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Today I am joined by Henry Chan of 9 Hole Reviews for the monthly Q&A – enjoy!
00:00 – Intro
00:34 – Kyrö sponsorship
02:14 – What is Henry’s take on the M7/M8 platform, and where does he think US Army small arms ought to focus on?
17:10 – Why aren’t more GunTubers at matches?
25:40 – Would Henry do Practical Accuracy video(s) on the .50 BMG?
33:50 – How have our relations with manufacturers, curators, collectors, etc changed over the years?
39:24 – What guns we’ve filmed have been the most surprisingly good and bad?
55:08 – What would each of us be doing if YouTube hadn’t worked out?
I laud what Henry Chan is saying here, but… I don’t think he “gets” it, either.
There’s a lunatic focus here, on the individual weapon. It reeks of the fascination with the sword, back in the days before firearms: The sword was the weapon of the leadership, the elite; the pole arm was the primary and most effective actual weapon issued to the soldier doing the actual fighting, yet nobody ever really wanted to spend a lot of time studying or romanticizing them
The reality is that the weapons doing the majority of the actual killing are not the modern-day equivalent of the sword, the overly-romanticized individual weapon, but by the supporting arms like machineguns, mortars, and drones.
Because of this factor, the entire discussion and thought process surrounding individual weapons is warped past all utility and discussion. As Ian rightly points out, the sight-range facts are out there: You’re not going to even get targets past 300m often enough to make them worthwhile, and the further reality is that those targets past that range band need to be addressed as area targets, not individual point targets.
That’s how you make war, as opposed to running a target match on a range.
People lose sight of what “making war” actually consists of. It is not a show of prowess between two champions out in front of their armies, nor is it a show of marksmanship prowess. It is sheer, unadulterated murder on an industrial scale, and when you forget that? You lose lives, treasure, and the war itself.
I feel safe in asserting that if you were to take an organization trained and equipped in the manner I would advise, to cold-heartedly murder the enemy as quickly and efficaciously as possible, and put it up against the current mentality wherein the idjits want the emphasis on killing individual targets out there in the great beyond?
I guarantee you that the former is going to be ruling the battlespace, which is going to be filled with the cold dead bodies of the latter. You do not win modern war by way of the “noble marksman”, you win modern war by coldly analyzing where the killing power actually is, and applying it as effectively as possible. The rifleman lost primacy in that arena sometime back around when massing infantry to conduct volley fire became untenable.
Deal with it. That’s reality. Today’s infantry is an arm that exists solely to provide close-in fire and security for the actual killing tools like the forward observe, the machinegun team, the mortar crews, and the drone operators. They don’t have a “primary arm” purpose any more, and haven’t for about the last hundred years. They’re an important part of the combined arms team, but they’re not the primary one any more.