NATO Battle Rifles book:
https://www.headstamppublishing.com/cold-war-battle
00:30 – What is a “battle rifle”?
03:02 – What is the specific definition of “full power cartridge”?
07:59 – Will the US 6.8×51 lead to more widespread battle rifle adoption?
10:54 – Full auto practicality in battle rifles (w/ FRTs and such)
12:40 – Favorite hypothetical boutique AR-10 chambering?
14:14 – Why no bullpup battle rifles?
16:04 – BM59 vs M14
18:46 – Do any militaries still issue battle rifles?
19:57 – SBR’d battle rifles and diminishing returns
22:48 – What is the ideal caliber
24:34 – Battle rifles in non-NATO cartridges
26:16 – Is the Colt Monitor a battle rifle?
Custom 7mm BAR video: https://youtu.be/HsRUMLE9ZQ8
28:24 – Soviet post-WWII battle rifles?
29:10 – Should NATO have adopted 7.5x54mm French?
31:05 – Would a 7.62x51mm AR-18 be viable?
32:56 – What if the .280 British had been adopted?
34:47 – Is “battle rifle” a useless term today?
35:25 – Interchangeable caliber rifles, like the SCAR program
36:36 – Battle rifles as a specialized tool like PDWs?
38:25 – Battle rifles in competition shooting
40:25 – Best & worst: SVT, MAS, G41/43, Hakim
43:25 – Earliest point a battle rifle armed force would have been viable?
45:10 – Best battle rifle scaled down, and best intermediate rifle scaled up?
48:15 – Why does the FAL drip so hard?
49:38 – Does experience of Ukraine lead to more battle rifle usage?
50:52 – Is the SKS a battle rifle?
“(…)Favorite hypothetical boutique AR-10 chambering?(…)”
There exists 7mm Rem Mag derivative of said design dubbed Great Lakes Firearms GL-10 7mm Rem Mag North Woods 24″ Stainless Steel Barrel GL10LA7REMSS-NTW https://gunprime.com/products/great-lakes-firearms-gl-10-7mm-rem-mag-north-woods-24-stainless-steel-barrel-gl10la7remss-ntw
There exists 12 gauge derivative of AR-10 dubbed Intrepid RAS-12 / AR-12 https://modernfirearms.net/en/shotguns/u-s-a-shotguns/intrepid-ras-12-ar-12-eng/ though it use own type of ammunition NOT typical 12 gauge
There exists .45-70 Auto derivative of AR-10 dubbed Christine https://www.phoenixweaponry.com/ar-10/ar10_rifles/christine_45-70
“(…)Battle rifles in non-NATO cartridges(…)”
MAS-49 and derivative thereof are not singular example of Cold War-era non-NATO cartridge weapons of this category, as Switzerland deployed Stgw.57 https://modernfirearms.net/en/assault-rifles/switzerland-assault-rifles/sig-510-stgw-57-eng/ using 7.5×55 mm GP11 cartridge.
The Swiss choice of terms to describe that weapon are equally idiosyncratic… “Sturmgewehr/Assault Rifle”? Seriously? God knows I love me some StG57 goodness, but calling that wannabe Light Machinegun an “assault rifle” really butchers the entire concept. Like, did the Swiss really know what an assault rifle was supposed to be capable of…?
Noun nomenclature has consequences, folks. Get it right; language is a tool for thought, and if your language/terminology is flawed, all that can flow forth from your thinking is error.
‘Battle rifle,’ as I have heard it used, is mainly meant to say more about the speaker than the weapon. An ingenuous way to hint at expertise not present in his listeners. Sort of like ‘synergy’ or ‘innovation’ in business. Or like why dogs pee on trees
That would be the main reason I find the use of it on this site so bloody painful…
If you want to use Swiss technology AND Sturmgewehr but fear 7,5×55 might be too much for your shoulder then use Modell 1947 https://firearmcentral.fandom.com/wiki/7,5mm_Sturmgewehr_47
“(…)Earliest point a battle rifle armed force would have been viable?(…)”
When decision makers would accept higher volume of fire at cost of accuracy.
.458 Winchester Magnum M1 Garand- see Kentucky Ballistics’ review of the rifle/cartridge combo.
