Great link, with a straight-up, apolitical arms and armor discussion. I was beginning to think they'd gone extinct.

John Browning has to have been the finest designer of automatic weapons to ever have lived. He has no less than four classic designs to his credit: the M1911 .45 automatic pistol, the Browning Hi-power, the Browning Automatic Rifle, and his classic .50 caliber machine gun, known today in the US military as the M2.

The current version of the M2 is a refinement of Browning's design but in all essences is unchanged, as I understand it.

Top quality war p*rn for the literate. (No pictures.)

Warning to lefties: Brutality discussed. No Chimphitler references. Troop morale discussed. Proceed at your own peril.

These hole-ups are referred to as Alpha Whiskey Romeos (Allahs Waiting Room).

Marines crack me up. God bless em.

Small wonder there's a preference for the .45

Mr. Den Beste,

Please check your email.

Ahhhh. This is like a soothing balm to my cankered soul.

One question: why are we still using that goddam M-16 popgun? I have yet to hear from a soldier who actually likes using it in combat. I hope the upcoming M-8 is a better weapon (although it still uses that dinky 5.56mm round).

"John Browning has to have been the finest designer of automatic weapons to ever have lived."

Hooray for the Mormons. There's a reason you don't mess with them.

Love the M1911A1 Colt .45!
Why the Army went to the spit wad 9mm never made any sense to me. I shot a burglar (would be burglar, that is) with my 45. The round hit a stud in the wall, went through two 2x4's, drywall etc., and I still got one of the fool's kidneys! A 9mm round woud never have made it through the wall. God bless our troops! I especially loved the part about Allah's Waiting Room.

A lot of this article looks, well, bad. It's been heavily laughed at over at AR15.com and doesn't mesh with what verified honest to god Marines have said who've come back.

Some little things: It's an M249, not a M243. It fires from a belt, not a drum. No Kevlar stocks have been put on M14s, as they don't exist. Nobody puts red dots or low power scopes on 'em either. Least I've never seen a pic of it, and the Marines I know haven't seen it either. The Marines do not use the M24. They use the M40 sniper rifle. The M40 does not come chambered in .300 Win Mag. The new body armor is light, at like 20 pounds, not 6. The 7.62mm Russian is never called the ".308".

There is no way terrorists are using Google Earth to gather intel on US bases. Considering the overhead shot for my old neighborhood in Naperville, IL is several years old, I somehow doubt the AQ boys are getting up to the minute reports from Google.

A lot of this just reads funny. Although I don't doubt the 5.56mm haters have come out. Somehow people I know keeping dropping dear and hogs with single shots though. And SF keeps using it. Wonder why they haven't grabbed FALs or G3s if it sucks so bad.

And Monty, the XM8 is dead. For a while now.

The 1911's single-action cocked-and-locked position is also terrifying to see in somebody's holster.

The 9mm is OK if you're not restricted to using ball ammo in it. Some +p+ CorBon hollow points make it pretty respectable.

Unfortunately, we don't do that.

I remember reading something almost exactly like this (without the Google Earth bit in particular) several months ago.

Spade:

What are they replacing the XM-8 with? I heard H&K was the prime contractor (German firm, go figure), and that the new M-8 (or whatever) was already on the production line being churned out for deployment in 2007. Wha' happen? Does that mean we're stuck with the chunk-o-shit M-16A2 for another ten years?

And no, I don't want to hear about how that candy-ass 5.56mm round is okay -- it's not. Sure you can kill someone with it; but you can kill someone with a rock, if you throw it accurately enough. It's got no penetrating power, and the extra zip is useless due to how light the round is; the slightest turbulence can cause the round to tumble and veer off. Plus the M-16's magazine (at least in the A1 version) was a complete joke -- you dared not load a magazine full-up lest it jam and hang a shell up in the ejector.

As for sidearms -- why not standardize on the .45 Desert Eagle, or some military variant? That's a good, reliable, hard-hitting weapon with years of battle-testing behind it.

Google Earth may not be as out of date as you think. Got a call from a buddy I was deployed with, told me Google Earth had our base on it, and checked Google Earth...based on construction ongoing on the base, I would say the data was less than a year and a half old. Scary resource...the baddies still need to do "eyes on" and know what's what, but it's certainly another tool in the toolbox.

I liked how he mentioned that these dead terrorists were found to have opiates in their system. Now Karl Marx said that religion is the opiate of the people, but who knew that these jihadis would take it quite so literally? LOL

The new body armor is light, at like 20 pounds, not 6.

