MAJ Ehrhart - Increasing Small Arms Lethality in Afgh.

[Infanteer]

FUCHSc. I agree that the Taliban are not a well trained opponent, but you do not have to be that good to be that lethal so that it counts. Combat is not defined by absolutes. It's very context specific and all very relative. Good enough merely has to be "better than."

What is more, NO good Army will take the tactical conduct of operations in A'Stan as being illustrative of anything other than irregular warfare against a 2nd rate opponent.

Yes. And good enough merely has to be "better than" for a little while.

These guys know their turf, they know killzones and they are persistent. That's enough to be "better than at times" and killing them requires the same skills as facing a regular opponent - only with them you have more considerations to take into account.

[Fuchs]

Since you're making the assertion that we are tactically inept, and I am out here daily generally seeing the opposite, I think the onus is on you to prove it.

Define "a powerful opponent" - enfilading fire from a PKM kills, regardless of what the guy firing it is wearing.

Don't try to nail me on something that I didn't write.
I wrote "The behaviour observed in AFG is outright suicidal in modern army-on-army warfare."

A patrol moves out in several lightly armoured vehicles in terrain where it's visible beyond 1,000 m and often the convoy is even moving through a valley while surrounding mountain or hill tops are not secured.
A modern army would kill the whole convoy with ease.

An infantry squad comes in contact with the enemy, is pinned down by small arms fire and calls CAS for help.
In high end warfare, it would have been suppressed in the kill zone for 30-120 sec before being killed by mortar fire.


An outpost is established in company strength.
An army opponent would have destroyed it with artillery before its completion.

A civil engineering project is being guarded by infantry and light AFVs in an agricultural area.
Again, arty & good bye.

A patrol conducts a presence patrol.
To show yourself in army-on-army war = suicide. Even 20km deep in the division rear area.

An infantry-on-infantry contact in hilly terrain. One part of the small unit fixes, the other attempts to flank.
Competent armies have a security element in their flanks to stall flanking attempts - a two-man team with LMG suffices.

A house/compound is being assaulted. Suppressive fires + assault.
Again,a competent enemy would defend from more than one position, providing kill zones around the house from detached security elements or other fortified positions.

Infantry calls for helicopters or a Reaper drone for support.
Reaper is an easy target drone for modern battlefield air defences. Helicopters couldn't dare to fly high, much less over enemy-controlled terrain if they faced a modern opponent.

Infantry patrols without (near)permanent concealment or cover.
A sniper pair with a heavy rifle and actual AP cartridges kills them off one by one until they reach cover or concealment. Their vest plates are being penetrated at 500+ m.

A fortified position is being assaulted by TB infantry. The defenders shoot back.
Everyone looking over the wall instead of through a tiny slit or periscope would be shot by snipers. Every position without overhead cover would be a mortar kill zone. Every fortified position that has been identified a few minutes or more ago would already be a death trap, a mere firing mission for the enemy artillery with later mopping up by infantry.

Infantry is carrying M136s on patrol through a barren environment.
An enemy IFV arrives and accepts their surrender.


NATO soldiers expected to die within weeks of WW3 even without any nuclear attacks.
Today ISAF/OEF-A endure a lower attrition rate than a per cent per year.

Any attempt to claim that ISAF/OEF-A meet the survivability demands of modern high end warfare is utterly hopeless. The threat is marginal by comparison. Look at the South Ossetia conflict. More dead than in a year in Afghanistan - in a matter of days. The forces involved were much smaller.
A marginal threat does certainly not lead to the amount of carefulness as necessary in army-on-army warfare.


I know that these statements are not capable of comforting those who serve(d) in AFG, but they're the harsh truth.

Let me refer to this for further explanation.
The TB are far more permissive than an opposing army would be. Naturally, the Western troops use this freedom of action and use tactics that would not be acceptable against a less permissive opponent.

[Fuchs]

These guys know their turf, they know killzones and they are persistent. That's enough to be "better than at times" and killing them requires the same skills as facing a regular opponent - only with them you have more considerations to take into account.

