Doesn’t fit in an SR25 mag. That was a primary goal of the creedmoor. That it is also a really good bolt-action cartridge is a side benefit.
XM7 worries from the field.
- Thread starter Terry Cross
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I’m not mil or former mil, so take this opinion for what it is worth. But; from the Delaware River, to a meadow on the Trinity river, Mt Suribachi, a spider hole in Iraq, and to the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan, modern conflict relies on some group of dirty grunts standing on a patch of dirt, carrying rifles. Regardless of what was done by the artillery or the airplanes, it ain’t yours until you have guys standing on it. For my money (and it is our money) my strong preference is that our guys be carrying the best available. I just wish we could agree on what “best” means.
And just to say that I have some skin in the game, beyond my tax dollars, my son joined in January.
And just to say that I have some skin in the game, beyond my tax dollars, my son joined in January.
Going forward you are going to see less infantry as a ratio of forces and probably more SOF if they can be scaled up. They are going to be doing those types of roles. Small, highly trained, agile teams who can operate in a EW and Drone world. They will have what they need, as they always have.
Massing infantry formations is nothing but a big juicy target. You will want smaller, dispersed units that can hide easier and attack with little/no warning.
Mobility, agility, EW defense and superior SA is how you will survive on the modern battlefield. You cant hide from satellites, C5ISR, Sensors, Drones, EW emissions, Infrared spectrum and probably some other shit we don't even know about working together.
We live in a different world. Just as the breach loader and the machine gun changed war, Sensors and AI are going to as well. Modern warfare may becomes the bloodiest and costliest warfare of all time, just due to the ease off finding, locking and hitting targets while not wasting munitions trying to get a 1:1000 hit ratio.
Massing infantry formations is nothing but a big juicy target. You will want smaller, dispersed units that can hide easier and attack with little/no warning.
Mobility, agility, EW defense and superior SA is how you will survive on the modern battlefield. You cant hide from satellites, C5ISR, Sensors, Drones, EW emissions, Infrared spectrum and probably some other shit we don't even know about working together.
We live in a different world. Just as the breach loader and the machine gun changed war, Sensors and AI are going to as well. Modern warfare may becomes the bloodiest and costliest warfare of all time, just due to the ease off finding, locking and hitting targets while not wasting munitions trying to get a 1:1000 hit ratio.
You can, but the how all depends on the part(s) of the EM spectrum that are used by sensors covering your location. SAR is the only imaging method that can penetrate clouds/smoke, (edit: MWIR/LWIR can depending on the heat variation and smoke density) and it is very difficult to analyze unless you’re trained. It also can be impossible to analyze if there are lots of moving things (like leaves in the wind). LWIR and MWIR can’t penetrate through barriers, even transparent ones. And it’s easy to stay unobserved in the non-SAR RF wavelengths. You just don’t emit, or go back to the basics and use directional antenna, transmitting extremely briefly and only with enough power to reach the other radio. Not perfect but it eliminates a lot of the DF/TDOA fixing.
Every sensor had a weakness. But it does add a lot of complexity to the world of deception and concealment.
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Very true point.
I guess my comment wasn't worded clearly because the picture I quoted I don't think came up.
I was comparing when they chose to chamber things in .30-06 and similar instead of the 6.5x55 that was also a well known caliber at the time.
(Very late 1800 / very early 1900 range).
Even around WWII they were still humping a lot of .30-06 as a primary round.
I think had something like the 6.5x55 been chosen instead of the .30-06 small arms development for the next 50 years might have gone a lot faster.
5.56 is great and all for it's intended purpose.
It's just interesting that all the cool kids have been trying now for some time to figure out how to stuff a 6.xx back into the same rifle size for "better performance".
In the end however I think at some point it won't make any difference, the first military to figure out how to go full on AI driven hands off killbots without humans in the decision loop will start dominating things short of using theater weapons and everybody else will dive in big time.
Then it's machines vs machines and then winning machines mopping up the humans who's machines lost.
(or well falling back to nukes to avoid that).
I’ve seen this movie before. After they mop up the losing side’s humans, they start going after the “winning” side’s humans too.
Or they just eat the entire biosphere.... (Horizon: Zero Dawn) obligatory "fuck Ted Faro"
Not sure if this iteration of the optic will be useful but I think the tech will continue to evolve into a more useful version. Same thing applies to the newer high pressure ammo. Those are really the two good things I think will come from this program. I want the ICAR to succeed in its contract. I was talking to someone in the ammunition development area and he was explaining that ammunition developed for the icar could see a 300fps gain over standard 6 arc ammo currently available. That's something I would be interested in.
