that an ideal ‘combat’ revolver, if a revolver can be said to be ideal for the rough and tumble of irregular warfare, would be a sturdy fixed-sight, full-underlug, stainless .357 Magnum. It would have no adjustable sights to get damaged, have a full lug to protect the ejector rod and give some weight at the front, be in everything-resistant stainless steel, be built on a large enough frame to handle a steady diet of .357 but not too heavy to inhibit fast handling,  be in the powerful and versatile .357 and still have the option to be fed with .38’s if thats all that was available. The only major manufacturer who made something like that was Smith and Wesson with their 681 series of revolvers built on their L-frame*. An excellent gun it has been out of manufacturer since the 90’s. Ruger, though, once in a while, drops a fixed-sight variant of their GP-100 and thats what your buddy Zero is looking for. The 3″ variants are easy enough to find, and there are some 4″ DAO re-imports that century brought in a while back, but the full-lug versions are scarce.

One of my 'Grail guns'. Still looking.

One of my ‘Grail guns’. Still looking.

I came across an auction last week for a half-lug version and I’d take that over nothing. But…I missed the auction deadline and the store that had it for auction sold it shortly before I called. Dang it.

I would much rather run through the apocalypse with a Glock or HiPower, but if I were to carry a revolver, and I were expecting trouble from things that had language skills, this guy would be a top contender.

 

*= Yes, Smith ran of some oddball, very-limited-run .357’s with fixed sights on their N frame. (Most notably, the 520.) But the numbers are small enough that they may as well be non-existent. Also, the 520 was blued. There was, I think, a fixed sight variant of the 627 out there but N-frame is bigger than the handier L-frame and I don’t believe it had the full underlug.

The Gun-A-Month program

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In an effort to dial back my insane gun buying addiction, I am trying to limit myself to one gun a month. I was actually doing pretty well this month until I made he mistake of walking into a local shop and looking at their suppressor display case. Sitting in it was a lonely stripped Anderson (Poverty Pony! Thrift Thoroughbred! Frugal Filly!) lower that had been SBR’d.

Hmmm….

I have a JAKL ‘pistol’ that really needs a genuine stock and not some sort of ‘wrist brace’ aberration. Since the JAKL uses bog-standard AR lowers (with the exception of a slightly modified bolt release) I can finish the lower, put a Midwest Industries folding AR-180 stock, and drop the JAKL pistol upper on it and make myself a nice compact .223.

Or I can just build up the lower with an AR parts kit, and go find ‘pistol’ AR upper.

So, technically, this counts as my gun for March…which may not have been a great purchase because there is a gun on Gunbroker I’m probably going to buy that is a rare version of something I’ve been looking for for a couple years now. Im not gonna spoil the ending, but I’ll tell you about it when the auction is over.