thedrifter
11-23-04, 05:57 AM
11-22-2004
Guest Column: Today’s Troops Need a Better Bullet
By Philip Quigley
In Vietnam, troops had to deal with a competent and highly adaptive enemy, disease, poor morale, worse weather, an overconfident command, and an unsupportive public and media. Another problem they had was their unproven rifle, the M-16A1, and its new experimental round, the .223 Remington, or as we know it today, the 5.56mm NATO.
Today’s soldiers and Marines are issued a similar rifle, the M-16A2, which still uses the 5.56mm. This round is light, you can carry many magazines or belts, but it has the same drawback it did forty years ago: It is ineffective.
In Iraq, similar to Vietnam, we are currently engaged in asymmetrical warfare with a highly adaptive, morally entrenched enemy. He mainly uses guerilla warfare and hit-and-run tactics, avoiding force-on-force confrontations.
To the common infantryman, this is what the Vietnamese used to call a “belt-buckle fight” – up close and personal – this time in an urban, usually densely populated environment. The enemy does this with the sole purpose of confusing us in the fog of war, amidst homes, markets and buildings. He hopes for us to create civilian casualties, making the Iraqi public increasingly hostile to American troops and the new Iraqi government.
Given the enemy’s resolve, we must give our soldiers and Marines the best weapon system and round available today. We must find a replacement for the 5.56mm NATO round.
As a Marine Lance Corporal, I served with 1st Platoon, Alpha Co., 1st LAR Battalion (a LAV-25 unit) during the invasion of Iraq and subsequent siege of Baghdad in April 2003. In one particularly fierce firefight at a place we Marines called the “O.K. Corral,” we found out just how ineffective the 5.56mm NATO round actually was.
My platoon leader, hoping for a fight with the Iraqi enemy, had volunteered my platoon to conduct a roadblock on the main thoroughfare of a known hostile town in the southern region of Baghdad. About three hours in, he got his wish. We called the fight, the “O.K. Corral”, not in honor of Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday, but because that’s how far the enemy soldiers were from us. We were close enough to hear them talk with each other and to hear the metallic clank as they racked their AK-47 rifle bolts.
This is quite an unsettling thing, especially when LAR Marine scout teams operate in 3-4 man groups, and we were spread up and down this road.
I was on the third vehicle in my platoon, Red 3. To our left was a power station and open desert with little vegetation. To our right was the town. My vehicle was the closest to the town. All the scouts had a bad feeling about the assignment, since 2nd Platoon had been ambushed in the area the night before. The platoon scouts were dismounted outside the vehicle, and the crewmen were asleep in the vehicle, though they should have been on turret watch.
The fight started a little after my vehicle’s SAW gunner and I went on watch and noticed men down an alley passing out long, wrapped objects from a dumpster. The vehicle gunner, asleep at the time, didn’t notice the movement on the rooftops nearest us either.
Still concerned with the alleyway, I saw an IR flash signaling to a high-rise building to our rear. At that moment enemy personnel launched four infrared flares over each one of the vehicles in my platoon. The enemy was counting us. This immediately drowned out my PVS-7 night-vision goggles. I knew something was fishy, as did my SAW gunner. He saw the reddish dots coming down over us from the sky. We woke everyone. Then the enemy launched regular illumination over each of our vehicles and the fight was on.
My platoon members and I were pinned down from innumerable snipers in the town and enemies bounding on our position from the desert. We were being shot at with AK-47 and RPK light machine gun fire. It was scary how well the enemy knew our positions, undoubtedly being guided by the snipers in the high-rise building and the light from the illumination being launched from the mortars in the building.
My scout team took cover by a small sand berm facing the open desert area. Rounds were whizzing by our heads. I had an M-16A2 with PAC-4 thermal laser device. With my PVS-7 goggles, I saw nice outlines of targets. I put the laser center mass and pulled the trigger, averaging 2-5 shots on each target and emptying two 28-round magazines during the expanse of the fight (I never loaded a magazine with a full thirty to save the spring).
The SAW gunner sent out all of his love for our attackers in the form of a belt of 5.56mm ball and tracer. We didn’t count how many we got. We had no idea because after being hit, it seemed like they just got back up. They wouldn’t stay down.
