“Battle rifle” is not a formally recognized term like “assault rifle”, but it is widely used, and I think it has a lot of utility. It is intended to differentiate between intermediate-caliber and full-power military rifles, and to that end I propose these four criteria to define a “battle rifle”:
1 – A military style or pattern rifle
2 – Intended primarily to be fired from the shoulder
3 – Self-loading (either semi- or fully automatic)
4 – Chambered for a full power rifle cartridge
Battle Rifle:
Garand.
FAL.
G3.
Simples. As a certain furry four eyed rodent puts it.
Sounds about right. Seems to have a had a sweet spot of use between 1945 and 1970s. But, in defining the battle rifle, don’t you have to define the assault rifle as well. Lot more variability to contend with in the later.
It is the politicians that need to listen to this lecture, but of course they won’t. Legislation is “purer” if the lawmakers have no idea of what they are legislating about.
So if the BAR that is being given away was used by Gun Jesus at match, then does its value go up since it has a holy blessing upon it?
Regarding XM5 which was renamed M7 probably in order to enhance confusion, some time ago was delivered to 101st Airborne Division alongside companion belt-fed weapon and will be subjected to New Equipment Training for details https://www.cryptogon.com/?p=69380
which resulted in following graphical comment https://topwar.ru/uploads/posts/2024-04/120631_original.webp
Does anybody disagree with said comment and if yes why?
I wouldn’t say the xm7 is long, it’s shorter than an m4 with suppressor. As for heavy, yes but only with all the crap on it. 8.38 lb without suppressor. it’s the optical sight and suppressor that adds the weight penalty of I think it was over 4 pounds of extra weight? also isn’t the IAR all kitted out about 12 pounds to so not really all that heavier if that’s the case.
with all that said, I dislike the ngsw project and think a lot of the goals could have been met with a new weapon firing a better bullet with a better shape, like the 7.92 cetme or even the 5.45 Russian, rather than reach the performance with 80kpsi.
“firing a better bullet with a better shape, like the 7.92 cetme or even the 5.45 Russian, rather than reach the performance with 80kpsi.”
Meanwhile Tula Cartridge Plant is developing enhanced penetration 6,02×41 cartridge https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2024/01/10/new-russian-6-02×41-cartridge-and-prototype-rifles-ak-22-mini-svch/ which uses conservative (all-metal) case.
I haven’t heard of that until today, fantastic cartridge on paper at least. I wonder if it will produce more reliable wounding than 5.45 and 7.62?
Well, it has been half a Century since the 5.45 x 39 appeared on the scene.
That is about the same time the “Brown Bess” was in front-line British service.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the Russian 7.62X54R has been in service since the 1890s, and the 7.62X39 since 1943…
I’m almost sad that I have to point out a couple of salient facts: One, the odds of this cartridge being adopted are slim and none; the Russians aren’t in a position to make such a thing work, and will likely still be using the old rounds well into the latter half of this century. Two, the reason that this cartridge even exists has rather more to do with the Kalashnikov enterprise needing to generate money than anything else. A new cartridge/rifle combination would do nicely to keep the company afloat. Whether or not the Russian state will be in a position to pay for them, on the other hand…? Questionable.
The Russians are great, in theory. Execution? Except dissidents, they’re not so good at that. Eyes bigger than stomachs, so to speak.
Aaah… Just noticed that detail about the Brown Bess, Bruce.
The Brown Bess musket was first designed/issued/stamped as a pattern circa 1722. It went out of service sometime in the 1850s, when the last of the flintlock versions were converted over to percussion.
So… Yeah. The 5.45X39 has some longevity issues, by comparison. Even the venerable 7.62X54R hasn’t got as much time in service as the Brown Bess… Yet.
The XM7 is made to be used with the suppressor and, at 80.000 psi from a 13″ barrel, is better to use it if you don’t want to end up with a lot of deaf infantrymen after the first engagement. It has to be considered an integral part of the rifle.
So, all in all, is not really shorter, or lighter, than a G3, or a FAL.
better training and doctrine is needed. A better tripod and actual machine gun training for the crews and ncos how to employ them. Throw in a few small mortars as well and train the ncos how to direct the fire. The new xm5/m7 rifle and the machine gun are not going to solve the lack of training and skill.
I am channeling Kirk here. 😉
Well, it ain’t like anyone is going to be actually doing anything rational to prove the point, now is it?
If you look at the long trail of US small arms development, the sad fact is that it’s a continuing thread of trying to overcome lack of training and basic soldiering skills going back to the Hall breechloaders. Sure, you could actually go to the trouble of training your way out of problems like being unable to generate an actual infantry column-killing volley from your hastily trained troops, but where’s the fun in that? Especially when the government is willing to spend massive funds on complex technical solutions to simple training issues…
Anyone disagrees with me? Take a look at the M240B, and compare it to the L7. Or, anyone else’s MAG58 that got adopted: US says “OMG… PFC Ragbag could burn his ickle widdle handsies on the hot barrel!! We must cover it and protect him!!!”
Lessee, now… Couple of million bucks to design and implement POS handguards on the weapon, or spending a couple minutes in training on “Don’t touch–Hot!!”?
Yeah, we know what path the US is going down…
I agree. This is an example of how the “experts” expect the public to not question their pronouncements, when tomorrow the “experts” will change their minds and make the complete opposite pronouncement.
Personally, even though it would cause logistics issues, I don’t see the point of forcing a single rifle on all soldiers. I try to imagine if things would have turned out better for Custer if he had a mix of shorter range repeating rifles and longer range Springfield trapdoor rifles.
The “public” has nothing to do with this debate. This is a pentagon decision kept within military “experts “.it’s political ramifications are confined to who’s calling the shots among the ordinance department and the private contractors.
The dynamics works no matter the circumstances. In this case the “public” are the military officials and members of Congress. When somebody sees an opening for monetary or power gain, it is amazing how quickly “settled matters” get unsettled. I don’t know who pushed the idea of the new rifle/cartridge, but the same dynamics were at work when the push occurred to go to intermediate cartridges. I am sure that back then, the people advocating for intermediate cartridges made the same appeal of superior knowledge and the dire need to change, just like what came from the advocates for the new system. My exit question is how long will the new system remain as the only rational approach? Not long from what history has taught us. Then a new batch of experts will be peddling their wares.
I haven’t run into a member of the “expert” class that was really a subject-matter expert on anything beyond self-promotion. I’m sure they’re out there, but… Not that I’ve personally experienced.
The guys I want to listen to are the actual students of a subject, the men who acknowledge their inadequacies and the questions that still exist. You start professing to “expert authority”, and you’ve lost all credibility with me.
The humble man, who can back up his assertions with personal experience or knowledge? He has my attention. A self-declared “expert”? Oh, hell to the no…
Regarding BAR, what about accepting it is MACHINE RIFLE as seen at weapon itself
http://fullautoclassics.com/winchester-1918-browning-machine-rifle.html
and calling it day?
Taxonomic challenge: what about AR-15 chambered for .25 Winchester Super Short Magnum? It does use AR-15 sized magazine, but ballistic-wise it is vicinity of 6,5 mm Arisaka (Winchester’s round use lighter bullet, but provide higher muzzle velocity)
Think we’ll worry about that if a military adopts an “assault rifle” chambered in .25 WSSM. Perhaps we just draw a line at the shortest full power rifle round case length & say a battle rifle round must be at least this tall to ride?
While Ian was presenting, I was going to say the easy way to differentiate btwn a battle rifle & a hunting rifle was a bayonet lug. Looks as though the M76 & SVD both have em.
Also standard magazine capacity would be useful in differentiating hunting and battle rifles. Yes, you can rig up high/low capacity magazines. But look at original manufacture specs to see what the rifle was intended to have for magazine capacity.
Look… None of this appearance- or characteristic-based differentiation matters one whit. An expert with a good bolt-action rifle can produce the same tactical effect as a merely semi-skilled shooter with one of the general-issue individual weapons of the latter half of the 20th Century.
Where the true differences show up is with regards to tactical effect generated. So far as that goes, there’s not a hell of a lot of difference to be seen between a British rifleman armed with an SMLE at Mons and a British rifleman armed with an L1A1 at Goose Green… What made the difference at each battlesite was more the supporting arms and the doctrine. Performance of the individual weapon? Hardly mattered; the Brits would likely have prevailed were they still armed with the SMLE and had similar skill-at-arms to “The Old Contemptibles” at Mons. About all the L1A1 really enabled was reducing training time to achieve that rate of fire, thus allowing training on other weapons and skills…
I have to pick nits here and say that the Brits were using L1A1 SLRs and not FN FALs which the Argentines were in the form of the 50.61s.
A battle rifle is like porn. “It’s difficult to describe but you know it when you see it.”
Nice joke!, however famous quip was not being connected with mans third favorite activity (or forgottenweapons “guys” 4. or 5. of course, after shooting that is on 3.place)
Sorry, I redact my comment !
It really was used in “obscenity” case, but I read it before connected to some other example, like an animal or something.
No, now I remember – it was from some japanese TV series where they described to characters about noises of an elusive fictional bird that char. were searching for in a forest; hard to describe but you will instantly know when you hear the noises.
To the Americans, the M16 is a shorter ranged battle rifle. To the Russians, the AK is a longer ranged sub-machine gun.
Any shoulder fired rifle issued in large numbers to combat infantry is a “battle rifle” whether bolt action or self loading. The term “battle” connotes military combat. So if a “rifle” is issued in large numbers to infantry for combat use it is a “battle rifle”.
The term “assault rifle” describes a proper subset of “battle rifle”.
“Any shoulder fired rifle issued in large numbers to combat infantry is a “battle rifle” whether bolt action or self loading.(…)term “assault rifle” describes a proper subset of “battle rifle”.”
Then what is relation between battle rifle and service rifle?
It’s the same damn thing, only with a better marketing image… Which is one reason I loathe the entire construct of “Battle Rifle”. It’s a f*cking service rifle, and since that term’s been in use for dog’s years, well… Why the hell change it because some vacuum-brained gunwriter wanting to sell magazines in the 1980s thought it up?
“(…)better marketing image(…)”
So… like GL-70 in https://genius.com/Allan-sherman-chim-chim-cheree-lyrics which
promise me miracles, magic, and hope
But, somehow, it always turns out to be soap
?
Well, I vote for the SKS as an honorary battle rifle, it being a shorter-ranged variant on such themes as the Ljungman/Hakim and MAS49/56, perhaps even the Garand. Might we have a category called “Battle rifle that doesn’t hurt your shoulder as much?”
SKS is not a service rifle; it’s a carbine-class weapon. Which is what should have been on-issue from about 1917 forward…
So AR-10 in 7.62×51 is “battle rifle”. OK. What is AR-10 in 7.62×39? Assault rifle? So same weapon can be both “assault” and “battle rifle” based only on caliber?
Or… wait. StG 58. FAL. 7.62. Called “Assault rifle” by the Austrian military. Is it a battle rifle or is it assault rifle?
What about Swiss StGw 57?
To me, good ol’ local term “automatska puška” describes it all the best.
If its AR-15, well, thats poluautomatska verzija automatske puške.
Sorry! Cant have it all 🙂
I agree that best distinction is on basic operating principle. (Manually) Repeating – Semi-automatic – automatic.
This creates least amount of confusion, since it clearly defines what weapon is capable of. Everything else, including caliber is secondary.
Also, picking and choosing military and civilian terminology can lead to quite confusing results, as different militaries call same things by different names or different things by same name. 🙂
PS. Local terminology was not without it’s own hickups. Eg, during development of M70, folding stock version was designated “SMG” – “Automat” while fixed stock version, otherwise fully identical to folding stock one was “automatic rifle” – “Automatska puska”. But that was ditched in 1968. reformation of military designations when “automat” was defined as firing pistol caliber ammunition. Rudiment of that is Zastava still calling M85 and M92 short rifles “automat”/”SMG”.
Than we have Czech, who still call any stocked automatic weapon “Samopal”… from Skorpion to vz.58 automatic rifle.
