Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "BFBS Forces News" channel.

  1.  @JammyDodger45  Edgar Brothers are the Prime Contractor for the UK as an importer, not manufacturer. They arrange for all the carbines, optics, scope mounts, magazines, blank firing adaptors, simunition kits, protective gear, and all associated items to be bundled, then delivered. In their own words: "As the Prime Contractor and UK Distributors, Edgar Brothers will be utilising a range of battle-proven products from suppliers from around the world to deliver the chosen solution." Edgar Brothers is acting as a privatised military procurement agency, not a manufacturer of weapons. They have no ability to manufacture KAC weapons, Vortex optics, LAMs, etc.
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  2. ​ @JammyDodger45 KAC has the contract for the carbine. Vortex has the contract for the LPVO. Aimpoint has the MRDS. Magpul makes the furniture and magazines.
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  3. UK was instrumental in the development of the DFLCS for JSF-B with the VAAC Harrier and X-35 test program, with Rolls Royce making the lift fan. They've been in on it from the ground level as partners with the US.
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  4. This looks like ERNA re-named. Was there in 2008. At the end when we were recovering, Putin invaded Georgia.
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  5. When I arrived there in Feb 1996, we thought the same thing. They were shining flashlights in mortar tubes trying to provoke retaliatory counter-fire. Then we had a Nork pilot defect in a MiG-19 with air-raid sirens going off. Then we had a NorK Scout Swimmer get canoed by a ROK Army soldier on the Imjin River, then the sub incident and killing spree the commandos went on for many weeks. It's a war zone.
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  6.  @cplcabs  I was talking Iraq 1990-1991 and I absolutely have studied the order of battle of Iraq, Serbia, and Russia for decades now. Been studying Russian order of battle since the 1970s before we moved to West Germany in 1980. The Ukrainian border region with Russian IADS is a bit of a different problem for certain. Somebody made a comment that a former Wild Weasel pilot didn't seem to be aware of the AOR and threat, which is like telling a 20yr career plumber he doesn't know how to fit a pipe.
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  7. Airborne School used to be a suckfest until Carter mandated that women be able to attend so they could get a cool looking badge too. The result is that our training was watered down and diminished the actual forces that use airborne insertion methods. Para Regiment is a great unit because they have maintained a combat-focused culture, whereas in the US, we have a PC and careerist culture that places combat focus last on the list in the regular Army.
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  8. ​ @cplcabs  Like Iraq and Serbia? How much have you studied those conflicts? Iraq had German, French, and Russian SAMs with a vast IADS network.
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  9. Weight, complexity, and performance. A dialed-in Stoner gas carbine with increased length gas system, correct port diameter, and proper bolt carrier bore dimensions will run very smoothly suppressed, especially with a low back-pressure flow-through suppressor like this one. External piston designs are heavier, snappier, and require several mechanical complexities inside the fire control group to deal with the hammer slap, as well as the earlier unlocking due to immediate carrier movement from the piston blast acting on it. They have to be sprung heavier as well.
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  10. The UK was instrumental in laying down much of the foundation for the Digital Flight Control System for the JSF-B variant in the VAAC Harrier testbed, as well as making the Rolls Royce lift fan for it of course as an early partner with the USMC in the JSF-B program. They even had test pilots in the States working on the experimental X-35, so the UK has been eyeball-deep in this aircraft virtually from the start. It's a phenomenal achievement really for both the US and UK to have pulled off such a fighter, and the UK's F-35 logistics infrastructure has already been used to support USAF F-35As deployed abroad.
