Isaac Botkin and Michael McMartin sit down to talk about The Pub Club, a T.Rex Arms book club that reads military field manuals, and why a return to basic combat skills is need. In addition to fleshing out the "Citizen's Defense Industry," The conversation includes infantry roles, innovation, the future of T.Rex nylon gear, and the Band of Brothers Cinematic Universe.
And as promised, here is a link to the first Marine Corp publication that we are reading:
https://www.marines.mil/News/Publications/MCPEL/Electronic-Library-Display/Article/2472229/mcrp-3-10a4/
Isaac Botkin and Michael McMartin sit down to talk about The Pub Club, a T.Rex Arms book club that reads military field manuals, and why a return to basic combat skills is need. In addition to fleshing out the "Citizen's Defense Industry," The conversation includes infantry roles, innovation, the future of T.Rex nylon gear, and the Band of Brothers Cinematic Universe.
And as promised, here is a link to the first Marine Corp publication that we are reading:
https://www.marines.mil/News/Publications/MCPEL/Electronic-Library-Display/Article/2472229/mcrp-3-10a4/
If you're curious about what the citizens defense industry is or how you can gain more basic knowledge and hard skills, this is the conversation for you. Welcome to another t-rex talk and another interview. Today I'm talking to my good friend, michael McMartin, who's another internal t-rex Interview. So a bunch people, michael, have asked for interviews for people in the industry, interviews for people outside of the industry. But a lot of people want to meet more t-rex folks and some people listen to the podcast, probably already sort of know you because you did a bunch of content already. Some of our most specific technical email content that we've ever created is all yours.
Michael:You're met to your program. Yeah, good topic.
Isaac:So you've had a bunch of different jobs inside of t-rex. Some of it has been content creation, some of it has been customer support, some of it has been inventing products, some of it has been testing products, and you have a new thing that you're doing which is not Very outward facing, but it's called pub club. Oh, pub club. Yes, pub club is one of my favorite things, and no one outside of t-rex can see it, so I figured we could talk about it on the podcast sure let's talk about it.
Michael:Yeah, well, what do you want to know? What do you want to know about pub club?
Isaac:Well, so unfortunately, it does not involve going to cool little Establishments that have Guinness on tap, right right, it's not that we are reading Military publications as a small group of people. Half of the group, no, not half the group. All of the group is random people with no experience, and Then you, you are the one with the experience, you're choosing the publications and you're walking us through the material. Sure, yeah?
Michael:and by experience it's very minimal. I mean, there's people out there. Obviously this, the stuff scales, but Just regular four-year guy, you know, in the infantry. So just pay good attention. I still try to read and keep up on these things. I still consume a lot of the content that other people put out and have a pretty good idea my fingers on the pulse of the industry as a whole, I would say.
Michael:But you know, I really wanted to provide something internally for folks. I wanted to get a little bit more in-depth look at what Basic infantrymen are up to and what are all the tasks associated with that. I think people have a different view or a different perception of what that might actually look like. Everybody just kind of considers the guy running around in the woods with a rifle but talking through offensive and defensive tasks and getting the range cards. And you know, even just recently we talked about what the Marine Corps calls mount military operations and urban terrain, mm-hmm. So everything from exterior to interior which you know you could call CQB or CQC or whatever school you come from. But yeah, we're just right now going through the Marine Rifle squad pub. I can't remember the exact number four-tech ten, alpha something.
Isaac:It's a decimal, then there's a decimal and other numbers.
Michael:But that's what we're going through first, because I just figured that's the best, like broad overview that just touches on a lot of things, and then gonna try to gauge the interest of everybody in the room Once we get through this pub of hey, what do you want? Drill down more on yeah, and just keep tackling pubs that way.
Isaac:We just meet once a week for 45 minutes over a lunch break, but I will say that, more than enjoying, it has actually changed my thinking on a bunch of stuff, and we've talked about this a little bit in general. Like many people who are have no military experience, my Expectations or presuppositions about what the military does or what military skills are necessary have really been filtered through like just Watching global war on terror from the outside. Yeah, at the beginning there was, I think, a lot more regular infantry stuff. War correspondents went over they embedded with regular units. There was a bunch of like I don't know kind of brand new, like traditional conventional stuff, and then the attention really shifted to like what special operators were doing. Special operators got more specialized and it just feels like the attention really switched to the tip of the spear primarily.
Michael:Yeah, I think you could also make the argument special operations got less specialized. Yes, yeah, they.
Isaac:They took on more and more special missions which required them to have wider skill sets.
Michael:I think, sure, okay, yeah, I can see that is. That. Is that where you're? Yeah, I was saying they got more confined in their scope and just now, solely focusing on a very specific set of missions gotcha and and Kind of eating into in. You know, whether it's right or wrong, I don't know, but I the way that I saw a play out was they started eating into a more conventional mission and I think a lot of that and there's other people have commented on this too in the past that that's a lot, mostly due to, like, risk aversion. Yes, by command right, you have a better trained force that's going in.
Isaac:You can probably less collateral damage, all of those fun things focus a lot more resources on. They're always gonna have the best Intel and you know surveillance and support.
Michael:Yeah, rather than your 18 year old kid who just got you know three months of training is now there you have somebody who went through a pipeline worth of training and and more skill sets they're. They add a whole lot more than just your regular infantry guy. So, yeah, it's an easier asset to Plug and play right, sure.
