From the Army Times -
(Side note: Don’t let the name fool you, the Army Times Publishing Co. is owned by Gannett newspapers and has no official affiliation with the military.)

Army to buy thousands more Mk19s, M2s

By Kris Osborn - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Sep 16, 2008 6:46:22 EDT

The Army is buying 4,600 Mk19 grenade launchers and 29,900 .50-caliber crew-served M2 machine guns, whose heavy-caliber rounds and high rate of fire have proven valuable in infantry counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, service officials said. (Service officials? Was it Colonels Larry, Curly and Moe?)

Such weapons help target small groups of insurgents on the run or blended in with the local populations.

“Normally with a 7.62mm, you have a lot more difficulty when you have an enemy going behind a cinder block wall,” said Richard Audette, Army deputy project manager for soldier weapons at Picatinny Arsenal, N.J. “With a .50-caliber, you can take the wall out.”

I pretty much expect most journalists to not have a grasp of these things. But, really? We’ve obviously broached a new level of absurdity.

“Blended in with local populations?” The MK-19 shoots 40 milimeter grenades in either high explosive  and high-explosive dual purpose (when you want to either blow up or shred everything)  and the venerable M-2 (ma deuce for those who love her) was designed as a primarily anti-armor weapon. So as Gen. Petraeus departs our new counterinsurgency tactics will involve launching vollies of grenades into crowds or firing indiscriminately with a weapon created to take out light vehicles.

You see that hoss on the far left - that’s our darling. The one second from the right is 5.56 NATO, the bang-bang that comes out the end of the M-16s and M-4s. The round third from the left is 7.62 NATO used in the M-60, M-240 and the old timey M-14. Short of that cute little .22 (far right) and the bulldogish 7.62×39 of AK-47 fame (third from the right) none of these round would have any difficulty with a “cinderblock wall. ” If you need any further proof here’s some Bubba on YouTube popping a cinderblock with a dinky little 9mm highpower.

So what we’ve got here is some prime, grade A horse manure. Using a .50 machine gun or a 40mm automatic grenade launcher for counterinsurgency is not only stupid it’s sheer lunacy. Hosing down the joint when someone goes “behind a cinder block wall” is a good recipe for losing a counterinsurgency, because either of those weapon systems will surely “take the wall out” in addition to taking out the wall behind that one, and the one behind that and the one behind that. If it’s a 40mm grenade it will probably go through a few walls and then blow up. If this sounds like a good way to win hearts in minds in a crowded urban area then… well you probably belong in Army logistics.

Surely no one in the Army actually believes this. But they will merily feed it to the clueless wonks in the media who will regurgitate it for the rubes and most notably the rubes in Congress. Likely these systems are in dire need of replacement. The M-2 entered service in 1921 — no, that is not a typo — and during my days in green I was assigned a few that I would be willing to swear came from the original factory order. The MK-19 is an atrocious beast to clean and maintain under the best of conditions. Having lugged a weapon through the middle East sand let me assure you that is about as far removed from the best of conditions you are likely to find.

What the order comes down to is simply stuff wearing out and breaking and the request is being couched as needed for “counterinsurgency.” From one end, it is an innocuous justification for things they need. From the other end, and this is the slippery part, it is the manifestation of a trend to label anything and everything as counterinsurgency as a way to AVOID justification. The F-22? Need it for counterinsurgency! Future Combat Systems? Gotta have that for counterinsurgency! The USS Ronald Reagan? We’ve got all those insurgent carrier groups out there. You don’t want them winning, do you?

The entire selling point of the new counterinsurgency strategy was that it existed outside of the bureaucratic brontosaurus of the Pentagon. If it has been munched up already then the future is exceedingly doubtful.

Via the Army Times

The Army has stripped the Asymmetric Warfare Group of its weapon of choice - the Heckler & Koch 416 - saying that its mission requires the unique outfit to carry the standard issue M4 carbine.

The decision reverses a policy that allowed the AWG to buy 416s instead of carrying M4s when it was established three years ago to help senior Army leaders find new tactics and technologies to make soldiers more lethal in combat.

Members of the AWG have declined to comment on the issue, but sources in the

416s, arguing that they outperform the Army’s

community told Army Times that the unit fought to keep its several hundred M4 and require far less maintenance.

I don’t know who finds themselves qualified to argue with these guys about what weapons work best. I’m more than willing to have a discussion about what I do. But if you try to criticize my writing style while being illiterate, yourself, I’m not likely to take you seriously. The guys of Army Special Operations don’t use their weapons in some vague laboratory setting with such and yon variable to determine functionality in this and that environmental condition, they take their boom sticks to far and nasty places and use them to complete their missions and come home.

Having hauled the M-16 (which, internally is the exact same as the M-4) through Kuwaiti dust storms, I can attest to the fact that the damn thing didn’t work as intended. It jammed, it fouled, it would fire, at most, two shots before remedial action was required to get it to go BANG again. The crappy direct impingement gas system, as opposed to piston-driven, simply lacks the reliability to perform in the field. This has been proven and tested time and time again.

More from the Army Times:

This is the latest round of controversy surrounding the M4 since late November, when the weapon finished last in an Army reliability test against several other carbines.

The M4 suffered more stoppages than the combined number of jams by the three other competitors - the Heckler & Koch XM8, FNH USA’s Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle (SCAR) and the H&K 416.

Army weapons officials agreed to perform the dust test at the request of Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., in July. Coburn took up the issue following a Feb. 26 Army Times report on moves by elite Army Special Forces units to ditch the M4 in favor of carbines they consider more reliable. Since then, Coburn has questioned the Army’s plans to spend more than $300 million to purchase M4s through fiscal 2009 rather than considering newer and possibly better weapons available on the commercial market.

