US Army says our GIs may need bigger guns. No, better history lessons. It appears as if America’s gun makers are lobbying for another US standard issue. The stories are creeping into the newswires that US soldiers need bigger guns. Our 5.56mm isn’t enough stopping power anymore, which explains the relentless insurgencies, they’re not stopping. Well, making historical comparisons isn’t going to serve your argument.
Soldiers, experts and a US Army Study are looking back at past adversarial mismarriages of ordnance to spell out why today’s GIs need to arm up. To our M4 assault rifle, the Taliban answers with the AK-47. Every schoolboy knows that, but it’s a differential in caliber that means our opponents can fire from almost twice the distance. While we’re berating the obvious, I’d like to point out their 7.62mm bullets also enjoy a home team advantage which ballistics geeks know affects range and velocity.
Apparently the Soviets had the same disadvantage against the Afghans, the soviets had the AK-47, and they faced rebels with Lee-Enfield or Mauser rifles. The WWII era guns suited the battle better.
Before that, the British were ill-equiped with Brown Bess muskets, against Jezzail flintlocks that ultimately drove every last Englishman out.
Is old better than new, it doesn’t help the case for the weapons makers. I’m reminded of when the crossbow fell to the Welsh longbow. New technology stoned by old, where the simplicity of brute force was the innovation. The Swiss pike figures somewhere in there, long pointed sticks, rough metal tips outclassing honed steel.
Short range versus long range incompatibility is not accidental. Weapons fashioned for the close-in fighting required of enforcing occupation came up short against the partisan sniper on the offensive.
US complaints of drawing the short stick are just keeping with tradition. Astute gun experts point to the M-4’s shortened muzzle as a major reason its fire lacks velocity. The shortened weapon is easier to carry through doors. An early foreshortened firearm used primarily for urban fighting was the blunderbuss. Made even more portable was the dragon, carried by the hated Dragoons, early specialists in oppressing unfree populations.
There are three common threads here, all of them related. The first is the coincidence that our pertinent examples are Afghanistan, and the Afghans never lost, regardless their weapon.
Not unrelated is that the practical, indigenous weapon has always prevailed.
And that’s directly linked to the Law of Insurgency, a principle which shamefully America doesn’t teach in its military academies. Put simply, insurgents always win.
Oh there were good old days of conquest when gunpowder ran roughshod over the stone-aged. Those days went with the conquistadors and the US cavalry.
Some may want to think our crusader edge is back, that an overwhelming US technological supremacy has restored the oppressor’s favorable imbalance, but it’s not true, boots on the ground. Wasn’t that was the lesson of Vietnam? Another lesson despicably cut from the patriot curriculum.
In Vietnam by the way, US GIs carried the larger M-14s, so both sides fired a similarly large 7.62mm round. Did it help?
It may be good military tact to upgrade our Afghan forces to the longer guns. But occupation-wise that puts us back at square one, trying to take the country, not administer it.
The industrial age, and with it the equalizing effect of universal access to weaponry, has meant the end of conquest and twilight for colonial occupations. Populations rise now against post-colonial inequity, but the victor is preordained as the tide.
The lesson for arms dealers who want to sell us more stopping power to kill our foes? Historians know what gunsmiths may deny, there’s no stopping them.
A staple of army surplus stores since the days Banana Republic was the Starbucks of olive drab, the Israeli Paratrooper Bag was marketed as the Swiss Army Knife of handbags. Beside the ludicrous notion that an airborne assault fighter would shoulder a single-strapped man-purse, the red logo of a winged parachute raises another incongruity. For what pretext does a nation’s defensive force have “paratroopers?” I know the US/UK imperial powers label their entire military as being for defense, but they’ve got client states to dominate. Every nation’s special forces are now synonymous with SWAT, basically unconstitutional deployment of paramilitary forces against their own populations. Even if we grant governments this tool of repression, they don’t use parachutes. Paratroopers are the advance team for an invading army, dropped behind enemy lines to demolish another’s defenses against the main assault. And that’s why Israel is so unsuccessful in defending itself, it’s attacking.
“U.S. and Swiss soldiers never fought side-by-side in a war, no Swiss town felt an emotional bond to the U.S. for a past liberation or economic assistance program,” which creates the vexing obstacle that the Swiss Army won’t lend their knives to NATO or other USG non-multilateral projects:
I watched the Wimbledon finals with a fan who would brook not a peep of admiration for the adversary, regardless who was sporting the better form.