When I read official for example Yugoslavian manuals and their terminology, I cant escape the feeling of seeing some things described too complicated, like intentionally, to mystify the whole art and craft. It points me into direction like its not just unintentionally by some military-science-geeks bureocracy complicated – or maybe its a sign of the times, and that times, now 40,50,60 years ago.
But back to main discussion, I think at least percent of the problem is in primarily USA mode of commercial firearms market, biggest and most extreme in the whole world. As such, it is unescapably tied to a market trend of always inventing new terms, to sell the same old things as a new package. Plus, assault rifle got bad and notorious treatment in their media, so battle sounds (paradoxally) as a more neutral term.
Well said. But never interrupt adult children once they get into a p____ing match about terminology that in the end matters nothing.
Yugoslav military manuals were heavily influenced by German ones, and later by WW2 era US ones. Hence focus on all little details and technical stats that general riflemen did not really need to know.
OTOH, they are treasure throve for a weapon geeks 🙂
@Bojan,
I don’t know that I can agree with you about the overly-technical thing being of value only to “weapons specialists”.
Consider the following note, taken from a study referenced by Dogwalker, which was produced by the US Army:
“*Current military usage of the two words salvo and volley is confused. By “salvo” the
Navy and Air Force generally mean, respectively, the simultaneous discharge of several
pieces, or the simultaneous release of a number of bombs; the Army usually employs the
word to indicate the successive firing of several guns within a single command unit.
“Volley” is commonly taken by all services to mean the simultaneous firing of a number
of rifles or guns, with the exception that the artilleryman often applies the word to the
independent (unsynchronized) firing of a certain specified number of rounds by each of
several associated pieces. What is discussed here and in the following pages is either
a simultaneous, or a high cyclic rate, burst, with the number of rounds per burst automatically set rather than dependent upon trigger release. In the former design, con-
trolled nutation of the rifle muzzle would provide the desired shot dispersion or pattern;
in the latter, the scatter would be obtained and controlled by multiple barrels, a mother-
daughters type of projectile, or projection of missiles in the manner of a shotgun.”
You’ve got different services of the same nation that can’t agree on the meaning of basic terms of discussion with regards to these “technical things”. I’m not sure that I can fault the JNA for being too pedantic, particularly with the fact that many military terms wind up being taken up by the general public, and then seeing their original meanings warped out of recognition by popular usages of the terms by people who’ve no idea at all about the military meanings.
The historical fact is that imprecise language almost inevitably leads to flawed thinking about the subject. You say “tomato”, I think you’re talking about the fruit, and you’re thinking we’re talking about that big red ball on the side of Japanese WWII aircraft…
Any time the marketing types get involved, the language gets obfuscated and meanings lost. It’s a part and parcel of what marketing does… Create demand. You do that by getting people’s interest, and never mind whether or not what you’re marketing has actual… Value. Hell, if anything, it’s the job of the marketer to obscure true value, so that people then want to buy that which is essentially of limited or no value.
Taurus Judge, I’m looking at you…
This whole “battle rifle” terminology is part of that… It was marketing-speak from day one, an utterly meaningless term, one with no value whatsoever.
This suggest some correlation between battle rifle term and marketroid https://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/marketroid.html
FAL is specific case. Today you have biggest chance to encounter FAL in 7.62×51 mm, but it did not begin like that. Before it got final form it consumed .280 British cartridge, see 3rd XOR 4th image from top http://modernfirearms.net/en/assault-rifles/belgium-assault-rifles/fn-fal-l1a1-c1-slr-eng/ which without doubt was intermediate, but then… one member of NATO insisted on using T65 cartridge and so tension was applied thus dragging said weapon into battle rifle category as defined above.
It seems currently there are two opposite camps, one believing that using intermediate cartridge is conditio sine qua non in order to be assault rifle and one that it is not. FN Herstal seems to belong to latter as they claim that
https://fnherstal.com/en/defence/portable-weapons/fn-scar-h-mk2/
The FN SCAR®-H Mk2 STD assault rifle is chambered in 7.62x51mm NATO calibre and is available with barrels of various lengths…
The 13th Analect of Confucius has application, here:
“Zi Lu said: “The ruler of Wei is anticipating your assistance in the administration of his state. What will be your top priority?”
Confucius said, “There must be a correction of terminology.”
Zi Lu said, “Are you serious? Why is this so important?”
Confucius said, “You are really simple, aren’t you? A noble man is cautious about jumping to conclusions about that which he does not know.”
“If terminology is not corrected, then what is said cannot be followed. If what is said cannot be followed, then work cannot be accomplished. If work cannot be accomplished, then ritual and music cannot be developed. If ritual and music cannot be developed, then criminal punishments will not be appropriate. If criminal punishments are not appropriate, the people cannot make a move. Therefore, the noble man needs to have his terminology applicable to real language, and his speech must accord with his actions. The speech of the noble man cannot be indefinite.” “
If you cannot precisely define the meanings of things, then you cannot discuss them.
Language, being the tool of thought, must be precise and accurately describe that which is being thought about. You cannot get good things out of fuzzy and ill-defined terms.
And, as this discussion about “battle rifles” shows, the language isn’t at all correct. Nor is the language around the machinegun; witness all the different ideas encapsulated in American military English from “Automatic Rifle” on up to “Heavy Machine Gun”.
Imprecision is the enemy of correct thought, and there’s hardly anything more vague and cloud-cuckooland than most of the terminology and verbiage surrounding small arms and tactics.
Has anyone heard the official rational from the US military as to why they are going from an intermediate cartridge to a full power cartridge?
My guess is to better defeat body armor. And this comes from a change in what the Brass feels is the most credible threat the country is facing.
For the last couple of decades, the US military has injected itself into various bush wars around the globe. The opponents in these wars were poorly equipped, meaning no body armor. So the lighter rifles with a higher ammunition carrying capacity for each soldier worked. Now, I am thinking, the most severe threat are seen as China and Russia. These armies would have body armor, so a more powerful cartridge is needed.
No. See “Increasing Small-Arms Lethality in Afghanistan; Taking Back the Infantry Half-Kilometer” by Maj. Thomas P. Ehrhart (2009);
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA512331.pdf
It’s all about being able to use the individual rifle effectively out to at least 500 meters. Better yet, 1000 meters.
Which is unfortunately complete BS and always has been.
Specially-trained sniper being able to hit effectively beyond 300 meters? Absolutely, that’s what snipers are trained for.
Designated Marksman with specially set-up DMR doing it? Again, absolutely.
Machine gun team with a properly-mounted and dialed-in GPMG in something like 7.62 x 51mm doing it out to 1,000 meters? Yes; that’s why a machine gun team is in the infantry section to begin with.
An individual rifleman, even with optical sights, being able to effectively hit a point target beyond 300 meters? No. It has never happened except by dumb luck, and never will.
This is the old Ordnance delusion of “marksmanship tradition” rearing its dumb head again. Ordnance simply refuses to accept that a battlefield and Camp Perry are two entirely different environments, and what works on one is unlikely to work on the other.
As for the “new high-powered” cartridge, the 6.8 x 51mm isn’t new or even particularly “high-powered”. It also isn’t a 6.8mm. As seen here;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.277_Fury
It is in fact a 7 x 51mm cartridge, launching 130 to 140-grain bullets at a high of 3,000 f/s (130-gr) to a low of 2,750 (135-gr). I find the 2,950 for the 140-grain hard to believe; 2,650-2,700 would be more doable with that bullet weight, in that cartridge volume.
Basically, 6.8 x 51 or .277 Fury, or whatever you like to call it, is little more than a slightly-altered 7mm-08 Remington, a sporting cartridge dating to 1980 as a factory load, that was first developed as a wildcat from the .308 Winchester around 1958-60.
And ballistically, both are simply reiterations of the 7 x 57 Mauser of 1892. Just like every “7mm”, “.276”, or etc. “Ideal Military Rifle Cartridge (TM)” developed during to 20th Century, going back to the .276 Enfield of 1913 and the .276 Pedersen of 1934, with later iterations such as 0.280in Enfield in 1949 and “6mm SAW” in 1975.
What they all overlook is that in trying to make a 7 x 57 clone perform like a .30-06 (which is pretty much a lost cause from the start), they pretty much scuttle any chance of it being controllable in autofire in a rifle. thereby screwing the entire concept of an “assault rifle”.
Yes. It’s the M14 debacle’ all over again.
Furthermore, Ordnance paid Sig something like $350M to develop this hotted-up rifle. When they could have ordered essentially the same thing “off the shelf” from several U.S. manufacturers (notably Ruger, S&W, and Olympic) based on the Knight SR-25 platform ten years ago. Yes, they have been making AR-type rifles in calibers like 6.8mm Creedmoor and 7.62 x 51mm (and, yes, 7mm-08 Remington) for almost a quarter-century now.
I can only assume nobody at Ordnance reads the ads in the back pages of Firearms News.
Or else they wanted a 100% brand-new, Ordnance-created Super Rifle to “Show The World”. The cost to the taxpayers be damned.
The new SAW version may be worth the effort. Anything would be better than the under-calibered M249 or the overweight M240. (Let alone those PoS M60s still hanging on in odd corners of armories.)
My preference would be an MG3 in something like 7.21 x 71 Lazzeroni Firebird; if you’re going to to have a GPMG, it should be able to reach out and swat something a long way away.
But in the individual infantryman’s rifle?
Stick to something that’s effective and accurate to about 350 meters on single-shot, that is controllable in burst or full-auto fire within 100 meters.
Because that’s what your individual rifleman should be doing if he’s been properly trained. Leaving the long-range interdiction business to the machine gunners.
If you’re designing your rifle and cartridge to do the MG’s job, you’re doing it wrong.
clear ether
eon
Yes it does sound like someone had a cozy relationship with SIG rather than understanding the existing US market.
I agree with your assessment of not needing a super rifle for every member of an infantry company. I am starting to like the Russian doctrine of having quite a number of snipers/designated marksmen in a company. You need credible longer range capacity to keep opposing forces honest. But the intense firing is going to be close range and a weapon system where the bulk of the company can carry lots of ammo to lay down serious bullet swarm seems rational.
Thank you for laying out my objections to NGSW so succinctly.
I’ve a post on the issue, down below… And, oddly enough, it ties into the whole “battle rifle” nonsense Ian addresses here.
“My preference would be an MG3…”
A thing SIG did that could have been really adopted. The SIG MG710-3. An MG3 (MG45, due to the roller delay) lighter than a M60.
The SIG 710 series had one major thing going against it… Swiss.
Both on a cost-to-manufacture basis, and the fact that the Swiss were then unlikely to sell to the US or any other major buyer, because “neutrality”.
As well, the idjits in procurement here in the US would have never gone for it, even if they got it for free. “Not Invented Here”, and because it was designed (mostly…) in accordance with the Germanic MG doctrine in mind…
Would have been nice, though…
It wasn’t that long ago this query came up and I post a reply, whereby one must think in terms of the wars of 80 years ago.
Quite simply, more recent military strategy no longer relies on throwing men at other men with each man having a shoulder-fired rifle with a long-range cartridge, in a hefty caliber, Semi-Auto and magazine fed, for each man to lob as many bullets as they can reasonably carry (where an intermediate or pistol cartridge of that time would not have been effective) to shoot at nearly as many other men that are marching towards each other, also with similar battle-rifles, or maybe entrenched machine-guns nests – like some throw-back to the Civil War. Will a bolt-action be sufficient? Maybe, but only as support to machine-gun nests and other heavy-hitting artillery of an infantry.
“Battle Rifle’ describes a rifle to meet the needs of infantry foot-soldiers going in first in a targeted battle ground, utilizing large numbers of bodies to overwhelm the enemy that may be embedded in a rural or open terrain (such as Marines Iwo Jima who primarily had Garands) as the premiere mode of attack, that as semi-auto, could lay down a single-man barrage in greater quantity and faster than bolt actions could, against machine-gun nests in the Pacific and Germany.
