Troops left to fend for themselves after Army was warned of flaws in M4 rifle

[JASmith]

One of the challenges facing advocates of getting the best infantry weapons is the doctrine placing the infantry in the "clean up" role after first, airpower, and then artillery have worked over the battlefield.

Aircraft, artillery, and their weapons are hugely expensive with the result that the firms providing this class of equipment have serious lobbying power.

The two taken together make getting a serious program to modernize infantry armament extraordinarily difficult. The fact that the M-4, the Ma-Deuce, and existing mortars do very well in the nominal infantry makes building that case very difficult.

Special operators, on the other hand, frequently are required to depend only the firepower they can bring to the fight without recourse to the larger world of bombers and artillery. That may be one of the reasons the special forces have wide latitude for selecting weapons.