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So, our friend @FilmLadd on Twitter posited thus:

https://twitter.com/FilmLadd/status/661737049398108160

Oh, there is, and will be increased remote controlled (and eventually autonomous) weaponry.  But there will always be a place for the infantryman on the ground.

Let’s take a look at a current situation, security for a Forward Operating Base in Afghanistan. A large FOB serves as the logistical hub for a network of smaller Combat Outposts to conduct operations in a given region. They might be centered on an airfield that provides a base for Close Air Support, airlift and airborne Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance assets.

These large bases are attractive targets for enemy attack. But they’re also hard enough targets that the Taliban doesn’t like to stage mass attacks against them, as it would prove too costly in lives and equipment.  But the Taliban does like to make harassment attacks, primarily with either mortars or the ever popular 107mm unguided rocket.

The base isn’t completely helpless here. First, the base has counterbattery radar, that detects incoming indirect fire and issues a warning for all troops to take cover. More importantly, the radar can track back the rocket to its launching point, and provide that data to our artillery for counterbattery fires, often before the rocket even lands. And while that is going on, the counterbattery radar is also cueing C-RAM, Counter Rocket, Artillery, and Mortar system. Currently C-RAM is a modified Navy Phalanx 20mm gatling gun that uses a radar to track both the incoming projectile, and the outgoing stream of bullets. It merges the two until the incoming is destroyed.

Coupled with elevated sensors on masts using Forward Looking Infrared, that’s an integrated system that pretty much means attacks on the FOB can rarely be more than simple nuisance attacks.

But @FilmLadd sees a future where networked unmanned systems operate even further afield. FLIR, Millimeter Wavelength Radar (MMW), and other sensors mounted on what he calls “armed stalks”, and armed with the CROWS or some similar system, lording over  the battlefield.

Sounds great, right?

As to FLIR and MMW, neither sensor is perfect. Both are vulnerable to countermeasures.  Worse still, they give a “soda straw” view of the battlefield. It’s very difficult to maintain situational awareness with the limited field of view offered by them. And while an operator is evaluating one contact, others aren’t being searched for. Then there are the weapons mounted. It’s a sad fact that weapons, even generally reliable weapons in our inventory, jam from time to time, usually at the most inopportune time. That’s with daily maintenance performed on them. Left uncared for for more than a day, dust, or rust, can quickly render a weapon useless. Finally, control of these remote stalks has to be via radio frequency networks. And every RF network is vulnerable to some extent to jamming. There’s ways to mitigate that, but none are perfect. Heck, you’ve probably got a wifi deadspot in your house that frustrates you. Why would you think Army networking built by the lowest bidder is any better? The other option is running cabling to the “stalk” but that leave the cable vulnerable to being cut, either by enemy action, or simple carelessness, such as a truck driving over it.

There are remote weapon stations in development, such as the Containerized Weapon Station, basically CROWS mounted in a TriCon container that can elevate its sensors and weapons and perform as an unmanned guard tower. But that’s designed to be used within the perimeter of a base. After all, the guns require maintenance, as do the sensors (dust settling on the FLIR window will degrade its performance very quickly), resupplying its ammo and checking its backup power system. That’s pretty much the state of the art, today.

But if you were to emplace it outside the perimeter, you’d still have to send a patrol out at least daily to service it, and where is the benefit to that? That simply means you’ve given the enemy a known, fixed point where our troops will visit sooner or later, and likely in an extremely predictable size and manner. That’s practically a written invitation for an ambush.

So the used of unmanned sensors and weapons makes a fair bit of sense for the defense of a static position. But there simply isn’t the capability today to field unmanned ground systems independent of ground troop formations. Nor is there likely to be some fundamental change to technology that will enable remote systems to become offensive systems without accepting severe limitations in capabilities.

Though you’d be hard pressed to find anyone that actually preferred the damn thing to a 1911, the M9 did its job well enough that it stuck around for 30 some odd years.

The Army, however, realized that, although the M9 was adequate, technology was still marching along, and it was probably time for a replacement. And so they sought out to look for one.That was a decade ago, and according to the Washington Times, Congress is getting sick of their shit. Apparently, the Senate Armed Services Committee is set to release a report entitled “America’s Most Wasted: Army’s Costly Misfire” that puts them on blast for it.

The report claims that, in the last decade, the only thing the Army has done to update its service sidearm is come up with a bizarrely complicated series of requirements that manufacturers will have to put up with.Okay, let’s ignore the fact that the Army just wasted a decade coming up with the rules for a new pistol without actually getting to the part where they start looking for one, or the fact that one of America’s most powerful leaders can’t pun to save his life.

