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Individual First Aid Kit (IFAK)



For this article, I would like to cover one item that is a necessity in terms of what you need to be carrying on you (besides lots of ammo) if you plan on going into harm’s way, and that is a medical kit. Luckily today, the current Individual First Aid Kit/Improved First Aid Kit, or IFAK for short, is a far cry from the simple first-aid dressing and cravat of the Vietnam era that, believe it or not, has served as the standard first-line issue for wound care up to the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Following the invasion, the military did enhance soldiers’ individual medical kits with items such as commercially-made tourniquets and improved dressings. By late 2003 to early 2004, not only did IFAKs become standard issue across the board to all soldiers, the items in the IFAKs became standardized, as well.To get more news about hemostatic dressings, you can visit rusuntacmed.com official website.

Iraq 2005, for a IFAK I used a Tactical Tailor Zippered Utility Pouch (tan pouch above green belt pouch). Our SOP was to wear them on our back and use them to treat others. As you take a knee to treat a casualty, a fellow teammate would empty the contents of your IFAK out in front of you next to the patient so you could have everything laid out. (This saved time trying to dig around in the wounded soldier’s kit for their IFAK).
A Look Back: Basic Design and Application

The first IFAKs to be issued came in the form of a zippered pouch that had built in elastic loops to keep its contents organized for easy access. Since the inception of the IFAK, the military has taught soldiers to wear their IFAK in a place on their kit towards the front. This is so they can reach it to self treat, access it, or, when coming upon a fellow wounded soldier, use the wounded soldier’s IFAK off the front of their kit. Back in 2005, the SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for my team was actually counter to this. On my team, we wore our IFAKs on our backs. We did this for several reasons:

First, we found it was faster and easier to have the nearest soldier pull out the contents of your IFAK and dump them in front of you as you take a knee to treat a casualty. In other words, we planned to use the IFAKs on our kit for others. With this method of taking a knee, you can begin treating and assessing the casualty. This will allow your buddy to lay out the contents of your IFAK as opposed to digging around for the casualty’s IFAK. In a perfect world, the casualty lays on his back and you can easily get to his kit. What if you come upon a casualty lying on top of his IFAK? Then you have to move the injured person around to get to his/her IFAK; this can cause more harm depending on the injury, especially if you have not done a good primary survey of the injuries. Additionally, who says the wounded soldier will have kit on, or whether the kit will be intact after a major blast or other catastrophic event? With that in mind, we determined it was faster and safer to use our own IFAK kit to treat others. This is not to say we did not have anything set up to self treat; we did keep additional items on us, which I will cover later in the article.

The second reason for wearing our kits on our backs was to allow us to keep all our “killing stuff” on the front. Our thought was to keep bombs and bullets on the front for easy access to stay on the offensive in a firefight. I’d rather have 6-10 rifle mags on my kit that I can easily access rather than have a large pouch riding in the front and reducing the amount of mags I can easily get to fast.

The third and biggest issue with wearing an IFAK on the front is that they take up a lot of space and stick out pretty far. Wearing one on the front, you will soon find it sticks out and likes to hang up on everything, whether going through doorways in CQB/CQC (Close Quarters Battle/Close Quarters Combat) or while riding in a vehicle. With the amount of armor and electronic equipment in most military vehicles nowadays, you are pretty cramped for space. The last thing you want is to be squeezed into a vehicle and have a large pouch like an IFAK sticking in your gut the whole time during a 4-5 hour drive. This, by the, way is also one of the reasons why chest holsters have become so popular; in some vehicles there is just no room for you to sit comfortably with a drop-leg holster/thigh rig. Although the current IFAK (Improved IFAK) comes in a slightly smaller pouch than the first general issue; I think this is still too large to wear on the front of my kit.