The quantity of soldiers were the key; the tool of first strike efforts, their ‘battle rifles’ serving a need that a rifle or carbine in intermediary cartridges were not yet deemed worthy to accomplish (the M1 carbine, Thompson, or Reising were not up to snuff to handle) as opposed to the advantages that technology later brought us, of jet, helicopter, air-attack/support and guided missile/cruise-missile that later wars had, and now drones, which clear an area to leave a situation where whatever of the enemy remained was relegated to more close-quarters combat/urban warfare/embedded opposition whereby an intermediary Assault Rifle in intermediary cartridges made more sense (tighter geography and strategy, closer ranges, faster moving, clearing areas, policing, need for higher quantity of fire instead of long-range need, etc.)
The “battle rifle” served the need for large-numbers of soldiers trouncing in, able to shoot faster than a bolt-action, with longer-range reaching ammo that could still hit hard at those longer ranges, while maintaining energy farther out inevitably with better accuracy at those longer ranges.
So they had rifles that had less capacity, but they made up for that by having a higher capacity of men, who unfortunately were expendable in ways that our technology allows us to avoid today. And due to that, we no longer so casually dispose of our soldiers as expendable equipment.
That’s what made it a ‘battle’ – throwing a mass number of bodies at another mass number of bodies, raw, bloody, long-range shooting at each other indiscriminately until one side or the other lost more lives than the other side. That’s the raw ‘battle’ part of large numbers of man-and-rifle against other large numbers of man-and-rifle until one side is subdued.
And that was a ‘battle’ of large numbers of troops, a true ‘battle’ of quantities of men; not precision scalpel carving by technology and leaving whatever is left to urban-warfare, closer-range, or police-like actions where anything more wieldy from an STG-44 to an M4 would be more of a benefit.
During the 36 days of fighting on Iwo Jima, just throwing body after body at the problem until the Japanese relented, nearly 7,000 U.S. Marines were killed, another 20,000 wounded – and some 22,000 Japanese soldiers were killed, until some 671 were left to be captured. We would never see such man-to-man ‘battles’ of bodies against bodies like that today, for one single small (but important) stretch of land for our entire Pacific war effort. Instead, it would be airstrikes, missiles, and drones, and men would only be sent in to clean up and establish fortifications after it’s all clear.
While some may thing “the semi-auto service rifle didn’t make all that much difference to either tactics or operational considerations” – tactics, strategy, or even methodical approach were necessarily what they had in mind. It was raw battle, and it was called a ‘battle rifle’ for the perception of what it could achieve.
Our preemptive and targeted technology no longer needs to use large quantities of men as weapons to win a ‘battle’. The physical troop-based part of combat happens now with much smaller numbers of men, in closer quarters, going in after the technology has accomplished most of what was needed to do long-range work, where in WWII, long-range battles were done by quantitative manpower and ‘battle rifles.
Such as were most military firefights during WWI and WWII and into Korea. You didn’t hear much of the term ‘close quarters combat’ except when troops got within the cities of Europe occupied by Germany during WWII. This urban-warfare is the very reason that it was the Germans that developed the first ‘Assault Rifle” STG-44, as they realized it would be much more useful, effective, and practical use for their urban-warfare needs that had short-range/closer-range fighting.
So that’s was is meant by a ‘battle rifle’ where the battles were most fought by men and their rifle alone, at much longer distances to lob as many hard-hittng longer range bullets as much as possible with as many men as possible.
Yet… “A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good General because he has plenty of soldiers”… (Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort 1741-1794)
And we saw plenty of bad ideas and plenty misuse of soldiers during WWII – Operation Market Garden being just one such example, the Battle of Stalingrad another (for the Germans, starting out as a ‘battle’ and turning into urban-warfare) – among many others.
III
Most everyone is thinking by today’s mode of combat, and that the gun itself defines what is a ‘battle rifle’ – no, it was the type of ‘battle’ and a need for a certain type of rifle as is being cited here, for that type of massive numbers men against an opposing massive number of men form of ‘battle’ at the time that defined the rifle.
It’s simply rare that we have ‘battles’ of that type like we did in WWII, and it’s certain that will be a thing of the past going forward.
As for the 1918A2/A3 BAR, it certainly was a battle rifle but meant in conjunction and support with a mass number of other guys carrying M1 Garands. it was all about overwhelming a mass number of opposing soldiers embedded in trenches, holes, and machine gun nests and a light-to-carry machine gun like the BAR was meant to do that job and still act as a shoulder fired rifle if needed (but it’s sure quite heavy if you’ve ever had the pleasure of carrying one around for a while).
III
Utterly erroneous worldview on display, here.
This is the same sort of foolishness that focuses on the essentially accessory weapons like swords in ancient melee combat. Precisely as the French aristos focused on the idea of knightly combat at Agincourt, and failed to consider the actual killers on the battlefield, the longbow and polearms.
Individual riflemen ceased having “sole tactical relevance” shortly after the Civil War. Hell, during it, to be honest… Ask Pickett.
Yet, people still focus on the rifle, ignoring the fact that it’s essentially become a local security tool. The entire concept and worldview underlying the incessant emphasis on this weapon is a clear indicator of an individual who does not think clearly and critically about what is actually going on in combat. Either that, or they’re blind to honest observation and thinking without pre-conceived ideas that they either came up with because of movies and other fraudulent accounts, or because they were taught by other delusionals.
News flash, people: The rifle is not what you think it is, and hasn’t been for nearly all of our lives. It is not the “arme blanche”, the arm of decision for small unit actions.
And, much like the mass murders perpetrated on the French nation by its “true believers”, today’s weapons “favoritists” are leading us down a primrose path to ruin and death.
Bluntly put, the individual rifleman and his rifle haven’t been decisive on the battlefield since the late 19th Century. They’re important, but… Not decisive. The fantasy of the “battle rifle” is part of this entire failure-mindset.
F..k the battle rifle BS term.
It was intended as a slap at the M16. “That ain’t a ‘battle rifle’.” Why? Because it wasn’t the beloved, worshiped, genuflected to “Full .30” caliber.
My only problem with that was that you hit more with the M16 on auto than you do with any 7.62 NATO on auto. The only “full .30s” that anybody ever hit consistently with were the Russian AK and the German MKb/MP/StG family. Firing “short” .30 rounds about equivalent to a .30 Herrett, ballistically speaking.
The 7.62 x 51 NATO is a decent GPMG round and sniper rifle round. A round for full-auto fire in an individual weapon it just isn’t. For that you need something with a much lower recoil impulse if you actually want to hit anything.
The definition of a “battle rifle” is “the rifle you can effectively take into a battle and use to subdue the enemy”.
Only hits count.
clear ether
eon
Eon, seems historically backward that only rifle that got close to full auto full power shooting controllability was very smarty designed and engineered FG-42, before all FALs and G3s and such.
These 2 examples I mentioned last both feel like they should have used medium power round like 7.92×33 or even russian 7.62 from getgo, but got shortchanged in the end with somebody stuffing into their mouth more then they could have chew. So you got rifles that were ok on semi auto, but then you could ask, why such configuation- why not m14ish, and magazine size, firing semi 10,15 is even enough etc. etc.
I wonder now if you could “tame” these rifles in such calibres with VP70ish approach – sacrificing 10-20% of bullet speed (and thus range) to get more full auto controllability
FG42 was designed specifically for the German paratroops. Unlike everyone else’s, the German paras were “owned” by the Luftwaffe. And Goering regarded them as his very own private army. So when they wanted something “special”, Uncle Hermann got it for them through Luftwaffe channels instead of Wehrmacht.
The genesis of the FG42 was the invasion of Crete in 1940. The paras came under fire from SMLEs and Vickers HMGs, and their primary weapons at the time were the MP38 SMG and some 7.9 x 57 bolt-action rifles. They were outranged and outgunned, or at least they thought so.
They weren’t really interested in the new “MachinenKarabiner” firing an intermediate cartridge. They wanted a selective-fire rifle firing the full-power 7.9 x 57 round. The result was the FG42, which did come closer to being a successful “full .30” assault rifle than anything before or since.
In the end, instead of being the replacement for the SMG and all rifles, it ended up as the paras’ SAW. In effect, the same role’ as the BAR in the U.S. infantry squad.
Of the two, I have to consider the FG42 the better design for its job. I’ve never fired one but I have enough “trigger time” on various models of the BAR to appreciate its advantages and drawbacks- like that idiotic two different rates of autofire instead of regular selective-fire. (No, it was not JMB’s idea- Army Ordnance owns that ballsup.)
A BAR built like an FG42 (firing from open bolt on automatic and closed bolt on single-shot) would have been a lot more effective, especially in the hands of troops properly trained in the use of a machine rifle as opposed to a “light machine gun”- which the British Bren is, and the BAR is not.
cheers
eon
Not to mention, a BAR with a pistol grip and a legit crew-serve capable feed. Top-mount magazine, side-mount magazine, or belt. The rifle stock with bottom mount magazine only ever made sense as an individual rifle in the Automatic Rifle class, meant for the delusional French concept of “marching fire”.
Actual firepower? You best be able to divvy up feeding the magazine-fed gun with shooting it. Otherwise, it’s an ineffectual minor boost to squad fires.
Kirk;
Replace the BAR’s Frenchified magazine with a belt feed and you get… the M240.
Yes, the FN MAG is essentially a BAR mechanism converted to belt feed, rebuilt with a pistol grip and a quick-change barrel, and “strengthened” to stand up to the stresses of sustained fire.
In the process, FN turned an air-cooled machine rifle into…. an air-cooled medium machine gun.
In fact, you could argue that the MAG is the world’s second most successful air-cooled heavy machine gun, right behind the Browning M2HB .50.
What you cannot successfully argue is that the MAG/M240 is a light machine gun. Because it ain’t.
Which leads to the question, WTF is it doing in the infantry squad, instead of in the heavy weapons platoon, on a tripod, where it belongs?
clear ether
eon
@ eon
The decider seems to be north or south of 10kg.
In Ukraine, IE. MG3 and FN MAG, much appreciated as fixed position or vehicular weapons, but a MG gunner walking with the infantry always carries a PK.
A belt-fed BAR, with a quick exchange barrel, can’t reasonably weight less than 10kg.
An MG42/MG3 can. It only needs to make a MG45, so leaving out the muzzle booster and the need of a receiver sturdy enough to withstand the impact of the recoiling barrel. You don’t even need to make the barrel shroud out of aluminium (but you can).
@eon,
Fully aware of the BAR/MAG58 provenance. It’s just too bad that the guys at Ordnance didn’t see fit to adapt the Colt Monitor or FN “Modele D” mods for the BAR, as opposed to the A2 monstrosity they put on issue…
The continued primacy of the PK-series in Ukraine only points to what I’ve always said: That weapon is the true “master work” of Kalashnikov, and what he ought to be remembered for… If only the US had had the balls to admit they got it wrong, and adopted a US version of it.
I’ve watched yesterday a video of BAR and its 2 modes, Ive heard about it long ago, but forgot it. Slow mode is just too slow, sounds almost like somebody is pulling the semi shots manually in succesion, and fast mode is, again, too fast, gun jumps around. Seems like sweet spot would be the rate of fire between these 2 – but ofc you are left with plethora of other FA defects. Naturally, BAR is at least 2 decades older then FG42, so we could cut it some slack there…
Personally, I think for F.W. commenteers beloved MGs, having some modern system that could reliably have 2 rates of fire (first like 500 for sustained fire, second like 800,850 for bursts) is probably not a bad idea. I wonder if manually shortening the bolt carrier travel could accomplish that in simplest way, and not having some catchers like in BAR or Škorpion.
@Storm,
Rates of fire are a poorly-understood issue. The Germans wanted, deliberately and with malice aforethought, the highest rates possible. The MG42 was supposed to have a 1200rpm rate, and the specification for its replacement, which was to be the MG45, was supposed to have a minimum of a 1500rpm rate.