The training issue is definitely real. If I could be king for a day I would absolutely bring rifle MMS to a decisive skill for advancement in the Army. It's such an easy thing to fix too. But you watch the Army attempt to emplace any
And then you think about how it would this work in a draft with rapid deployment of new soldiers. The time and skill you can invest in them is going to be limited. Definitely going to be a challenge.But I will say advancement of material solutions isn't mutually exclusive to training solutions. They both need to happen, but you don't have to self-limit based on one or the other. And in the Army, these two lines of effort exist in different responsibilities. Tradoc and operational unit training vs force modernization and CDDs.
When you annihilate any logistics hubs and turn any transportation assets into smoldering remains before Infantry have a chance to even deploy into the theater, our Infantry don’t have to take any ground from them because threat forces never even reached their intended dismount points. This is happening before any Infantry unit even gets alerted. It’s all over too fast.
With the way we do layered ISR now, there isn’t any way to get through those chokepoints and allow threat Infantry to fulfill their mid-stage transportation plans. They wouldn’t even survive early-staging and departure of friendly lines in most cases.
If we were to prosecute ODS today, it would look much different, go down much faster, with more brutal efficiency and speed. For ODS, not all of our TACAIR strike platforms were night/all weather capable, with precision-guided munitions.
Most of the F-16 force at the time lacked any of those capabilities. Now ALL of the combat-coded F-16CJs have it, plus Wild Weasel capes, and they are outdated compared to F-35A.
The layers of satellites, high-altitude/high endurance drones, manned ISR, mid-altitude ISR, and low altitude ISR platforms are a totally different force structure than in 1990-1991, and many of those are armed with PGMs.
I did a series of analyses overlaying modern combat capabilities over several key conflicts in the 20th Century to see how they would go down, then looked at each Theater Combatant Command and extrapolated campaign evolution against modern threats in each of those regions. This is why I don’t see a place on the timeline for Infantry to even be deployed in a combat capacity for these types of Larger-Scale Conflicts.
I DO see a more modernized Infantry as maybe one of the key assets in COIN and contingencies where lower-intensity conflict emerges as matters of surrogates for the larger actors. SOF would be the lead leveraging host nations in that though, supported by US and coalition/regional air.
But the internal propaganda of Infantry taking ground, seizing key terrain, and repelling a conventional army’s counter-attack are outdated and repeated to a minority internal audience to make us believe we were some kind of bleeding edge element to the success of any overall future campaign.
If someone can talk me through the specific region where they see Infantry playing the advertised key role that were were told in 11 series land, I’m all ears. I’ve looked at Europe, ME, Asia, Central America, South America, Africa, and the islands of the South Pacific, including near Australia and Indonesia. None of these regions make any sense to deploy Infantry in a historical sense.
If you study how modern air assets are designed, made, and employed, we’ve moved to a multi-spectral sensor cluster format with algorithmic-based threat libraries and net-centric connectivity. This is especially true with F-35s, which have one of the most capable AESA Radars ever made, fused with 7 different IR sensors and at least a dozen more passive RF sensors embedded under the skin.
In CENTCOM, there was a National Command-level Named Target of Interest assigned to specific spy platforms to locate, and they couldn’t. A flight of F-35s on an unrelated mission accidentally geolocated and PID’d that target without the pilots even trying to find it.
Once any one of these sensor nodes geolocates and PIDs a TGT, that data is fed into the network. TGT detection is fed into the net as soon as possible, so other nodes nearby can use their sensors to scan and analyze it through whatever processing capacity they have onboard, which is interleaved with the network.
The AESA Radar Ground-Mapping and Imaging modes in the pre-IOC APG-81 AESA had resolution that was breathtaking. They scrubbed the images, but they could pick out individual windows on casinos in Vegas from 80nm away. That was before any sensor-fusion with the EOTS (a FLIR pod and Laser Spot Illuminator/Tracker/LRF built into the nose).
Forget about dismounted Infantry or insurgents, and think about all the vehicles on the land, in the air, or sea needed to prosecute a full-scale military campaign. They are nothing but targets now.
I’ve worked on programs tied to some of the capabilities/platforms you’ve mentioned. My background is with adaptive EW, computer vision/ATR, tracking&fusion, autonomy, manned-umanned teaming, etc.
We have some amazing stuff, and I do believe we’re leading the world in cutting edge military R&D. But there’s a difference between what the MIC advertises to government customers in tailored demos * and test reports vs how everything works together in the real world across domains.
* not knocking our testing or demos. We have far more transparent and realistic testing than our adversaries, it’s not even close. But humans are human and like to put some polish on their work by putting it in the best light sometimes.
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Were these analyses done for a government customer? Are there white papers or products available (unclass or high side)?
As for deploying infantry in a historical sense, I’m not sure anybody is claiming they should be used in a historical sense. Infantry would likely need to be decentralized and more agile in any future large scale conflict.