LESS, not more. You need to take MUCH LESS into account.


The Taliban are like an army of LRR scouts. The can improvise some non-LRR actions.

An army opponent would have much, much more at its disposal than LRR improvising all the time.

Would you really want to suggest that German troops in Russia had more considerations to take into account when fighting against partisans than when fighting against the combined arms Red Army with its air support?

Te best we could do is likely that we agree to disagree.

[Ken White]

criticizing governments that engage in potentially fruitless nation building wars which rarely work and are terribly wasteful of people.

He is also saying those kinds of wars teach -- embed, even -- bad habits and the purchase of expensive equipment with limited uses (MRAPS, anyone...). I very strongly agree with him.

As Infanteer said and this is really the point:

..killing them requires the same skills as facing a regular opponent - only with them you have more considerations to take into account.(emphasis added / kw)

Presuming you mean the "regular" opponent requires more considerations, that's correct. A whole lot more. Artillery just for openers, mass and rapid maneuver capability or two quick additives...

As Fuchs says:

I know that these statements are not capable of comforting those who serve(d) in AFG, but they're the harsh truth.

They are indeed truths and he's just scratching the surface. I appreciate and thank everyone now serving but no professional should get lulled into believing that either Afghanistan or Iraq were or are wars in the total sense. They are a series of skirmishes against lightly armed opponents and are a totally different thing to warfare against even a near peer opponent. While major war is itself a series of small unit skirmishes, there are so many more of them and so many more elements come into play that a very different mindset -- and equipment set -- comes into play.

The myth that "COIN is the graduate level of war" is dangerous. It does require a degree of thought and interaction that differs from conventional warfare but it does not require less thought or effort. Indeed, conventional warfare is far, far more demanding on commanders and large units even though it is not much more demanding on individuals and small units.

It is simply a matter of scale. It is also a matter of opponent mass and capability. Governments are at fault for committing their troops to poorly thought out campaigns; Armies are at fault for presuming those campaigns are the future. Every war is different, yet warfare changes little and small wars differ considerably from large ones.

The US Army picked up a number of bad habits in Viet Nam -- some of those bad habits (micromanagement and lack of trust of subordinates being two big ones, overuse of Artillery in COIN like operations and inadequate and insufficient patrolling being two more) still adversely impact the force 35 years later. In fact, the Small War in Korea still has flawed legacy problems (the one year tour, condensed and 'economical' training) 60 years later...

[Steve Blair]

The US Army picked up a number of bad habits in Viet Nam -- some of those bad habits (micromanagement and lack of trust of subordinates being two big ones, overuse of Artillery in COIN like operations and inadequate and insufficient patrolling being two more) still adversely impact the force 35 years later. In fact, the Small War in Korea still has flawed legacy problems (the one year tour, condensed and 'economical' training) 60 years later...

I would contend that these small wars simply solidified traits and trends that were first formed during the big wars (WW 1 and WW 2), and those traits in turn stem from some of Root's reforms and the historical American reliance on a very small standing army and mass militia in times of conflict (which translates after about 1916 to the draft).

Many of the bad habits the force has been saddled with came from poor planning for the next big war, not from participation in small wars. The failures and omissions run deeper than "small versus big" or caliber debates.

[Danny]

Ken, I'm glad to see you say that about micromanaging the military. I can't comment on lessons learned from Vietnam, and I'll leave to you where the Army picked it up. I certainly see reflections of corporate America in the Blackberries, instant access to hundreds of e-mails per day, and control over every little jot and tittle of everything that comes up all day every day with the staff level officers. I have even started a category on this:

http://www.captainsjournal.com/categ...-the-military/

Beginning with one of the most absurd instances I have ever seen in print:

http://www.captainsjournal.com/2009/...-riskless-war/

I'm sure Ken could add several thousand instances from his career. It's disappointing. One of my dislikes of the ROE in Afghanistan is not what it says, although I have my beefs. It is the very notion of a four star general issuing a tactical directive to Lance Corporals and Sergeants in the field under fire. Lord, why can't generals focus in logistics and strategy, and let the boys in the field focus on tactics?