This wasn’t a mistake, either; they did it deliberately. Why? Because the Germans believed that the best way to produce casualties with an MG was as far from the gun as possible, and that to do that, you needed to absolutely saturate that beaten zone downrange with as many bullets as possible in the shortest time possible. They did calculations, and concluded that if you had a mere 600rpm rate, then the first bullet gave enough notice to anyone sharing that beaten zone with the guy they’d spotted to target, then the time between first and last rounds of the burst would be long enough to allow some of the rest of the element to get down below the line of fire or seek cover. If you dumped the same number of rounds on the beaten zone twice as fast, however…? Ain’t nobody going to be able to react quickly enough to avoid being hit.
Rates of fire are what they are because the people doing the planning and logistics don’t pay attention to the same issues the Germans did. The Germans optimized for killing; the Allies (and, NATO today…) optimize for delivering “discouraging fires”, not lethal ones.
As I’ve said many times before on here, the fundamental error is in not understanding how the MG works within the tactical system, regardless of whatever fantasy ideas people might have about it. The Germans would have rightly looked at many of the on-issue MG systems of today, and laughed their asses off at the ill-conceived notions represented by those modern guns. They’d also have some pointed words for their successors in the Bundeswehr about letting US and UK practices influence their decisions about rates of fire.
The “too high” rate of fire thing is an artifact of the people looking at the German system and not seeing what was really going on with it. They had their reasons for wanting it, and judging from the casualties they generated, I’d say they were correct.
“(…) have 2 rates of fire (first like 500 for sustained fire, second like 800(…)”
If you need machine gun with such rates then use BESA Mark II
https://www.militaryfactory.com/smallarms/detail.php?smallarms_id=221
Have you seen Garand Thumb’s clip on the RM277 (firing full auto from the shoulder a cartridge more powerful than .308)?
https://youtu.be/1IDrmo_1-Ig
You don’t really need to sacrifice speed. But you have to add some complexity.
“(…) sacrificing 10-20% of bullet speed(…)”
JSDF did and thus their Type 64
https://modernfirearms.net/en/assault-rifles/japan-assault-rifles/tip-64-eng/
fired reduced loading,similar in all dimensions to the standard 7.62 mm NATO but with alighter bullet and a smaller powder charge that generated muzzle velocities of about 715 meters per second instead of the ‘NATO original’ 810 meters per second.
This is not a completely bad approach, but I was aiming logistically at round that can be used with both MGs and rifles, thus this reduction should be accomplished by rifles own mechanism, or some gas blowby and such. But this japanese idea at least lets you use the same cases, however you always run into a scenario where troops could by mistake or desperation load wrong ammo in their guns and damage ’em.
Few years ago I threw an idea of universal bullet for mgs and rifles, that is only stuffed in different sized cases…
@Storm, I am sad to say that I can see no way possible of ever “squaring the circle” to create a cartridge for both the individual weapon and the crew-served support MG. The mission requirements are too different.
On the one hand, you need something that is light enough for the individual weapon to be fired on full-auto and still be controllable. It also doesn’t need to be all that energetic out past about 500-600m, just enough to kill a man reliably out to those ranges.
The crew-served support weapon needs to be lethal out to around 2000m, if you can manage it, and be powerful enough to get through light cover. That is not something you’re going to be able to do with something that’s still of use in the individual weapon, no matter how hard you wish for it. The physics just aren’t on.
I’ll admit to the siren-call of the general-purpose cartridge, but… I’m also enough of a realist to observe that it’s never worked, and that the “desire path” through the maze has led to a two-caliber solution, every time. Germans went that way, the Soviets went that way, we silly-ass Americans finally figured it out some 20-30 years later, and… Now we’re going to try a unitary round for both roles again, and it’ll likely be doomed to failure. The idea just doesn’t work.
About the only way I could think to make such a thing workable is if maybe you had propellants that could be tailored to work differently in specific barrel lengths, or something… Have a longer barrel that would afford more time for the propellant to do a second-stage burn for more energy, or something.
However, that founders on the fact that you’re then hauling around and manufacturing a bunch of stuff you don’t need for the individual weapon, which is a logistic stupidity. You need different characteristics in each role; why not have two different cartridges?
That’s what practical experience has shown us since WWII. We should acknowledge the facts on the ground, and just accept that two calibers are likely the bare minimum we’re going to have to provide.
This post by Ian seems almost intentionally designed to “literally trigger” me. And, so it did. I had a vitriolic (yeah, more so than usual…) response ready to go, all I had to do was hit “Post Comment”, and it would be here in all of its sarcastic glory.
However, comma… Didn’t happen, because I got called away from the keyboard, and had second thoughts upon re-reading it.
See, here’s the issue: There are two entirely different worldviews at odds, here. There is the one typified by Ian and a lot of his readership that’s wrapped more around the weapon itself than about how it is used. The other school, of course, is “How the hell are these things used, and what good are they…?”
The dichotomy goes back a long, long way: Think about how distorted our ideas are, about swords. Everyone focuses on them, rather than the weapons that were actually the meat and potatoes of the battlefield, things like polearms. Outside some very specific and oddly emphasized stuff in Japanese manga, hardly anyone focuses on things like the naginata, which arguably were far more effective in most combat actions than swords.
So… Ian is fascinated by the firearms equivalent of the sword in these terms. That’s who he writes for, and it is why he (and, his audience…) aren’t interested in the things that I find really fascinating and interesting, like the tripods and doctrine of the machinegun. Hardly anyone is, to be honest… The “romance of the Kentucky rifle” and the accompanying distortions surrounding the “individual rifleman” stem directly from this.
Go take a look at NGSW: Millions for the rifle/MG, not a goddamn dime for a better tripod, rangefinder, fire control system… Or, training on those things.
The whole utterly ridiculous idea of a “battle rifle” comes straight out of this world where the focus is on the wrong weapon. “Battle rifles” ceased to really have tactical effect about the time that we finally stopped with the idea of massed volley fire with individual soldiers shooting at kilometer-long ranges. That role went bye-bye due to the MG coming along, and distilling the effect provided by thousands of infantrymen spread out into huge targets into something that four or five men could provide from a single weapon. As such, the entire thought process leading up to “battle rifle” is essentially a 19th Century concept that the idjit class hasn’t quite gotten through their heads. Out past 400m, in combat, you’re highly unlikely to be able to get the average soldier to engage point targets at all effectively; such engagements are edge cases, ones that see high-value targets engaged by specialist shooters who are given the opportunity and time to do so because there are other guys drawing the fire and laying down suppression with their weapons. Trying to make every soldier a “designated marksman” is an admirable goal, but it isn’t one that makes the slightest amount of sense from a pragmatic tactical point of view. The money and time you spend lavishing that sort of training on the mass of your troops will evaporate under the weight of enemy fire in combat, the same way that the “Old Contemptibles” of the British Empire withered away under the systematic concentrated fire of the more rationally-organized German Army.
As another observer said of an earlier British effort, “It is magnificent, but it is not war…”
The thing here is that the issue isn’t the weapon, it’s how it is used. NGSW is an artifact of the same world that produced the delusional concept of the “battle rifle”, the same way that that “school” produced the M14 and the 7.62mm NATO. It comes of a world-view that refuses to examine what really goes on in combat, and romanticizes the “individual rifleman” much the same way popular culture romanticizes the sword; the rifle, in the end, ceased being the major weapon in infantry combat about the time the MG came along and became practical. Yet, we still insist on treating them as if they’re “the main thing” in combat, when they manifestly are no more than local security tools to keep the real killing machines in operation… The MG, the mortar, and the RTO. You put your money into the rifles when you fantasize about the riflemen being the primary “arm of decision”, when the reality is, they aren’t. The arm of decision throughout most of the 20th Century was the MG team and the mortar, along with that guy calling in fire from supporting artillery and air power.
Today, I suspect that the same fundamental error is being made with regards to drones. The idjit class is going to continue to focus on the romantic “sword” sort of thing, ignoring the fact that most if not all of the killing is being enabled or conducted by the drone team…
NGSW ought rightly, instead of trying to produce “mo’ bettah” rifles, be focused on doing a better job of enabling precise MG fires, integrated with targetfinding, and indirect support fires. If I’d been running the program, I’d have likely looked at the weapons, said “Yeah, these are adequate… We need better and more accurate ways of laying them on the enemy, more than anything else…”
I’d have purchased a modernized Lafette that could go with the infantry into combat, issued observation and range finding gear, revamped the training for MG teams, and implemented a design program meant to produce a truly integrated solution for fire control/observation down at the squad level. Those things would have produced results, in much shorter time than the idiocy we see with this recapitulation of the M14 and 7.62mm fiasco.
You will note that ain’t nobody in Ukraine right now talking about “needing overmatch”. They’re all perfectly content with the current small arms suite, and for good goddamned reason: It works.
NGSW is too big, too heavy, and addresses the exact wrong things about the issue. The development and provenance of the term “battle rifle” is part and parcel of the entire sorry system, the one that is still locked into the idea of the individual shooter being the “arm of decision”, as they were back on the mass formation battlefields of the 19th Century. The entire concept and worldview encapsulated in “Battle Rifle” is utter folly, and indicative of a near-total sense of denial and delusion about how combat works in the modern world.
The only rational actors in all of the 20th Century that I can even begin to defend are the Germans, who put the idea of the GPMG on the map, and then rationally built out their tactical system on it. They didn’t leave the Kar98k as their basic infantry weapon by accident; that was done because they rightly recognized the real place of the “individual rifleman” on the battlefield, and that was absolutely and emphatically not as the “arm of decision” for the small unit action. That role died on the battlefields of the 19th Century, and even today, all too many people fail to recognize that fact.
The raw and unpleasant fact here is that “battle rifle” is a term by which you can identify people who use it as being essentially non-serious contributors to the discussion of small-unit tactics and military affairs. They’re the same sort of people that yammer on and on about the katana or Romano/Iberian short sword, while ignoring the fact that the polearms and projectile weapons did most of the actual, y’know… Killing.
I suspect, strongly, that this whole issue revolves around the Walter Mitty mindset that has more people focused on the romantic aspects of it all, rather than the practical ones. You see very few works of historical fiction written from the standpoint of the guys in the ranks; most works of fiction tend to focus on the more “romantic” officers and leaders, the ones with the swords, which feeds into the entire fallacy of those swords being at all significant in military terms… The delusion is strong, even thousands of years after we last had battles centered around such foolish things as swords.
Were you to really have an honest appraisal, most of the interest would be on the polearms that did the majority of the tactical work. Instead, it’s “sword this, and sword that…”, incessantly yammering on about all the accessory items that were usually worn only by the leaders.
Individual weapons like the rifle are in the same delusional category, thus “battle rifle”. Rifles ain’t won a battle by themselves since maybe the 1870s, folks: Get over it.
To revert to the 1960s, right on.
Except I’d go further and say that you have to look even further back to see the infantry as the “arm of decision”. Damned near as far as you’d have to reach back to show cavalry in that role’.
I could argue that it was infantry armed with the smoothbore musket (not the over-rated “rifle-musket”) that was the last bunch of foot-sloggers who won a battle with their (more-or-less directed) firepower. Namely, at Waterloo on Sunday, 18 June 1815.
Except that even then, most of the actual casualties were inflicted not by infantry musketry but by artillery, specifically artillery firing “shrapnel”. What everybody but the British later more sensibly called “spherical case”.
SC plus canister were the premier infantry and cavalry killers from about the Seven Years’ War on. You can probably thank Frederick the Great of Prussia for that. Gustav II Adolf Vasa may have first made field artillery a serious threat on the battlefield (or at least his artillery chief, Lennart Torstensson did), but it was “Alte Fritze” who made artillery the Queen of Battle; the killing arm that dominated the battlefield, never mind the noble hussars’ and etc.’s fantasies of “martial glory”.
After that, right through the “rifle-musket” period (which only lasted about a decade, from Balaclava to Gettysburg), spherical case, shell, and (at under 400 meters’ range) canister, all fired from smoothbore gun-howitzers in direct-fire mode, ruled the battlefield. By essentially making mincemeat of everybody else on same.