Isaac:Yeah, and on the media side, for people on the outside it's a much better asset to follow around and make movies about and give book deals too. So I think a lot of us did get focused very much more kind of on the tip of the spear thing and so I have neglected personally. But also I've just neglected to think about those super basic Necessary skills.
Michael:Yeah, just being able to communicate with hand signals, sure, walk in formation Like the bare bones, yeah formations are really interesting because I could get anybody in there to draw like a wedge on the whiteboard or something like that and everybody would be able to do it.
Michael:Yeah, but as soon as we get on the ground and start walking around, suddenly it's a hard task and it is kind of funny I was actually talking to Brandon about this but like that's something that you pick up, like over time that you start to just get a feel for what the spacing should be and what is correct, yeah, but when you have to devote and you see this a lot with the competition world and shooting when people have to devote a bunch of their Mental bandwidth to just doing the task or the underlying task correctly, you're losing it somewhere else. Oh, yes, so you know, there's some popular folks out there. I'll say, like shooting just has to run in the background. Well, this is the same type of thing like these. These tasks, these skills need to just be able to run in the background. Do you have to train them near as hard as shooting? Absolutely not.
Isaac:They are much simpler tasks, but you do need to train them, get up to a certain competencies, compensacy like, oh yeah, the little, teeny, tiny exercise that we did yesterday, where I came in and completely missed one of my corners sure so, like Something else popped up. People were in different spot, they weren't even targets that I had to address, but it was just like oh, he's here, so I'm not gonna go there. It's yeah, yeah it was not automatic yeah exactly so I did.
Isaac:I did realize later, though Technically that was still an L shaped ambush, for sure, for lowercase.
Michael:L. I like it so strong. Walling is now. Just, it's still an L shape in a building. For, anyway, any of you that are following that CQB reference. Yeah, that's. I think that's been. The really eye-opening part for me is I'm, as I'm going through the pub and we're just doing a chapter at a time, some of the chapters a little bit longer than others, so we'll split them up. But as I'm going through, it's been an awesome refresher just for me To go back through all this stuff. I start picking up on what are like the pain points in these pubs for everybody else that they don't necessarily understand. How can I put this in Clearer terms for somebody that doesn't have any foundation or background doing any of these things? So it's been a really fun perspective to go back through it in that manner.
Isaac:Yeah, yeah, for me it's definitely. These are all really easy things, yeah, but making them automatic is not easy, right? You have to put in some time, you have to put in some effort and you just have to do the work. And so I feel like I should be doing more of that that work, and I've been very focused, even, you know, just over the last few years at T-Rex like we should solve Maps, navigation, communication. We should do it at a high level, we should use the most advanced technology. We should try to bring it down to the civilian level, but it should be advanced military stuff.
Isaac:I Do think over the last couple years, I've dialed that back a little bit to where it's like we should figure out the basics, because people are going to be confronted with Situations we can't really foresee, plan or prepare for. But the basics they could make the basics automatic and I would free them up to deal with other stuff, rather than being like here's how you're going to develop your entire intelligence network and your digital encrypted self-healing Communications network, or is what everybody wants because it's cool and it's a new thing to buy and put on your kit. Yeah, and I want to develop it because it's a fun thing to research and make content about. But being able to walk in formation through the woods without thinking about it so you can think about other stuff, yeah, it's kind of important kind of kind of should just have that one ready to go and not have to train it in the yeah moments notice.
Michael:Yeah, I think those those basics what they ultimately support. And you really shouldn't stop at the basics which probably sounds kind of funny to say, because you hear saying all the time brilliance in the basics, right, yeah, and just making those even better and better. But I guess what I mean by that is don't get to a certain competency level in the basics and and just call it good, like right, you should also be working up to a competency level and then Starting to branch out other things. Yeah, is the way that I view it. Like you can go through the army publishes it, the Marine Corps publishes it, basically your infantry tactical tasks, I think is what they call it. But like your thousand level tasks, yes, go Google this. You can pull up a PDF right now and you can see what is a basically trained infantryman need to be capable of doing. And if you can do all those things, look at the next level of tasks, which I think is the 2000 level, and then look at the next level of tasks and just keep building on that.
Michael:But I would really recommend just start, get those basics out of the way. You don't really have to revisit them, like their basics for a reason, because they're fairly easy to acquire. So this shouldn't take a lot of bandwidth and training time to get to that level in the first place. That's what boot camps are for. You know, various countries get people through in weeks time Mm-hmm, yeah to be basically prepared for whatever they're gonna throw them into. Yeah, the whole goal is to get somebody prepared to just survive Initially, while they can continue to learn, to get better and improve their SOPs, ttps, all those fun things, but to get them through that initial conflict, yes, and then start adapting to it.
Isaac:Mm-hmm.
Michael:So that base level that's the goal of that is is just getting you to be able to survive. You know, initial contact, for lack of a better way to put it.
Isaac:Yeah, yeah, I mean, I was thinking about band of brothers and, obviously, the the band of brothers TV series, which is the greatest TV series ever made. I said it was good to me, so I have an annoying thought about this. There's a, there's a new one coming out. It's not fly boys, a masters of the air, oh sure, yeah, and I think it's on Apple, yeah, but, but people are calling it like a new series in the band of brothers cinematic universe.
Michael:Oh, I haven't heard that yet.
