Comments by "Mortablunt" (@Mortablunt) on "Task & Purpose"
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@ArchOfficial It's been a long time since I've been over the history in detail. I have old episodes of Tales of the Gun on VHS, and some more scholarly books on the shelf. The issues are more rounded and complicated than Mr. Stoner wanted the M16 but meanypants army wanted the M14 to stay and rigged everything against the M16.
You can go back to early AR15 models and XM16 models and you'll see the lack of chroming, lack of forward assist, the barrels being ultra light. The original AR15 design (as per the Armalite catalog prior to the military M16 moniker) was meant to be an ultra light and ultra accurate rifle. So extra weight was saved wherever possible -- from avoiding chrome, to shaving off the barrel profile, to eliminating parts related to reliability, and so on.
You sort of a had a 5 faction war going on with the M16 (I'll call that going forward unless refering to pre military commercial prototypes)
1. Eugene Stoner
2.General LeMay (Airforce)
3. Springfield Armory (& co)
4. M14 backers (Army)
5. Robert McNamara
And it can be 6 because some testers and generals were pro M16, heavily after the T44 debacle had put what they saw as an inferior product, the M14, into American hands, through trickery.
One thing to be clear was Springfield Armory was the army's semi in house source for everything bang. Much of the resistance came from the fact the M16 was from Armalite Corporation and not the national arsenal. There were also generals who staked singificant parts of their careers on the M14. Regardless of whether or not they beleived in it, the M14 was the home team product.
The anti M16 faction did do some rigging by setting requirements and also outright interference, such as the infamous arctic conditions test.
But, to be clear, the M16 originally trialed was an unchanged select fire build of the AR15, exactly as Stoner had made it. Upon Macnamara forcing its adoption, the generals proposed a long list of improvements to the AR15 for its transformation to the M16, all refused. The original XM16 and M16 pre a1 were disasters, even without the powder issue. The a1 incorporated over 100 suggested improvements and was a much better rifle for it. This included an assist, a thicker barrel, and chrome lining -- all features not included by Stoner and refused of implementation upon adoption.
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Zdravstvui iz Ameriki!
I will commentate a little on your fine comment.
1. I did not believe Russia wanted to take Kiev, the number of forces committed was much too small. What was accomplished, however, was to distracted 50% of Ukraine's military for 6 weeks with forcing them to protect the capital while the Azov coast (and the land route to Crimea) were captured, doubtlessly a strategic war aim. If nothing else, Russia needs the land link to Crimea. The work of the VDV with Hostomel and clearing out defenses was amazing. Supposedly Russians did go into Kiev to skirmish, but no serious assault was made, ie, no armored combined thrust into the city.
2. Russia has waged a campaign of strategic destruction on Ukraine's ability to make war going forward. Harkov was targeted because it is the industrial heart of Ukraine. Missile and bomb strikes to staging areas and supply dumps have occured nonstop. As seen by Ukraine's lack of effective counterattacks, even against the 40 mile convoy, it seems Ukraine's ability to make war is severely reduced, they have no ability to wage a meaningful strategic offensive.
3. I have lived in both countries, and I speak Russian though not Ukrainian, and both peoples are dear to me. I am very upset to see them at war. I want the Ko's and Ev's to share chai and buterbrodi, not obstrelbi and rakety. Ukraine has made prolific use of human shields, diagrams from the captured Azov Battalion headquarters in Mariupol even showed how to array human shields around a common Khruschevka apartment building. Videos I have seen on Telegram show noncombatants deliberately kept near weapons and positions. And there is no shortage of mainstream press images of military equipment located in courtyards, near schools, and so on. I also will not say Russian forces are being sinless. Russians fight war hard, and the tales coming from occupation zones are consistent with prior behavior. War crimes are most common with ill disciplined forces experiencing low morale, like say, poorly supplied young men who don't even want to be there and are upset at fighting people they see as brothers, who hate them and try to kill them.
