The Emdom USA/militarymorons.com IAP, or Immediate Access Pouch. Without doubt the best mag pouch design I’ve ever seen that never gained any significant notoriety, which is pretty crazy given what it does and the time it was brought to the market.
It’s difficult to track the timeline of any given piece of equipment since there isn’t exactly a wikipedia or IMDB of tactical gear, but I did manage to dig up that fact that Emdom brought this thing to market at least 8 years ago, if not even earlier than that with prototypes. We may live in a kydex utopia now of brilliant pouches that provide good retention while still allowing instant access, but that was not really the case for the most part when this pouch came to market. The Eagle FB pouches and ESSTAC KYWIs have been around for a while of course, but they never really gained a huge amount of popularity because it takes a long time for the market to adapt to new concepts. One of those concepts being the idea of not having anything going over the mag for no-question retention.
If I were to guess I’d say the elastic that provides the retention here is an idea based on the standard double mag pouch that Eagle popularised at least 15 years ago and has since been copied more times than you’ve had hot dinners. The old trick of course being to tuck in the lid on your double pouches (which were usually too tight for realistic use with 2 mags anyway) to create a pouch that provided fast access to a single magazine. Here I think the concept has been pushed further, some might say to its’ logical conclusion. Removing the lid entirely, adding a plastic piece inside the the mouth of the pouch so it stays open making indexing a snap and then of course only sizing the pouch for that single mag.
The attachment method is obsolescent by modern standards in terms of bulk and weight reduction but there’s no arguing the resilience of the design or construction of either the webbing or MALICE clips. Emdom build things to the high standards anyone would expect from duty use gear and though I might choose ESSTAC pouches or MP2 inserts as a preference these days, I still like this design a lot. I just wish I’d listened to my buddy Ko-Tac and bought more back in the day, because they would’ve done exactly what I was looking for.
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