The last battle you can truly say was probably won by infantry alone was Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485. And that may simply have been because it was raining like an SOB, bogging down everybody, getting armored knights stuck in the mud, wetting everybody’s bowstrings, denying the falcons and culverins visible targets, and turning the whole soggy mess into a pike-vs-English bill free-for-all. Hence proving what Wellington supposedly said 330 years later; “ The purpose of cavalry on the battlefield is to lend tone to what would otherwise be merely an unseemly brawl.”
Right through to the end of the smoothbore muzzle-loading field artillery period, the gun-howitzer firing spherical case and canister accounted for the majority of casualties on every battlefield it put in an appearance at.
The first major war fought in the breechloading rifled-artillery period, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, showed what artillery was evolving into. It reached maturity in Flanders in 1914-1918, and its apotheosis on the Eastern Front in 1941-45, a fact often completely missed by Western historians to this day. Simply put, it killed anything that moved, tried to move, or looked like it was even thinking about trying to move.
Everywhere else, airpower got all the good press, by people who didn’t really understand that four-engined heavy bombers were simply a form of very long-ranged heavy artillery. The high-tech descendants of Baron Menno von Coohorn’s first mortar. Why batter your way through a fortress’ walls when you can hammer it flat from above?
The wars that major powers have lost since then have pretty much all been the same kind of wars. Ones in which the enemy was dispersed, in small groups, acting more like bandits or raiders than a cohesive army, and thus forcing the major power to try to engage them mainly without artillery as the decisive arm.
Airpower can help, but in the end, if you’re having to engage guerrillas or etc. force-on-force primarily with infantry, one of two things is going to happen.
1. At some point your political masters are going to get fed up, so are your civilian populations, and you’re going to have to give up and leave. Enemy Wins. (Vietnam, Somalia 1996-1999, Iraq 2004-2012, Afghanistan whenever, etc.)
2. Your political masters get pissed-off enough that the gloves come off and you hammer “them” with everything you’ve got. You Win, more or less.(OIF 2003, Gaza today.)
The only sure thing is that if you try to fight “irregulars” on anything like their terms, you are going to lose. They have the “home field advantage”.
And when you have fantasies of the infantry being the decisive arm, with the individual rifleman being the hero who will win the war for you, that is exactly the bear trap you are sticking your “short arm” into.
And when it trips, it is going to hurt like Hell.
clear ether
eon
Ah, eon, old buddy…
It’s the Infantry who’re supposed to be the “Queen of Battle”, and Artillery that is the “King”.
Mostly because, as one wry old infantryman put it to me, the King is constantly and consistently f*cking the Queen in the ass…
Just spotted this error on a re-read, and I couldn’t let it go… Sorry!! 🙂
Yeah, Mea Culpa.
😉
cheers
eon
Kirk:
I thought you would have something to say on this one. Trouble is, things like more training and better tripods are not really sexy are they? Things like that don’t build careers, whereas new rifles and cartridges do. Think how much it will cost just to stock up on 6.8mm rounds. That’s the way to get on a company board after you retire.
One thing puzzles me about the infantry half kilometre thing. It seems to have been the case that the taliban were engaging our troops at over 500 metres. Question: what with? Most seemed to have standard AKs, so it wasn’t them. Would it just have been PKs? Is that what this new weapons system is an answer to? A few taliban with 7.62x54R machine guns? It is hardly news that a full power machine gun can fire with effect at more than 500m is it?
John K,
Sadly, I don’t really think we actually “know” what the hell the deal was, in Afghanistan. Because, we never really bothered to look for it.
Based on the subjective (purely so, I might add…) reports that were made to me personally, and the after-actions reviews that I had access to, I don’t believe that anyone was really doing more than “We took fire; PFB Bob got hit, sounded about like a PK to me, and I think they were shooting from about 800+ meters from us…”
What they were using to do that? LOL… Unimportant!! We don’t need to know, really…
Except, we really did.
I ran into nobody that put eyes-on the MG systems that were shooting at them while they were shooting; could have been some dude with a PK standing up and firing from the hip, for all we know. I rather think, from the effects? They were PK MG systems on tripods, locked in and operated by guys who knew what they were doing, and who’d pre-registered a lot of their fires.
Precisely the skill-at-arms shown by the various German Alpenjager units in WWII. Nothing particularly special, but you’d have thought we were fighting Superman from the way our forces went about dealing with it… As well, nobody went out to really gather the data, determine what the actual source of this “overmatch” was. Something I find unconscionable, but then… I’m that kind of guy.
The reality is that our problems were not our weapons, but how we employed them. Number one, you don’t get into a small-arms fight with insurgents; that’s like fighting a midget by getting on your knees and never standing up. He’s gonna beat your ass with experience, if nothing else.
The math is vicious: You can only achieve about 800m off of a bipod with a machinegun. Past that, you need a locked-down tripod and a well-trained crew, plus observers that know what they’re doing. And, do note: I am not talking about Carlos Hathcock, here. I’m talking about the average infantryman, the lowest common tactical denominator. If you want to engage with small arms alone, which is infinitely stupid in an environment like Afghanistan, you need to have tripods with you, mortars, and observation assets that can tell you down to the inch where the enemy is. So… Yeah. Tell me again how any of NGSW addresses that problem set?
They fundamentally screwed the pooch with their definition of the problem, mainly because they were purblind morons with agendas. Wanna know how you “dominate the infantry half-kilometer”? With machineguns and mortars, not individual weapons. And, you do it only by delivering accurate and timely fire onto properly identified enemy targets, leaving none of them alive to have benefited from “On-the-Job Training”.
Which is why you also don’t allow any survivors to get off of any battlefield where they’ve dared to so much as raise a finger against your forces. It’s pest control, and you don’t let the pests live so that they might breed more pests.
So much of what we did in both Afghanistan and Iraq was pure wrong-headedness. And, I rather doubt that the military commanders we have are going to do any better in any war that we have to fight: They are operating under a mindset that does not begin to envisage objective assessments of reality. NGSW shows that; the current lack of salvage and logistics vessels in both the Army and the Navy fleet show that. These are not adaptable people, capable of learning: They won’t even recognize that there’s a lesson to be learned, out there. They’ll do fine if the enemy is equally blinkered and comes on at them in the same old way, but… Yeah. That ain’t the way I’d be betting.
“Battle rifle” is a symptom, writ in the terms of terminology. There hasn’t been a battle won by a rifle since… Good Christ… The mid-19th Century?
Kirk:
Rourke’s Drift springs to mind, 1879. A triumph for the Martini-Henry.
Did the taliban even have tripods? I’ve never seen one. They travelled light, really light. Until they came into $85 billion worth of US kit. Now they probably cruise in Humvees. Thanks, Brandon.
I imagine allied troops came under fire from taliban with PKs on the bipod, nothing more. These were not sophisticated guys. Your suggestions are apt, but, as I said, no-one ever got on the board of Military Industrial Complex Inc by recommending more training.
The question of whether or not the Taliban had tripods was never really addressed and/or answered.
From the effects they generated at the ranges they were supposedly firing from? They either had tripods and working MG doctrine, or they had something just about as good. I cannot see any other means by which they could have done what they did, with the beaten zones they were creating at the ranges they were.
You never saw pictures of tripods ‘cos those ain’t sexy, and nobody takes pictures like that, not for publication. It’s a part and parcel of the whole discussion here, wherein people that don’t know what’s important make decisions about what to portray and publicize. If I were wanting to show off the professionalism of my forces, and knew I was doing so for a qualified and equally professional audience…? Then, I’d damn sure be laying on the public relations show demonstrating the proficiency and proper equipping of my MG teams. If not? Well, I’d be showing the knuckle-dragging public what they thought was sexy, like guys humping guns on their shoulders through the bush, with ammo belts akimbo, like they were Frito Bandito-esque assclowns…
You can’t go by what you saw or didn’t see portrayed; you have to go by what effects were generated, and those were very obviously either tripod-based fires, or something else they figured out. What that might have been? Dunno; maybe some esoteric technique of locking the guns in so as to provide more stability than from the shoulder/bipod? If you had the ability to pick where the engagement was going to be, you could likely improvise something with tree branches or rocks and wire…
Remember that Bush started the crap in Afghanistan. Then Obama continued it. Then trump invited the taliban to camp David. And trump came up with the withdrawal plan. But didn’t follow through. And Biden implemented that plan because he was bound to it. So Joe Biden finally ended the disaster that Bush started and everyone else was too chickenshit to stop.
A bipod just means another 15-year-old boy to carry it. No big deal. Spotting is more intriguing.
Kirk:
I cannot definitively say the whether the taliban did or did not use tripods. They certainly had PKs, and it must have been these which were firing on the allied troops from 500+ metres. Was this fire effective? I don’t know. It must have felt effective for troops on the receiving end, armed only with 5.56mm weapons. Does that justify a new rifle, machine gun and ammunition? No. But recommending using what we’ve got, but with more and better training? Clearly that concept does not work.
Let’s see who turns up on the board of SIG in a few years’ time.
Well, from the standpoint of generating employment for connected senior officers and sales for the military-industrial complex… I think we can safely assert that Taliban PK fire was effective.
One of the things that really just pulled my chain about the whole “overmatch” thing was the emotional and subjective nature of the issue. You started asking questions about “Hey, just how big were the beaten zones you guys were experiencing…?”, and there was a near-total lack of good subjective information. From the way the guys described it to me, and from what I found in written AARs, it sure seems as if the fires they were getting came off of tripod-mounted guns.
But… As I said, nobody was really going out and doing the necessary when it came to actually getting good data on just what was going on. It could have been massed PKs firing off bipods, relying on volume to achieve effect at long range, but… Nobody I know even bothered to look.
That’s where a lot of this crap falls down: It’s all emotion-driven bullshit with very little actual data backing it up. The opportunity arose to sell “overmatch”, and here we are. Actual point of fact as to whether or not we were really, truly “overmatched”? I don’t think that the fact was ever truly established. Pure subjective emotional analysis.
Which statement will hurt some feelings, but from my perspective, that’s the goddamn fact. We took fire, couldn’t effectively answer it with our tools, and people responded without really doing the required thought.
I mean, hell… The guys firing the XM-25 they put in the field over there for testing were enthused about the weapon, so long as they didn’t have to carry it… But, most importantly, nobody ever really established what the f*ck it was doing downrange. All they could ever tell you was “We fired the XM-25, and the enemy stopped shooting at us…”
The issue of “why” was never addressed or answered, and like so much of our small arms realm of thought, there’s a gaping vacancy around that question. Were the Taliban ending the engagement because they were dead? Or, because the US was firing something new and weird at them? What were the actual effects, downrange?
Nobody knows. Nobody really bothered to go do solid BDA, from everything I’ve been told.
Almost all of US small arms procurement is based on emotion and subjective impressions of the soldiers. Hell, go back and look at the issues surrounding the M14 in Vietnam, when they dragged in the M16 to replace it: There’s jack and sh*t for actual, y’know… Numbers, to back that decision up. It was all “emotion and feels”, because some guys were feeling let down due to the amount of fire that they were getting from the VC and NVA fire complex. Accurate numbers never existed… Thinking about it, the M14 could well have been doing a decent job, but because the differential in volumes of fire was there, the emotions got involved. And, here we are…
All of this deserves rather more research and much better numbers before making decisions, as well as a scientific and documented rational process being applied. One that we could be doing, today, with all the drones and other assets we have on the battlefield. Yet, ain’t nobody bothering…
Kirk:
Has anyone done any of this sort of research since SLA Marshall? And even he made most of it up.
To my mind, the taliban were hit and run guys. They would not want to get into a pitched battle with allies which might end in an air trike. So a belt of 7.62mm at 500m would have done just fine. They knew they would out range the allies armed with 5.56mm and all get safely back to the cave for supper. Goat stew if they’re lucky.
The important thing to remember is that they did not defeat America, any more than North Vietnam did. America just got bored and went away.
@JohnK,
So far as I know, ain’t nobody done the research. Ever. Not so as to get numbers I’d trust, at least.
The thing is, the data they’ve got is based on stuff they can get data on; it’s like the old joke about the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight, because that’s where the light is, although he actually lost his keys waaaaay over there, in the dark where he fell down…
It’s all circular reasoning based on subjective and emotional impressions. No hard data, nothing objective… Nothing replicable.