According to military.com

In 1999, individual body armor was again improved with the introduction of the Interceptor system. Although the Interceptor vest weighs a fraction of the older 1980s issue PASGT vest (8 pounds compared to 25 pounds), the Interceptor is capable of defeating 9mm ammunition

The XM-8 should be replaced with tthe Alexander Arms .50 Beowulf AR conversion. :-) But seriously, I think the 6.8 MM SPC might not be a bad idea. No need to redesign a new weapon, change the majority of your manufacturing and suppliers or even retrain and reducate your troops if you use the 6.8MM AR conversions.

A lot of this, though, seems to gel with stuff I've read elsewhere, from people who generally know what they're talking about, like strategypage.com. Probably not all, but dissatisfaction with the 5.56 round seems pretty common, as with the 9mm pistols. (For similar reasons that prompted the adoption of the M1911 .45 in the first place - you need something like that to stop crazy-ass fanatical terrorists who are all hopped up on goofballs.)

Here is an article about the 6.8mm Barret Arms M468.

http://www.military.com/soldiertech/0,14632,Soldiertech_M468,,00.html

There is a ballistics chart near the bottom and i have to say i likey.

Has that cute little 6 y/o girl test fired it ? What does she think?

I think that the lower weight for the Interceptor Armour may be for the vest without any ballistic plates - installation of which would increase the weight while also improving ballistic protection well beyond 9mm ball.

Agreed that the 9mm is weak - most of the police forces I am familiar with use the .40 I had the chance to fine the Glock .45 in September - lots of fun but don't know too many females who could handle it. A lot of female cops have issues with even the .40 - not even primarily the recoil but the thickness of the grip being too big for their mitts.

You would be correct - I just found this

The new body armor, which is unisex, is equipped with removable throat and groin protectors, as well as front and back removable plates, which can stop 7.62 mm rounds. It weighs 16.4 pounds; each of the two inserts weighs 4 pounds, and the outer tactical vest weighs 8.4 pounds.

I dunno...as far a general statements go regarding weapon systems, these look pretty similar to what soldiers from my battalion (Army MPs) described.

As for the slight errors in the posting (M243 not M249, AK round in caliber, etc), I'd chalk it up to an enthusiastic but non-military parent and/or someone with a little gun knowledge getting himself in trouble (my dad still calls the 5.56mm a .223....it's not wrong, but it's not right, either).

The mapping programs aren't current, obviously, but US forces are using existing buildings as well as building new ones. Printing off an older map that shows existing buildings, and then filling in what's left based off of informants, would be a useful tool.

The M14 part sounds odd, but again, I believe he mentioned them being used by Spec Ops guys, and they've always done things their own way. I'd guess it was a misunderstanding on someone's part....either the marine son or the father.

This letter seems like an amalgamation of things, and some of the ballistic details are indeed questionable.

About the Marine Corps snipers... some of them are probably close to Hathcock numbers; this jibes with personal reports I've heard from returning marines. Our long-rifle marksmen have taken a terrible toll on the insurgents/terrorists.

Also, some of the Chechens are proficient precision riflemen; they shoot far better than the average jihadi.

The reason 5.56mm rounds are used is because they don't kill. A dead soldier is out of action but a wounded one needs treatment and evacuation - an additional 1-4 soldiers out the action.

Go to: http://www.strategypage.com Read today`s piece entitled: WEAPONS: Little Bullet loses Respect.

Marine`s dad and my own USMC experience in combat and training are basically consistent. The M16 & SAW are too sensitive to environment; labor intensive and do not instill confidence when at the OK Corral. Ironically, Comrade Kalashnakov designed AK-47 to address all these issues(almost). Few parts, all big parts and bonehead can operate & field-strip. Not accurate but Ivan planned on automatic anyway. Handful of sand in receiver; it shoots...

When I am Dictator I will make something similar except ammo will be infrared heat-seeker for 98.6 degrees........ :^/

"The reason 5.56mm rounds are used is because they don't kill"

That sounds irrational to me. There is a story about how the M-16 was came to be accepted by the U.S. Army which included photos of dead VC with huge gaping wounds and enthusiastic verbiage in support. They wanted it to work.

It's the shooters that count and I pretty much think that they want one round kills every time. In a lot of states you can't use 5.56 to hunt game animals because they suck.

There is a nice new article on the subject at Stragegy.com : http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htweap/articles/20051115.aspx

Dang Hawkins,

You snuck in there while I was trying to clean up my spelling......

Well, that's what I was told by an expert (one of those guys who can rattle off statistics about how likely you were to survive storming an enemy outpost or crossing a minefield under fire). Besides, they knew pretty early on the effect of caliber. The .45 was specifically designed with crazy philippino rebels in mind. They could have just armed everyone with .45s if they wanted to kill with every shot.

