People still ask me why the IDF runs short of equipment. I answered that in detail a few months back in The Donors Are the Logistics, and nothing in that answer has changed.
Israel is in the longest war in its history, fought on more than one front. Gear goes into the field and comes back ruined. The army covers the floor. A gun. Bullets. A helmet and a vest, many of them older than the men wearing them. A bed and three meals a day. Everything above that floor lands on the unit, which in practice means it lands on donors.
That was the situation in the first month of the war. It is the situation now.
What has changed is what soldiers ask me for.
The second shortage
There are two gear problems on this base and only one of them gets attention.
The first is the one people picture when they hear the word shortage. A soldier has nothing. No uniform, or one uniform that is hanging wet on a line at six in the morning when the alarm sounds. I wrote about that day in One Uniform, If That. That problem is real and we are still working on it.
The second problem is quieter, and it is the one filling my WhatsApp now. The soldier has the item. The item is army issue. It was designed to be produced at scale and handed to a conscript for three years of service. It works.
Nobody designed it to be worn every day for two years by the same man.
A rifle sling is the clearest example I can give. The army strap is a length of webbing about an inch and a half wide. Put a rifle on it and hang it on a shoulder for a fourteen hour day and the webbing turns into a wire. Now do that for six hundred days. A padded sling costs under a hundred and fifty shekels and spreads that weight across the whole shoulder. The two items do the same job on paper. On a body they are completely different objects.
Boots are the same story. Army issue boots are heavy, stiff, and built to a price. A good pair of tactical boots is lighter, breathes, dries faster, and holds the ankle properly on broken ground. A soldier walking a perimeter for eight hours in each of them will tell you the difference inside a week.
Daniel
Daniel has a bad shoulder. It was bad before this round and it has been getting worse since May.
He is not going to say anything about it. That is not how it works here. A man with a shoulder problem who reports it gets pulled from the roster, and being pulled from the roster means the seven other men in his machlaka absorb his shifts. So he carries the rifle on the other side, then switches back when that one starts hurting, and he keeps going.
I got him a padded sling out of a donor shipment. That is the entire story. A strap.
He came and found me two days later to tell me he had slept through the night.
Lior
Lior is one of the mechanics on this base. He goes into Gaza and comes back out most days of the week. His job is recovering vehicles that break down behind enemy lines and getting them running again. He works under a tank in full kit, in the heat, with people who would like to shoot him somewhere nearby.
He has a bad back. He is in his forties. He has been doing this since October 2023.
His vest was army issue and it sat wrong on him. All of the load hanging forward and low, the plates heavy and the carrier cut for someone standing upright at a checkpoint, not for a man on his back under an engine block for an hour.
We got him a properly fitted carrier with lightweight ceramic plates. Same protection level. Several kilos lighter, and the weight distributed across his frame instead of dragging on his lower spine.
He is doing the same job today that he was doing in June. The difference is that he expects to still be doing it in December.
What we have distributed in the last three months
This went to sadir and miluim both. Units by Gaza, on the Lebanese border, on the Jordanian border, soldiers in training and soldiers in regular service. Combat soldiers, drivers, mechanics, logistics staff.
- 110 tactical uniforms
- 75 Rudy Project sunglasses
- 45 padded rifle slings
- 40 Rudy Project ballistic glasses
- 35 vests and chest rigs
- 30 helmets
- 30 sets of ceramic plates
- 6 pairs of tactical boots
- 4 drones
The boot number looks small next to the rest of that list, and there is a reason for it. Boots are the one item we handle one soldier at a time. Every pair is a specific request, either from the soldier himself or from his family, and we check each one before we buy. What he already has. Whether there is a medical issue behind the request. Sizing, which has to be right the first time because there is no exchanging anything out here.
We vet every request that comes in that way. Boots are just the item where the vetting shows up in the numbers.
The part I have stopped apologizing for
When I post a photo of a rifle sling or a pair of boots, I get messages telling me to spend the money on something that matters more.
The army buys equipment for an army. It buys to a specification, in bulk, at a price that works across hundreds of thousands of soldiers. It does not buy for Daniel's shoulder or for Lior's spine. There is no line item in the defence budget for the fact that a specific man has now been carrying a specific weight for six hundred days.
After two years of war, the body is the piece of equipment wearing out fastest, and it is the one the army cannot issue a replacement for.
A padded strap is a readiness item. A pair of boots that fit is a readiness item. A vest that sits correctly on a man with a damaged back is the difference between that man working in Gaza next month and that man sitting at home on profile.
Those items cost between one hundred and two thousand shekels each. Replacing the soldier costs the army a trained mechanic it does not have a spare of.
I buy the strap.
To help us get gear to soldiers:
US (501c3 tax deductible): https://givebutter.com/smiles-for-chayalim