As for the issue of the infantry half-kilometer, there is at least one interesting comment where I weighed in:

http://www.captainsjournal.com/2010/...#comment-29570

This is similar to some comments I am getting to this article via mail. No one in the Army believes that they will ever get the best weapons (or even the best training). It's a matter of making the most of what's there. The Marines do this with their rifle qualifications at 500 yards, and the fact that the Army doesn't do this has to do with strategic choices, not capabilities.

That said, I find it rather criminal that in all these years, the Army / Marines have not seen fit to invest in a replacement for the Stoner system of weapons that at least uses an open bolt system (or better yet, piston), and gives the fire team and squad a more variable choice of weapons at their disposal.

It would appear to me that Major Ehrhart's recommendations are basically correct. Other than money, what reason could there be NOT to implement both better training and more latitude in weapons selection?

[Ken White]

Each generation sort of gets its own war(s) and thus learns its own lessons -- which we notoriously do not analyze well or successfully pass on to our successors.

I would contend that these small wars simply solidified traits and trends that were first formed during the big wars (WW 1 and WW 2), and those traits in turn stem from some of Root's reforms and the historical American reliance on a very small standing army and mass militia in times of conflict (which translates after about 1916 to the draft).

This is not a quibble, it is important:

Each war adds its own fillips to previously absorbed bad lessons.

Many of the bad habits the force has been saddled with came from poor planning for the next big war, not from participation in small wars.

With that I totally agree.

The failures and omissions run deeper than "small versus big" or caliber debates.

While that is true, it should not be allowed to obscure the fact that bad lessons accrue in all wars for the next one or that small anything cannot totally prepare one for a big anything. one reason for the phenomenon as you state it is that junior leaders in one war mistakenly presume their next war will be like their last where they may be far more senior and thus able to do far more damage (See again Korea and Viet Nam. See also the Powell
Doctrine...).

It is a matter of scale and that is very important. What you say is true at the macro level; at the micro or personal level it is all too easy to base ones future plans and actions -- and thus ones responses to stimuli -- on current experience.

That is rarely wise

[Steve Blair]

It is a matter of scale and that is very important. What you say is true at the macro level; at the micro or personal level it is all too easy to base ones future plans and actions -- and thus ones responses to stimuli -- on current experience.

That is rarely wise

Agree, but we also tend to obsess on the micro level without making any real attempt to fix the problem (or at least understand it) at the macro level. That's why I like dragging this old rock out from time to time. Fixing (or at least messing with) the micro also makes some people feel like they're accomplishing something, while in fact the bigger problem remains as the elephant in the corner.

When I look at how the institutions of defense respond to external stimuli (in the form of conflicts), it's interesting to see how their responses have hardened and become more strident in the years after World War II. I suspect part of that is a function of sheer size, but it has certainly allowed the macro problems to linger on and multiply at all levels.

And now I'll put the pet rock away and stop derailing the thread...

[Infanteer]

Don't try to nail me on something that I didn't write.
I wrote "The behaviour observed in AFG is outright suicidal in modern army-on-army warfare."

Well, I'd argue that the behaviour in Afghanistan is simply an adjustment of our own TTPs to the enemy. Has anyone seriously argued that we should fight the Warsaw Pact like we'd fight bandits? I don't think anyone would disagree with the point that Ken White raises with the insurgencies and skirmishes.

We were talking about small arms ammunition and what kills in a small-unit engagement. I don't get how a rifle platoon guarding a development project and getting flattened by a brigade of enemy artillery is related to it. I guess I failed to read the intent of your change in topic - mea culpa.

The fact of the matter remains that small unit firefights of 10-40 guys in Afghanistan are much the same as they would be against a regular foe anywhere else. Small groups of guys trying to shoot, move and communicate to kill each other with crew-served weapons doing most of the killing. For me to do so, I still like light rifles, MGs and light mortars (and other HE-senders). Arty or air are just add-ons for either side; having neither air defence nor effective indirect fire is not a characteristic unique to either Afghan insurgents or irregular foes in general and CAS and indirect are not ubiquitous in Afghanistan.