45/70 in that mini soccom M14 version, but with 8 rnd Garand clips; bet that would sell – You know at normal prices, 7.62 one, or…
The American military wedded itself to .30 caliber in 1892, and until the advent of the AR15/M16/5.56 cartridge the theory was .30 was the best bullet diameter for all around military use.
It wasn’t all of the military, just the bits responsible for choosing the weapons.
Which, interestingly enough, were very rarely the guys that were supposed to be doing the fighting, the Infantry. Look over the rosters of who made the decisions, and it’s mostly down to Ordnance and other non-combat types.
Which is ‘effing bizarre, when you start thinking about it. Kinda like “How’d the FBI manage to be the only government agency in the history of everything that wound up being run by the same guy for fifty-odd years…?”
Look up “Gaston B. Means”. A real-life “Charles Augustus Milverton”.
When William J. Burns ran the Bureau of Investigation (Not “Federal” yet) from 1919 to 1924, Means was Deputy Director. And used his powers to gather dirt on pretty much anybody who was anybody, in or out of DC.
When Coolidge appointed Hoover to replace Burns in 1924 (probably the only major mistake “Silent Cal” ever made), Hoover fired Means but kept his “files”. And added to them.
He remained as Director until his passing in 1972 because everybody knew what had happened to the very few people who bucked him.
Incidentally, his one major booboo was siding with Westbrook Pegler in the Reynolds vs. Pegler libel case. Pegler lost and Hoover had to do some fancy footwork to avoid getting splashed with the mud afterward.
Hoover was very good at blackmail. in fact, it seems to have been his only actual skill set.
cheers
eon
That’s all history that nobody teaches, today. Because, it’s supposedly “irrelevant”.
I’d contend that as things are founded, so they go on. And, given the quite literal darkness surrounding the founding of the FBI…? You should not be too surprised at what it has turned itself into, these days.
Personally, I think there ought to be a totally different setup, when it comes to the Federal government executive agencies. Ain’t nobody ought to be in a position where they are solely “Federal”. Every position throughout the national-level government ought to be filled by personnel seconded there from the states, in order to avoid the issues we have with regards to Federal overreach. The FBI ought to be more of a national-level gendarmerie, filled with temporarily-assigned state and local officers, all of whom have to be vetted and experienced police before they even qualify for the FBI academy, another thing that ought to be set up differently. Like in Congress, nobody should be able to “make a career” working for the Feds. Hell, I’d go so far as to say that the only pensions they ought to be getting are from their home states, period. Not even pay for Congress; they all ought to be paid by their state and their electorates… You ain’t doing your job, sweetheart? You won’t be getting paid, then.
Come to think of it, why don’t we vote on what we are gonna be paying our representatives in Congress…? That’d solve a lot of problems; say someone gets into office on lies, then doesn’t do what they said they’d do. Instead of waiting until the next election cycle, you just need to get enough signatures on a petition to zero out their pay until an election/pay decision event could be held… That’d put the fear of God into them all, along with the promise of forensic audits for all and sundry in their families.
A lot of the issues we have with things like the Bryan Kohberger case is that small rural (hell, even major urban ones…) jurisdictions just don’t have the money, experience, or resources to investigate or prosecute really major crimes. As such, there ought to be a secondary level of regional or national policing/prosecutorial power that can parachute in and do what is proper. The FBI ain’t it, the way it is these days; way too politicized, and the problem with its agents is the same one you have everywhere you try these “Educate and put in place laterally to run things” paradigms we’ve become so fond of. You can’t substitute classroom time for the tacit and tribal knowledge you get from practical experience actually in the field.
“Someone gets into office on lies”. And this written apparently without irony. Too funny…
“(…)Hoover was very good at blackmail. in fact, it seems to have been his only actual skill set.(…)”
That would explain reality bends inside FBI Story (1959) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052792/
The book it was based on, while “officially” written by Dan Whitehead, was pretty much dictated to Whitehead by Hoover.
I read it as a kid. And actually believed it.
Of course, I believed the TV show, too.
By age twenty-two I was working with actual Bureau personnel, and learned how it really worked.
clear ether
eon
Oh no, not again.
Best definition of “Battle Rifle”;
A true “Battle Rifle” would be one you could take into a scrum and actually hit something with. With enough power to put an enemy on the ground with one or two center hits. But not so much recoil as to be uncontrollable in automatic fire by anybody smaller than Dwayne Hudson.
