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Prior to 1986, Group Industries imported BAR parts kits and then manufactured and registered full-auto receivers for them. This produced transferrable guns which were subject to NFA registration and the $200 transfer tax – which was a much more significant sum at that time than it is today. Some of the potential customers were people (like reenactors) who wanted guns that looked and handled like real BARs but were not regulated by the NFA. To satisfy this subgroup of customers, Group designed a receiver which neither had nor could be adapted to have a gas piston, rendering the gun manually operated. It would fire from an open bolt, but had to be manually recocked after each shot. This was not legally a machine gun, and he made 68 of them.
When the Hughes Amendment to the FOPA passed in 1986, manufacture of new transferrable machine guns ceased, and Group Industries went out of business. Its assets were sold off, including a number of parts kits and unbuilt M.O.R. receivers. One of the buyers was Ohio Ordnance Works (then called Collector’s Corner). They got ten receivers and after selling them, decided to develop a semiautomatic BAR for that same non-NFA BAR market. That gun ended up being the M1918A3, which is still available from them today.
[OFF-TOPIC so ignore if you wish]
New-fangled M7 rifle https://taskandpurpose.com/news/m7-pentagon-testing-office-list/ was dropped from a program the Pentagon designed to run independent stress tests on new weapon systems for real-world scenarios.
Is that alerting news or just effect of bureaucratic move which resulted in dropping 99 programs from jurisdiction of DOT&E?
Look… Trying to make sense of what the hell goes on behind the scenes in the US military procurement system is just going to leave you curled in a fetal position in some lost corner, sobbing quietly to yourself about wanting to have it make some sense…
Not. Healthy.
You’ll know what you know when the BS finally oozes it’s way to the surface in public, after the idjit types finally acknowledge the reality that the M7/M250 are basically the Tonapah power plant of small arms. This will no doubt happen, it’s merely a question of “When” and “How many bodies will be attached to the bill for “Lessons Identified and Then Bloody Well Ignored”, otherwise known as “Lessons Learned”. Because the US military is anything but a “learning organization”. If there were such a term as “anti-learning” that would make sense in that usage, that’s what they are. The active ignorance the member participants in this “system” put on display is quite literally maddening, to any sane observers.
Seek not for “reason” or “logic”; abandon all hope, ye who enter…
“(…)abandon all hope, ye who enter…”
I fail to comprehend how Kanye West is relevant for described situation, nonetheless above description would suggest said system does prefer TYPE 3 of https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00284-9 as decision makers, that is Compulsive, who persisted in harmful decisions despite both punishment and informational intervention.
Sounds like the Mark 14 torpedo all over again.
You have no idea how typical that whole episode is, inside US military procurement.
I could point to dozens, if not hundreds of examples.
Case in point: MICLIC. The choices were between a USMC-optimized design and the British Giant Viper, which was designed by the same combat engineering geniuses that brought us God alone knows how much working gear for combat Engineers. The dudes running the tests all thought that the winner was Giant Viper; it performed the best, cleared the longest length of lane, and was optimized for ground-based armored warfare. The MICLIC was designed and built for clearing surf-zone obstacles like the ones you see in the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. As such, it had a much heavier charge line and a lot shorter distance-cleared. The numbers are interesting: MICLIC gets you around 70m, usually. Giant Viper, typically upwards of 250-300m, depending on crosswinds and other issue. If you’re a US Army Combat Engineer, what you’re looking at to clear 300m of Soviet-doctrine minefield is a minimum of three MICLIC shots, maybe four. If the enemy does not know where you’re breaching, by that point? LOL… They aren’t actually defending that obstacle belt.
Tactically, the MICLIC is inferior to the Giant Viper. Guess which one we bought…?
What’s even better is that all the guys doing the testing were adamantine-clear on the issue: Giant Viper won the test competition, hands-down. MICLIC wasn’t even in the running for what the Army wanted. Instead, we got MICLIC because… Well, nobody could ever really answer that question.
It was one of those “temporary stop-gap interim solutions” that was supposed to have been replaced by various other systems, none of which actually proved to work at all well: There was SLUFAE, or “Surface LaUnched Fuel-Air Explosive” that looked really cool on paper, but when they went to test it out, the issues of dispersal of explosives across actual open ground became an issue. Then they came up with some crazy-ass net affair that had shaped-charge submunitions tied into it at intervals, and… Well, the whole thing just didn’t work, was monstrously huge, and hauling that shipping-container sized abortion around on the battlefield was a non-starter.
We kept MICLIC mostly because there wasn’t anything else, and it worked. Supposedly. Until you talked to guys like Floyd Rockwell, who would gleefully describe to you how his guys doing area clearance after the liberation of Kuwait got mongosso money for having to clear the breach lanes they’d used MICLIC on, because it had the unfortunate habit of leaving a bunch of sensitized mines scraped off to the sides of the lanes by the secondary mine plows that proofed the lanes… Very few modern mines are susceptible to blast overpressure as a means of clearing them, and that’s the primary mechanism used by MICLIC. Unless you get the line charge into direct contact with the mine body, close enough for sympathetic detonation…? LOL. Just… LOL.