Holdfast, the .45 is easy for a little tiny 5'3" woman to use. I know. Mine's a Kimber, and if you're ever out in Northern California, I'll take you to the local range and demonstrate just how easy it is.

Sexist!!

(I'm just kidding about the last.)

My 5'3" daughter can handle my Springfield .45 just fine, and shoots more accurately than I do.

Something to keep in mind.

I was most accurate with the .44 during my firearms training (age 19 at the time). I'm a shorty like your daughter, Dave, 5'4".

Many women will find they are as accurate as the men or even better, and often so even with the larger calibers.

Monty, there are a whole lot of NVA, VC, Somalis, Panamanians, Iraqis and Al Quaeda members who will dispute your analysis of the 5.56 as "weak".
And that's just for America- we've sold the M-16 to about a dozen nations; another half-dozen or so produce it themselves (check Jane's to find out which). The SAS carry it by choice. Pretty good for such a horrible POS, eh?

Hawkins- the AK was designed long before the AR15 was a gleam in Gene Stoner's eye. After they captured some M16's, the Sovs switched over to a 5.45mm round based strongly on the 5.56. They still use it today.

Rho- I've been carrying a cocked-and-locked 1911 as a everyday CCW tool for about six years now. Nothing scary about it- if you devote the handling practice you need to, which you should be doing no matter what you carry. Sure, if you're a klutz you'll get hurt- but that's true with any other handgun.

Anybody who thinks that the 5.56mm wasn't designed to kill has never seen anybody shot with it. Check out www.ammo-oracle.com for good information on it

On the XM8, it's being replaced with nothing. It was never very good to begin with, which is why it lost the SOCOM contract to the FN SCAR (having your handguards melt during a test is bad). The barrel length on the standard version of it was way too short for effective fragmentation of M193 and SS109 rounds.

If you keep your M16 clean, and properly set up for a desert environment, it won't jam on you. Magazines are of course the weak link in any rifle system, but if you treat them well they won't fail you either.

A comment from RustedAce on Ar15.com, a Marine who was out in Western Iraq was "I disagree with the jamming M16 problems, Maybe he had older ones or something, not one person in my unit had a jam that wasnt related to a broke mag. I would bet his unit just hand guns that were wornout beyond thier time, we had a problem with some of our SAWs that were decades old, but the newer ones worked great.

He is 100% correct about most all the insurgents being foreigns.

I disagree with the 5.56 thing, just becuase I saw an insurgent not die from 7 hits of 7.62 he was driving a car, it took him out but he was still breathing, then had one guy that took 1 round of 5.56 and bit it imediatly, its all about shot placement, I got into arguments with my unit alot about this, asking them what could possibly be better, because of complaints of people getting hit with both types or rounds and not dying. The general answer ended up being .50 but you really cant just carr that around

TV has spoiled us with 1 hit kills."

Lots of 249 gunners on AR15 talking about how theirs are fine.

The 5.56mm is, also, in my opinion a good round. People somehow expect a one shot kill. It's not going to happen unless we start dusting off .45-70s.

"the AK was designed long before the AR15 was a gleam in Gene Stoner's eye. After they captured some M16's, the Sovs switched over to a 5.45mm round based strongly on the 5.56."

And Mikhail Kalashnikov hasn't stopped bitching about it ever since. :-) Ever see that peice where he and Stoner had a nice little face to face conversation and he blames Stoner for the downgrade in his babys performance, making the Sovs think he was on to something they were missing using such a small round? Everything is matter of degree, and of course, competing data and opinions. ;-)

Anyone who wants more information and a pretty thourough debunking of this topic can do worse than to start here:

and see it done by people who actually went there and did that.

There is a story about how the M-16 was came to be accepted by the U.S. Army which included photos of dead VC with huge gaping wounds and enthusiastic verbiage in support.

There's been several revisions to the rifling twist that mitigated the tumble. An original twist M16 was firing a very marginally stable bullet.

You know, if the mousegun calibers (5.56 and 5.45) had so much stopping power, more state fish and game departments would allow them for big game hunting instead of limiting them to groundhogs.

5.56 does not penetrate barriers worth a damn, and never has. If it did, and if it had decent knockdown power, the military wouldn't be building the various 6.8 SPC variants for the M4/ M16 and SCAR platforms, nor would there be contracts for shorty versions of the M-14 like this mod. Want a real world example of how bad the 5.56 loading is?

Read Micheal Yon.

In the series of events where LTC Erik Kurilla was shot, his Sgt. fired his M4 into the abdomen of an insurgent 4 times at point-blank range, including taking off one of the guys testicles, and the Sgt. still had the fight the guy hand-to-hand in a pitched battle before finally taking the advantage, and the guy still survived the fight!