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  11.  @overcorpse  The “X" in front of XM7 (XM5 had to be dropped due to Colt’s existing M5), is your first clue it isn’t a program of record yet. XM7 will not be issued to all front line troops because it’s too heavy, doesn’t allow enough ammunition or magazines to be carried, and there are major questions about barrel life. I foresee a weapons mix where most combat soldiers will still carry some newer variant of the M4 with SOPMOD Block II and III inspired updates. All soft skills combat support soldiers will carry M4s as well if they don’t have a sidearm. Guys I know in SF said they were getting it last year, then haven’t heard anything since as there are delays. SF has said it’s only really a good DMR for them, not something every soldier on an ODA would carry due to weight, mag capacity, and bulk. Big Army PEO for XM7 is getting a slew of comments like this as they do initial trials with the system, and the dual charge handle open receiver design isn’t winning over anyone so far. XM7 is a DM Carbine at best, with impressive performance but at a weight/bulk penalty.
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  12. The Stoner operating system is a sleeved piston with internal expansion in-line with the bore, which is superior in many ways to a Tokarev op-rod piston design.
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  13.  @ForcesofValor16  Turkeys voting for Christmas are people in the UK who want to submit to Germany and France by getting rid of the British Pound and going to the Euro, while letting the EU parliament tell Britons what shapes of cucumbers are acceptable to eat. The EU is destined for failure since you have so many different cultures in different regions who have been fighting with each other since the earliest records of history. UK citizens with enough sense to recognize this are well justified in their decisions.
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  14. Yup. US population is 331 million. Finland is 5.5 million. There are tiny States in the US with more fightes, transports, helos, special ops, artillery, etc. than 95% of nations on earth. My State alone has at least 72 F-35As, a National Guard helicopter base, artillery, a Special Forces Group, MI, Engineers, a USAF Logistics Depot that overhauls and upgrades fighters, etc.
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  15. The US has been crushing the Belgians in assault rifle designs for over 60 years.
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  16.  @jungletroll3844  Harrier started out with small wings. US made the big wing AV-8B, which was also adopted as the GR.7 in the UK with constant joint testing, validation, and exchanges between RN, RAF, and USMC. F-35B/JSF-B has been a joint effort between UK and USMC/JSF JPO before JSF even. UK validated the STOVL Digital Flight Control System on the VAAC Harrier testbed to eliminate the wonkiness of the Harrier's manual nozzle lever control system for VTOL. That was the baseline RDT&E for X-35B STOVL flight controls, and UK test pilots were on exchange in the US at the time to fly the X-35B as developmental partners.
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  17.  @robinstreets1792  The US Medicare and Medicaid programs make US Defense budget squirm with envy, and they're filled with billions of fraud, never audited or discussed much. Meanwhile, defense programs are under constant scrutiny and attacks. Congress uses Medicare and Medicaid as political slush funds to reward campaign donors, with Medicare A being used as a rolling hospital bail-out fund, but then the hospitals line workers are always wondering where the money went. It would be far better to let the private sector with massive defense contracts employ those people in high tech and manufacturing jobs with excellent private benefits, than scrounging for basic care on the dole-out after the money has been pilfered by political opportunists. Then we could have funded F-22A and F-23A simultaneously with obscene production numbers and sustainmemt, on top of thousands of JSF. The defense sector employees could send their kids to private schools or tutor them at home, so as not to be caught up in the socialist prison system of public schooling and counter-productive welfare conditioning. Federally-funded medical programs are wretched disasters, unless you're talking about Federal employees, which then becomes very high-end with Blue Cross/Blue Shield. NHSs in Europe are one of the biggest resource-wasting, tax money black holes ever devised by man. I've lived under several if them in Germany and Finland, with a lot of anecdotal accounts from family in Sweden. If you look at the number of hospitals, clinics, specialists, and dental clinics in even the poorest areas of the US and compare them with major cities in Northern Europe, it's sad to see what Europeans put up with unknowingly. It could be so much better, but socialists think it will create socioeconomic disparity by unleashing people's true potential, so better to just keep everyone muzzled and chained-down with limited take-home income potential and property ownership. My elderly parents are getting decimated financially by the tax codes there.