4. Bucha happened, the Russian ration pack story is pathetic.
5. The most common AT threats are various form of RPG and ATM, single warhead HEAT. The cope cages work just fine against those. The ERA works just fine against those. In videos I see of attacks, mostly filmed by the Ukrainians, the Russian tanks are taking 3 or more hits to go down, and usually the crew manages to get to safety and then abandon the tank, IE, tanks are rarely being destroyed catastrophically with all hands aboard, meaning the tanks can be recovered, refitted, and the crews reused. I haven't seen any Javelin videos yet. I think this is deliberate; they are very valuable, so Ukraine doesn't want to risk their best operators, and their missile stocks, being hunted and killed by Russian Spetsnaz because they give their location away with a video upload.
6. Maps schmaps, it's all still very unstable at this stage. Off Voennaya Hronika's Telegram, it looks like Russia has a number of encirclements going on, ISW shows similarly. France24 is the one I like to use the most for arguing this stuff as people will leap on me for posting any Russian source. Even the BBC is showing that Russian territorial gains are significant in the Southeast.
7. My own point: Russia is deliberately using irregular, ie, Chechen and Donetsk troops to handle battles like Mariupol so they can save and ready their own regular infantry for the inevitable Ukrainian counteroffensive. Russia is saving bombs and shells for the same reason. The speed of advance is being traded for being cheaper in lives and weapons, because Ukraine can still muster an army of 200,000 which will come for the Russians sooner rather than later. Russia needs to be well prepared to defend, because it needs to prove that the taken territories won't be regained, so Ukraine will agree to peace terms.
8. My own point: I am reminded a lot of the Syrian Civil War coverage in western media. We were told every day how hopeless it was for Assad, how any day he was going to loose, how the brave Free Syrian Army was going to bring democracy, how many regime men were defecting, how FSA control kept expanding, until suddenly it turned out Assad was going to win after all. This doesn't mean one side is going to win, just that I really don't trust the western narrative that Russia is "losing" -- losing countries don't gain and consolidate ground. If things were truly as bad as our media likes to say, the whole front would have collapsed.
9. My own point: Ukraine failed for over 8 years to defeat civilian militias. I strongly doubt they can actually attack and win against the Russian regulars. They do very well hiding behind civilians and protected structures in cities, but they are not nearly so skilled at the offensive.
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@just-a-purple-ork
Go check Red Effect and Cone of Arc for clarification about the T14, the engine claim is like saying the US uses the Mauser 98 because it uses the Mauser action in the M40A rifle.
Anyway...
The gun is absolutely an important part, because it offers flexibility and cheap firepower against more numerous more delicate targets. Not everything needs a tandem shaped charged hollow penetrator missile -- men, cars, and APC's will go down just fine to the 30mm. That ability to not waste short supply priority munitions is very important when operating at scale for prolonged periods.
There are some truly huge tradeoffs for all possible substitutes for an A10/SU25 aircraft. For one, you get about 80 minutes of loiter with them, during which they can be on site to deliver precision support within seconds. Not the minutes it takes artillery to reckon out a shot and then get it over. These planes can carry more than helicopters or drones, that's important, it means they can stay combat effective longer.
Helicopters are a convincing alternative, but they still carry much less and are significantly more fragile than fixed wing aviation.
The big problem with the Bayraktar is it has a tiny payload. You get up to 300lbs across a max of 4 shots. Can't be beat for persistence, agreed.
For maximum firepower and basically unlimited endurance, nothing beats tanks, but then there's the problem with getting them there and the lack of perspective they have on the ground.
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The real problem is lack of realistic analysis driving design and doctrine.
For three major conflicts in a row, absolutely everything be looked at said infantry engagement distances are shorter then our theorists predicted, whoever shoots more usually wins, and having a handier weapon that fires faster is advantageous. In response to that we came up with the M14 which was somehow even heavier and less wieldy than the two rifles that went before it. And then we had to drop it rapidly when he got his teeth kicked in by the Kalashnikov.
Sometime in the 1980s we came to the conclusion all future wars would be fought in Europe using precision munitions, so we shrunk our artillery, putting everything on 155 mm systems with a tiny allotment for 105 mm systems for special applications. we also transitioned artillery to be a division level asset. The result was a little couple units did not come with a fire power as we are seeing Ukraine and 155 mm can’t fit all the niches it especially can’t compete with the mobility and rate of the 122 mm systems.