After a while, the attack seemed to hit a lull, and then picked up again. The enemy was getting closer and the shots from the town were getting closer too. My vehicle commander, who didn’t do a thing during the fight, popped his head out of the VC hatch and yelled for us to get in. Thinking we were about to be overrun, I stood up first and laid down suppressive fire on burst mode, emptying another magazine quickly while the SAW gunner emptied half a belt in what seemed like a solid burst of fire. He then got up and pushed me into the scout compartment. As we pulled out, all we heard was the whine of the engine, squawk and static from the radio, and rounds ricocheting off and around the vehicle.
The engagement, though not a huge success on our end, was without further incident on our way back to Fort Apache, an abandoned Iraqi test site we converted into our Company base camp. Fortunately, by the grace of God, no one was injured or killed. Red Platoon made it out intact.
We had no firm estimates of how many enemies we killed. The best guess was 20-30, but there was no way to tell for sure. Patrols the next morning through the area found no bodies, weapons, spent brass or even blood. The only signs that an engagement in the area had even occurred were the bullet holes in the walls, the scorch marks left from exploded 40mm grenades, and a burnt-out marketplace. Battalion intelligence later confirmed to us that the soldiers that initiated contact with us were Syrian and had modern Russian equipment, including night vision with infrared capabilities.
But that encounter also confirmed in my mind how ineffective the 5.56mm NATO round actually was. All of my fellow scouts came to the same conclusion – the 5.56mm NATO just didn’t do its job.
Soldiers and Marines today need a round that will take the fight out of any opponent with no more than two center-mass hits. The Russians have had since the 1960s a similar round to the 5.56mm NATO, the 5.45x39R. Like the 5.56, the round is small-caliber, high velocity, but unlike the 5.56, upon impact with its target it creates a massive wound channel because of a hollow space in the nose of the round, which becomes unstable. The Russians widely touted their success with the round with stories from their Spetnaz teams in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It has been in existence for nearly 40 years and yet the Defense Department has made no attempt to duplicate this round for our 5.56mm weapons.
We need to get working on giving our soldiers and Marines the best round possible to do the job, even if we have to copy Russian technology to do so. It has worked for them, why not us?
That would be one concrete way that Congress and the administration could support our troops in harm’s way today.
Guest contributor Philip A. Quigley Jr. served as an enlisted Marine combat scout during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and is pursuing a post-military goal of writing about contemporary defense issues. He can be reached at HawkmanPQ@aol.com. *Send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=DefenseWatch.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=696&rnd=116.92065561315002
Ellie
Guest Column: Today’s Troops Need a Better Bullet
By Philip Quigley
In Vietnam, troops had to deal with a competent and highly adaptive enemy, disease, poor morale, worse weather, an overconfident command, and an unsupportive public and media. Another problem they had was their unproven rifle, the M-16A1, and its new experimental round, the .223 Remington, or as we know it today, the 5.56mm NATO.
Today’s soldiers and Marines are issued a similar rifle, the M-16A2, which still uses the 5.56mm. This round is light, you can carry many magazines or belts, but it has the same drawback it did forty years ago: It is ineffective.
In Iraq, similar to Vietnam, we are currently engaged in asymmetrical warfare with a highly adaptive, morally entrenched enemy. He mainly uses guerilla warfare and hit-and-run tactics, avoiding force-on-force confrontations.
To the common infantryman, this is what the Vietnamese used to call a “belt-buckle fight” – up close and personal – this time in an urban, usually densely populated environment. The enemy does this with the sole purpose of confusing us in the fog of war, amidst homes, markets and buildings. He hopes for us to create civilian casualties, making the Iraqi public increasingly hostile to American troops and the new Iraqi government.
Given the enemy’s resolve, we must give our soldiers and Marines the best weapon system and round available today. We must find a replacement for the 5.56mm NATO round.
As a Marine Lance Corporal, I served with 1st Platoon, Alpha Co., 1st LAR Battalion (a LAV-25 unit) during the invasion of Iraq and subsequent siege of Baghdad in April 2003. In one particularly fierce firefight at a place we Marines called the “O.K. Corral,” we found out just how ineffective the 5.56mm NATO round actually was.
My platoon leader, hoping for a fight with the Iraqi enemy, had volunteered my platoon to conduct a roadblock on the main thoroughfare of a known hostile town in the southern region of Baghdad. About three hours in, he got his wish. We called the fight, the “O.K. Corral”, not in honor of Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday, but because that’s how far the enemy soldiers were from us. We were close enough to hear them talk with each other and to hear the metallic clank as they racked their AK-47 rifle bolts.
This is quite an unsettling thing, especially when LAR Marine scout teams operate in 3-4 man groups, and we were spread up and down this road.