Isaac:That is a phrase that I both hate and Kind of like, because it sort of just means like reality, so like, if you think about it, it includes things like Black Hawk down also in the band of brothers cinematic universe.
Michael:Absolutely the generation kill. Generation kill is like my favorite mini series, just because it was like I Can't say a parallel, my experience. But I was in a cat platoon, a combined anti-armor team, and we were mounted, you know, the whole time and Humvees and it was just like watching. That was like, yeah, this is great, like this is exactly how the dynamics are inside the Humvee and all of that. And I was, you know, in later During G watt and stuff, but those are the early days, but it still hadn't changed that much, yeah, you know.
Isaac:So that show resonates a lot with me at some point we should watch them and compare or compare them, compare notes on what has changed. Training wise, culture wise. That would be fascinating, because one of the things about Band of Brothers, obviously 101st Airborne they're paratroopers, they're getting extra training. It is still really short. It is really short time and there have been people I need to do more research on this there are people that spend more time on the boat getting to Europe than they spend in training. I believe it.
Isaac:Yeah, and so that is a wildly different paradigm than the one that we have today with the US military. And part of that goes a little bit back to what we're talking about with global war on terror. Global war on terror is not a real war. It is a whole bunch of little tiny armed conflicts that are managed so well in one sense, like we had, especially towards those last few years. I feel like we had it kind of down to a science, not war fighting in general, but what we were doing in those particular theaters with that particular thing. Like we could pretty much pick who we wanted to fight, when and where and with who, kind of always send the special forces guys. I think it felt like that was what it kind of boiled down to, which is wildly different than we're gonna send a huge chunk of our population to go fight a very huge part of somebody else's population.
Michael:Yeah, definitely. I kind of had a separate thought going all the way back to the pub club and just one of the reasons why I've been telling people why this would be valuable for them to just get this initial foundation is so that way, when they go and they talk to all these guys who've put themselves out there all these SF guys or special operations guys and stuff they can start asking them better questions. Yes, instead of just like really fundamental stuff.
Isaac:How do you kill a century if all you have is this Sure yeah.
Michael:So they can start asking.
Michael:They can be like hey, I now have a baseline knowledge and those guys are gonna have different experiences, that they're gonna tell you to try this or try that and you can start incorporating those things, instead of just going straight to them and you're getting I don't know not quite like a PhD level, but you know what I mean like you're going straight from high school into masterclass type stuff, like why don't we just get our bachelor degree first, or whatever education level you wanna equate it to? But let's make a step, just get up to the foundational piece, and then let's start getting a little bit more advanced, start bringing on the quite literal. A special operation part is they're doing different mission sets, so what are those and how do they support the main effort? Yeah, I think that's an interesting point to make, just because folks want to go straight to the SF crowd, the special operations crowd, to get all of their information, and it's like I think you could get more out of them if you were able to go to them with better questions.
Isaac:Yes, yeah, I agree 100% and I could be wrong about this, but I believe that we are at this point in the United States' history. We I'm talking to me, not you, because you have the experience but we untrained guys with no military experience are probably the most separated from some of those basics than any point in American history. Like my generation and the next generation, less likely to have been out hunting, less likely to have been out hunting in groups, less likely to have been hanging out with our dads, war buddies, like there's a large chunk of Americans who have served in the military, but it's very different than right after World War II or right after World War I or even after Vietnam. We guys my age spent way less time out hunting in the woods with guys who had seen combat than like my dad's generation and some of those basics. Yeah, we're just further away from them now, I think.
Michael:Yeah, I totally agree.
Isaac:If we did decide like World War III is gonna look like World War II and a huge chunk of the 18 to 24 year olds in the country are just gonna go to boot camp, we would be starting more from scratch.
Michael:Yeah, and I mean you're already seeing that in like recruitment numbers, right, like just people, it's not even a, it's both ways. Like some people just aren't as willing to join up anymore, for whatever reason they have, but then also not as many people are qualifying. Yeah, can't meet. That. Minimum standard for physical fitness is probably one of the biggest ones.
Isaac:That too. I'm always just thinking about the head knowledge, but the physical fitness is a massive component.
Michael:Yeah, every step, at least from my experience, and not going through. You know selections and all that stuff, but anytime you went to a school house or whatever, like the first thing you do is your physical standards. Yeah, Like that just weeds. Like people get sent home cause they can't get their pull ups or whatever on day one. They don't care about teaching them after that point. Yeah, If you can't do this, then I'm not gonna teach you all this stuff. Like that is the barrier to entry in the military, at least from what I've saw.
Isaac:There is a new path forwards, which is that If you can't pass the physical, you can call yourself something different and become an admiral. Sure, I'm not sure if I'm gonna leave that in. Yeah, that's fine, yeah, that's fine, yeah, but yeah, no, that is an interesting thing. So I'm gonna say something else that's controversial. To get brave, Nice.
Isaac:I really don't want my kids to go to war ever. However, that's not really in my control. Sure, what is in my control would be giving them some of these basics. So my plan is not to start running my kids through boot camp now, but I have brought James to Pub Club, like at least once, and I have been thinking about like. Next time, when we go on walks, when we hike in the woods, when we're doing stuff with compasses, which is just fun, we should start doing the actual hand signals as opposed to stupid made up hand signals and there's only like 20. It's like memorizing the 20 hand signals that are in the Marine Handbook. It's like when your kids are young. That's fun, it's not school, it's not drudgery, it's fun to do Marine Hand signals in the woods, and then some of that stuff becomes automatic.
