You seem not to understand what I have been saying. The US Army is the one complaining with it's members talking about the need to replace 5.56x45mm at every turn. They are the ones who talk about their inability to reply to the Taliban. The Australian Army doesn't. They just get on with the job. I am not calling for the ability of soldiers to hit targets at 1,000 metre ranges, the US Army is. I am asking why they adopted a carbine with it's inability to hit targets more than a few hundred metres away. I'd actually ask what advantage M4 has? The US Army is showing apparently a lack of understanding of what is required by the task facing them and instead is seeking a technical solution which was found way back in WWI - combined arms....
I think everyone knows what you're saying. You just don't know what you're talking about: Conventional tactics of "fire and maneuver" and "supporting arms" are irrelevant if you no longer need to close the distance. How many machine guns does a sniper team need to kill someone with a TAC 50 from half a mile away?
The purpose of a machine gun is to stop an infantry force from moving so riflemen can get closer to kill them with hand grenades and gunfire from 100-200 meters away, which is about as far away as you can just about make out a moving person with some drab clothes on a dreary winter's day.
I know this because my cousin lives down the street from and has dogs. He walks his dogs sometimes and I wave to him while walking to the store. I can see him down the street where I live which is about 200 meters. He's very tiny. I don't think I could see someone to the tree line behind his house, which is closer to 300 meters, unless there were a lot of people and they were being inconspicuous. Or they were shooting at me. Even then I wouldn't be able to hit them. I'm no expert marksman. I can barely hit a tin can at 25 yards with a tiny gun like a M1 carbine. I have a Type 53 carbine personally but that's not worth much these days, though I'm sure Li or Boris would have used it well enough back when folks were raised on farms and not in libraries. My eyes are just too egg-shaped to be useful for that kind of stuff though. I'd probably need an optic to reliably hit things at 300 yards. Or a lot of practice.
I tried to make the evidence obvious but it's pretty clear that shooting people
is a hard task without computerized guidance, so I gave you a real world, common sense example of "suburban street" which happens to be what the Red Army considered to be within the distance of 75% of small arms engagements in the Great Patriotic War, to help visualize the issue.
Anyway the Squad Designated Marksman Rifle trialed by the 82nd ABN had an "effective" range of 800 meters with a large ACOG optical gunsight or 6x sniper scope. It was based on the M16 because the Army had a bunch of them and no one carried them as much anymore. The US Marines just bought HK416s with 16" barrels and shoot out to 600 meters regularly. SDM-R was kept from away from everyone presumably since the Army decided that dedicated marksmen are kinda dumb in a world where optics are cheap and they're now pursuing a 1x/6x variable zoom scope for everyone, possibly combined with a fire control system for NGSW.
If the Australian Army had any brains or money it would be trying to turn everyone into snipers. It may be doing that, I don't know. I just know there's simply no range problem.
Afghanistan's long range ambushes were irrelevant since they never caused casualties.
They were an annoyance at best and useless at worst. When combined with IEDs they just slowed down a column. These are the physical effects, but the psychological effects were greater. The moral is to the physical as three is to one.
So this sort of attack is great because it makes the occupiers angry, frustrated, and destroys their morale while doing very little to expose your weak fighters to danger. You get to score a victory by blowing up a truck, shooting guns at some foreign invaders, and go home to tell of great victories while those guys, who lost three people in a Humvee (an objectively small but subjectively massive loss) get to go home in shame and wondering if they will ever control the roads. We already know the answer.
It's pure harassing tactics that are the bread and butter of any paltry and militarily weak partisan force like the Vietcong and Soviet partisans before them. When the Taliban wanted to come out and fight they did it like any other light infantry force. If they had to fight a 2040s ground force instead of a 2000s ground force they would have been slaughtered because in the 2040s everyone will be a super accurate soldier
with multispectral vision and
computer guided gunsights.
These are not new technologies in any practical sense. Such systems
exist for commercial hunting, and
if the history of militaries tells us anything, pushing weaponry down to the lowest common and requiring
less and less training and expertise to use is the natural outcome. The issue with NGSW, which is more about the fire control system than the big bullet, the latter of which is just to punch through ESAPI-style plates that the Red Army had and Russians have, as it's a "everyone is turning into snipers" problem. In the next 10 or 20 years everyone will be capable of hitting moving targets accurately, at significant range (excess of 300 meters, perhaps even 500 maybe) with single shots,
possibly while moving or unsupported, and
using silenced rifles to do so
to make gunshot detection problematic:
5. Does ShotSpotter detect gunshots from gun silencers?
Yes, it does. “Silencers” are more accurately called suppressors as they suppress the
impulsive sound of gunfire, but do not wholly eliminate it. The ShotSpotter sensors are
designed to pick up the sound of gunfire from suppressors, but it does make it more
challenging. [emphasis mine]
There's literally no way to protect against this without making soldiers bulletproof or re-inventing trench digging machines at the moment.