Which means it ain’t science. It’s purest flim-flammery, if you go by what there is out there.
The answers to the question of which weapon is doing what are important, but we don’t even know that because we never look. I mean, I would love to know what the hell goes on in the average firefight, just what it is that happens. But… We don’t know because nobody goes and looks for the data. You would think that it’d be easy to do, with the current drone technology, and how everything is getting wired for sound, but even with full top-down surveillance, you have problems figuring out what the hell is going on.
I think I told the story about the guys in Iraq that thought they were shooting back at the enemy, but were shooting at an empty hillside while the enemy actually got whacked by a third party we never identified, but who was probably the enemy’s fire support element… We watched that happen in real time, but nobody ever had a clue where the hell the fire came from that effectively wiped out the guys shooting at ours, or who was doing the shooting. Color of the tracer tends to make me believe it was enemy blue-on-blue, but who really knows?
The facts are out there, but nobody looks. We really need to get some research going, and then do actual forensic investigations on the battlefield. Like, what round did what to whom, and when did it happen? Wouldn’t really be all that hard to get to at least the edges of the data, by simple aerial observation.
I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of our subjectively developed ideas about combat are totally wrong. I know for a fact that just about every AAR ever conducted at the National Training Center, which is wired for one-over-the-world eye of God data collection, heavily featured what could charitably described as utter delusion on the part of participants as to what actually happened in combat. You’d have the commanders all the way from Battalion down to individual tank confidently get up and describe what they thought they saw, and time after time, the Observer/Controller leading the AAR would have to get up and say “Yeah… About that… Here’s what actually happened…” Which would usually be something completely different from what the training unit thought had happened.
In real live combat, I think it’s even worse; there’s never any corrective. I think there are psychological factors going on that we don’t fully grasp, and that we ought to be doing after-action interviews with POWs taken, to find out what the hell they thought was happening, while also doing scientific forensics on the KIA and WIA. Right now, you can get some reliable data on the edges of things by examining what got back by way of the casualty system, but even that’s questionable. It’d be nice to know, for example, how our guys got hit, what did it, and who fired it.
Right now? No way of telling, because we’ve never bothered to look at it. We need to, rather badly, because the lack of data is leading us to go down these ridiculous rat-holes like NGSW.
Kirk:
I agree with what you say, we really do need this knowledge. The problem is to design the programme so that there is something in it for General Dynamics. Unless you can spend a few billion and get a seat on the board when you retire, who’s interested?
@ Kirk
“Has anyone done any of this sort of research since SLA Marshall?”
Yes, “OPERATIONAL REQUIREMENTS FOR AN INFANTRY HAND WEAPON” by Norman A. Hitchman (John Hopkins University, for the Department of the Army) with statistical analysis by Scott E. Forbush and George J. Blakemore, Jr.
The reply above was for JohnK, sorry.
@Dogwalker,
I’d quibble with you about the “…since Marshall…” thing. That study you cite dates back to 1951, and was based not on actual battlefield research, but scholarship and testing conducted with basic trainees at the Engineer Replacement Center at Fort Belvoir.
Not a hell of a lot of actual combat data, there.
And, while I agree with the conclusions they reached, I have to question the means by which they were actually come by. To me, the path to knowledge has to go through analyzing actual combat actions forensically, not calculating hit rates from training sessions during initial entry training…
I think I said it before: Most of the studies that I’ve seen on this stuff are more “looking for lost keys under the lamppost” than anything else: Lots of effort and money expended on the things we can access easily, rather than doing the difficult work of investigating what really happened.
If you go look at the work done at the Little Big Horn battle site, you get an appreciation for the sort of thing you have to have going in order to actually analyze a battle. And, what’s missing from most contemporary study of the issue.
If someone had done with Wanat what they did at Little Big Horn, and then reached the conclusions resulting in NGSW, I’d have very little trouble accepting things about that program. As they manifestly did not do any such thing, I am and shall remain dubious as to the entire proposition of “overmatch” even being a real issue.
“(…) look at NGSW(…)not(…)dime for(…)rangefinder(…)”
Wait. Does not a built-in rangefinder inside XM157 https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/all-about-the-xm157-next-generation-fire-control-system-for-the-xm5-rifle/ count as rangefinder?
OK, Daweo… Follow me, here: The rangefinder I’m talking about is the one that is in the hands of the MG crews and the fire control personnel using it. The built-ins are nice and handy, but they’re also basically irrelevant within the ranges that are actually fought at. You really only need rangefinding for the “Past 800m fight” that you also need a damn tripod to really achieve effects at.
The problem with a lot of this crap is that people really don’t understand war and how it’s fought. If you’ve ever been situated anywhere on a hillside in the American West, waiting for a column of tanks to approach from literally tens of kilometers away, and realize that the only effective weapons you have to bring to bear on the fight are in that damn truck with the long-range radios…? When you recognize that you can’t effectively deliver fires onto even infantry in the open, at 2000m, even though you can observe the bastards getting into position?
Small arms are an irrelevancy, all too often, the equivalent of someone’s hideout gun when they’re fleeing from a guy in an airplane that’s strafing them or dropping bombs. Sad, but true.
So, yeah.. NGSW puts rangefinders into the optics of the rifle sights, but those aren’t accurate enough or have enough of a field of view to really provide decent corrections for MG fires.
What’s necessary is something like a set of binoculars with rangefinders and a reticle built-in, so that you could sit a marker on a target, click the button to designate it, and then have your gun fire, seeing where it actually hits, then hit that spot with the designator such that the calculations for correcting fires are instantly sent across the net to the entire squad/platoon element so that people could fire accurately. Along with that, you need to be able to integrate what everyone sees, so that if PFC Schmedlap down on the end of the position can get eyes-on the enemy, he can pass that information and target on up to the rest of the element… While also enabling the commander to decide priorities on who gets engaged when and with what…
Solve those problems? You don’t need “better weapons”; what we have will do just fine.
What we really need is to train people properly so that they know what to do with the array of gadgetry we already have.
But…that ain’t sexy, and it doesn’t get the Congressional appropriations.
And nine times out of ten, getting those and getting put in charge of the resulting PROGRAMS! are what drive promotions.
This is how you end up with O-7s and higher with an Idi Amin-sized billboard of ribbons on their left breast pockets. Many of whom have never has a posting outside of the Pentagon.
It’s also how said O-7s “trade” such ribbons back and forth like baseball cards or Pez containers. Over and above the ones “awarded” for being “good staff”, i.e. just for “being there”.
There’s a fine line between being an actual army and being a pyramid of sinecures for the “well-connected”, and I’m afraid we crossed that particular Rubicon a long time ago.
clear ether
eon
Absolutely.
Why else does MG qualification still reflect the idea that their major use is in the defense, from fixed positions? Where are the dynamic ranges, wherein the gun team has to move downrange and engage targets from successive positions, the way they would be in real life? Where are the ranges set up in mountains, to support such things?
Nowhere. And, they won’t exist until some bright light realizes that there’s more to machinegunnery than just blasting away along Final Protective Fire lines during a defense.
“(…)O-7s(…)”
What is this? Is this some hermetic joke against certain photo
https://mpopenker.livejournal.com/2848211.html
published by U.S.Navy with optical sight backward?
Daweo;
In the U.S. military, enlisted grades from privates to sergeants are “E”‘s, Warrant Officers are “WO”‘s, and commissioned officers are “O”s.
In the U.S. Army, it goes;
O-1 2nd Lt.
O-2 1st Lt.
O-3 Capt.
O-4 Major
O-5 Lt. Col.
O-6 Col.
O-7 Brig. Gen. (“one star”- *)
O-8 Maj. Gen. (“two star”- **)
O-9 Lt. Gen (“three star”- ***)
O-10 General of the Army (“four star”- ****; there is usually only one at a time.)
Equivalent naval ranks are
O-1 Ensign
O-2 Lieutenant Junior Grade (“Lt. JG”)
O-3 Lieutenant
O-4 Lt. Commander
O-5 Commander
O-6 Captain
O-7 Rear Admiral, Lower Half (one star)(“Commodore” before 1934)
O-8 Rear Admiral, Upper Half (two stars)
O-9 Admiral (three stars)
O-10 Fleet Admiral (four stars) (again usually only one at a time)
Note that all ranks O-7 and above must be proposed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
Yes, it’s complicated.
cheers
eon
The reason that the US Army stuck with the 7.62 NATO after WW2, was that in WW2 everybody complained bitterly about the lack of penetrating power of the M2 Ball cartridge. Some infantry units would accept M2 Ball, and would only except AP, Ordnance finally gave up and started issuing AP in M1 clips. Ordnance was unhappy because the AP was loaded hotter for MG use and wore out the barrels of the M1 and bent operating rods. Everybody forgets that the first thing that happens in battle, when something goes bang, is everyone gets under cover and you have to get through that cover to get them. Same thing happened with the 5.56. the original 55 grain bullet was bad at penetrating cover so they came out with heavier bullet with a steel core. The Army didn’t adopt the 5.56 until all the WW2 vets had died or retired. We’re seeing the same cycle all over again. Light weight, lots of ammo verses penetrating cover.
I’d say that the cycle never really cycled, to be honest. The people in charge never really figured sh*t out, and it shows. They really don’t know why the M16 worked better in Vietnam, nor do they understand what was the big deal about the M60/M16 combination, back then. They don’t grasp that the Vietnam jungle war was very much a small-arms centric fight, and that the war they prepared for in Europe was not; they don’t get why everything they were doing for training in the 1970s and 1980s lacked relevance when the troops hit Afghanistan.
In short, the US military really doesn’t “get” small arms. They’ve gotten away with it for so long because there’s all that lovely supporting arms fire we lavish the troops with, but going forward? Things are very likely to be very different; the reality of the next war for US troops is going to include a lot of things they’re going to have to pull out of their asses under fire and adapt to on the fly. At least one of the issues they’re going to have problems with, to my mind? That new individual weapon, which is far, far too heavy (particularly with the fully-loaded version of the cartridge…) to really function in the same role as the M16. It might make a decent DMR; it won’t cut it as a general-issue individual weapon. Guaran-damn-tee you this: The same thing will happen with it that happened with the plan to issue the M4 to support troops, and keep the M16A2 for the Infantry. The Infantry units will glom onto the M4s still on the MTOE, and pass off the too-heavy NGSW POS rifles to everyone else. The MG may remain, if it is reliable enough… If not, then it, too, will go the way of all things flesh.
The “desire path” of Infantry small arms didn’t run through the M16A2, due to weight. It didn’t run through the M14, due to weight and a too-heavy cartridge with too much recoil. I’m gonna go out on a limb and predict that the latest and greatest NGSW abortion will follow the same course.
Which an idiot with a lobotomy could have predicted.
HK came soooo close to getting NGSW right with the G11. Except that it was a Rube Goldberg nightmare inside that would have been a howling horror to keep working in the field as opposed to a nice, clean, dry test range.
But the concept was almost sound. Fire bursts at high cyclic rate and have a lot of ammo actually on tap. The FN P90 is built around the same concept; its one drawback is needing a round with greater oomph than a 9 x 19mm.
The one thing about the G11 which was complete nonsense was the idea that somehow inertial dwell time would delay felt recoil until after the last projectile of a three-round burst had left the muzzle. Umm, no; Newton’s Third Law has not been repealed and no Act of Congress will do so.
The ACR tests showed that the G11’s recoil had to be controlled just like any rifle firing in burst mode; soldiers briefed in on HK’s version got caught by surprise on that, unlike the ones firing the Colt or AAI ACR prototypes.
(And the Colt was a gussied-up M16A2, and the AAI was little more than a cosmetically-altered, small-caliber M14 clone. But I digress.)
