Defense Tech: Keep it Simple

[unhappycamper]

Keep it Simple

You know, it’s been said that the U.S. Army is the best equipped force in the world but I’m really more amazed by what we don’t have that other armies do than what we do have, or what we want to have that oth­ers don’t.

Take, for exam­ple, the four shot 25mm XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System cur­rently in the works (the XM25 is itself an off­shoot of the doomed XM29 OICW thingie). It’s sup­posed to be effec­tive out to 500 meters against point tar­gets, will have a built in multi-spectrum electro-optical sight, and will have the abil­ity to indi­vid­u­ally pro­gram the burst time on the launched pro­jec­tiles so that they explode behind or over the tar­get, thus defeat­ing any frontal cover the tar­get might have.

Sounds good on paper, and I’m sure there’s no other Army out there try­ing to develop a weapon specif­i­cally designed to attack a tar­get behind cover, but the real­ity is, we haven’t got one of these either (yet, and I don’t see these get­ting issued soon either), and there are a lot of really sim­ple weapons cur­rently in ser­vice which could just as eas­ily per­form this mission.

Rifle grenades: What’s wrong with rifle grenades? We, the American army, used the hell out of them in WWII and Korea, but they went away after that. Were they not high tech enough, or was this one of those “no guns on jet fight­ers” deci­sions, where we decided that the types of wars we’d be fight­ing in the future would ren­der these weapons obso­lete? There are any num­ber of designs out there now that could imme­di­ately enter ser­vice with the US mil­i­tary as short range (<300m) anti-personnel, anti-tank (ok, anti-APC), dual pur­pose, indi­vid­u­ally fired muni­tions, yet we haven’t got any.

I under­stand that we have ded­i­cated grenade launch­ers like the M203 now that can fill the role of the rifle grenade, but the 203 is an indi­vid­u­ally assigned weapon, and in the stan­dard infantry squad there are only two (one per team) and in the Army’s table dri­ven orga­ni­za­tional scheme, if your unit isn’t autho­rized any (like mine) then you just go with­out. With a rifle grenade, on the other hand, every­one in the unit has the capa­bil­ity of car­ry­ing one or two, and they can be fired by any­one (this capa­bil­ity would enable a com­man­der to stock­pile the grenades in a defen­sive posi­tion, or with a sup­port by fire ele­ment, with­out dis­rupt­ing unit orga­ni­za­tion by shift­ing grenadiers around.)


Rest of article at: http://defensetech.org/2009/11/05/keep-it-simple/

[westerebus]

1. Video games.

They discovered this requirement in a video game and said: boy, we could use one of those. The rest is one more line in the wish list commonly refereed to as the Defense Appropriations Bill.