Around 10 years ago we came to the conclusion all future wars would be asymmetric affairs where we build an enormous advantages over lightly armed insurgencies. So we centered all training and doctrine around fighting from a place of superiority with guaranteed air control and minimal fear of enemy armored assets. Both our veterans who have been to Ukraine as well as Ukrainians who have been trained by us have said that the style in training they got for that sort of war is horribly inadequate for what they’re dealing with against Russia.
Very recently we came to the conclusion air support could make up for infantry fire power so we decided to instead switch to this heavier caliber automatic rifle style firearm meant for longer range engagements with precision shooting. This would be great for fighting long range Afghanistan style ambushes but it simply isn’t the reality in absolutely anywhere else we fought in the past century. I did the math on this and the fire power mismatch is so bad that a whole squad of Americans with the M5 could be 1.8x outmatched in firepower by a single fireteam of Russians with the AK74 even if the Russians didn’t have a machine gunner.
The lessons we need to pick up on to be ready for our most likely next big war are as follows:
1. Engagement ranges will be short; few opportunities for multi mile tank tails few opportunities for thousand yard marksmanship. Close range fighting where he shoots more wins.
2. Dumb weapons with a high manufacturing rate need to become a priority. As we have seen in every single conflict with having you so far that goes for any length of time armies that rely on smart weapons very rapidly run out of them and can’t build enough to make up for it.
3. We need to rewrite the doctrine to develop the ability to operate in contested airspaces. Both Ukraine and Russia particular Ukraine have shown that you can keep an air space dangerously contested for a very long time even against an overwhelmingly more powerful opponent. Our assumption about always being able to get air supports or medevac is completely ludicrous against any serious enemy.
4. Armor is important. There is absolutely no substitutes for the kind of immediate power having tanks on the ground gives.
5. We currently have no light drone doctrine and it is a gaping hole in our capabilities web.
6. Our kit is getting too heavy; repeatedly we see on the battlefield in Ukraine soldiers leaving heavier equipment behind simply because it slows them down too much. We need to figure out a more minimalist approach to equipping our soldiers.
7. Infantry taking on tanks with smart weapons is a fantasy. Even systems like the javelin only work about 15% of the time, and it requires roughly a full minute of enemy compliance with the operator exposed to enemy fire with line of sight. Our launchers are too heavy too complicated too fragile, and the results to vindicate our approach simply do not exist.
8. A reusable light man portable rocket system would be greatly appreciated. Range 600 yards, reloadable, takes a variety of munitions. Just keep the weight of the launcher under 12 pounds. Time after time in every conflict where they’re available especially for urban fighting, weapons like the RPG 7 are used as a kind of general purpose anti-son of a bitch machine for clearing structures, fortifications, thickets, and anywhere goes may hide. We need some thing like it that is actually light and compact enough to be carried easily by an infantryman.
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And overall a loss of trust in the idea of the West. The West hasn't done anything inspiring in our lifetimes. I'm 30. I missed the Cold War. All I've seen our governments do is bicker and sputter. Afghanistan was a necessary war run overlong into a defeat, Iraq was a crime that started a chain reaction of horror. The USA and the West haven't done anything inspiring since 1991. Shit about freedom and democracy turned out to be lies, it was about revenge and money in the end. We Millenials were sold hard on college, Zoomers got told about trades (yes we were told about them but they were treated as a kind of option for failures and idiots who couldn't get college if you read between the lines) and entrepreneurship, so they aren't going to trade their lives for degrees. I can't tell you what a 2,000,000 strong military stationed worldwide gets America. Not when we've got housing crises, people dying every 10 minutes from lack of basic health care, severe economic crunches, and decaying basic ammenities back home, none of which can be solved with big bombs. Who are we fighting? The Russians? We're too cowardly, we sent a poor regional power to be our rep and they're getting chewed. The Chinese? Same, just wait. What, is Mexico, Canada, or Trinidad going to attack us? The military is the biggest line item in the US discretionary budget. Imagine if that went into improving quality of life. Imagine if that went into a health insurance company and medical chain run as a GOC. Imagine if that went into infrastructure. Imagine if that went into drug treatment campaigns. Imagine if that went into social services. We'd make Norway look like Haiti!
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