NGSW will be a pipe dream until Ord admits that
1. It’s stupid to expect the individual PBI to successfully engage a point target beyond about 350 meters;
And
2. That job requires a properly-mounted support machine gun manned by an MG team who know WTH they are doing.
Two things the U.S. Army has unfortunately never really had.
clear ether
eon
“(…)G11(…)”
If you wish to use case-less ammunition like G11, but have lesser number of moving parts then use VBR CAR https://guns.fandom.com/wiki/VBR_CAR
I generally learn something new every time you post, Daweo… Kudos.
Never heard of that project, ever. Looks a bit more workable than the G11, which was never, ever going to be a “thing”. Other than an overly complex answer to questions I’m not sure were worth asking…
I have to break contact with you regarding the viability of the ideas encapsulated in the ACR and G11 programs.
Firstly, any jackass demanding the “minimum 100% improvement on hit probability” is smoking crack. We’re well past that era of small arms design potential. You might have been able to say that the Lebel was a major improvement over things like the Dreyse or the Kropatschek, but… Even it wasn’t 100% better.
It’s all incremental, these days. The potential simply isn’t there, until someone makes major break-throughs in terms of materials and energetics. Alternatively, maybe if they ever manage to get enough electric power into a battery to enable a man-portable rail gun…
But, that sort of exponential improvement that they were demanding of the ACR program is pure lunacy. Better? Sure; absolutely doable. But not that much better…
It’s also essentially pointless, because of the limitations of the human behind the trigger. You may have the ultimate uberwaffe on issue, but PFC Joe Snuffy, esq. is still going to be what he is: Highly unstable in terms of serving as a firing platform. Maybe if you did an electronic trigger with a designator that you could set on target, and only allow the rifle to fire when aligned with it…? Some deal like that, maybe coupled with that gyroscope thingy the Israelis are sticking on the Negev.
In the end, the raw limits of human capabilities are where your problems with lethality and range come in. Doesn’t matter what you put in front of PFC Joe, he’s gonna have the same shoulder and be just as unstable a platform.
Which is why I’m dubious of all these “hyperburst” weapons. None of them have worked out, in practice, and I think you’d be a lot more cost-effective by taking what they cost and putting that money into training and ammunition. Alternatively? More MG teams.
I still think that its a superior solution, to base your tactics around the MG and its firepower. Forget trying to make your riflemen Carlos Hathcock with gadgetry, just spend the money and time on mo’ bettah MG teams and training. Oh, and work on networking observation and targeting data down at the squad level, such that if PFC Joe sees something, he can report it, his leaders can evaluate it, and direct appropriate fires on it.
We’re on the same page here. I just didn’t expand that much.
ACR emphasized high ROF bursts, and in the case of the Colt ACR “duplex bullet” cartridges. Since a 5.56 x 45mm round with two 35-grain bullets in train instead of a single 70-grain bullet could likely be used in any standard M16 variant, the logic of the Colt ACR escaped me at the time and still does. Although many of its features (no carry handle, retracting stock, ACOG-type optical sight, etc.) have since showed up on later operational M16 versions like the M4.
(Plus of course that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned 1:7″ pitch rifling.)
The Steyr entrant, with its plastic-cased telescoped ammunition and saboted flechette projectile, was essentially “SPIW Redux”. It had 1:100″ (!) rifling to avoid imparting any appreciable spin to the fin-stabilized flechette.
The AAI prototype also fired a flechette, in a sabot, from a 5.56 x 45mm cartridge case, with 1:85″ rifling. Firing standard M193 from that might have been interesting, rather like the world’s highest-velocity Daisy BB gun.
The “100% improvement” just wasn’t going to happen, as you said. But from all I can determine, the program planners weren’t even sure what would constitute that “100% improvement”.
ACR was destined to failure because it was screwed up from the beginning. Because, as with everything else to do with Ord and small arms, nobody has ever done the basic research on things like what constitutes “practical accuracy”, what is an effective but controllable “rate of fire”, and how in the Hell do you train Citizen Soldier John Q. Public to make effective use of that Johnny Seven One Man Army Gadget in the few short weeks of Basic plus AIT?
Until those questions are asked, and answered in a way that an intelligent ten-year-old can grok, this sort of thing will happen over and over again.
cheers
eon
ACR was exactly like everything else they’ve trialed… Ill-conceived, poorly thought-out, and eventually not procured.
I suspect that the NGSW thing is going to blow up in their faces, but we’ll see. The Army will likely try to push that thing through, despite the issues with it.
I’m still vastly amused that they’re planning on putting it atop the M122/192 tripod. Like, WTF? The same tripod you put under the M1919 series? Really? Like that one worked so well?
It never ceases to amaze me the amount of wishful thinking and failure to comprehend reality that goes into the entire procurement system, regardless of branch or service. The small arms fiascoes are echoed in things like the LCS issue, and all the rest. The really bad thing is that whenever you see a success, you wind up going “How’d that happen?”
“(…)Steyr entrant, with its plastic-cased telescoped ammunition and saboted flechette projectile, was essentially “SPIW Redux”(…)”
I fail to see how http://modernfirearms.net/en/assault-rifles/austria-assault-rifles/steyr-acr-eng/ is connected to Metro Redux video game, nonetheless I want to point out while metrology used during ACR project might be dubious, Steyr ACR itself is result of competent engineering as https://armourersbench.com/2018/02/25/steyr-advanced-combat-rifle/ describe is as the simplest weapon, the simplest round, and the most cost effective approach of any of the ACR contenders
Daweo;
SPIW- Special Purpose Individual Weapon, the original flechette-firing proposal, circa 1964-65;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Purpose_Individual_Weapon
It had its origins in the infantry School’s Project SALVO (1946-51), which first quantified the concept of the sustained firescreen.
SPIW went through several designs, one of which (from AAI in 1969) bore a strong resemblance to AAI’s ACR prototype of a quarter-century later;
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/AAI_SPIW_rifle_1969.png
All SPIW proposals used flechette ammunition working roughly like that of the AAI ACR;
https://topwar.ru/uploads/posts/2020-08/thumbs/1596529413_1575641349_1.jpg
Which of course was basically a more “mainstream” version of the Steyr PCTA round.
I know nothing of this “Metro Redux” game you refer to. “SPIW Redux” is simply Vulgate Latin for “SPIW Revived or “SPIW All Over Again” to me.
cheers
eon
“(…) “SPIW Redux” is simply Vulgate Latin for “SPIW Revived or “SPIW All Over Again” to me.(…)”
I do not agree as AAI SPIW and Steyr ACR are mechanically distinct.
Former is piston-operated, ammunition https://guns.fandom.com/wiki/5.6%C3%9753mm_XM110 is so arranged to allow movement of primer
Latter is using vertically moving block with 1 chamber and ammunition is so shaped next round can push previous case forward, which is subsequently thrown downward.
Observe that Steyr was able to secure numerous U.S. patents as enumerated by https://armourersbench.com/2018/02/25/steyr-advanced-combat-rifle/
US #4944109
US #4817496
US #4930241
US #4949493
US #4916844
US #4760663
US #4739570
US #4941394
They both fire fin-stabilized elongated dart in sabot, but Steyr might took inspiration from ammunition APFSDS ammunition for tank guns of that era.
Regarding video game I mentioned it might be better known under full title Metro 2033 Redux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2033_(video_game)#2033_Redux
The NGSW will get canned because the 6.9×51 operates at a very high pressure to get the performance they want. Smokeless powder burns hotter as the pressure goes up. Unless they have a new pixie dust or unicorn poop incorporated into the propellant, it’s going to eat the barrels up in short order. To stop that from happening they will have to lower the max average pressure for the cartridge and, guess what, it no longer has the marvelous performance that sold it in the first place. Shades of the 30-03 cartridge an WA 30 cal powder.
It’s what killed the Ross, in the end, along with the British attempt to replace the SMLE with the nascent creature that became their Pattern 1913 in the original too-hot caliber. Same would have happened, I suspect, with the .276 Pedersen.
You start having barrel erosion issues? You need to back the hell off. And, by doing what they’re doing with a downloaded cartridge for the individual weapon role, they’re just recapitulating the two-caliber solution…
So. Why bother, gentlemen? Are we “saving” any money?
“(…).276 Pedersen(…)”
According to Vickers-Armstrong Handbook of the Pedersen Self-Loading Rifle (English) available at https://www.forgottenweapons.com/m1-garand-development/us-pedersen-276-rifle/ pressure is English 19 ton, I did look up STANDARD BALLISTICS OF KYNOCH CENTRAL-FIRE METALLIC CARTRIDGES and detected that
·30 Rimless Rifle (U.S.A. Model 1906) is giving 20·0, so actually Pedersen cartridge is *lower* pressure than 7,62×63 mm.
@Daweo,
I may have mis-remembered something I read years ago about the .276 Pedersen. I can’t find the reference now, but I vaguely recall it saying that the powder used and temperatures it produced were doing nasty things to the barrels.
My memory being what it is these days, I may have conflated that with one of the other attempts at perfection in a cartridge…
Maybe the greatest weapon in Western warfare for about 2000 years – except for that long stretch in the middle when Rome had the organization to produce a sword-wielding infantry – was long pointy sticks being jabbed by a rank of men. From the time that Greek hoplites with ever-longer “spears” first fended off Persia, to the decline of the Spanish tercio. Because swords and longbows take too damn much training and money.
We can also credit the Red Army after about 1942 for figuring out that surrounding their tanks with footsoldiers carrying submachine guns was more effective than rifles. It’s not so different than the German approach in that the tank is the punch, the subgunners the bodyguards. That role made the Red Army want a better submachine gun, which led to the Kalashnikov, which grew into the assault rifle role as the Simonov was found unnecessary.
That was meant to be a reply to Kirk.
Oh, I wholeheartedly agree with you, with the caveat that the Romans really weren’t quite as “gladius-centric” as we imagine. They carried the Pilum and the Plumbata in every battle, and used them extensively. The sword was an important weapon to them, while they fought, but it was more a psychological weapon than anything else: The Roman reputation for literally hacking apart their enemies had an impact on everyone they fought. Even the Dacians, who were perhaps the only people that ever figured out how to effectively deal mano-y-mano with the Roman infantryman, went down before the mass of Roman force that confronted them.
And, again… The focus is on the sword, where it really doesn’t belong. I’d wager that a Roman legion would have had some issues dealing with Swiss halbardiers and other more advanced polearms. Odds are that the Swiss would have used the hooks on their halberds to pull apart the Roman formations and then skewer them at arm’s length, before those swords ever got close to them. Same thing might well have happened were they to ever have faced the English longbow and its accompaniments.
Whenever anyone pictures ancient or medieval combat, they focus on the sword; the reality is that the polearm, axe, and other such things ruled the day. Even the knights went down before men armed with warhammers… Once someone with a halberd or billhook pulled them off their high-and-mighty horses.
You also have to factor in the “fantasy” element in the “romance of the sword”. As in, fantasy literature and its writers and readers. Not to mention all those AD&D players.
Check the AD&D combat rules. Swords have ridiculously high multipliers on initiative, armor penetration, damage, you name it. And there are a dozen “+6 Sword of Piercing” type magic items for every “+4 Arrow of Hitting”.
Gary Gygax claimed his original 1972 Chainmail rules (the basis for pretty much all AD&D combat rules down to the present) were based on actual research. I call BS on that; I’ve looked up most of the sources he claimed to use, and they don’t back up his numbers.
In fact, those sources strongly suggest that the most all-around effective CQB weapons back in pre-gunpowder days were mauls and “war hammers”. Which with one good smack could cripple or kill a horse, let alone a man, armored or not.
But Heroes Must Have Swords. Because…they’re Romantic.
That’s as may be, but the most recent filmed version of AD&D level “romanticism”, the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy, sort of inadvertently gave the game away.
While Aragorn and Boromir were busy hacking away at orcs one-on-one wit their “magic” swords, the two deadliest combatants on the battlefield were Legolas the elven archer, who could basically kill anything he could see out to 200 meters or so, and Gimli the dwarf, who could hack his way through a squad with his ax in the time it took the two “heroes” to finish off one opponent apiece. I suspect they became buddies because Gimli was always handy to keep the enemy infantry off Legolas’ ass while he went about his business.