The Russians also seem less than impressed with their 5.45 round. The newest Russian assault rifle being tested, the AEK971, is being heavily tested in the old 7.62x39 loading as well as the standard 5.45x39 mousgun loading.

Keep varmint calibers for mice, and bring back the 7.62x51 NATO for chewing up concrete and getting to the insurgents on the other side.

I'm curious. A rifle cartridge like the 5.56 is longer than a pistol bullet, and has more gunpowder behind it.

Is it actually the case that a big pistol round like the .45 ACP is actually deadlier than the 5.56 NATO? I would think that even fairly light rifle bullets would be more deadly than even higher-caliber bullet rounds.

Is that right or not? Forget accuracy and firepower-- is the 5.56 inferior as regards stopping power to the .45 or .357 Mag?

I meant "I had thought that even fairly light rifle cartridges were more deadly than higher-caliber PISTOL rounds, like the .45 ACP."

And Monty, the XM8 is dead. For a while now.

The XM8 was killed for bureaucratic reasons - as an outgrowth of the OICW project, it never went through the normal procurement process for new weapons, and the other manufacturers want their shot at a new contract.

What are they replacing the XM-8 with?

Given the tiny numbers of XM8's that have actually been made, the real question is, "what are they replacing the M16's and M4's with?" Last I heard was some nebulous talk of ginning up the procurement machine to get a single new rifle for all the U. S. military services. So apparently, the answer is, as Spade pointed out, "nothing, for at least a few more years." On the bright side, this gives them another chance to use up enough of their ammo stocks to be less recalcitrant about moving to a better cartridge.

I heard H&K was the prime contractor (German firm, go figure)

You heard wrong. While the XM8 is based on the H&K G36 (itself an "homage" to Gene Stoner's old AR16/AR18), H&K seems to have been out of the XM8 program for a while; Alliant Techsystems produces the XM8.

Plus the M-16's magazine (at least in the A1 version) was a complete joke -- you dared not load a magazine full-up lest it jam and hang a shell up in the ejector.

The M16's box magazine is no worse than most others, really, in either design or production quality. The policy you mention was put in place during the Vietnam years because some troops abused their follower springs by overloading magazines. Since damaged magazines could not be told at a glance from undamaged ones, policy became to just underload all of them. As far as I have heard, this policy was never officially applied to the 30-round magazines, which were adopted after the overloading problem was recognized.

Monty, there are a whole lot of NVA, VC, Somalis, Panamanians, Iraqis and Al Quaeda members who will dispute your analysis of the 5.56 as "weak".

I don't doubt that plenty of Filipino rebels (among America's earliest Muslim-guerrilla enemies, BTW) were killed by .38 pistols in the early 20th century. That didn't make the .38 adequate for that job.

And that's just for America- we've sold the M-16 to about a dozen nations; another half-dozen or so produce it themselves (check Jane's to find out which). The SAS carry it by choice. Pretty good for such a horrible POS, eh?

How many of them took it for logistical reasons (ammo commonality with likely American allies, back when it was the only 5.56mm rifle) or political reasons (necessity of spending American military aid on American rifles) rather than for combat-effectiveness reasons? And as for the SAS, the British Army's idea of a 5.56mm rifle is the L85 - next to that steaming turd, even the M16 looks reliable.

Hawkins- the AK was designed long before the AR15 was a gleam in Gene Stoner's eye. After they captured some M16's, the Sovs switched over to a 5.45mm round based strongly on the 5.56. They still use it today.

The Russians are too strapped for cash to buy much in the way of new rifles, but among the ones they are buying, the OC-14 Groza modular rifle used by their airborne forces has abandoned the 5.45 for the old 7.62x39mm. The new AN-94 Nikonov in 5.45mm, though adopted on paper, and higher-tech internally than the Groza, somehow seems to be a lower procurement priority...

If you keep your M16 clean, and properly set up for a desert environment, it won't jam on you. Magazines are of course the weak link in any rifle system, but if you treat them well they won't fail you either.

Even the Chauchat can work under ideal conditions. Reliability is in large part a measure of how far you can depart from those conditions before the machine starts screwing up. The common answer for the M16 seems to be, "not far".

its all about shot placement, I got into arguments with my unit alot about this, asking them what could possibly be better, because of complaints of people getting hit with both types or rounds and not dying.

It is indeed. And the cartridges people are discussing as 5.56mm replacements (6.5mm Grendel, 6.8mm SPC), as far as I have heard, keep most of the 5.56's flat trajectory in comparison to 7.62 NATO, while bucking wind better with their heavier bullets.