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  18. Notice how SAS and SBS chuckled at the SA80 and used Colt Commandos or AR-15 rifles since 1965. That's the first clue what a POS the SA80 was (when it was introduced in the 1980s well after the Regiment had been using AR-15s and Diemaco Commando variant carbines). Australian SAS did the same thing when Australian Army adopted the AUG under licensed contract. SASR just kept using ArmaLites and didn't look back.
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  19. ASTOVL was a UK/USMC/USAF/DARPA project since 1983, then morphed into JAST, then JSF. UK makes 15% of every JSF variant, not just the Rolls Royce lift fan on the B models. Every ejection seat in all F-35s is Martin-Baker. There are many other subsystems and components made in the UK. Same with Canada. Tons of JSF parts are made in Canada and the Canucks don't even know it due to their media.
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  20. I don't know where you heard this, but it's simply incorrect. The AR-15 was specifically developed for the Army's Small Caliber High Velocity Rifle concept, competing against submissions from Winchester and Springfield. It was not intended for civilian hunting or varmint use, though it is well-suited for that. The AR-10 came first, chambered in 7.62x51mm, then was scaled-down to .222 Remington, the .222 Remington Special aka 5.56x45mm, which was later commercialized as .223 Remington. SAS acquired many early production Colt 601 AR-15s and used them in the guerilla war in Borneo.
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  21.  @shrapmagnet  Para Regiment's Airborne Course is tactics-focused, with pushing the air head outwards from the DZs using Small Unit Tactics. There are no tactics in US Army Airborne School as those of us who attended and graduated all know. Airborne School became a cool badge school for desk-drivers who never wanted to get dirty, but wanted to look like they were relevant before GWOT. If I was in charge in the 1980s, it would have been a 20 jump course with different mission profiles actually focusing on airborne insertion methods and tactics, with an emphasis on night mass attack. Mass attack has largely become irrelevant. Ranger Regiment is the only place where they have done meaningful airborne insertions, and even those have been extremely limited.
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  22.  @TheCerebralDude  I love the FAL, but it's not even an assault rifle. It's a battle rifle that should have been chambered in .280 Enfield. If you've ever shot a FAL for accuracy, they suck. Parts count is way higher than needed, but it had better controls interface ergonomics than the M-14 or G3. Charge handle location is nice and so is the selector on the FAL. Adjustable gas on the FAL is cool as well. They're heavy, long, and cumbersome, are terrible in the house, and don't have high hit probability even at intermediate range.
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  23. Which is why it hit IOC first, was the first US variant to deploy into combat for 8 months, and demonstrated more than twice the readiness rates of legacy fighters it replaced in the USMC while working off small helicopter deck carriers. Good to know.
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  24. I thought Russia was de-escalating. What's going on here?
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  25. US, UK, and France conduct trilateral combat exercises every year helping to integrate with each other as senior allies in Europe, despite Russian efforts to sew seeds of discontent between them. One of Russia's geopolitical imperatives is to break up European and US alliances since Russia lusts after access to sea ports on the European peninsula.
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  26. Russia sucks at force projection and always has. Logistics isn't a familiar concept in their culture.
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  27. Finnish Air Force is far superior to Ukrainian Air Force in quality of fighters, weapons, and training. Finnish Air Defense units are world class as well, rarely mentioned.
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  28.  Anthony Roic  UK has been intimately involved with specification and development of the JSF-B from the start, with critical independent and cooperative experimentation, testing, production, and systems integration. The idea that JSF-B is a US product pushed onto the UK is completely erroneous, and anyone stating such should be recognized as a complete ignoramus on this topic.