And, considering that the system itself ain’t exactly entirely safe to begin with, consisting of a Rube Goldbergesque rocket and firing system attached to 2000lbs of C4? Yikes. Just… Yikes. I hated prepping those damn things, and I hated even more having to supervise clearing the misfires, which happened often enough when I was an Observer/Controller that we thought we ought to be getting the same explosive hazard pay that EOD got.
I really have no idea how the Marines cope with prepping those damn things shipboard, before sending them off to clear beach obstacles. I would very much NOT like to take part in those operations, in any capacity. I’m actually rather surprised that the Navy lets those damn things on their ships in any sort of ready-to-fire condition.
If you need to clear passage in minefield AND do not want explosion before time comes then use CARPET https://defense-update.com/20060627_carpet.html
Carpet rockets contain only liquid fuel which is flammable but not explosive in regular operating conditions. Therefore, if Carpet rockets are hit in their canisters, they do not cause any danger to the system, vehicle or nearby troops
That looks like what SLUFAE wanted to be, but I’d lay you long odds that the Israelis have the same problems with it that we did with regards to weather conditions and consistency, and just accepted it all.
I remain highly dubious of the proposition that mine clearance via general application of high explosives to wide areas is at all effective; most fusing these days is sophisticated enough that blast overpressure doesn’t work, and if you’re trying for sympathetic detonation of military-grade explosives…? Dear God, the sheer volume of conventional explosives to achieve that for something like mine clearance? The mind boggles.
I think they’re going to eventually get down to what the Germans were doing with sappers on the Eastern Front, using drones. The Germans typically infiltrated and lifted mines in their breach lanes, or set explosives such that they could detonate them when they needed the line open. Drones will eventually be able to do this, and then we’ll be in a whole new world of measure/countermeasure…
If you can dig up the material, the German improvisations on the Eastern Front for countering mines make for really interesting reading. One of the things they used to do, in order to reduce “fear of mines” was hold their meetings to issue orders deep in minefields, which the parties going to the meeting had to safely traverse by discovering all the mines in their path… Or, so it was reported. I’m not sure I believe that one, because of the sourcing. What better way to encourage your American/British captors to go get themselves killed than by describing something like this…?
But, I heard the same “familiarization” idea from actual German sources I spoke to personally, soooo… Maybe they did do that.
Have I mentioned how much I hate mines? I don’t feel like I’ve made that point strongly enough…
BARs are one of the most formidable weapons in their class. Imagine one with an FRT. OOW, please imagine one with and FRT.
I honestly can’t imagine anything you could do with a BAR equipped with a Forced Reset Trigger that would be at all worthwhile, in any sense of the word that didn’t come from the viewpoint of an ammunition salesman…
Tactically, the BAR was always questionable: Too big a cartridge to really serve practically as mobile fire support, and designed for one-man use such that you couldn’t effectively deploy it meaningfully in a support role. The BAR was an example of a hastily-specified weapon designed by a genius just well enough that the military that ordered it was stuck with its half-assedness for most of the century, especially when you realize that the BAR wound up serving right up until Vietnam.
I love the BAR, but I like its evolved form a lot better, the one where the Belgians took and turned it upside-down and applied a belt-feed to it. You know… The M240 or MAG58?
The problem of the genius of Browning was that he wasn’t the kind of genius that does everything immediately right. All of his most successful weapons needed a lot of developement time and feedback to be polished to, almost, perfection.
IE, how to disassemble and clean his weapons almost always seemed like an afterthought to him (and the BAR is not an exception).
Main problem with the BAR is that, for how much mechanically sound it was, it had been made for a kind of tactic (marching fire) that didn’t really have any real use on the field. Then, it had been forced in a role (LMG) for which I often wonder if it was worse the BAR or the Breda 30.
The fact that it was already there in 1918 prevented the adoption of a better LMG, and the fact that BAR magazines only worked on the BAR, and the Ordnance wanted compatibility, worked against the adoption of a magazine fed M1 rifle.
You’ve restated my thesis about the BAR perfectly, here…
It seems to me that the 1986 “Hughes Amendment” is so much unconstitutional bullshit. There can be no doubt whatsoever that fully automatic weapons are valid militia arms. That is the criterion by which the Second Amendment must be judged. I am sure that the present Supreme Court would agree with this. A case really needs to be brought. Obviously, the people who spent $25,000 for a Sten gun might disagree.
Only $7K for a sten gun….
That’s a steal. Mind you, they were only fifty shillings when new.
Yeah but how much is that in today’s mcheap? I know it’s cheap. But prices and wages were lower then too.
I’d guess it would be about fifty pounds in our devalued currency. Still pretty cheap.
Quite true. Thanks. U.S. websites cite numbers from $3-7 USD. Even allowing for infection that’d be under $100 I am guessing
Fifty shillings maybe in materials, not labour (of love!)