[Fuchs]

The fact of the matter remains that small unit firefights of 10-40 guys in Afghanistan are much the same as they would be against a regular foe anywhere else. Small groups of guys trying to shoot, move and communicate to kill each other with crew-served weapons doing most of the killing. For me to do so, I still like light rifles, MGs and light mortars. Arty or air are just add-ons for either side; having neither air defence nor effective indirect fire is not a characteristic unique to either Afghan insurgents or irregular foes in general and CAS and indirect are not ubiquitous in Afghanistan.

OK, let's try it this way:

a) You are Inf Plt leader in a great war. Your Plt is in combat with an enemy who's using agricultural walls for cover 400 m ahead of your position. You can call for mortar support.

b) You lead a TB warband in AFG. Your warband has fixed a Canadian patrol 400 m ahead, behind a wall. You have 20 minutes left till enemy air can be expected to intervene. You do not have mortar support available.

c) You are Inf Plt leader in AFG. Your Plt is in combat and fixed behind a wall. You have 20-40 minutes left till air will intervene.

d) You are Inf Plt leader in a great war. You are in combat and fixed behind a wall. The Bn main fight is elsewhere and the Bde main fight isn't in your Bn area. You get no support, but you've got a couple SMK grenades and a large area with much concealment is just 100m to your south. You expect a red mortar attack ion less than two minutes.


Do you get where I see the difference?

Arty and mortars are not "add-ons". They're essential combined arms combat components. The can eradicate your small unit in minutes, something the TB didn't achieve EVER against ANY Western small unit in YEARS of warfare.

Facing such a threat and not being sure that enemy comm is interrupted, you have little other choice than to keep contacts brief and move (disappear) often - while you could sit safely behind the very same cover for hours if in combat against TB.

[kaur]

Sorry for spoiling, but I'd like to add 1 table to Ken White's comment.

It is simply a matter of scale. It is also a matter of opponent mass and capability.

Wilf, said:

I would dare, SUGGEST and without blinking. - Suggest means go work it out, do the trials and do the training. IF it does not work well, DO NOT DO IT!

Has any Red Team ever dared to test this idea?

[Ken White]

Agree, but we also tend to obsess on the micro level...while in fact the bigger problem remains as the elephant in the corner.

Perhaps a bad choice of words on my part; I 've noticed one can educate the young and even the middle aged. However, old Bull elephants are not going to listen or change. So you've got to get the young to think right in hopes that when they get old, they'll be in the habit. Don Vandergriff sent me a briefing he'd presented to the Chief of Staff -- of which nothing had come -- I wrote him back and suggested he edumacate the LTs and they would change the system as the grew in it and pointed out starting at the top and working down does not work, even a really smart guy like Shy Meyer discovered that.

And now I'll put the pet rock away and stop derailing the thread...

It's not a derail, it's pertinent and you're correct that some obsess over inconsequentials.

However, the difference between low and high intensity war is quite far from being inconsequential. That point needs emphasis.

Kaur:

I don't see any spoiling effect. Your chart doesn't contradict a thing I've written here. In fact, if it does anything, it backs up my comment that "(Fuchs) is criticizing governments that engage in potentially fruitless nation building wars which rarely work and are terribly wasteful of people" and "Governments are at fault for committing their troops to poorly thought out campaigns; Armies are at fault for presuming those campaigns are the future."

[Bob's World]

OK, let's try it this way:

a) You are Inf Plt leader in a great war. Your Plt is in combat with an enemy who's using agricultural walls for cover 400 m ahead of your position. You can call for mortar support.

b) You lead a TB warband in AFG. Your warband has fixed a Canadian patrol 400 m ahead, behind a wall. You have 20 minutes left till enemy air can be expected to intervene. You do not have mortar support available.

c) You are Inf Plt leader in AFG. Your Plt is in combat and fixed behind a wall. You have 20-40 minutes left till air will intervene.

d) You are Inf Plt leader in a great war. You are in combat and fixed behind a wall. The Bn main fight is elsewhere and the Bde main fight isn't in your Bn area. You get no support, but you've got a couple SMK grenades and a large area with much concealment is just 100m to your south. You expect a red mortar attack ion less than two minutes.