Yes it’s fantasy, and no, that’s not quite the way it was in the original books. But it’s actually probably a more accurate depiction of what really happened on medieval and earlier battlefields.
French knights got it earlier than anybody else, according to Edwin Tunis in Weapons (1954). (It’s still an indispensable reference IMPO.) He noted that by the mid-15th Century, French knights had discarded the “broadsword”, replacing it with an early form of the rapier, with a thin enough blade to slip through the links of mail or the seams in plate armor. The idea being to convince the “vanquished foe” to fork over a decent-sized ransom if he wanted to keep breathing.
When the French knight needed a striking weapon, he resorted to a mace, which in his case looked like this;
https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/33836/1823316/main-image
Or else a “war hammer”;
https://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/aa/original/DP-15647-024.jpg
By the middle of the next century, everybody was doing it “French style”. Bashing somebody over the head with a blunt instrument just worked better, armored or not.
The Magic Sword may be a medieval romanticist’s obsession (Siegfried, King Arthur, etc.), but in actual fact, if you wanted to keep your head attached to your everything else on a medieval battlefield, you’d have been best advise to grab a mace, maul or war hammer.
And PS; get down off your knight’s charger. You’re entirely too good a target up there.
clear ether
eon
(ex-12th Level Half-Elf Ranger) 😉
The Romans used sword AND SHIELD. It was a combo. To reduce the range was effective in their case because the body was protected by the shield from the knee to the eyes, so they could get close with relatively little risk and once there, the gladius gave more options than the pointed stick.
I don’t think the pike would have been a problem for them. Once Hannibal trained the Romans in using the maniples tactically, and not only as a mean to fight frontal battles on uneven terrain, the Romans dispatched the phalanx with ridiculous ease. Yeah, they had problems in penetrating it frontally, but they had no reason to do so.
Heavier polearms. Halberds, bills, glaives, would instead have been a REAL problem. Roman shield and armors were not made to withstand the kind of impacts those weapons could generate.
One has to remember that only the Dacians ever gave the Roman infantry enough trouble that they had to change armor and tactics in the middle of a campaign… The Dacian falx was basically a short halberd, hooked to get behind the shield and to pull the guy carrying it out of alignment with his formation to be hacked apart…
I’m reasonably sure that the Swiss halberdiers would have achieved similar effects, with lower casualties because of the distances they could work at.
I’m really not all that certain why the hell the halberd took so long to be invented. You’d think that billhooks and the like would have been agricultural implements a long way back, and that the halberd should have come out of those fairly early on… But, I haven’t ever heard of anything like them being documented until well into the Medieval period.
It’s an interesting question, just like “Why the hell wasn’t anyone using an atlatl after the stone age…?” You’d think that such a simple adaptation would have been in use with the Roman pilum, but… Apparently not.
The atlatl was superseded by the short, wood bow. It was easier to make and use.
The old joke is “To train an archer, start by training his grandfather”. With the atlatl, you needed to start with his great-grandfather.
You have to give the Chinese credit. They took long looks at the atlatl (they encountered it in what is now Indonesia) and the bow (they met it in the hands of the Jurchens to their north)- and invented the crossbow.
Like the later “hand gonne” and even later smoothbore musket, any reasonably intelligent peasant could be taught the basics of using it in about ten minutes.
From then on it was just a matter of drill, drill, and drill some more.
cheers
eon
I had a friend that was deep into primitive weapons, and I honestly don’t remember the atlatl being that hard for him to pick up. The couple of times I screwed around with his setup, it sure seemed as if you could become reasonably proficient with it in fairly short order, but maybe I was missing something…
Eon, atlatl in indonesia ?
I thought that puny impotent weapon was characteristic of south/mesoamerica.
Atlatl? Puny? Insignificant?
I would refer you to the multiple Spanish conquistadores that had their non-plate armor punched through by obsidian-tipped atlatl projectiles… It’s hardly an insignificant weapon. Hell, that was one of the things that enabled ancient man to dominate wherever he went.
Kirk, that was exactly where I was aiming at, some youtube reenactment (or a recording of TV program where it was shown, like History whatnot) of weapon effectiveness I watched at least a decade ago shown iirc it failed to defeat conquistadores body armor. Now, maybe they used it in video poorly or wrong design, but in any case I’d say though historically engineered by local warfare specifics where it worked, when paired with “invaders” tech, it was simply inadequate and obsolete.
@Storm,
The Meso-Americans had problems punching through plate armor like the cuirass you’d find on your typical Spanish Grandee. The leather/fabric/mail armor on the foot soldiers? Fairly easy to get through. Also, horse armor…
There were records of them taking off a horse head with those flint-knapped mahuicoatl wooden swords, so the idea that they were some sort of pushover isn’t precisely… Accurate. I think that whatever plagues there were that swept through did rather more of the work for the Spaniards than a lot of people are willing to credit.
For long ranges Romans preferred slings (it’s little known, but the sling outranges the bow, due to the better aerodynamic of the bullet), then they had various sizes of ballista, then the lighter pilum, then the heavier pilum. So they thought to have all the distances covered.
The pilum had it’s best effect at relatively short range, on enemies that were already charging (bodies falling, people stumbling on pila, discarded shields and friends’ bodies…) so to extend the range was not seen as that useful.
The pilum could only be thrown about 8-10 meters (11 yards) due to its mass.
Legionaries also carried two or three light javelins that could be thrown 25 to 30 meters (30-35 yards) to open the ball with.
All of the above were replaced by the plumbata, the lead-weighted “arrow dart” about the middle of the 3rd Century AD. They could be thrown with an underhand “softball pitch” from a crouch, to go into a high arc and come down with lethal impact. And a legionary could carry half-a-dozen of them in leather loops on the back of his shield, within easy reach.
Legionaries with slings? Not to my knowledge. All accounts I’ve seen say that slings were the weapon of the peltasts, the auxiliary militia forces, who wore no armor and had at best a small “targe” round shield and a short sword that was more of a long dagger. While they couldn’t stand in the line with the heavy-armored legionaries, they could move faster and maneuver quickly. According to Tunis, the legion commanders used them to do end runs to outflank enemy formations.
War has always been complicated.
cheers
eon
A trained guy can throw a standard pilum at 34m from a standing position and at 40m doing some step.
Wearing an armor for the first time in his life, he can throw the pilum at 28m from a standing position and at 32m doing some step.
Wearing armor and holding a scutum for the first time in his life, he can trow the pilum at 18m from a standing position and at 24 meters doing one step.
So it’s safe to assume a trained legionary could throw a pilum at at least 20m if it was thrown while holding a scutum, and close to 30m if they could leave it on the ground for a moment.
Vegetius mentions the sling as a standard weapon for every soldier, but id doesn’t count if really standard legionaries used them. The only thing that counts is that the ones using them where there. For sure Romans mass-produced sling bullets (they are so common that you can buy one for cheap), and even produced special whistling bullets, to use as terror weapons.
Yeah. War has always been complicated. That’s why it’s better to know your sources.
Given what is known about Vegetius…? I’m not all that sure I’d be relying on him for reliable details… He wasn’t, shall we say, a practitioner? He was a wannabe reformer, trying to bring back half-remembered days of martial glory, and there are more than a few places in his work where he’s all agog over things he only knows via hearsay.
He is a much-cited source, but then again… He’s all we have for a lot of things. If you’re familiar with the trope, he’s kinda the Sparky of his time.
Devil’s Advocate, and all.
Infact in my first statement I said “Romans” (obviously intending the Roman military machine), not “legionaries”, and in the second I added: “it doesn’t count if really standard legionaries used them. The only thing that counts is that the ones using them where there. For sure Romans mass-produced sling bullets (they are so common that you can buy one for cheap), and even produced special whistling bullets, to use as terror weapons”.
Being the standard legionaries or the auxiliaries using them, what counts is that they were used. And the fact that the Romans mass-produced (even if not exclusively) lead sling bullets (lead, as any metal, was precious) means that the use of slings was absolutely integrated in Roman tactics.
@Kirk
While I agree that some technical knowledge is needed to every user of any weapon, does a riflemen really needs to know weight of the AK bolt and bolt carrier and proportion of those masses? Or depth of the rifling? Or how thick is anti-corrosion cover? And all those were in the local small arms manuals… Why? Because those were structured like an old German and Austrian manuals, that also had those things in them. Why did they? Because those were, back in the day those were also manuals that were used by people who were repairing those weapons. But in the ’60/70/80s those had separate manuals for maintenance and repairs, yet such data was left in the regular “grunt level” manual.
During my conscription time, my No.2 (part of the LMG team) was… lets just say that he was not terribly bright. He could not remember half of those things and barely passed course for MG assistant, but he could change belt in less than 5 seconds, he could change barrel w/o even making an effort, and in the whole plt he was only guy who could disassemble and clear gun faster than I could. If heavens forbid I had to go to war I would have taken him as an assistant over almost any other guy, lack of knowledge of thickness of corosion protection coating being damned. 🙂
@Bojan,
I’m not really arguing for including all that esoterica and then playing Trivial Pursuit with people over all of it. Much is just “nice to know” stuff that actually confuses the shit out of people more than it enlightens and helps.
On the other hand, if you include all the clear technical terminology and illustrations as “useless fluff”, you run the danger of having all too much “voodoo bullshit” infesting the ranks. Some of that stuff is valuable, and insisting on people knowing it is not necessarily a bad thing. When ordering spare parts or reporting a gun that’s gone down, it really helps to be able to tell the higher powers that “Hey, the sear notch is chipped out and no longer catches the sear…” vs. “…the trigger thingy isn’t stopping the gun when you let go of it…”
There really has to be a balance with it all, and you have to keep the lowest common denominator in. In all too many cases, to use an example, the average soldier is going to be lucky to be able to tell you that there’s an enemy tank in the perimeter. That’s all you really need, with vehicle identification, but it does help if you’ve a guy or two in the unit that has the presence of mind to count road wheels and gather up the other clues that tells you whether or not you’re being overrun by the 3rd MRR or the 7th Guards Tank Regiment. That info might be vital to the intel guys figuring out what is going on, and where the major effort is going in…
Of course, you also have to train the guys not to interpret when they report… You don’t say “Yeah, there’s a T-64 in the perimeter…” when you’re just able to make out a few details. You want them to just describe what they are seeing, and report only the facts they observe… Interpretation should be left to the specialists that (hopefully…) know more.
That is a scholar bias and almost damnation, that is often prevalent on internet, I’ve devised an example like if you would to have a guy who knows everything about every detail of soccer and its history, but if you were to give him a ball, he wouldnt be able to run mere 50 meters and score a goal, because he was “born with two left legs”. But, knowing some details certainly helps beyond pure and bare mechanical function as in changing the belt, I suppose such guy would not be able to diagnose and repair any problem in gun.
There’s always a problem with balance, when it comes to where you draw the line on what’s “too much info” vs. “not enough”.
And, then there’s the other problem: Dumbing everything down for the “lowest common denominator”. If you do too much of that, then when things don’t match the the things you foresaw in design and training, you’ve left your guys crippled.
Case in point, as an example? There are entire manuals devoted to demolitions with explosives in the US Army. In them, you will find all sorts of good things, but you’ll not be finding a basic explanation of what the hell you’re actually doing with high explosives. This is a bit of a problem when you are out on the bleeding edge of things, and find that the truckloads of common standard explosives your training and calculations are based on don’t exist in that theater of operations…
At which point, you’d better have a solid understanding of that which goes into it all, or you’re not getting things done.
The demo card tells you to do X with Y, using this equation and this layout; if you know what went into that, you can adapt almost anything to doing the same job. The problems come when the basic underlying knowledge isn’t imparted or even present in the training materials.
I’ve been through a bunch of different country’s manuals, and I find that the US versions are usually really dumbed down, and the UK usually manages to do a better job. German manuals are decent, fairly well-balanced; the esoterica is there, along with the basics. What little I’ve seen of other nation’s manuals makes me wonder if a bunch of them aren’t being farmed out to the same set of people, because they sure read alike in translation…