Tactical:
Of, referring to, or constituting actions carefully planned to gain a specific military end.
So most people are using the word incorrectly. But people do that with lots of words, so the definition should now be:
Of, referring to, or constituting equipment or actions...
Do you like freeze dried food?
Cargo pants?
Synthetic insulation?
Kifaru backpacks?
KA-BAR?
Fuel tabs?
GPS?
Digital cameras?
Maps?
Canned food?
Do you use a belt made from sturdy webbing?
What do they all have in common? They're all tactical. Each was developed as a part of the War machine.
Some of the stuff marketed as tactical is just silly, but a lot of it is designed, developed and employed to assist in the killing of bad guys.
So tactical has become a giant industry to assist good guys beating bad guys any way possible. That's a good thing in my book. And as a result, normal people have access to all kinds of cool stuff.
I don't understand all the hate surrounding this word. Does marketing stuff as tactical get some people to spend money on stuff they don't need? Sure it does, that's marketings job. To get you to buy stuff.
Essentially, I see two broad groupings of things there. 1] Heap of stuff that has properties X,Y,Z that someone advertises as available. 2] Heap of any old crap that someone is trying to manipulate you into buying, using whatever means.
Sure, there is a bit of overlap between those two groups, and to a point that's fine. Caveat emptor and all that. A guy walks into a surplus store to be told that a 58 pattern sleeping bag is a real bargain, you just wont find a down bag which is that warm on the civilian market at anything approaching that price, whilst playing down or omitting everything that is rubbish about it. I don't have a problem with that. The savvy buyer knows his subject and wont trip on that. Game on, cherry picking.
Where I have a problem is with stuff that is damn near exclusively in group 2. Group 2 concerns mind molesters. Propaganda, theories of attitude change, persuasive communication, call it what you like, there is a dirty great machine that spends billions finding out how to leverage others to their will. And I am extremely resistant to that.
It doesn't make much difference to me whether they are telling a Minister, President, King that holding his hands in such a way a using key hook words will secure more votes, or that tagging as invented by NASA for use in space sells more pens on the home shopping channel. Those that know tell those that don't how to sell any old crap to people that know even less. It doesn't really matter what the crap is, nobody cares, the goal is simply to get you to buy it.
Pertaining to the stuff that concerns us here, a lot off the current peddle involves the tactical hook. Before that we had the bushcraft hook, and all the junk foisted on to feeble minds that wanted to identify with the imagery from some TV show. Before that L00K W0W, SURVIVAL TIN OPENER. And so on.
It's not like this stuff bothers me as such, it rather effortlessly goes down the spam filter chute, but it can be fun to take the piss out of it. I'll just has happily dig at the idiot buying into QVC manipulation and watches designed for space as I will the Copro Winfrey influence machine, or the guy that buys-in to the tactical needle and thread repair kit at some massively inflated price.