Do you get where I see the difference?

Arty and mortars are not "add-ons". They're essential combined arms combat components. The can eradicate your small unit in minutes, something the TB didn't achieve EVER against ANY Western small unit in YEARS of warfare.

Facing such a threat and not being sure that enemy comm is interrupted, you have little other choice than to keep contacts brief and move (disappear) often - while you could sit safely behind the very same cover for hours if in combat against TB.

Such as the Canadian force fixed by the TB force is not authorized to employ CAS or indirect fires due to the Civilian (innocent) populace in and among the civilian (insurgent) populace he is fixed by. The location has a high number of IEDs limiting his freedom of maneuver, but they are known by his opponent so do not affect his maneuver; and because there are no front lines, he can hear over the ICOM radios being used by the insurgent that a complex attack is being pulled together that will likely have him taking fire from 270 degrees on his position with the next 15-20 minutes.

Aerial evacuation is possible, but not until sometime after sunset which is some 7 hours away. All ISR has been pulled to support higher priority operations elsewhere. Nearest QRF is 15 KM away, but will have to clear IEDs and deal with a continuous TIC to get to your location.

Meanwhile your commander is expecting you to "clear" the compounds to your front, while the compounds you "cleared" yesterday to your rear are now reoccupied by insurgents, as well as the innocent civilians who live there.

Oh yes, and your mission is not to defeat the insurgent, but to protect the populace.

It may not be graduate level war, but you better at least have your GED.

[Fuchs]

Well, we don't seem to argue about the degree of difficulty and whether the same behaviour would be suicidal in a great war anymore (my original points).

You seem to pile on points that need to be considered by a small unit leader instead, and that's really an endless game because - and I think you understand that - it would be no problem to me to add one or two forum pages of things that should be considered (but cannot all be considered) by a small unit leader in a great war.

There would be many things included that are not necessary - at times even contraproductive - in a small war environment. Like minimising the exposure to airborne sensors, radio silence, jammed radio links or being enticed to survive the war by simply becoming a POW.

[William F. Owen]

Has any Red Team ever dared to test this idea?

No but armies running around with STENs, MP-40's and PPSH have pretty much done a useful level of empirical testing. MP-7 is actually deployed in A'Stan, but I don't know in what form or scale.
The IDF of 1948 had predominantly STEN Guns and MG-34/BRENs and very few rifles. The Arabs in contrast had mostly rifles. Not proof in and of itself but food for thought!

....and as I said, I'd want a lot of testing before being more than provocative with such ideas

[Firn]

-----------------

Some general thoughts on automatic weapons and support weapons. The machine pistol has just as a rifle a specific set of advantages and disadvantages. One decisive factor in the far greater use and need for MPs in WWII might have been among other ones that it could greatly ease the suppression of the enemy and the employement of the crew-served weapons, tanks or hand-grenades. Soldiers mostly armed with bolt-rifles had a far harder time to suppress and silence under similar situations and had great disadvantag in many combat settings against troops with a high ratio of automatic weapons. Thus they sought to get their hands on automatic weapons. With this kind of "positive feedback" going on, the generally observed trend to increase their ratio seen in pretty much every war in the last 90 years is quite understandable. On the other hand specialists like sipers would try to shield themselve from enemy suppression by cunning, training and camouflage. (Sound suppressors on the "long range" rifles coupled with good training and tactics should lower the suppression of the sharpshooters and thus increase their effectiveness.)