Either you
start wearing power armor and strutting around at 10-20 miles an hour like PITMAN or you dig a big trench and shoot without seeing the enemy because light infantry ambushes are confusing and chaotic.
Maybe people will be hiding
with multispectral cloaks or something but there's no real way to determine if you're under infrared/thermal observation and potential sniper attack from several hundred meters. Perhaps
bullets for elite snipers will be laser guided or maybe
robots will be necessary to lead armored/mechanized phalanxes due to massive casualties of human ground troops? Either way infantry tactics are slowly devolving to singletons or pairs of men in foxholes controlling half a kilometer of terrain with a big ass sniper scope, radio datalink to a stealthy recon plane, and maybe an anti-tank missile.
That's probably more a 2080's meme than a 2040's one though, but it's the current trend line. Barring some massive disruption in global industries like "the world economy collapses" or "global thermonuclear war" it will get there eventually.
This is well known by subject matter experts at Frunze and other military academies who formed the bulk of Soviet warrant and commissioned officer corpus, and became the Russian military's NCO corps. It's not some new secret sauce or invented cultural revisionism. It's simplified, distilled forms of Liddell-Hart's and Fuller's semi-religious, doctrinaire, primitive groping-in-the-dark about the nature of war put into easy to understand rules of thumb and heuristics.
The only reason Westerners on the Internet don't know it largely is probably because military science is still treated as a sort of religious scholarship or art school isolate instead of a real science. These sorts of facts and figures are somewhat obscure, but not particularly special or secret knowledge. OTOH even in military circles there's a tendency to think the current way is the only way, and there's no Academy of War Sciences in the typical Western democracy, whereas Frunze has a connected network of universities and treats its curricula like an engineering degree.
Of course all militaries are the same so the difference is more of one of degree than one of practical. It mostly says more about the quality of officers churned out on their first day than anything, not who rises to the top. The cream always rises, Western cream just needs a percolating period to really get up there while Soviet cream came prepackaged.
West Point has very gifted professors and writers who do good works, as does Sandhurst and the various military associated labs in UK and America have produced extensive reams of knowledge about main battle tanks and aircraft respectively. The average Boris Vatnik probably thinks the AK74M is just fine and doesn't need an optic which is why he hates the rails on the AK-12 without the optics that Russia badly wants but can't have.
tl;dr Supporting arms (i.e. machine guns, mortars, grenade launchers) are not major casualty producers, they are vehicles towards casualty production.
Rifle fire is the most effective mass killing tool during the attack by light infantry. This is perhaps equaled by the grenades from mortars and hand-tossed. The entire purpose of a defense is to stop riflemen from getting within 100-200 yards of a defense position at which point rifle fire becomes overwhelmingly deadly. Beyond that distance, due to the limitations of the human eyeball and frequency of movement of unsupported fire caused by breathing, errors in lead calculation and trajectory, and shooter wobble, all combine to "make hitting things hard". Putting a .223" slug on a target with an area of maybe 100 sq. inches moving laterally at 5 miles an hour at 200 yards is a fairly tough maths problem, even without stress of being shot. Doubly so if the target is constantly altering its shape and exposed area.
We're reaching a point where optics have eliminated the eyeball limit and computerization and mechanization will eliminate shooter wobble and lead errors. This eliminates some of the prime purpose of the supporting arms, which was to increase rate of fire over massed groups of riflemen (as was the case in
1899 and
1905 and to a lesser extent,
1861 and
1871) and free up manpower to do other things.
The distinction between supporting fire and rifle fire will eventually disappear and it will just become 'gun' that 'kills'. The natural outcome is everyone is a sniper in 2100 and wears a stillsuit like Fremen that has all sorts of neat stuff built in so they don't leave spoil besides dirt and they subsist entirely on a liquid diet that doesn't leave solid waste or something I guess. That's probably hyperbolic but it makes for funny mental images and good fodder for my pixel art hobby.
Anyway manpower will again be freed up to do other things. Perhaps they will fly drones or make robot tanks or just work at Starbucks.