Plot those three factors on an X-Y-Z axis and the intersection point looks suspiciously like an M4 carbine. Or an AKS-74. Or a FAMAS. Or even (ack) an SA80. (Assuming you can ever get that last one to work.)
All fire “small caliber, high-velocity” (SCHV) rounds. All have maximum effective ranges of about 300 meters. (No, I do not give a s#!t what anybody’s Ordnance Department claims.) In the hands of the average “citizen soldier”, none are effective beyond about 200 meters, and 100 meters or less is their “best practical range”.
Hand that “citizen soldier” a “full-.30” caliber class “battle rifle”, and you can divide all the above numbers in two to get the effective range of <i<that rifle in his hands.
It takes years to make a rifleman that can handle “that much” rifle. And even then, he’s not going to be hitting much with it on full-auto. That’s Newton’s Third Law of Motion in action and no Act of Congress can repeal it.
The only thing dumber than handing the infantry a rifle chambered for the support machine-gun round is giving the support MG team a machine gun firing the intermediate round of the infantry rifle. No matter how much you play with bullet weights and powder charges, the result will always fall short of the job requirements for the support machine gun. (Assuming that your army even knows what those requirements are, which is not guaranteed today.)
The infantry rifle and support machine gun are two entirely different breeds. They require two entirely different classes of ammunition.
Every attempt to have “One Round To Rule Them All” has failed. Just as this latest one (6.8 x 51mm) will fail. It’s too much cartridge for the rifle and probably not enough for the MG. At best, you’ll end up with the old Japanese and Spanish “solution” of having two different loadings, one for the rifle, the other more powerful one for the MG. Which is just the two-cartridge solution hiding behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz.
I still maintain that in every military formation, especially Ordnance, immediately retiring every officer O-6 and above would be a massive improvement.
clear ether
eon
^^^^THIS^^^^
Absolutely this.
eon must be a genuine-article Grade-A genius, because he agrees with me so very much on this issue.
Especially on the “Retire all the O6 types” idea. Reason I say that is because I’ve been inside the belly of the beast, and I’m here to tell you that the promotion boards have been using the precise wrong formula for decades on end. For ever Sam Damon, we’ve promoted twenty-eleven Courtney Massengale types.
That’s about the best definition I’ve read. I think that in addition to gun writer use and abuse of the term “battle rifle” that we should also note the contributions of the German language in much of this English language lunacy and bewilderment?
I mean, it was to suit the bellicosity of Herr Hitler that “Sturmgewehr” was contrived… Postwar, the DDR commies were satisfied to call the things MPi or “machine pistols” or SMGs even though they clearly were what in Russian is an “Avtomat.” A category apparently not-translate-able? The Wessis, meanwhile, decided to adopt the “G-1” and “G-3” in which the G stood for “Gewehr” or rifle. But like the Swiss, persisted in calling these service rifles “sturmgewehre.” Enter the U.S. gun scribe, who wanted to differentiate between “assault rifles” that used SCHV or intermediate cartridges from those using the MG cartridge…
Decades ago, in some of the same U.S. firearm literature, I once read a British “squaddie” or perhaps he was “section leader” describing IRA weapons in Armagh after some thwarted ambush or other during the “Troubles.” He was nonplussed about the Thompson’s gun and the M-1 carbine, but saw in the Garand rifle the peer equivalent to his issue L1A1 self-loading rifle. Nato squads evolved a synthesis of the German and U.S. WWII experiences: the rifles of the USA with the GPMG of ze Germans.
Again, I decry the term “battle rifle” as being both redundant and confusing.
As Ian points out, once you start trying to define the term with concrete terms and examples, you have to include a whole hell of a lot of things that are clearly not in the category that “most people think of when using the term”. Which is a clear sign that your terminology is flawed and inadequate…
Something I will continue to contend we need to keep working towards reducing. Small arms are confusing enough without adding in bullshit meaningless marketing terms like “battle rifle” that nobody in the military profession has ever used, and which were arrived at via the good offices of quasi-literate American gun magazine writers.
I mean, if you’re going to have to include an RSC 1917 in the same class as an AR-10, you’ve set your parameters so wide as to be effectively useless.
The terminology ought rightly to be something like “Service Rifle”, and then differentiate from there as needed with constructions like “NATO Service Rifle”.
