Picture of Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll, in the green jacket, is shown, from left to right, mockups of the Northrop Grumman-Colt precision grenade launcher, the FN America PGS-001, and the Barrett/MARS SSRS. An M4 carbine and an M320 grenade launcher are also seen at right.

Picture source from the US Army.

So I’m just learning about this for the first time because I sorta just figured the military would have some semblance of Strategic common sense left in maintaining the 40mm under-barrel grenade launcher platform they’ve been using for decades.

Nope. Fuck that.

Apparently the DOD is looking into competing contracts for a 25mm semi-auto magazine-fed grenade launching man-portable shoulder-mounted rifle. They’re estimated to only carry 5 rounds per mag, have whatever shitty computerized Optics they’re gonna slap on their dogwater rifles, be used to shoot down drones, and have shotgun canister rounds for close quarter combat.

Thing is, it’s gonna be fucking heavy, at roughly 14 pounds loaded unless they can shave off more weight. It’s gonna decrease the infantry squad Firepower by at least two riflemen by making each fireteam’s designated grenadier able to only shoot grenades and maybe a pistol sidearm if they’re lucky.

They’re not gonna carry the new fancylad XM7 Rifle because that’s already like 10 pounds of shit as is plus ammo in addition to the proposed 14 pounds of shit grenade launcher rifle plus ammo, that’s just too much shit to move with and just a fucking mess to deal with in general. If they get told they get to use the M4 carbine system as their primary carry, that’s still around 7 pounds plus ammo of extra shit they gotta handle.

XM7 below

M4 below

The fucking Pentagon’s brilliant thought leaders are already bickering over whether or not the new rifle carrying 10 less rounds is a good thing (more stopping power plus range per round) of a bad thing (less massed fire for suppression and less ammo capacity). Introducing what looks to be another fuck up to the standardized infantry squad loadout is sure to really hamstring the footsoldiers of the u.s military if they actually follow through with this.

Fuck me, the rational side of my brains looking at this pulling the hair out of its head but the sicko commie side is going sicko-jammin

  • Breath_Of_The_Snake [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    31·
    5 days ago

    They also tried this before and it fucking sucked.

    About the xm25

    But it was expensive; each round cost $1,000 and was expected to drop to $35 or so in full production. And the system frequently failed. I photographed a sergeant major firing it in a "familiarization shoot” and something like eight rounds failed in a row. A military police soldier and I slowly counted the shots as I took photos, marking each time that another two weeks of our pay had gone downrange and failed to explode.

    It was worse on patrols, where troops couldn’t count on the weapon in tough fights. It was risky to break cover to fire the weapon when it might take five or even 10 shots to get the burst. They obviously tried, but the troops in contact reports would come across the brigade chat system, saying that they’d expended 10 or 20 rounds for zero enemy casualties.

    Apparently the airburst is the key point. They want an easy way to precisely get a grenade behind cover at long range.

    Too bad they forgot that grenades have to actually explode to be useful lol.

    • Llituro [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      23·
      5 days ago

      …[S]omething like eight rounds failed in a row. A military police soldier and I slowly counted the shots as I took photos, marking each time that another two weeks of our pay had gone downrange and failed to explode.

      that’s incredible actually, what a quote.