Michael:Yeah, I think I said it multiple times during the Pub Club but like the coolest thing or the goal is just be non-verbal, right and be able to do everything with hand and arm signals and be able to go out for a day or however many hours and stuff, and nobody says a word the entire time, but the mission still gets accomplished. Like that to me, like that fires me up. Just think about that concept.
Isaac:And this is kind of a joke, but not really Having four small children move around non-verbally Also sounds like-.
Michael:Camelia Fire Team's eyes of four.
Isaac:Yeah, that's good, yeah, yeah absolutely so, yeah, so my current plan which you can check back on me in a couple years is the way I do is to do a little bit more of this super basic stuff with my kids as kids, not because my plan is for them to be part of the next warrior cast that goes and conquers other countries, but in a worst case scenario, some of these things are just gonna be automatic and maybe they'll be a little quieter too. We'll see.
Michael:Right, right, yeah. Couldn't agree more. I think that's an admirable philosophy to raise your children with.
Isaac:It's also sort of cheating for me because I wanna do stuff with them and there's a huge swath of things that I no longer have time to do as hobbies. But spending time with my children is very important and they can have hobbies and I can do their hobbies with them and I know that definitely the boys, but I think all of them would love more outdoors land nav stuff and bringing along some hand signals and some other stuff. I think we'd just make it super fun and memorable for them and then I'd actually be getting my practice in Actually be doing the work. So yeah, so, as we're talking about like in one level, it sounds like kind of a high bar. Like we're giving up, we're asking people on the podcast and this isn't homework assignment but like people are probably hearing, like I have to go download military manuals, read them, find people to go out into the woods to practice this stuff with, give up lunch breaks to read this thing. It sounds like a lot. I feel like it shouldn't necessarily be a lot.
Michael:I think that's the reason why I wanted to do little, bite-sized chunks of the pub club thing. We're only doing 45 minutes once a week. It's a minimal commitment just show up. Basically, I do acknowledge that it would be a lot more difficult for you guys to go through it if you didn't have someone like myself or somebody else to like help explain the things going on in there.
Isaac:There's definitely a vocabulary gap and you've done a great job at teaching it, but I definitely feel like anybody who has been through boot camp can be like oh yeah, that's not what it means.
Michael:Yeah, yeah, it's true, but that's the nice part about it is right now, I would say. I would make the argument that time is on your side and to use that to your best ability while you have it. So you just start biting things off and you don't have to sit down and read a whole pub in one week and try to distill its secrets or anything. Just take a chapter of time, use the table of contents, go through and be like, hey, what's something that I want to learn more about? Yeah, well, these offensive operations, like how to conduct a raid or an ambush, or okay, cool, let's look at defensive operations. How do I dig a fighting hole? What does the Marine Corps say?
Michael:It's a standard, things like that. You can just find the things that apply to you or the things that you want to learn within these manuals, and the Army has their version as well. It's much thicker. I think they kind of combine the scouting patrolling manual with their basic manual too. At least that's my take on it. Somebody will probably correct me on that, but it is like 800 pages or something like that, so it'd be a lot bigger to get through.
Isaac:Yeah, but, like you said, these are bite-sized chunks that you can go through and so, yeah, I recommend it. I know that they're in the gun community. There's constantly talk about night vision and thermal and all sorts of really cool, important stuff, but it does feel like stuff that is largely effective once you put it on top of the basics, once you have the foundation for it. If somebody who doesn't know how to walk in the woods with a thermal device is not a special forces soldier.
Isaac:Right, you can get all of this equipment and all that fun stuff, and there's nothing wrong with that, and in fact it's a courage, but yeah, and if it helps you get out in the woods to do the other necessary work, yes, buy the thermal and go walk in the woods at night, absolutely.
Michael:But if you don't have a basic understanding that you need to provide security for yourself or your team at virtually all times and it's really not negotiable then it won't matter, right? So, you know, those types of principles are the ones that I'm really trying to hammer and get across. Like 360 degrees of security at all times, like there's very few exceptions for why you would ever want to break that rule, right? So those types of lessons are the ones that I'm really trying to hammer through on the pub club. But, yeah, hopefully they're getting through.
Isaac:Yeah, would you like to make a spicy comment about the importance of 360 degrees security at all times in the civilian world?
Michael:In the civilian world, oh, when you're playing airsoft. This actually happened at Copperhead.
Isaac:I was talking about like going out Sure Nashville.
Michael:But no, this happened like in airsoft right In Minecraft. When we went out to that Copperhead in New Mexico and that was the first Airsoft event that I've ever been to and Christian actually in our media team, he was like, hey, you know, I'm not really sure where to fall in here. You know, what should I be doing? And I was like you should always be like looking to find work. You should always be.
Michael:If you see that people aren't looking in direction, pick up that direction, like it should just be initiative based or whatever fancy term you want to use for that, but find work. Basically. And I think about halfway through the day he came up to me and he's like pretty excited. He's like man, I just I just got like six guys because you guys were all going in the door and I just decided, hey, nobody's looking behind us, I'll look behind us. And then, like six guys came through like around the corner. We all would have gotten hit by BBs, you know, if Christian hadn't turned around and pulled rear security, you know. So those types of lessons that most people just they are not thinking about. It's hard to pull rear security, it's hard to turn your back to where all the action is and stuff, but that's where the discipline comes in and trusting your teammates.
