Wilf wrote: I don't see this at all. I see no interest in developing the Platoon in the US, the UK except via hanging computers off them. Training is everything, and it's not that expensive. I have a personal opinion that we don't do it very well, because we don't seem to see a relationship between what training costs and what performance increase it actually creates.

If you can't train operationally effective infantrymen in under 6-8 months, you are doing something wrong.
Often, it isn't that we are doing something wrong, but rather that we cannot control outside influences (base-level working parties anyone?) or constraints.

A lot of things influence training, and certainly basic precepts of safety worry us the majority of the time to a degree that I think is dangeriously exaggerated. Ask a platoon commander to take his platoon from a cold start and conduct a non-illuminated night attack, and I doubt many could do it without extensive rehearsals beyond what we execute for reasonable safety considerations as a dry run. Why can't he do that you ask, when he is certainly trained in its execution? We tend to get too busy doing a lot of other things that are deemed necessary by folks outside our immediate sphere.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken White
.....my combat BAR experience was in the Marines and having three of the monsters with 13 (or more often, 10 ) men made a difference.....

Rifleman wrote: This seems important to me. My understanding is that the traditional 13-man USMC rifle squad (and the fire team concept as we know it) was built in 1944 to maximize the BAR's strengths. The BAR is what the USMC had to work with and they made the most of it by having three BARs per squad and three Garand riflemen manuvering around and supporting each BAR. I think the USMC squad had one (or two?) more BARs than Army squads of the same era did.

But could it not be said that the smaller German squad during the same era made best use of what they had to work with: the MG42? My understanding is that the German SOP was to get the gun into action; the Mauser riflemen screened and packed ammo to the gun.

So might not the AR v. LMG argument hedge on squad size and organization? It just seems to me that larger TOE squads can make best use of the AR and fire teams, but that smaller TOE (plus often being understrength) squads built around an LMG, a grenadier, and a handful of riflemen (and too small for internal fire teams) have been just as successful. Of course that type of squad requires fire and manuever to begin at platoon and not squad level. A smaller squad can usually fire or manuever but usually not both without being reinforced.

I know I've stated this idea before but it seems worth repeating - especially considering the recent posts. But my experience is peacetime light infantry, not combat, so someone tell me if their combat experience says that I'm way off base here.
I think you are on to something with this. Considering the derision with which our own infantry seem to view the SAW (just look at how it gets issued to "the boot" when the TO/E calls for the next senior man after the TL), I don't think the Corps will get its head around just how the AR/LMG fits into our tactics because we are for the most part very immature about the concept of employment in the first place. It just seems as though very few officers and senior enlisted have though about the issue in the least.

We definitely do not organize ourselves to support the SAW-man. He predominantly humps his own ammo, while other team and squad-mates get the burden's share of 60mm ammo and AT-4 rounds, as well as batteries, specialized kits for tacital site exploitation, etc. Heck, it may just be that we simply do not have a large enough loadout of ammo for the SAW-men to make them effective for any duration, thus the heavier reliance on the combined arms concepts of M203 and direct fire employment.

The SAW is also integral to the movement of the team as a whole, since we preach fire and maneuver down to the squad level, more than we preach establishing a base of fire where the riflemen support the SAWs (we do bases of fire, but just not with the SAWs so prominently figured.

I have not seen it first-hand, but I know that there is a degradation of lightfighter skills occuring, since nowadays just about every rifleman also has to have an incidental HMMWV license, be qualified in escaping from it while hanging inverted, and has to have (sometimes to the extreme) familiarity with CSWs because we have killed more troops through NDs that we have killed bad guys it seems.

I started out as a light infantryman and am now in the light armored recce community, where we transport scouts in what could be considered hybrids (certainly considering how we fight them). Our recce/cav doctrine should very clearly delineate who supports whom, when, and where, but in practical application we have some difficulties deciding just what to do.