This is the same Army full of fire and brimstone for Rumsfeldian “transformation.” How about we worry less about a go-go gadget army and more about the basics, like functioning rifles.

Last year, lawmakers cut funding for FCS as they faced mounting pressure to protect troops in combat. They initially tried to “reallocate” as much as $900 million that was earmarked for the program to help pay for body armor for soldiers, up-armored Humvees, Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) trucks, and other war needs.

Army officials balked, sounding what one staffer on Capitol Hill called a “general alarm,” and dispatched several senior Army officers to the Hill to repair the damage. They feared that the cuts were the first of attempts to entirely kill off the program. Their efforts led to much of the funding being restored and ultimately only about $200 million was cut from the program.

Cut it now or cut it later, it really doesn’t matter. At current funding levels, the U.S. Army will field Future Combat Systems right about the time the sun supernovas. The bottom line, is that this program represents the “legacy” of a wide swath of military officials, just as it represents billions of dollars in government contracts.

As for needing the tools to win in the “next-generation of warfare;” I would recommend the history section at the Library of Congress. The tools are all there and have been polished by thousands of years of human history. Certainly, Army officials salivate over Robocop warriors marauding, casualty-less, through the bad guys, and it sure sounds like a good time. Reality, however, has a way of injecting itself into these fantasies.

Back in 2002, the U.S. Navy ran the “Millennium Challenge” to simulate war in the Persian Gulf. As anyone who has been involved in these things can tell you, the ultimate conclusion is that BLUEFOR (the good guys) will emerge grandly victorious, decimate the OPFOR (the bad guys) and prove once again that nothing can stand in the way of the U.S. military, least of all, the U.S. military.

But to play the role of Bad Guy in Charge (BGIC) for the Millennium Challenge, the Navy hauled up a crusty, retired leatherneck by the name of Paul Van Riper. Van Riper wasn’t even given the benefit of a proper military for the simulation — No real navy, no real air force, just some old boats, propeller planes and archaic surface-to-surface missiles. The general plan was that Van Riper would put up a token resistance before Johnny came marchin’ right on through, haroo, haroo.

At what should have been the end of the exercise, 2/3 of the big, fancy U.S. Navy fleet was nestled cozily along the bottom of the Persian Gulf.

Since defeat deviated from the script - the Navy simply refloated the fleet and continued along the simulation as if nothing ever happened. Van Riper, refusing to play the sucker, stumped out of the exercise. Gary Brecher, was the first to point out what a huge freaking deal (warning this site is a goldmine of information mixed in with big boy language and occasional human anatomy) this is for U.S. operations. The War Nerd reprises his assessment of the whole thing (and takes a sharp jab at the big media (which caught on about six years too late) here.

Naval theorist who are not posed to make money on ship construction have been claiming the days of the surface navies are well-past. William Lind recount’s Admiral Hyman Rickover’s forecast in his column, “Davy Jones’ Locker.” (This Web site is safe for all audiences.)

About thirty years ago, my first boss, Senator Robert Taft Jr. of Ohio, asked Admiral Hyman Rickover how long he thought the U.S. aircraft carriers would last in the war with the Soviet navy, which was largely a submarine navy. Rickover’s answer, on the record in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was, “About two days.” The Committee, needless to say, went on to approve buying more carriers.

Barring modern U-Boat warfare, bad guys the world over are learning that the best way to beat high-technology, is to go for technology so low as to be almost primitive. In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers found out that the government’s high-performance jet fighters are great against other jet fighters but lousy against dinky propeller planes that can fly slow enough to make tracking a pain and low enough that shooting them out of the sky might pose more of a threat than letting them toss homemade bombs and Molotov cocktails out of the window. (This too, courtesy of Brecher.)

When we’re staring at one of the largest defense budgets since world war 2, it’s sobering to to realize that our enemies are very capable of doing more with less. The U.S. public has a very strong opinion about the invulnerability of its military. It’s hard to tell what effect the USS Coral Reef might have.

Via the Air Force Times

By Sudhin Thanawala - The Associated Press
Posted : Monday Feb 4, 2008 6:39:04 EST

HONOLULU - A fighter jet among a troubled fleet of F-15s that recently returned to the skies plunged into the ocean Friday, but the pilot ejected in time and was rescued shortly afterward.

A Coast Guard helicopter plucked the Hawaii National Guard pilot from the ocean. He was taken to a hospital and was listed in good condition.

The pilot, whose identity was not released, had extensive flight experience, said Maj. Gen. Robert G.F. Lee, the Hawaii National Guard commander.

By far the most important thing, is that that pilot was alright. This is easily forgotten when we start talking about million dollar losses.

A distant second, is that American lawmakers have some tough issues to face. We can pretend that the F-15 is going to last until the slated retirement of 2025, but pretend may be all that we can do. These birds are getting old and the Air Force maintainers are working like dogs to keep these machines in the air.

The recent defense budget clocks in at a sobering $515.4 billion. The last time our defense spending looked like this the country was in full mobilization for total war. This procurement blitz, which I am very proud to announce I have dubbed the “Splurge,” will fetch the Air Force four additional F-22 Raptors for the year. But the Defense Department is not budging on the F-22 target number of 183, and while no one is disputing that the Raptor is awesome, like angry Ninja awesome, replacing almost 700 F-15s with 183 F-22s does not jibe. At the risk of summoning the angry spirits of communists past, “Quantity has a quality all its own.”

We are going to have to find out what’s important to us and let our lawmakers know. It is senseless to say that we shouldn’t “play politics” with our military, sense deciding funding of what and how much is inherently political. We’ve got a while to wait before the F-35 enters the stage, and relying on 30 year old fighter for our air defense is looking increasingly shaky.