Ian is absolutely correct to focus on how these things are used, in order to create the terminology to discuss them, but I don’t think he’s really addressing the realities of the various situations.
An RSC1917 was used almost identically to the then-standard Lebel and Berthier rifles; the Garand was tactically indistinguishable from the M1903 in all variants, just as the MAS49/56 was basically indistinguishable from the M14/G3/FAL in tactical usage. As such? You really cannot form a useful taxonomy around these things.
We should be working towards simplicity and clarity, along with consistency. The term “Battle Rifle” is, as Ian demonstrates, neither simple nor clear, and it sure as hell isn’t consistent if you’re going to include the Federov and other early semi-auto offerings in the category.
I was under the impression that we’d all decided that the Federov was a nascent assault rifle, anyway…
The really dangerous idiocy here is that the people that came up with ideas like the NGSW are influenced by this sort of thing, and I’d wager that the real reason we have the NGSW in the first place is that so many of our idjit class have bought into these arguments about the “Lone Rifleman” and the cult of the individual marksman, rather than the sordid truth that the small arms fight belongs to the machinegun and mortar out past about 400m. Realistically, it really belongs to those weapons from roughly 200m, but since you can still be sort of effective just killing individual targets out to maybe 400m, there’s a lot of slop-over with regards to it all.
My take is that the reality is that individual weapons need to be light, handy, and capable of doing what amounts to the equivalent of skeet shooting for the close-in final approach sort of combat. If you’re carrying something like what the NGSW program produced for the individual weapon, odds are pretty good that you’re not going to be doing very well in that close-in and last-ditch reality; as such, the weapon is a failure.
Talk to some of the guys who fought with the M14 in Vietnam; few will complain about the long-range issues with them, aside from the fact that they encountered vanishingly few occasions for that. What they complained about was that “grabbing the belt buckle” sort of engagement, where they just could not dominate the firefights. This points to a reality, which is that the individual weapon needs to be optimized for those roles, and that’s just not something that the big NATO-caliber guns were good for. I dare say that if the US had adopted the T48 FAL, they’d have run into the same problems and come to the same conclusions as the Brits themselves did in Malaya: Something lighter and handier was needed.
I mean, if you can keep the enemy out past 200m, or so? Then, maybe these over-sized individual weapons make sense, but the reality is that you’re still going to be at a huge disadvantage when they manage to get close-in. Especially if your MG doctrine and equipage is bad…
In the end, dual-caliber is the way to go, and the idjit class is ignoring all the historical lessons on the wall, the ones written in the blood of improperly-equipped soldiers…
Bingo on the gun magazine writers angle. First I ever hear the term was by a budding history prof who in his youth had worked some exotic jobs like oil exploration in Thailand during the Vietnam war and rural road construction in Rhodesia in the 70’s. He had handled a few firearms in the course of this. When he said “Main battle rifle (like a hungry man saying “rib eye steak) and reached for his beer, it was time to pack it in for the evening if you could get away. The old Aristotelian “willing suspension of disbelief” was about to be soreley tried
I have to admit that the sheer pretentiousness of the term was what set me off when I first encountered it back in the late 1980s. Plus, the assuredness with which the idjit-writers were using it, which led me to the library to look up the term…
Which did not then exist, anywhere outside the fevered pages of the various “Assault Rifle Monthlies”, where the vast majority of the information was usually reported in the most breathlessly wrong ways imaginable. You really couldn’t count on much of anything being either accurate or truthful. It was all the most inane marketing-speak you could come across, nearly as bad as the hot rod magazines or Cosmo.
Imo, everything thats not a pistol caliber and with native full auto capability, is assault rifle.
If its Fal with semi auto selector only, then thats a semi version of Fal assault rifle.
The function is paramount and good intelligent people got confused with caliber difference fallacy gradation, which is more between pistol ones to rifles, then .223 to .30-06, so the last one is moot, again, imo.
The problem with looking at it like that is that a key characteristic of an actual “assault rifle” is that the weapon has to be both light and “wieldly” enough to serve an individual soldier effectively in close-in combat, be capable of being controllable by that soldier when fired on full automatic, while at the same time being effective out to 400m or so. The cartridge is critical to this, maybe not so much the caliber involved, because you can get quite a few different bore diameters to fit into that triangle.
