07-21-2013, 11:34 PM
Tony Williams Wrote:I think it's more subtle than just lack of money - cancelling one new DDG-51 destroyer or a dozen F-35s would probably be enough to pay for the replacement of all the US small arms.
The problem is the official mindset. Senior officers are extremely reluctant to admit that there's anything wrong with 5.56mm, partly because they don't want to shake the confidence of those who use it, partly because it would generate bad PR and lead to them being accused of sending troops into harm's way knowing that they had deficient weapons.
So they keep trying to tweak the 5.56mm to make it better - something that they've now spent so much money on that if they were to turn around and admit that 5.56mm was fundamentally inadequate they would also be charged with wasting all of that development money in trying to come up with better loadings.
There is also the CYA aspect, in terms of the effect on careers. Nobody's career gets hurt by supporting the Army's official position (in this case, that 5.56mm is fine), but start rocking the boat by suggesting otherwise and you'll quickly become very unpopular.
Add all of the above together and what you get is massive inertia and reluctance to consider change, which makes getting anything different adopted - whatever its merits - a real struggle. Technical arguments can't prevail - it will take very senior officers and/or senior politicians to be convinced and tell the military to make the change.
Perspectives
I see it in an opposite perspective to that. There are plenty of senior officers who would love nothing more than to cash-in with a major contractor before retirement, with a new anything, caliber/weapon/camo pattern/body armor-doesn't matter, as long as the trade-show job is there waiting. Then you have to deal with the ground-truth reality that a lot of gun/military enthusiasts simply don't want to hear or refuse to take into account, since it offers them no real role in somehow contributing to the defense industry-aside from actual service or employment to such end.
There are a lot of guys now, and even before from every armed conflict where 5.56 has been used, that know what it does and doesn't do. It's an excellent cartridge that gets a lot done within common engagement distances, even from carbines.
Real-world Terminal Ballistics
Many others and I have seen its killing/wounding characteristics, and have been impressed, as it doesn't look like your typical rifle wound profile that you would see on medium game, unless you shot one with a .22-250 within 200yds using a varmint pill (messy). Since people are much thinner-skinned than most medium game, you can let your imagination be your guide, or look up some of the rare photographs that have been taken of real-world 5.56 injuries/deaths.
The naysayers cry "anecdotal" and cite other anecdotes of 14rd non-instant kills (some people don't want to die, regardless of what you shoot them with. Charles Beckwith was shot through the stomach with a 12.7mm machinegun, and didn't die. He went on to be the Commander who stood-up and led SFOD-Delta in 1977.
Agendas
What I do see are a lot of complaints from people/soldiers who had an agenda before they were deployed, and no matter what their experiences were, even if they never saw someone shot with 5.56, they come back and talk about how "5.56 doesn't put people down", "takes 14 rounds to kill someone", "5.56 gets people killed", etc. I even had a guy who was really rude and emotional about the whole thing tell me straight to my face that guys in his unit unloaded with the SAW on enemy in Iraq with 50rd bursts, and still no instant kills. I then asked when he was there, and after some fidgeting, it was revealed he's never been near Iraq, and was in The Old Guard back at Fort Meyer in D.C. (who actually had some Companies deploy, just not his.)
I heard it from this guy, therefore...
I can most positively assure anyone, if you even let go of a 7rd burst with the SAW on someone, it will be extremely brutal, and yes, I've seen it done. These are some of the ridiculous things I've listened to though, from guys who can easily pull the wool over other people's eyes and put up a big front so that you won't ask the questions that boil down to them never having deployed, or if they did deploy, they were in the rear with the gear, or heard if from another unit that was in-contact, so now they absorbed the 3rd-hand info and internalized it, and will represent it as 1st-hand.
Look how people vote with their feet...
If 5.56 was so deficient, no Special Operations unit with the autonomy they have would even touch it, yet instead, you see a preference for it. Afghanistan is often cited as a reason to need a new cartridge, but units do well with balancing their small arms structure with 7.62 NATO and 5.56 weapons if they have the flexibility to do so.
Greed-based Surveys Backfiring
When the Army has conducted surveys that were prompted by greedy Generals, Colonels, & contractors looking to sell a new system to the military, to their dismay, 85% of actual combat arms soldiers who have used the M4 reported positive results with the system, to include reliability, accuracy, weight, lethality, user-friendliness, etc. Kinda puts a halt to any new opportunity for HK (facing financial hard times) or FN to hoist some new weapon on the soldiers, that will not do anything of value the M4 can't, and introduces several new failure points or negatives the M4 never had.
"Here's what you need! Thanks for not asking."
Then you have guys who decided amongst themselves that the Army needed a new cartridge that nobody but this couple was asking for, and went about a shady way of trying to force it on even their own community (who wanted nothing to do with it), and when their own and big Army said as much, they cried foul and that "soldiers weren't getting the best that they deserve", "lives will be lost", blah bl-blah bl-blah BS, to the point that they had to be physically escorted off of Fort Bragg after being told to stop.
Fan club to the "we know better than the customer" guys.
To add insult to injury, guys who are totally well-meaning find out about it, and grab the banner moving forward with such a project, and try to market it by saying it's "hush-hush", "can't talk about it", "super secret speshul farces", "order yours now-I know this guy.". That's a fast track way to destroy your name in the SF community, especially by claiming it's backed by SF when it isn't, and almost nobody else in USASF Command wants it, let alone the rest of USASOC and SOCOM.
The best thing those who aren't familiar with the way things work in the military could ever do to help with this, is devote the amount of time, energy, and resources they have spent on studying and analyzing the minutia of small arms, ballistics, projectile shaping, etc., and redirect all of that towards:
* The current state and history of initial entry training for both enlisted and officers
* The current state and history of NCO and Officer professional development
* Unit training standards and actual traditions
* Organizational bureaucracy and barriers to training by the risk-aversive military institutions in the US and some Western Nations
Grand Scheme: Cartridges/chamberings are marginal factors
This caliber/cartridge argument is virtually meaningless in the grand scheme of things. You want to fix something, go look at how Fort Benning conducts Infantry Officer Basic Course (waste of time/resources), or how the Army conducts PLDC (ditto), Infantry BNCOC (same thing) and ANCOC, or the SGM's Academy. Look at how the Advanced Officer Course is run (for Captains).
Where to place your focus
If you really care about this mess, and know what M855 and M80 are, but don't know what PLDC, BNCOC, IOBC, or ANCOC are, you need to fix yourself first before making any further comments about how to fix small aspects of a cartridge that won't matter if the leadership can't even run basic marksmanship training that is effective, focused, and truly improves their soldiers' hit-percentages. Hint: The leadership can't shoot well themselves, so how can they teach it?
Study the promotion system, rater system, and organizational doctrine and TO&E, and how local and State economics/employment blow military readiness easily away as far as priorities go. If you were able to devise a workable fix for that, you would be a genius. I've been playing around with ideas in my head for 2 decades on how to fix it, and I'm still stumped as to how to replace the gubm't gravy train teet with a no-BS military force that takes training seriously, only promotes and rewards warriors, while punishing and expelling worthless morons that somehow slip through the screening and entrance system.