------------

While it seems to me that the article by the MAJ outlined the current situation well, I think there could have been a greater focus on the problems of finding and Identifying the enemy at long ranges. The specific terrain and the part of the enemy tactics might favor the (greater) use the low-level use of spotting scopes, binoculars, high-powered scopes, and perhaps periscopes. Better finding and identifiying should lead to better fixing and easier destruction by the support weapons like mortars, grenades, artillery or CAS.


Firn

[Fuchs]

A bit small arms history background:

Submachineguns were an stopgap.
Semi-auto rifles and even mroe so automatic rifles weren't reliable until the 1930's (M1 Garand and Vollmer Maschinenkarabiner; the first assault rifle).
This meant that the best way to improve close combat firepower over carbines/rifles were shotguns, hand grenades, pistols and submachineguns.

Today we can easily produce automatic rifles (~M14), automatic carbines (~M4), subcarbines (rarely in military), assault rifles (~AKM) and semi-auto sniper rifles (~Dragunov).

Submachineguns are about as heavy and clumsy as assault rifles, yet vastly inferior in effective range and typically also so in regard to penetration. We don't need this stopgap anymore.

Machine pistols are even more inferior in accuracy and range, yet at least they're light and compact. Nevertheless, they're inferior to some PDWs that offer a much higher velocity bullet.


I'd treat the latter as PDWs, never as a front line infantry primary weapon. A Javelin operator, MG gunner or driver may be issued such a small weapon. They should also be issued a full weapon, such as an assault rifle (to be stored in a vehicle if not needed at the moment).

The firepower in forests and inside buildings is too weak with machine pistols and PDWs.



I'm generally OK with an assault rifle concept that's focused on 200 or 300m combat range with only tripod machine guns, AT weapons and scoped rifles shooting farther. The assault rifle / carbine should be a trust-inspiring and well-selected design, though. I consider the personal weapon to be quite important for the confidence of the individual soldier. That's why I would also consider issuing a light AT weapon and at least one hand and one smoke grenade to every soldier who doesn't use some heavy weapon.
I don't only think of infantry here!

[William F. Owen]

If someone asked me RIGHT NOW, I wouldn't touch PDWs because there simply isn't the need. They do however produce an interesting set of arguments - why I wrote the article.

I'm pretty much set in my views on platoon weapons right now, mainly because they keep getting validated, but any new information will always make me think again..... hopefully...

[carl]

The article calls as strongly for better training as it does for a new infantry rifle or calibre. Without the training no hits will be made at extended ranges no matter what kind of rifle. And improved training will improve the effectiveness of what we have now. Everybody wins, but as I have gathered from reading SWJ over the years, that might be harder to do than getting new equipment.

Also, could the XM-25, if successfully fielded, do a lot to fix the problem? Could the problem also be addressed by increasing the number of GPMGs carried (per Kaur) or 51mm type mortars or even using the M203 for indirect fire?

The above questions are actually questions, not opinions in disguise.

[Firn]

The above questions are actually questions, not opinions in disguise.

IMHO the biggest nut to crack for a dismounted patrol is to suppress the enemy mortars and their observers when they are used in competent fashion in difficult alpine terrain and if the enemy holds the high ground. A mortar hidden in a ravine or shielded by a crest is pretty much impossible to silence by patrols down in the valley or on the slopes - especially if they get also hit by suppressive AKM and RPG fire. Observers and some boys could shout corrections back to the mortar and avoid so radio chatter. The returning observation and fire effort will almost entirely be directed at the sources of direct fire! With good dispersion chances are high that the (distant) observer (higher up or on the flanks) can keep doing unhindered his job. This reverse slope harassing is easily set up in many regions of Afghanistan. I wonder how often the "reverse slope" is a hamlet.

Mortar bombs and other ammunition and weapons transported by small groups, boys with goats, etc over a long time could have been stashed in suitable places and collected at notice by the shadowing spies and observers. With enough bombs and time to fire them even lesser skilled mortar crews can be very dangerous. If done well, this tactic is, without a lot of resources, hard to tackle.

@Fuchs: I just used the machine pistols as a historic starting point for this very observed "co-evolution".


Firn