My take on the whole thing is that it’s not the weapon, it’s not the cartridge, either: What is important is how you use the damn thing, and whether or not you can use it in the assault rifle role, which implies being able to do the sort of things we typically associate with submachineguns and shooting effectively at individual targets out to that maximum 400m range. If you can’t do all of that, it’s not an assault rifle. Case in point would be the Swiss StG57; you could extensively traumatize me by asking me to clear buildings with that thing. While at the same time, being in love with it doing defenses on open terrain… The StG90 is a much better compromise design for the sort of tactical role which has evolved over the last 80 years or so.
Similarly, with the M-14 and M-16: I would loathe doing building and trench clearing with the M-14, but if you asked me to defend a position somewhere with low vegetation and nice, long open areas…?
The StG57 and M-14 are very clearly not “assault rifles”, and neither are any of the other early NATO-caliber service rifles.
And, despite it being five words as opposed to two? I prefer that construction, because it’s actually clear and describes the weapons accurately. “Battle Rifle” could be damn near anything anyone ever took to war, as illustrated by Ian including things like the RSC1917 and Mondragon.
I have found local clasification to be most well defining.
Rifles are either:
– single shot
– repeating
– semi automatic
– automatic
Everything else is secondary. That is not w/o it’s issues:
So, both SKS and British adopted FALs would be “semi-automatic rifle”.
Both AK and G3 are “automatic rifle”
But at least that avoids things like 7.62×39 versions of G3 and AR-10 (like trialed and almost adopted by Yugoslavia) being “assault rifles” while 7.62×51 versions are “battle rifles”.
Internationally, all the terms in use surrounding firearms could use a deep, cleansing rationalization. Especially when you go to translate apparently like terms which actually reflect deep differences in thought on the described weapon…
I’d actually buy off on “Battle Rifle”, if the term weren’t so damn useless, and was defined less nebulously than even Ian is forced to in this video Q&A.
The reality here is that language is the tool of thought, and if your words, terms, and concepts are not well and clearly defined or agreed-upon, then your thinking about those issues with those specific tools will naturally reflect the incoherency of it all.
I mean, examine the idea of a GPMG, first proposed by the Germans with the term Universal-Maschinengewehr. They clearly meant it to mean an MG system to perform all the MG roles from squad automatic rifle up to what was then considered a medium support weapon on a tripod. The US adopted the German terminology with the phrase-description “General Purpose Machine Gun”, and ignored a lot of the underlying thought. Today, they issue the infantry with denatured guns that lack a lot of the real capability of the GPMG concept because the tripods and other supporting gear simply suck.
Try to argue that point, that the M240 and M250 are not “true GPMG” weapons because they’re lacking in the necessary accessories to make them such, and about all you get is stares; the “authorities” totally miss the point that the GPMG requires all the bits and pieces making it a true “weapons system”, and think they’ve checked the box by issuing what is effectively a bipod-only sad joke of a GPMG…
The fact that the tripod is just as important a part of that “GPMG” or “Universal-Maschinengewehr” concept is utterly alien to them all. And, this all stems from badly defined terms allowing for imprecise and erroneous thoughts…
Just because you call it a “GPMG” does not make it so, if you don’t close the loop with the effective “other parts” to make it work as such. They call it something that it is not, and think they’ve checked the block on it all. Reality would beg to differ…
When I wrote “caliber”, I meant cartridge, as for simplest example, there is 7.62×39 and 7.62×51 which are, ofc, very different.
Service rifle is a meaningful term.
As far as I can discern: A “battle rifle” was a means of distinguishing between proper select-fire intermediate cartridge should weapons, aka. Adolf Schicklgrüber/Hitler’s 7.92x33mm kurzpatrone “Sturmgewehr” –effectively pigeon holed by U.S. Ordnance as a ‘roided up SMG–Mikhail Kalashnikov’s “Avtomat” and European nations adopting the U.S. suite of squad-level infantry small arms with, uh, well, you know, detachable _box magazines_:
USA (army anyway) WWII and Korea:
1x NCO w/ M3 or M3A1 SMG .45 acp or M1 carbine .30 car.
1x automatic rifleman with BAR .30-06
10x riflemen w/ M-1 Garands .30-06
UK 1982:
1x L2A3 Sterling SMG 9x19mm
8x L1A1 self-loading rifles (20-rd. box magazines!) 7.62x51mm (Unless SAS, then M16s)
1xL7A2 GPMG 7.62x51mm or, perhaps, L4 Bren LMG.