Isaac:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So our, I guess, are we given homework? I usually give some kind of homework assignment, but you're the expert here. Do you want to give a specific homework assignment, or do you want to wait until we have something a little bit more concrete to give people?
Michael:I think I would revert back to what I alluded to earlier. Go and find these tactical tasks. If there's something you're truly interested in, go and find these. Go look at the armies, go look at the Marine Corps those are really the only two that I would look at and see where you fall. Just look at the basic individual events, the thousand level series for the Marine Corps I can't remember what the army calls theirs, maybe level one skills, something like that. But just see, like go through and just check off, like okay, yeah, I'm good there, and see where you stand with all these skills. Yeah, a lot of those skills, by the way, are weapon focused, though that is a big thing. So, like with a 240, make sure you can load and show clear or unload and show clear. You know immediate actions and stuff like that, how to prep an AT-4, whatever else. You know all those systems.
Isaac:You can probably just gloss those over, but sure, I mean, I have an AT-4 and you have an AT-4. Of course, most people, most people don't. Oh, they don't. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I mean, mine is very small. It came with a GI Joe kit. It's good stuff.
Michael:Yeah, I don't know. I think that's a worthy assignment for the folks that are interested is just go go grab those PDS. Maybe we can even supply them in, like the link or something.
Isaac:We can yeah.
Michael:I don't know how you feel about that, but I can pull those Our tax dollars have made those available to people, absolutely, they're totally open source, so we can actually send people out there.
Isaac:Yeah, and we won't hint at anything in the future. We'll just put the PDFs in the link. Yeah, yeah, we could do that. Yeah, so that'll be good. It's your podcast, the. And then the fun thing is I mean, there's probably been infinite conversations on infinite podcasts about the need to touch grass, have real physical friends do things with them in meat space. But like we could probably say that again, like, read these books by yourself, but also figure out who else is interested in this. To anybody in your area who would like to go walk in formation with you.
Michael:Sure, and it's just trial and error. Like you just start to figure things out, you start to feel like what's right, you know, that's one of the great tools really is Airsoft. That, like people, is the more accessible tool. There's obvious limitations. Right, you have range limitations. You know the projectile itself isn't going to go through walls or pierce anything. But beyond that, like you can still put into practice a lot of these like fundamental you know ideas like security and these other principles. So I would say that's a really great tool if that's something that people want to get into. But you can always just do what we did. When you don't have an ammo budget is just run around and yell bang bang. And that is I'm not even joking how the military trains a lot of the time, at least at a conventional level, just because the budget isn't there for to go shoot live rounds all the time. So you guys, you literally have guys running around yelling bang bang in the woods and nobody's laughing at it.
Isaac:Like you're taking it seriously, you're taking your training seriously, so that's the Especially if you're not training the shooting part, you're training the move and communicate part.
Michael:Yeah, that's at least something For sure. It's not great, of course, if you get blanks. That's a great thing to mix in there and get a little more noise and stuff for causing some confusion with communication and stuff, but yeah, so I have a question about airsoft.
Isaac:So obviously airsoft is great for some of the skill components. How is airsoft, Do you think, for community building? Cause you went with. You went with some people who are already your friends and were already interested in this stuff and then you saw groups of people who were also already friends, already had their own friend groups. There were cool people who were there. There were random people who were there. Like how how do you, is that a good place to meet people in your area who might want to just keep training and doing stuff with? Do you think?
Michael:I've been to two events, so you know my experience is extremely limited with the airsoft crowd, the one being out in New Mexico, copperhead, and then the other one being a Milsim West event that was in Pennsylvania. I think there's a strong correlation there, of course, that you would be able to find like-minded individuals that are interested in training these things, if nothing more than just to use it in their next airsoft game, and maybe it's not, you know, some grander idea For sure, yeah, but these things absolutely still apply with airsoft or paintball or whatever else. Right, like anything that is projectile that people are slinging towards each other. You know using these fundamentals are going to elevate, you know, your performance in these games. Yeah.
Isaac:Yeah, I also think another potential one would be the reenacting community. Oh yeah, now you have to be careful. I know lots of Civil War reenactors and there's a lot of old fashioned tactics and stuff in the Civil War era and so, while there's a ton of fundamentals that are the same, there are some people who are such sticklers about historical accuracy that they're ignoring maybe newer techniques of doing stuff. But there's a World War II reenacting community that really they really have a lot of these fundamentals and a lot of the fundamentals at least at the basic level, I think, are pretty well represented by World War II era training and World War II era operations and if you're thinking about infantry stuff, I feel like that's kind of neat.
Isaac:I have some very interesting experiences watching and participating in those where it's like, yeah, this is. I mean, this is not real. There is no projectile, right, but there is definitely a. We're trying to move as a unit, we're trying to do this, we're trying to do that, we're trying to do hand signals, we're trying to do Sure, we're trying to use cover and terrain. So there's an element of thinking about that that definitely develops when you were doing that and people are less freaked out by people running around with World War II era uniforms and rifles than modern up to day airsoft stuff.
Michael:Sure, yeah going full battle, rattle, just yeah. Walking into your local grocery store seeing a snack.
Isaac:Or just one time some friends and I went through a national park up in New England and nobody bad in the night. Everyone was like, oh cool. Nobody was like, oh my goodness, people with guns.
