The $35,000 rifle fires exploding ordnance, enabling US infantrymen to kill people behind walls or at distances of 2,300 ft. No indication that our soldiers can now SEE behind walls, or differentiate between combatants and noncombatants at such great distance. Meaning the XM25 will “revolutionize” killing, as military spokesmen say, probably the same innocents we’re massacring now, but an order of higher magnitude. If the same braggarts had a hand in naming the XM25, it means times (X) a magnitude (M) of 25, which I’ll bet is an arbitrary underestimation, where Collateral Damage approaches 100%. And get this, the Army assure us that the XM25 can be fired from the safety of distance and from cover, both of which the XM25 deprives of our adversary. “Revolutionary” pretends to reference the spirit of America’s only defensible war for our independence, but it really means another leap in the arms race, use of disproportional power, further distorting our inhuman arm’s length from war conventions, eliminating “cover” for our victims, but not for our own fighters because our opponents could never afford such a weapon. The DoD’s own words.

It’s class war after all. The haves against the have-nots. Specifically have-not the means to defend themselves from foreign oppressors. Nothing revolutionary about the wealthy keeping down the people.

And there’s nothing technologically revolutionary about the XM25 either. Laser metering, exploding bullets, timed remote detonation, none of those is a new development. Putting all that into a rifle bore is just a matter of budgeting for sky-is-the-limit weaponry. We could make guns that launched miniature yellow submarines if defense spending wanted to bear the expense.