The 5.56mm is, also, in my opinion a good round. People somehow expect a one shot kill. It's not going to happen unless we start dusting off .45-70s.

I'm willing to concede it's mostly adequate to 400 yards or so - enough for modern requirements, for troops with all kinds of fire support at their fingertips. But as long as you're dropping big dough on new rifles anyway, why settle for "mostly adequate", gambling that the support will always be there when and where needed?

That'll teach me to hit "Post" too soon.

You heard wrong. While the XM8 is based on the H&K G36 (itself an "homage" to Gene Stoner's old AR16/AR18), H&K seems to have been out of the XM8 program for a while; Alliant Techsystems produces the XM8.

should be

You heard slightly wrong. Alliant Techsystems started development of the XM8 as an offshoot of the OICW program (whose rifle component was based on H&K's G-36, itself an "homage" to Gene Stoner's old AR16/AR18), and some further development and most production work so far has been done by H&K's American subsidiary.

Sorry for the mix-up!

I just took off my interceptor vest. Bastard weighs 30 pounds without ammo. I am a large. I suppose a XXXS might weigh 20 pounds, but we don't allow dwarves in the Army.

Just got done firing my M16A2. I liked the A1 better for automatic fire, but the A2 works fine. Even my dirty weapon fires fine with minimum maintenance.

Last I checked, there are no Kurdish forces near the Marines. The article went from beliveable to questionable when the politics rolled arround.

Just sayin' cause I unfortunately have spent most of the last year in a lousy place far away from my family.

As a Marine, I can give you nearly verbatim what the PME told us when we went through the extended range course at OCS.

1. We use the 5.56 primarily because it allows us to hump more ammo into combat. The rationale is that because the Corps spends so much time and money on teaching all Marines to be a Rifleman, hitting center mass with a scope-less rifle from 500 yards with at least a modicum of consistency, the trade-off of giving up stopping power for a higher volume of rounds on a higher volume of targets, in a given period of time, makes sense. Whether this is in fact what reality and operational experience has born out is, to some extent, open to individual interpretation. I have never been in combat, so I do not have an opinion...yet.

2. The PME and his staff went into great detail about, IIRC, specifically the nomenclature, what they called hydrostatic shock. The reason that the A-2 can only fire a 3-round burst, unless modified after-market, is that some 50 lb head-types did a whole bunch of slide-rule/abacus magic and arrived at the conclusion that when fired in full-auto, after the 3rd round departs the muzzle, the odds that any round sent down range after that will hit it's intended tgt is virtually nil. So the thinking is that if you manage to hit a tgt center mass with at least 2 of the first 3 rounds, which have the best chance of hitting where aimed, then you have the highest chance of creating this hydro-static effect (really unsure of the nomenclature "hydrostatic"). Basically, when the first rounds hit the tgt, it sends out shockwaves just like a stone thrown in calm pond. Because the round is traveling so fast, the shockwaves travel really fast. Just when the waves are making their initial return leg back towards center-mass, the second round hits and sends out shock waves. The collision between the waves has the potential to liquify muscle, sinew and shatter bone in the immediate area, thus creating a helluv an internal predicament. Showed us video done on pig cadavers, cow parts, etc. Messy.

Now, this is what we were told. I have no idea whether a larger round would do the same thing with even more lethality, but I would surmise that it's a safe assumption. I think it would be tremendously interesting to see how the 5.56 would fair in a no-shit, well-designed, well-thought out weapon. The A2 isn't a bad weapon, but any that demands as much attention as it does can't be even remotely deemed as "great". The thing reminds me of what Tim Taylor said about high-maintenance, physically gorgeous women, "Everybody wants to drive a Porsche, but we all want to go home with a station wagon..." (a funny line, though I do not include to be sexist, I KNOW women can shoot as well as men) If the physics of what I described above are true, then the theory of less stopping power vs more rounds holds up. I just don't think the M-16 A2 is a worthy weapon to fully prove it.

surf-actant

As you were.

In my last statement, replace "prove" with "fulfill".

surf-actant

Surf-actant,

I don't get the second part of the hydrostatic shock business since it seems it would depend on precise timing and placement of an extremely quick second round. Hard to buy on the face of it, but I'm listening. OTOH "stopping power," at least as the term is usually thrown around, has to be a myth where light arms are concerned; you can't knock someone down without taking an equal and opposite reaction that knocks you down. Last I heard, that rule of physics has not been repealed.

But I'm not learned about that stuff at all. I just go with big holes and charges. I figure if I do that, I'm pretty much maximizing whatever shock I deliver and helping the target bleed out as fast as possible.

Thoughts from the experts?