Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Ammo Follies
The creaks in the ol' Military Industrial Complex are starting to turn into cracks.
You can't blame it on having to arm support troops. Arming support troops is not a surprise. Every M16 shooter is supposed to go into battle with his uniform basic load of ammunition. For M16 gunners, that's--well, nevermind how much it is, exactly. But every M16 gunner is supposed to have it whether he's an infantry team leader or a desk clerk in Baghdad.
By extention, every unit is supposed to go into battle with a specific uniform basic load (UBL) of ammunition, which is set in doctrine, and it's pretty hard to get exceptions to that UBL.
We got our hands on some great HK MP-5 submachine guns that shot 9mm ammo. But the Army told us to get rid of the MP-5s and go back to arming our pistol shooters with 9-mils, rather than come up with the extra 9mm ammunition they'd use up.
(More on the ammunition bureaucracy from me here.)
It's not a matter of having to arm combat support troops, then--they are supposed to be armed anyway. To the full UBL.
It's a matter of neglecting our military-industrial complex for too long. Remember, we fought a much higher intensity war on two fronts for four years, in WWII. And then fought Korea a few years after that. And then fought in VietNam for nearly a decade--all of these campaigns were much higher in intensity and ammo consumption rates than the low to mid-intensity counterinsurgency now happening in Iraq.
We had 500,000 troops in Viet Nam at our peak, and still maintained a large presence in Europe and Korea.
Our army is smaller than it was a decade ago by entire divisions.
And we still can't keep our troops in bullets?
Where's George Marshall when you need him.
Splash, out
Jason
P.S. The best solution to ammo shortages is better marksmanship.
Which costs ammo. Training ammo. Which in the Army, is woefully inadequate. The USMC puts the Army to shame when it comes to marksmanship training, and pride in marksmanship.
But it's an investment which pays handsome dividends.
P.P.S., I was the investigating officer for one instance where a soldier accidentally shot himself in his ankle with an M203 grenade launcher. Fortunately, the round did not go off.
It was not his M203. He was a SAW gunner. They needed his SAW for a mission and he swapped his SAW. He had never qualified on the M203. He didn't know how it worked. He didn't realize it was loaded, and didn't know how to clear the weapon. Yeah, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to clear the weapon. But he also didn't realize that you can actually see a chambered M203 grenade by looking behind the catch mechanism.
As with almost all accidents, there were a variety of contributing factors that all had to happen together. But one of the problems was that units do not get enough training ammunition to cross train soldiers on different weapons. So a young soldier--in this case a 20 year-old pfc--can serve on a fire team with an M203, three M16s, and an M249 SAW, and in Iraq, a .50 cal machine gun or Mk 19 automatic grenade launcher in his squad, and never have qualified on anything other than the M16.
At the company level, units can't crosstrain, and still qualify their soldiers to standard. Even if they had the range time, they often can't get the ammo allocated.
We've got to do better.
You can't blame it on having to arm support troops. Arming support troops is not a surprise. Every M16 shooter is supposed to go into battle with his uniform basic load of ammunition. For M16 gunners, that's--well, nevermind how much it is, exactly. But every M16 gunner is supposed to have it whether he's an infantry team leader or a desk clerk in Baghdad.
By extention, every unit is supposed to go into battle with a specific uniform basic load (UBL) of ammunition, which is set in doctrine, and it's pretty hard to get exceptions to that UBL.
We got our hands on some great HK MP-5 submachine guns that shot 9mm ammo. But the Army told us to get rid of the MP-5s and go back to arming our pistol shooters with 9-mils, rather than come up with the extra 9mm ammunition they'd use up.
(More on the ammunition bureaucracy from me here.)
It's not a matter of having to arm combat support troops, then--they are supposed to be armed anyway. To the full UBL.
It's a matter of neglecting our military-industrial complex for too long. Remember, we fought a much higher intensity war on two fronts for four years, in WWII. And then fought Korea a few years after that. And then fought in VietNam for nearly a decade--all of these campaigns were much higher in intensity and ammo consumption rates than the low to mid-intensity counterinsurgency now happening in Iraq.
We had 500,000 troops in Viet Nam at our peak, and still maintained a large presence in Europe and Korea.
Our army is smaller than it was a decade ago by entire divisions.
And we still can't keep our troops in bullets?
Where's George Marshall when you need him.
Splash, out
Jason
P.S. The best solution to ammo shortages is better marksmanship.
Which costs ammo. Training ammo. Which in the Army, is woefully inadequate. The USMC puts the Army to shame when it comes to marksmanship training, and pride in marksmanship.
But it's an investment which pays handsome dividends.
P.P.S., I was the investigating officer for one instance where a soldier accidentally shot himself in his ankle with an M203 grenade launcher. Fortunately, the round did not go off.
It was not his M203. He was a SAW gunner. They needed his SAW for a mission and he swapped his SAW. He had never qualified on the M203. He didn't know how it worked. He didn't realize it was loaded, and didn't know how to clear the weapon. Yeah, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to clear the weapon. But he also didn't realize that you can actually see a chambered M203 grenade by looking behind the catch mechanism.
As with almost all accidents, there were a variety of contributing factors that all had to happen together. But one of the problems was that units do not get enough training ammunition to cross train soldiers on different weapons. So a young soldier--in this case a 20 year-old pfc--can serve on a fire team with an M203, three M16s, and an M249 SAW, and in Iraq, a .50 cal machine gun or Mk 19 automatic grenade launcher in his squad, and never have qualified on anything other than the M16.
At the company level, units can't crosstrain, and still qualify their soldiers to standard. Even if they had the range time, they often can't get the ammo allocated.
We've got to do better.
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