Picture this: On a windswept training area, a young female infantry soldier hauls herself out of a fire trench and shoulders her weapon. Her plate carrier rides up toward her chin, the shoulder straps are cinched as tight as they will go, yet the weight still hangs awkwardly.
Ten years ago, she might have been told to “get on with it.”
In today’s British Army, that bad fit is treated as a design problem rather than a personal failing.
For most of modern history, military uniforms have been structured around a single, convenient fiction: the “average” male body. Height, chest, limb length, hand size – all the numbers that informed boots, webbing, and body armor came from men because they were the only ones expected to fight on the frontlines.
Fraying fiction
As more women moved into more physically demanding military roles, that fiction began to fray, at least in Britain.
In Israel, even as more women join combat units, their uniforms – and their equipment – remain very much designed for men, despite obvious differences in height, weight, and build.
The first step in fixing it is data. Engineers cannot design for soldiers they cannot measure.
Over recent years, the British Army and its suppliers have been building up far more detailed “anthropometric” profiles of the force. Not just a simple S/M/L but a spread of heights, limb lengths, and body shapes across both genders and a range of ethnic backgrounds.
It turns out there is no neat divide between “men’s sizes” and “women’s sizes” but rather a messy continuum of bodies.
Body armor
Body armor is the most obvious battleground. Body armor that is too big leaves gaps or rides so low that it interferes with hips and weapon handling. Body armor that is too small or the wrong shape digs into shoulders, ribs, and collarbones, causing bruising and, over time, injury.
Designers are experimenting with more plate shapes and carrier cuts, tweaking where straps sit and how weight is distributed. The aim is a family of options that can be mixed and matched so each soldier gets protection that actually sits where it should.
Load-bearing gear is going through the same rethink. Traditional webbing assumed a reasonably broad chest and a long torso.
For shorter soldiers, male or female, that can mean ammunition pouches sitting halfway around the back, or hip belts cutting across the wrong part of the pelvis.
Newer systems focus on adjustability and modularity: more anchor points, more ways to route weight to the hips rather than the shoulders, and more scope to place pouches where hands naturally fall.
The concept is simple: The kit should follow the body, not the other way around.
Building boots
Then there are the boots – in days gone by, a quiet source of daily misery. A half size too big to accommodate a wide forefoot can translate into blisters, toe injuries, and poor balance on rough ground.
Introducing more widths and lasts (the molds around which boots are built) sounds unglamorous compared with hi-tech body armor.
Still, for an infantry soldier covering 20 kilometers carrying a heavy pack, it can be the difference between finishing the march and joining the injured.
None of this is driven purely by comfort. Poorly fitting kit costs money in lost training days due to injury, medical discharges, and reduced performance.
When a section is struggling up a steep slope, nobody cares whether the person carrying the machine gun is male or female; what matters is whether his/her kit lets him/her move, breathe, and fight as effectively as the person next to him/her.
Redesigning uniforms
In the end, designing uniforms and equipment for a mixed force means designing for reality. An army is made up of individuals, not averages – tall, short, broad, slight.
As a force’s demographics evolve, its equipment must evolve with them. More women in combat roles may have prompted a better-fitting kit, but its benefits spread far wider.
In the quiet world of straps, plates, and boot soles, the British Army is learning that in this case, “inclusion” is just another word for sound engineering.■
Andrew Fox is a retired British Army officer and research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.