I was on the third vehicle in my platoon, Red 3. To our left was a power station and open desert with little vegetation. To our right was the town. My vehicle was the closest to the town. All the scouts had a bad feeling about the assignment, since 2nd Platoon had been ambushed in the area the night before. The platoon scouts were dismounted outside the vehicle, and the crewmen were asleep in the vehicle, though they should have been on turret watch.
The fight started a little after my vehicle’s SAW gunner and I went on watch and noticed men down an alley passing out long, wrapped objects from a dumpster. The vehicle gunner, asleep at the time, didn’t notice the movement on the rooftops nearest us either.
Still concerned with the alleyway, I saw an IR flash signaling to a high-rise building to our rear. At that moment enemy personnel launched four infrared flares over each one of the vehicles in my platoon. The enemy was counting us. This immediately drowned out my PVS-7 night-vision goggles. I knew something was fishy, as did my SAW gunner. He saw the reddish dots coming down over us from the sky. We woke everyone. Then the enemy launched regular illumination over each of our vehicles and the fight was on.
My platoon members and I were pinned down from innumerable snipers in the town and enemies bounding on our position from the desert. We were being shot at with AK-47 and RPK light machine gun fire. It was scary how well the enemy knew our positions, undoubtedly being guided by the snipers in the high-rise building and the light from the illumination being launched from the mortars in the building.
My scout team took cover by a small sand berm facing the open desert area. Rounds were whizzing by our heads. I had an M-16A2 with PAC-4 thermal laser device. With my PVS-7 goggles, I saw nice outlines of targets. I put the laser center mass and pulled the trigger, averaging 2-5 shots on each target and emptying two 28-round magazines during the expanse of the fight (I never loaded a magazine with a full thirty to save the spring).
The SAW gunner sent out all of his love for our attackers in the form of a belt of 5.56mm ball and tracer. We didn’t count how many we got. We had no idea because after being hit, it seemed like they just got back up. They wouldn’t stay down.
After a while, the attack seemed to hit a lull, and then picked up again. The enemy was getting closer and the shots from the town were getting closer too. My vehicle commander, who didn’t do a thing during the fight, popped his head out of the VC hatch and yelled for us to get in. Thinking we were about to be overrun, I stood up first and laid down suppressive fire on burst mode, emptying another magazine quickly while the SAW gunner emptied half a belt in what seemed like a solid burst of fire. He then got up and pushed me into the scout compartment. As we pulled out, all we heard was the whine of the engine, squawk and static from the radio, and rounds ricocheting off and around the vehicle.
The engagement, though not a huge success on our end, was without further incident on our way back to Fort Apache, an abandoned Iraqi test site we converted into our Company base camp. Fortunately, by the grace of God, no one was injured or killed. Red Platoon made it out intact.
We had no firm estimates of how many enemies we killed. The best guess was 20-30, but there was no way to tell for sure. Patrols the next morning through the area found no bodies, weapons, spent brass or even blood. The only signs that an engagement in the area had even occurred were the bullet holes in the walls, the scorch marks left from exploded 40mm grenades, and a burnt-out marketplace. Battalion intelligence later confirmed to us that the soldiers that initiated contact with us were Syrian and had modern Russian equipment, including night vision with infrared capabilities.
But that encounter also confirmed in my mind how ineffective the 5.56mm NATO round actually was. All of my fellow scouts came to the same conclusion – the 5.56mm NATO just didn’t do its job.
Soldiers and Marines today need a round that will take the fight out of any opponent with no more than two center-mass hits. The Russians have had since the 1960s a similar round to the 5.56mm NATO, the 5.45x39R. Like the 5.56, the round is small-caliber, high velocity, but unlike the 5.56, upon impact with its target it creates a massive wound channel because of a hollow space in the nose of the round, which becomes unstable. The Russians widely touted their success with the round with stories from their Spetnaz teams in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It has been in existence for nearly 40 years and yet the Defense Department has made no attempt to duplicate this round for our 5.56mm weapons.
We need to get working on giving our soldiers and Marines the best round possible to do the job, even if we have to copy Russian technology to do so. It has worked for them, why not us?
That would be one concrete way that Congress and the administration could support our troops in harm’s way today.
Guest contributor Philip A. Quigley Jr. served as an enlisted Marine combat scout during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and is pursuing a post-military goal of writing about contemporary defense issues. He can be reached at HawkmanPQ@aol.com. *Send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=DefenseWatch.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=696&rnd=116.92065561315002
Ellie