France:
1 or 2x MAT-49 SMG 9x19mm
8 or 9 x MAS-49-56 7.5x54mm rifles (with rifle grenades aplenty)
(or maybe SIG-Manurhin SG 540 5.56mm rifles? or even 7.62x51mm G3s?)
1x AAT-52 GPMG 7.5x54mm
Bananarepublik Deutschland Bundeswehr:
1x Uzi/ MP-2 9x19mm SMG
1x MG-3 aka. MG-42 GPMG 7.62x51mm
8x G-3 7.62x51mm rifles and ammo and barrels for the MG-3 GPMG
Italy:
1x Beretta 38/49 or M12 SMG 9x19mm
1x MG 42/59 GPMG 7.62x51mm
8x Beretta BM-59 7.62x51mm select-fire Garand rifles with 20-rd. box magazines
Hence, “battle rifle” is the M-14 7.62x51mm rifle (1957-1964)
G-3 (1958-present [Germany to 1996/7])
FAL (1953-present [Belgium to 1980s])
MAS 1949-56 (1956-1980 with some outliers)
BM-59 (1959-mid-to-late 1970s, early 1980s)
And so on…
It is interesting how little emphasis was on close range automatic fire in NATO infantry doctrine, one of the key things that both Germans and Soviets found out to be very important in WW2.
In Yugoslavia, already in 1947. study about infantry weapons and section/platoon/company/battalion organization concluded that:
– LMG is a center and major and most important firepower source of the rifle section
– close range defense/offense is best done by SMGs or “heavy SMGs” (early designation for StG44 that was at that point planed for general introduction… that did not happen)
– some soldiers in the section should be armed with semi-automatic rifles in same caliber as MG – those with best shooting results to provide accurate longer range fire, potentially with rifle equipped with low magnification scope such as German ZF-41, those tasked with firing rifle-grenades (AT and AP), and as well LMG assistant.
– Ratio of SMGs to rifles should be ~1:1.
– Rifle section should be 10 men strong, with LMG, 5 x SMGs, arming section leader and 4 SMG gunners, who would form assault/close range defense half-section, and 4 x rifle, who would with LMG form a base of fire of the rifle section.
– In 8 men rifle section, as used by lighter formations (light, mountain etc) there should be 4 SMGs and 3 rifles in addition to LMG.
– Platoon should have it’s own support section, either MG, AT weapons or mixed (in practice all 3 types existed at various times).
– Company should be equipped with own fire support in form of 60mm or 82mm mortars, additional MG and AT sections, in order to give it at least minimal self-sufficiency in case of emergency.
– Battalion should be equipped with additional 82mm mortars, heavier AT weapons and additional MGs, both for general fire support and base anti-aircraft defense.
I think that one of the critical reasons this difference in thought about combat exists boils down to one thing, and one thing only: The vast majority of actual “combat experienced” officers and enlisted fled the colors as soon as they could across most of the West. The UK and US being the primary examples of this; demobilization led to all the careerists being put in charge of conventional forces that everyone was morally certain were rendered irrelevant by the atomic bomb.
In Yugoslavia and a lot of other countries, there wasn’t the same level of “get out of the army” madness, and a lot of good men whose observations about real combat had been validated by actual experience stayed within the military, and managed to make their voices heard.
Not so much, elsewhere.
It’s illuminating to read the papers of guys who went through WWII and Korea; a lot of them had left the forces during the brief peace in between those two conflicts, and then got dragged back into it. One of the staff officers in my old brigade was a family member of T.R. Fehrenbach, the historian who wrote This Kind of War about Korea. I got to attend a unit dining-in where T.R. actually attended, and it was amazing to hear him talk about it. One of the things he emphasized was the fact that it appeared to him, who’d had both WWII and Korean service to compare things, that the Army had regressed from what it was in 1945 to a pre-WWII state right before Korea, and that Korea basically forced a re-learning of lessons already paid for with blood. It was very interesting to hear him talk about it all, and have him say the things he said about the loss of actual combat-experience based knowledge.
I think that a lot of smaller countries where the “outside the military” opportunities weren’t quite so great, and that lacked the patrician US military academy culture did rather better at rationally acquiring and preserving hard-won combat knowledge.