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  29. The AR-15 family of weapons has had from 1957-2023 to evolve with US funding behind it every step of the way. The core operating system, ammunition, and magazines were pretty much dialed-in by 1967 with the M16A1/Colt 603. AR-15s have been in the UK MoD inventory since the mid-1960s at the latest, so the UK actually has generations of engineers and technicians who have proficiency in supporting it. The UK should have adopted and licensed their own AR-15 production in the 1970s, but instead chose to take another Stoner design (AR-18), turn it into a heavy bullpup designed by committee, and make it unreliable with a terrible trigger pull and overall crude construction. The savings to the UK taxpayer would have been considerable had they gone with the already-proven, lightweight, SAS-preferred AR-15 family of weapons. Now that it’s 2023, they are finally coming around for the RMs with one of the most cutting-edge AR-15 variants ever produced. This carbine beat out all the top company competitors in the trials, to include Hk, SIG, and several others. All of them were beautiful submissions, but this one rose above the rest.
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  30.  @TheCerebralDude  AR-15/M-16 and AR-10/SR-25 outclass the FAL. Notice who is using AR-15/AR-10 family weapons that used to use FALs: SAS SBS UK RMs UK Paras Australian SASR New Zealand Canada Israelis
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  31. Off the top of my head, the contract is stated to be for over 10,000 carbines and associated systems.
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  32.  @JammyDodger45  No problem. Britons have been systematically targeted by imbeciles in their own Parliament for generations now, making the business of firearms manufacturing extremely difficult, and thus cutting off England from its historical great position of producing its own small arms. I have lived through and monitored the situation loosely since the 1970s, and several people tried sounding the alarm bells, but were ignored or silenced. So when a UK company finds a way to associate itself with a small arms contract, I understand why people would want to believe that company is actually producing the weapons. The sad reality is I don't know if there's a UK-based company with the manufacturing capacity to handle such a small contract, let alone the future contract for the SA80 replacement.
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  33.  @Kaotix_music  KAC is making the full carbines in Florida. The UK firm, Edgar Brothers, specializes in importing and bundling products for police and MoD since 1947. They have zero manufacturing capacity in the firearms sector. They are a self-described go-between with the right connections to ensure military and police customers get the products they're looking for.
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  34. There's even more commonality than that. USAF F-35As have deployed through Europe, stopping in UK, and enjoy services from UK F-35B basing. USAF pilots are doing exchange with USMC F-35B squadrons working off LHDs. Cockpit is the same between all 3, with the B being the only 1 without a tailhook.
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  35.  @sei_asagiri  Stoner had nothing to do with the design of the Tokarev short-stroke piston in the 1930s, nor the Swedish Ljungman DI rifle. If you read the Stoner patents, his design is not DI, but an in-line internal expansion piston system. External Piston/op-rod guns generate the exact same back-pressure flow from high efficiency noise moderators on high-speed photography. The barrel doesn't know the difference between either gas system as particulates vent back through it. Where they differ is in shorter unlocking time due to instantaneous carrier movement and bolt rotation. This requires higher spring rates to fight the action. As to accuracy and precision, the Stoner internal operating system is inherently more accurate and demonstrably so over decades of fleet testing. The 1930s op-rod designs slapped onto the 1950s Stoner rifles and carbines is regressive and not helpful towards progress in the field.
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  36. @Blob B They're about the same unit cost for the UK Typhoons. Typhoon is way more expensive than people think with limited production numbers. F-35B cost continues to go down as the irders go up. Typhoon doesn't even have the Captor E AESA, maybe because working with F-35s makes it unnecessary.
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  37.  @stupidburp  US Navy Super Hornet shot down a Su-22 in June 2017 with an AIM-120C7. Last fighter-on-fighter gun kill with US built jets was Israeli vs Syrian AF in the 1980s at the latest.
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  38.  @jaysmith6864  The weapon used the most for MiG kills in Vietnam was the AIM-7E Sparrow, followed by AIM-9. The weapon used the most by MiG-21s was the K-13 Sidewinder copy in supersonic perch slash attack profiles.
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  39. Better for suppressed use, opposite of what many thought. The gas system has to be dialed-in for suppressed use, but once it is set up properly, they run very well, especially with a low back pressure can.
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  40.  @emersonmsd  Hk416A5 or A7 variant was in the competition and for whatever reason, did not win.
