Originally Posted by
pinzgauer
While the enemy behavior was real, the root cause was far more complicated then needing a machine gun with longer range.
My son was line PL in the battalion in the 173rd airborne that two very famous incidents in the korengal were documented. He served with and for people who were in these famous incidents. (Restrepo, "Chosen Few", etc )
Their walk away after quite a bit of analysis has nothing to do with the range of the machine guns.
The root causes were:
1) bad rules of engagement which did not allow the use of mortars. Modern infantry companies have tools to deal with area situations outside the range their machine guns. Is the light mortars. At that particular time they had a very difficult time getting permission to use mortars due to concerns over villagers and such. The enemy knew this and took advantage of it.
2) bad tactics in spreading companies and even platoons too far apart where they could not assist each other and the bigger mortars could not be brought to bear. This could have been just too few of troops covering too wide of an area because doctrinally they know not to isolate platoons and companies.
3) bad habit/training scars. The light mortar that line infantryman have has a much shorter range if used handheld then with the base plate. Due to the mountainous terrain no one wanted to lug the base plate around and it became convenient just to use them handheld. But that significantly limited their range to not much further than the 249 and 240s.
During my son's time this mistake was viewed as being entirely within their unit's control in the senior NCOs hammered this point.
Any discussion of carbines and machine guns with further range is immediately met with the reality that they don't get to train with either at even the current stated range limits, much less the further ranges of super weapons.
From memory with the 249s they do shoot out to 800 at the big places like Benning/Moore which have dedicated machine gun ranges. But a lot of ranges and certainly the live fire ranges just are not set up to handle that distance as I understand it.
The other issue is combat loadouts with the superweapons in most cases you have reduced ammo for the same weight and in mountainous train they already at limits.
This is true with 6.8 SPC and Grendel, it just doesn't solve a problem they have. The range trade off would not be worth the reduced ammo loadout
Consider all of the above as accepted.
Seems to me what this potentially brings to the table is a Medium machine gun with about the same weight as a M240 but twice the range with a comparable weight penalty when it comes to ammo. That is assuming it survives in conditions like Afghanistan.
It's hard to be a ACLU hating, philosophically Libertarian, socially liberal, fiscally conservative, scientifically grounded, agnostic, porn admiring gun owner who believes in self determination.
Chuck, we miss ya man.
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