Michael:The relationship is insane, yeah if you're ducked out in multi-cam and, yeah, head to toe of course. Yeah, that's a really good one. I've never actually really considered the enactment thing, but you are. I think you're really spot on with World War II, having a lot of parallel with modern day tactics, or at least getting it started, because that's where maneuver warfare is really starting to come more into play, at that like small unit level, from my understanding I'm not a historian or anything but at least for the United States, where we really started doing like squad level, platoon level type things and embracing that on a grander scale. So yeah, I think that's a great starting point too.
Isaac:Yeah, well, it'll be interesting. You know we have talked about internally a lot externally not so much about T-Rex wanting to be a part of and help build a citizen defense industry which is largely product focused, because that's what industry generally does is make product make stuff. But the civilian defense industry also needs, like, a civilian defense mindset to exist amongst the civilians. So I think that is something else to work on for sure.
Michael:Yeah, that's a long-term game right there.
Michael:Oh, for sure yeah and that's been the other fun part of what I'm doing now here at T-Rex is with the nylon development, and that's a huge focus of ours is anything that we're developing, designing, putting out for you guys to purchase is all just very functionally oriented. We're not doing things just for aesthetics. It's for a very specific purpose, a very specific reason that these products are getting designed around and things that we kind of wish we had. You know I work a lot with Lucas and Brandon on the ideation part of that. Alex has helped a lot with the medical products, you know. So we're tapping into our resources and then we're also reaching out to folks too when we have the opportunity to help inform design choices and what features are people really looking for. But that's something I'm really excited about moving forward to help support this industry.
Michael:Right Is getting more things out there that are designed for the civilian use case. But you know you could argue that it's the same as the military use case or whatever else in this context. But having more availability out there and having things that are a little bit more smartly designed function forward, that's really the main goal with the nylon products right now. We got a lot of catching up to do and I think if anybody that's familiar with the nylon industry would look through like our product lineup right now, you'll see some pretty obvious gaps and stuff. But those are things that we really want to start tackling hard and quite a bit of it is already underway, so excited about that.
Isaac:Speaking of nylon design, there is we've talked about this a lot internally too there's a pretty big difference between our holster side of the business and our nylon side of the business.
Isaac:Holster side of the business I feel like we are pretty cutting edge with both materials, technology process, like we're definitely trying to be at the very forefront of plastic, thermo formed kydex holster technology and inventing hinges and stuff, and we're not really doing that with nylon quite as much.
Isaac:The nylon silo is very much more tried and true, practically developed and in the past it has kind of bugged me that those feel a little bit less synchronized. But what I realized is that the holster industry is extremely young and the nylon or soft goods load bearing industry is very old, like a lot of the stuff that we're making now, speaking of World War II not that different from World War II stuff Like the nylon industry has been making load bearing equipment for American soldiers for a very, very, very long time. Right, a much more mature industry. The textile industry is all so much larger. There's so much more development and testing and stuff going on that the best way, I think, for us to serve people in that space is just going to look like a slightly different strategy than the best way to serve people inside of this new young kydex concealed carry area.
Michael:So that's been interesting to think about as we've yeah, I think you already touched on it Like we're more focused on the tried and true aspect of the nylon piece, you know, the actual design or the functionality of the product. We're not reinventing the wheel here. I'm honestly like we're just maybe not smart enough, I don't know but like that's Some new genius is going to come across in 10 years and design a plate carrier totally revolutionary or something. But right now you got a whole plate in your body a certain way and there's only a few ways you can really do that Right.
Isaac:Yeah, duct tape has been tried.
Michael:Yeah, so it's how you go about the design piece of it, though, and really maximizing the functionality, in increasing the functionality whenever possible. I kind of likened it to in the past, to like BCM Mark II, if anybody's familiar with. Like that product line from BCM. Like the Mark II upper receiver is still very much a mill spec upper receiver, but certain increases, different changes in regards to the forward assist and things like that. Just small tweaks, small improvements to make your life a little bit better when you're using it, and that's kind of that sweet spot.
Michael:I think that we're starting to land ourselves in of those small tweaks. We go out and we use this stuff on the range, we try to run it through as many battery of tests that we can and evaluate it with different magazines or whatever else, and try to throw as much as we can at it to try to find some weak points or some things that we could just slightly tweak, just an angle of the way the pouch is sewn or whatever else. It could be tons of things, but we're really focusing on dialing in the ergonomics of the equipment, the actual use case and the functionality. That can get that all married up together. So, and not trying to reinvent the wheel with crazy cutting edge materials and stuff. Yeah, of course we want to like stay on top of those things and know what's out there, but as far as incorporating that on a large manufacturing scale, you know, we're just probably always going to be a little bit of a step behind of where your smaller shops can get away with those types of things, for sure, yeah.
Isaac:Yeah, and a step behind, though, does mean fewer unpleasant surprises. Sure, we discover like oh Hypalon, only last three years. We've been using it for three whole years. No one knew, because it was brand new.
Michael:Absolutely, absolutely.
Isaac:What is the Hypalon replacement now?
Michael:They did a, so if you're talking about Hank, there's Hank Halo, the same company. Apparently, they did some tweaks to it, so it's better, like with laser cutters and things like that. Okay, I think we have yet to see it actually roll out, though. Just got an analysis pass here, okay.
Isaac:I find it hard to keep up with all the textile stuff.