How hard is it to dream up the perfect pistol?

Source: Pistol Problems – | @TheRhinoDen | Home Of All Things Military

Some folks love the M9 (or its civilian variant). Me, I’ve never liked it. But that’s merely a matter of taste.

The real issue here isn’t the pistol. It is the acquisition process.

Senator McCain wants to light up the Army for the lengthy, costly pistol replacement program. The problem with that is, the Army isn’t the one who set up the rules that is has to follow to buy a new pistol. Congress did that.

Let’s face it, the choice of a pistol, for all the emotional energy spent on it, is one of the more secondary concerns for the services. There are literally dozens of fantastic guns out there the Army could choose, and the advantages and disadvantages over any other choice would be so marginal as to be virtually invisible. It’s just a pistol.

But because the acquisition law is what it is, the Army has to go through the process of first determining the benchmarks it will measure a competition by, and then through the entire solicitation process, then the competition, and then awarding a contract, and then dealing with the invariable protest by the losing bids, which the GAO will almost automatically endorse, which puts the entire program on suspension, wasting more time and money, and often forcing the Army to start the entire process over again, right from square one.

Can you imagine GEN George Marshall having to fiddle with this mess while trying to build the host that became the US Army in World War II?

The guy in charge of small arms program management in the Army is a Colonel. An O-6. In Marshall’s day, he never would have seen a scrap of paper cross his desk on such a small issue. The Colonel would choose what he thought was best, and let the contracts.

But the Army can’t simply go to the Armed Services Committee and say, you know, we’ve taken a look at a bunch of pistols, and want to buy the Glock/Smith and Wesson/Colt/you name it.

That would be too simple.

I was discussing women in combat arms on Facebook, and since I went to all the trouble of actually writing something, I thought I’d share with you.

You simply have no idea what the infantry’s burden is like.
If you took the personal and unit equipment of a WWII infantry platoon, and divided its weight by the number of men in the platoon, you’d come up with an average weight of about 70 pounds.

If you did the same with an infantry platoon deployed in Afghanistan today, you’d come out with an average weight of about 120 pounds, with some individual loads topping 135 pounds.

To be sure, today the average infantryman is taller and heavier than his WWII counterpart, and has a greater bone density, greater skeletal mass, and greater muscle mass. But not proportionally. That is, the burden is still proportionately greater.

Worse, the average woman today in the Army *still* has less height, weight, skeletal mass and muscle mass than a WWII grunt. No matter how physically fit women are, they’re going to suffer debilitating sports injuries at about double the rate of men. Where’s the upside to an infantry platoon in that?

A loaded M4A1 carbine with the usual optics weighs 7.9 pounds. That’s about a pound and a half lighter than a WWII M1 Garand. But our grunt today also carries a much greater ammo load. While the 5.56mm round weighs a lot less per round than the M1 .30cal round, today’s grunt actually tends to carry a greater weight of ammo. That’s not including carrying extra ammo for other weapons (though that certainly happened to WWII grunts as well). Add on an M230 grenade launcher, and its grenades, well it adds up quick. Or get stuck humping an M249 and 600 rounds, or the delightful M240 and a couple hundred rounds (7.9pounds per hundred rounds) or worst of all, the 60mm mortar.

Interestingly, the Cold Weather Uniform when I joined the Army some 34 years later was virtually identical. In fact, when I got out, some units were still using this equipment in 1999.

Of course, by that time most units had converted to at least an early iteration of the ECWCS, or Extreme Cold Weather Clothing System, which combined Gore-Tex parka and trousers with multiple layers of synthetic pile liners.

According to an article in The Sunday Times the Ministry of Defence may have ditched a £2bn plan to buy a fleet Boeing P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft for the RAF to plug the gap left by the retirement of the Nimrod. The purchase of a Nimrod replacement was expected to be announced in the forthcoming Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) but the newspaper claims the plan to buy the Poseidon, seen as the preferred option, has been shelved after ministers declared that the aircraft were “fiendishly expensive”.

Source: NEWS: RAF Poseidon acquisition axed | Defence of the Realm

Japan is strongly marketing their new P-1, and LMT is offering a modified C-130J, but we have a sneaking suspicion Britain will chose the worst option, and simply abandon the key Maritime Patrol Aircraft mission.

Via Air Safety Network, here’s the reported vertical speed of the last minute of flight.  Hard to tell what caused such an immediate excursion from level flight. Airbuses have suffered from pitot/static probe issues before, but that usually leads to a less instantaneous excursion. We’ll see eventually. Yes, Russia will have a piece of the investigation, but so will Egypt, France, Germany, Ireland (the plane was leased from an Irish company) and probably some of our own folks.