My experience in the military was different. My squadron had a policy that only 5% of each job type could take leave at any given time. There were about 45 people who had the same job as me. Do the math: at most we could only use about 16 of the 30 days paid leave. If you include the four month deployments every two years when nobody could take leave, that drops to an average of just 14 days.
Those 14 days are not the same as the civilian world: if your leave went over the weekend then that counted towards your leave time. At the end of the year we were getting effectively the same 2 weeks of vacation I get now my civilian job. Only now I can take the days off I want rather than scheduling a year in advance.
Not only that, but many of those custom batteries do not react well in field conditions. They have a tendency to explode when wet. The semisealed lithiums are just not safe. I don't want to have to worry about carrying a small bomb when I'm wearing an AERPS kit.
For Air Force aircrew this seems to be changing. Most of the gear I've been issued in the last year runs on AA or AAA. GPS, NVGs, lip lamps, all commodity batteries.
Check our the technology section of their website. Towards the bottom they site excellent fatigue resistance. And the material is more elastic than Ti. At first glance of the properties I would have thought it was a metal-plastic matrix.
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My experience in the military was different. My squadron had a policy that only 5% of each job type could take leave at any given time. There were about 45 people who had the same job as me. Do the math: at most we could only use about 16 of the 30 days paid leave. If you include the four month deployments every two years when nobody could take leave, that drops to an average of just 14 days.
Those 14 days are not the same as the civilian world: if your leave went over the weekend then that counted towards your leave time. At the end of the year we were getting effectively the same 2 weeks of vacation I get now my civilian job. Only now I can take the days off I want rather than scheduling a year in advance.
Good for morale? Not in my unit.
Not only that, but many of those custom batteries do not react well in field conditions. They have a tendency to explode when wet. The semisealed lithiums are just not safe. I don't want to have to worry about carrying a small bomb when I'm wearing an AERPS kit.
For Air Force aircrew this seems to be changing. Most of the gear I've been issued in the last year runs on AA or AAA. GPS, NVGs, lip lamps, all commodity batteries.
Check our the technology section of their website. Towards the bottom they site excellent fatigue resistance. And the material is more elastic than Ti. At first glance of the properties I would have thought it was a metal-plastic matrix.