Michael:It's hard to keep up just within our little niche of the tactical industry, if you will. But you know, everything out there is sewn right now. There's so many textiles and different materials and some are, you know, made in the US and some are made overseas, and that just opens up all these other weird things I can get introduced. So, yeah, we actually work with just a really small segment of materials. Yeah, you know it's not that complex when you really break it down.
Isaac:Yeah. So, and you know, to be perfectly honest, that is true on the holster side as well Like there are all kinds of weird, advanced, super high tech, expensive polymers that you could do fancy things with, but that would be a $500 holster. Yeah, $500 holster is a terrible idea.
Michael:No, that's a great point. I think it was cry did like 330D pouches a while back and they started to find out they fell apart. You know, but that's not something you find out without the normal use case on it. So you can try to adopt all these things and roll them out, but then you know, you find out two years later or a year later like, oh, that was terrible, and now we have to redo everything. Yeah, so there is a certain amount of risk that you take on when you start to try to embrace that new thing.
Michael:But then what you're kind of getting into is you could make a pouch that is absolutely perfect, there's absolutely no compromises, does exactly what you want, has all the versatility, modularity, whatever word you want to use and does everything that you need. And it's probably going to be like a $200 pouch, right, yeah. And are people going to buy that? Yeah, right. So it's something we have to, like always balance out is what is the function for this product? As we're going through like ideation for a product, we have to hammer down that absolutely first, otherwise we get mission creep and we start trying to turn this product into well, what if it did this too? Oh, that'd be a cool feature. And by the time you're done with it, you have this mutant looking thing that you're trying to accomplish 20 different things with Right and oftentimes, whereas you could have just cut off half of those things and just made a different pouch. That is more focused on that.
Isaac:Yeah, and you know you're increasing the price, either with fancy materials or with the modularity where it's like this product is now 5% better at 5x the cost, Right, yes, this was well. It brings us back to kind of full circle. It brings us back to the basics and I think that in the military industrial complex, in the same way that a lot of us outside of the military have kind of got focused on the tip of the spear, I feel like the military industrial complex kind of got focused on providing the ultimate tools for the tip of the spear and everything else got neglected just a little bit. Do you think that's a?
Michael:Yeah, when I just look at what you would call soldier systems, where it's just your nylon, your tools, all of that, the equipment and from my experience in the Marine Corps it was your set issue gear didn't change for a full decade.
Michael:There was just no attention placed on that. Like, guys are still using front-site posts, m4s and stuff like that, whereas you get these soft units that are now doing M-Lock rails and they've got the latest and greatest in the fancy stuff. But the funding for the basic units has gotten better, at least on the Marine Corps side. For sure, they eliminated some tank battalions and things like that. But that helped fund what you're seeing now, like these modern Marines that are running around with high-cut helmets and definitely look the part right and they just have better materials. They have better resources now. So I think something got recognized a while back. Whether you like the tank exclusion or not, but it did go into something, yeah, interesting. So, yeah, you got to give and take a little bit, but I think there is more focus now on getting the rest of the conventional units brought up to another level where I think there was a solid decade where it was pretty neglected yeah, interesting.
Isaac:I know from some folks that I have talked to a lot of that comes from. The recent change is a lot of them have come from watching Ukraine and realizing like, oh yeah, this is kind of what warfare can look like. You need to be able to cover this entire line. That means all your conventional forces and then some.
Michael:Yeah, really truly wild, like the Ukraine stuff, thinking how things have come virtually full circle to trench warfare in modern times. But then what are the little twists on that with the drones and things like that and the countermeasures that have to be taken? So with modern tech, people are still digging holes.
Isaac:Oh, yeah, yeah. And it isn't just like we will strategically be able to pick the holes. That are special forces guys that have two, three, four years of training. It's like nope. This guy is 18 years old, he has two weeks of training and a shovel and we don't know if he's the place that's going to get attacked next. So we have 18-year-olds with shovels spread all over the line and there's no telling where stuff kicks off.
Michael:Absolutely. Yeah, this conflict has been very interesting and very eye-opening, I think, for a lot of people, like you're saying, starting to recognize that these conventional units really do have a place. We kind of got away from that with the GWAT and more specialized units basically doing conventional missions for the most part. You could definitely argue that, but I think ultimately that's really what it turned into.
Isaac:Yeah, and I mean this is all of human history, like you learn some lessons, you forget some lessons. Then you go back and have to relearn the lessons you forgot. And there has definitely been improvements, like Black Hawk Down, one of my favorite movies from the Band of Brothers cinematic universe. Of course you definitely see your regular infantry guys no herring protection, no night vision. I mean they left their armor behind on purpose. But there's a whole bunch of stuff that is more standard issue now that they didn't have back then and all the Delta guys have it Sure. And today regular guys have equipment loadouts that look more like the Delta Force guys in that movie than the infantry guys in that movie.
Isaac:Absolutely there have been a lot of lessons learned. There have been a lot of things developed and bought and issued and so forth, so it isn't like we've completely stayed static no At all. But I know that outside of the military community there's definitely been a focus on SEAL, Team 6 and the guys with the book deals, the people who get played by Mark Wahlberg Absolutely and then there's an awful lot of other people who need some focus and some attention and a lot of basic skills that need to be picked up before you're at the Mark Wahlberg level of fully funded super soldiers.
