WW2 Small Arms Lessons Learned and Ignored

Look at the feed spring near the feed lips. That helps guide the boolit from the magazine to the chamber. I replaced it with a new one that was bent to keep the cartridge from porposing out to high and jamming the action when the bolt closed. By keeping the cartridge lower the bolt could pick up on the rim and not the center of the cartridge. AGI has part of the article republished online. Dunno where my copy of the magazine went.

Whaccha all specialise in DarkLord? Repair? Pistol? Scattergonne? Rifle? Refinishing? M-T mines wanna no.

 

I suppose they've updated from their post-desert storm assessment. the often asymmetric nature of armed conflicts may have influenced this move back to fall-auto. The M4 I remember came about after that statistical analysis the pentagon made for all major armed conflicts from 1900 all the way to desert storm. the study concluded that an army doesn't need a 10-pound rifle capable of killing the enemy at 600 meters, and costing $2,500+ (back then.) a semi-automatic carbine weighing 4.5 pounds empty, costing less than $1,500 (back then), and an adequate man killer out to 300 meters max was enough.

 

It's been a while since wrote that, so I think I meant the adoption of the 3x 4 man fire team squad, which was innovated in WW2 after the 12 man squad that the army used proved to be unwieldy in the Pacific islands campaigns. Also they adopted 3x BARs per squad vs. the 1-2 (depending on the period) the US army officially had. Later on that concept lead to the adoption of the M27 IAR just as soon as a suitable rifle could be found and modern combat experienced proved the SAW too heavy for most combat situations. Of course that isn't anything new, US army testing in the 1960s found that either M16 only squads or those enhanced with Colt auto-rifles (beefed up M16s) proved to be the most effective in combat, which echoed German tests in WW2 with the Sturmgewehr.

Of course army leadership was stuck on the 1946 Fort Benning review that had WW2 leaders state that a LMG equipped squad was the way to go in modern combat due to how well the German squads performed on the defensive with theirs; US military leaders were still preparing for a WW2 style show down in Central Europe with the Soviets it was thought the SAW was fundamentally better given that they were going to be outnumbered by Soviet infantry and would be on the defensive as well as mechanized, so the weight wasn't that much of an issue. That is also when/why the M855 bullet was adopted to allow for 5.56 weapons to be fired out to longer distances and have more effect against body armored mechanized infantry given that the bullets were heavier and had a half steel core and it was thought there would be a need to engage out to 600m against dismounting mechanized infantry.

 

To be honest, the NATO feared the massive number of Soviet tanks, not the soldiers. Whatever the soldier guns and situating in battle, if tthe tanks ram through to the western front, there is not much to do about it.

 

Any modern military force is a combined arms unit. It wasn't simply tanks or aircraft or what have you that anyone feared, it was the combined force of which infantry remain a vital part of the team; tanks cannot operate without infantry as not just WW2, but all conflicts since then have repeatedly demonstrated. See even in the Middle East when Turkey lost a bunch of Leopards to infantry with AT weapons because infantry were not available to defend them properly.

 

But like said, I was a teenager in the late 70' s and early 80 's, and all the military discussions were about the Soviet massive tank power crushing through to west. Today, military power is quite more Advanced than 40 years ago.

 

Sorry, actually I did not define the time period but NATO was back in time the NAME and today we speak of EU quick action forces.