NGSW, disruptive innovations, and the small military team?

[LR1955]

The services are always asking for more, more, more performance.

Small arms doesn’t get anywhere near the priority many think it should because small arms like rifles and squad-level machine-guns are relatively inconsequential to conventional warfare.

For COIN/UW, they are extremely important due to concerns over collateral damage, but most of the US DoD’s budget is towards systems at much higher levels of the echelons of fire and all the combined arms assets that work together on the big fight.

By the time a dismounted soldier steps onto the ground in the wake of those systems, he’s only sifting through the rubble with smoking corpses buried underneath it and maybe some token pockets of misperceived resistance, who can no longer hear.

As gun guys, we tend to think that because we are familiar with rifles and such, then we know how much of the military works.

What I saw was that even for mid and many senior officers in combat arms, they simply didn’t have much of a clue of what was going on with slice elements and other major Army Career Management Fields, let alone what was happening in the Air Force or Navy.

A lot of that is being task-saturated in your own job scraping bark off the trees. You know you’re in a forest, but aren’t really sure how big it is and what’s going on around you outside of your area of perceived influence.

And that has been my point with the lethality thing for years. A guy in that forest can see only so far so to me it is better to develop a cartridge and weapon that is very fast to use and very lethal to 200 or 300 instead of a heavier, bulkier, weapon and ammo that is intended for 300 to X distance. I do not think any designer will come up with something equally good in both conditions so focus on the most likely scenario and give them something that really does give a quantum advantage over an enemy.