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  41. Nobody is trying to get into WVR of each other nowadays even in Typhoons vs Flankers. That fight is all about BVR missile exchange, where the Meteor really makes the Flanker be very careful using maximum stand-off, which is hard because the Typhoon has a very small frontal RCS and world class acceleration into supersonic regime. Flankers must rely on countermeasures if they gets MAWS at all during missile terminal stage. After that, they're going to bug out if anyone survives because nobody wants to close into helmet-cued ASRAAM range, just as Typhoons don't want to close into helmet-cued R-73 range. F-35 totally changes this with unobserved approaches with kinematic advantage over its prey because it can choose when to accelerate into optimum supersonic separation speed for the most brutal No Escape Zone parameters on a poor sucker who doesn't see it coming. Any talks about dogfighting immediately tell me the conversation is based on no modern weapons on any of the fighters. Typhoons normally carry 4 AIM-120s or Meteors plus 2-4 ASRAAMS and will be in a 2-4 ship minimum. Flankers carry anywhere from 6-12 BVR & HMS-cued HOBS missiles. You want to set up a merge with that?
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  42.  @MrTangolizard  Hk33 is 5.56, as I've used them myself. G3 is 7.62x51 NATO, same as the SLR. I think you meant G3. The SAS used a lot of Hk weapons in the 1980s, alongside AR-15s. The manual of arms for Hks were all the same and the G3 is more compact than the L1A1. G3 is more accurate as well, and had a comprehensive array of accessories and optics mounts designed and supplied by Hk. SBS used a lot of Hk weapons too. In the end, the Diemaco AR-15s proved to be as reliable, and far more lightweight, with superior ergonomics.
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  43.  @MrTangolizard  Over the past 18 months of actual trench warfare in Ukraine, how much evidence of bayonet work have you seen? US and UK don't fight that way. We're on the offense with Net-Centric Air-Land Battle with Air Power as the main effort, followed by long-range precision fires, artillery, mortars, IFV main guns, turret and co-ax belt-feds, anti-armor and shoulder-fired explosives munitions, then dismounted crew-served belt-feds and snipers, LMGs, grenade launchers, then Joe with his pea shooter to sift through the grayed-out carcasses in the rubble. There is literally no role for a bayonet in the 21st Century, and it was already marginalized to insignificance in WWII.
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  44. 1 trillion is an estimated lifetime cost including maintenance and operations for all 4 international variants to the year 2070. It's a scare tactic used to trigger people who have never studied aerospace lifetime budgetary cycles, while deceiving the reader by making them thing it's for 1 type of aircraft. F-35A F-35B F-35C F-35I There will be thousands of these made over the next 2 decades. There are almost 500 of them, and they just ordered 484 over the next 3 years starting with 2020. That means almost 1000 by 2022.
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  45. The KAC submission simply won based on performance and lighter weight against all the other competitors.
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  46.  @reccerat4446  You don’t face tanks with tanks, you bust them with Precision-Guided Munitions from air, long range fires, then down to tanks. It’s called echelons of fire, something amateurs have never heard of.
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  47.  @UnknownHumanOnline  Task Force 160= US Army Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) E&E= Escape & Evade QRF= Quick Reaction Force CAG= Combat Applications Group (cover name for the Army Counter-Terrorist/Hostage Rescue unit)
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  48.  @adamcottrell6454  Good post. JSF-B has been a joint USMC-UK program from the start. UK was heavily involved in developing the DFLCS STOVL algorithms in the VAAC Harrier, which transferred over to the X-35B, complete with British test pilots flying X-35B out at the USAF Flight Test Center. This joint effort dates back to the 1990s between the US & UK.
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  49. UK laid down much of the DFLCS testing in the VAAC Harrier, provided X-35 test pilots, and manufactures critical systems for the JSF-B, including the Rolls Royce lift fan.
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  50. Biggest upgrade is the net-centric capability with JTIDS.
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