Michael:Yeah, one of my favorite memes was the kid that's getting over like six steps and it's starting at, like you know, just bought your first plate carrier and it's like you know CQB is the step that he's reaching for. But all the things in between of just like land nav and you know hand and arm signals or radio etiquette, you know just like really basic stuff, is all getting skipped over and it's like I think you'd be better served Building that foundation. It does not take long, it's not advanced, it's basic. For a reason, build that foundation and then start branching out from there.
Michael:But, yeah, people are kind of neglecting the old saying of the crawl walk run and they're just going straight to, you know, full on sprints, or at least trying. Yeah, they all want to be Mark Wahlberg. You want to look the part, you want to look cool and you can't downplay that People want to look cool and that's not something to not take seriously. Right, like, you have to pander to that at a certain point and I would say we do that with our own media production. Right, like Lucas has said it chocolate covered broccoli, I think.
Isaac:right Is his saying that's the big difference between Lucas and me. The T-Rex Labs channel. It is broccoli covered chocolate occasionally. Usually it's broccoli covered broccoli.
Michael:Maybe some cheese on the broccoli, that's kind of. That's a good twist. Yeah.
Isaac:I'm just going to see how many more times I can mention Mark Wahlberg before you. This is an audio podcast and so I'm just poking you and the audience can't tell. Every time I mention Mark Wahlberg, the super soldier, you make this face and I just want to keep saying it.
Michael:Well, it's just funny. I don't know Marky, mark and the funky bunch.
Isaac:See how the special forces command for me.
Michael:Don't even give me starting the whole lone survivor thing. That's probably way too controversial for this podcast.
Isaac:So basic skill sets, basic understandings. It's something that the citizen defense industry, the military industrial complex, the United States military and the people outside all probably need to think about. Yeah, mark Wahlberg, he should probably think about it too.
Michael:He should, yeah, I agree, I agree, maybe no, never mind, I'm not going to say that comment. Do we want to?
Isaac:end with Mark Wahlberg.
Michael:I don't know. We should probably say something else, yeah.
Isaac:So obviously, michael, you and I will keep having these conversations in-house, because we just do. I think my new desk location will be pretty close to your current desk location unless that gets changed again. But we should probably keep having this conversation on the podcast. So I would like you podcast listeners to contact team at trek-armscom to ask some specific questions about the basics or maybe to suggest some specific military field manuals, tactical publications that are useful, because there's probably lots of basics that we could cover and think about and it would be good to start building out that library. So I would appreciate your input. But also, we will be talking to Michael again at some point. You'll probably be writing some stuff for newsletters, but we can keep having conversations on the podcast.
Michael:Yeah, I would love to do that. So we just wrapped up in that TC series. I actually got a lot of really good responses from people writing in. Some have even led to phone calls with some folks, great conversations around all that. But yeah, I do plan on writing more articles, maybe not in the immediate future. I'm kind of focusing on some other things right now. You have a full workbook yes, yeah, but that is something I'd like to continue doing. And before you recommend the Ranger Handbook, yes, that is something that you can absolutely look through Improvised explosives.
Isaac:That's the most important one. Everyone should have that one remember.
Michael:Yeah, but that goes back into the whole basic thing. There's a lot of basics in the Ranger Handbook, but it is a handbook, not a manual necessarily. So I'd like to point that out, that it's for folks that have already been exposed to and or know, hopefully, the basics and that's something for them to reference, right. So probably not the best move to just go straight to the Ranger Handbook and familiarize yourself with all the other hubs or foundational basics first, right, yeah.
Isaac:I think it is really important to have those basics, but at the same time, I think that it is really helpful. It's more helpful once you have some basics under your belt, absolutely, but it is really helpful to suddenly be in over your head, because I think that gets people serious quickly, sure, and I think that getting in over your head also shows you just like how big the world is. Yeah, so when we started doing automation here at T-Rex, I went to a really high end. I didn't realize it was a super high end. I went to a really high end Zeiss metrology trade show. Okay, it was, every single bit of it was over my head. I learned nothing actionable from that event, but I suddenly and finally understood, like, how big this thing was and how many steps it was going to take, and I came away from that meeting knowing what the word metrology meant and that it was not metrology. So that was like I did learn something.
Isaac:I came away from that, the science of measuring stuff. I came away from that having such a better understanding of like the bounds or like how not the exact boundaries, but how wide this new field of engineering and automation and engineering for manufacture was Like. It gave me a picture and even though I came away with no real immediate practical like understandings, seeing the big picture for an entire day and being immersed in it gave me like a very clear idea of what to do next, even though what to do next had nothing to do with the particular trade show. How useful would it have been if I'd had two or three basics to go off of, what would have been massive.
Michael:Right, and then you could ask the right questions later there, exactly, but yeah, I could see it going both ways, absolutely. So yeah, open the Ranger handbook, comb through it, see if you understand it. If you already understand some of that stuff, absolutely use it. But otherwise you're going to have to revert back to something at some point You're going to have to know some of those basics.
Isaac:You know what questions to ask. Yeah Well, thank you so much, michael, for being on the podcast. I enjoy our conversations a lot, but it is fun to include the podcast listeners in a conversation or two as well. So I once again will commend you for starting PubClub and recommend that everybody listening to the podcast get into some of those pubs. We will link to them in the show notes and go back and read them at TC emails if you haven't, and contact team at trex-armscom for any other questions you want to ask Michael or any other pubs that you want to recommend that we go through in the future and go outside and touch grass.
Michael:Wonderful Brilliant's. On the basics.