I wonder if my feelings are affected by the culture of my reserve unit when I first arrived. It was small, most of the members had been on multiple operations before, and due to the nature of the reserves in the UK at the time, nobody turned up if they didn't want to. The guys who were regularly attending training were well motivated and often older and more mature than their regular counterparts, hence the feeling that we could be trusted to square our own shit away.
Went on ops with a regular unit, and they also didn't see the need for a formal packing list. There were some items you had to have, but everything else was mission specific and worked on the theory that all you should have in your webbing/on your Osprey is ammo and water. As for daysacks, in vehicles they were set up as grab bags if you had to bail in a hurry, but on foot patrols you cut down your personal gear to fit into one of the side pouches, and the rest of the daysack was for Section/Flight ammo and kit. Of course, some of that may have been affected by the fact I was on mortars and thus we potentially had to carry a lot more crap than everyone else, hence we were pretty brutal with binning stuff off when required. That, and mortars tended to have the older and more mature guys on the squadron.
Came back to my unit, and, as mentioned, it had suddenly gone from 25% manned to 100%, and most of the new manpower did need some handholding compared to the old bunch. As a result, we turned to relying on the PAM for packing lists, and now I have webbing with far too much stuff in it that should be in my daysack or bergen, and bergens that are a good weight for road marches, but not at all representative of what is carried on ops.
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