h/t Kenny
(FORT FULLASHIT) In recent years, soldiers have seen a flurry of upgrades and new weapons, ammunition and optics added to their arsenal at a rate that outpaces previous decades of development in these areas.
Soldiers into their second enlistment today have a distinctly different weapons draw than they or their leaders did just a few years ago.
Those changes cover the full spectrum of small arms, both individual and crew-served weapons, mostly making existing systems lighter and more functional and adding new punch to the firepower of infantry squads, platoons and companies.
O yeah. They're all tactically operating tactically, in a high-speed low-drag transformational circle jerk of biblical proportions.
Oh please.
The only way to increase infantry lethality starts and ends with teaching infantry to
master their f**king weapons, and the only way you do that is lots of trigger time with quality instruction and feedback, and learning to do it cold, wet, hungry, tired, and with insufficient supplies of everything but bad guys, who are shooting back at you. You can't do it with simulators, comic books, and videos, let alone sales brochures.
And if you're not doing serious hit-the-target training at all (like Big Green hasn't done for 70 years) you're just going to miss faster with more expensive toys, and be "Shocked! Shocked I say!" when some fourth grade dropout with a vintage mid-century bangstick from the 1950s and home-made web gear greases your platoon and activates your SGLI, because he didn't get the memo you had cooler toys.
All that gee whiz Buck Rogers bullshit is going to totally shit the bed five minutes after it deploys with a real-world battalion with a bunch of guys with GEDs, rather than a hand-picked squad of poster soldiers chosen for PR at the R&D HQ.
Try to remember that
Pentagon Wars was far more a documentary than a black comedy, Then remember how every weapons selection since 1945 has worked out for grunts, vs. for the weapons salesmen.
Tell me about the time they "improved" the M-2 .50 cal.
And the .45.
And the bazooka.
And...
And...
And...
Then finally, remember that the least important and decisive weapons on the battlefield (since 1914, and except to the guys carrying them) have been the ones carried by the infantry.
If you want to hook up the grunts, start by ensuring you'll never be sending them anyplace not absolutely vital, and that by the time they get there, it'll be to garrison the charred remains of what used to be anyone who decides to oppose us.
Then take the entire JAG and AG Corps, top to bottom, and stake them out on a live fire range, and let the combat troops do FPF training on them until you need DNA evidence to prove they were ever human beings, and promise the troops that in the future, if they deploy, it'll be "weapons free, and God help the enemy" instead of prosecuting them for doing their job, like the last batch of military guys POTUS had to pardon.
Then find 200 generals who'll sacrifice their stars to make the point that their job is to train warriors, not to hire non-hacker Diversity Beans who can't do the job when TSHTF, and will flat out fire people for failing to cut the mustard. (Even Mad Dog Mattis as SecDef couldn't pull that one off.)
Do that, and you could deploy what you'll get with muzzle-loading black powder flintlocks and rusty pikes and they'd conquer the world.
Fail to do it, and you could give them phased plasma rifles in the 40W range, and they'll still lose.
Don't believe me though. Ask the Taliban in Trashcanistan who won every war there since Alexander the Great.
The Army should STFU until they buy something that works, 24/7/365/anywhere/anytime, prove it by training the hell out of it for 20 years, until they wear out the first buy entirely, and decide it's so good they want MOAR!, and so beloved by the troops they'd throw away food and porn if they had to, just to hump it into combat.
And stop buying sales brochure b.s., which gets you the new
Edsel class aircraft carrier, the F-35 Thunderjug, and "Diversity is our strength" kool-aid drinkers who hire soldierettes who can't throw a frag far enough not to eat their own shrapnel, transvestites who can't figure out which latrine to use, and can't-cunt officerettes who keep crashing their destroyers into cargo ships so slow they wave barnacles and jellyfish to go around them when steaming upwind.
The article is boob bait for the bubbas from the fap-fantasies of some PR second john in a Pentagon basement jerk-off shop.
(
So, I guess I'm back... )