US Army Unveils 'Revolutionary' $35,000 Rifle

rbrander writes "Don't call it a 'rifle,' call it the 'XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System' and get your $35,000 worth. Much more than a projector of high-speed lead, this device hurls small grenades that automatically detonate in mid-flight with 1-meter accuracy over nearly 800m. The vital field feature is the ability to explode 1m behind the wall you just lazed — the one with the enemy hiding behind it."

Comments

Re:Hope It Helps End the Fighting

[Allicorn]

Rounds are going to be relatively expensive yes, but it's not as if you fire the thing full auto.

How it changes the game in that enemies behind hard cover - who might otherwise engage you in a protracted firefight - will lose the benefit of that cover.

It's in service now with the 101st airborne apparently, so I'm sure we'll shortly find out whether it's the exceptionally useful tool it appears to promise to be.

Re:Hope It Helps End the Fighting

[eldavojohn]

Basically, look at the lowest price you can find on a reputable AR-15, then take 10-20% off of that to estimate what the government is paying.

Sounds like you two know a hell of a lot more about pricing on assault rifles than I ever will.

Basically, I treated it like everything else the government buys for me with my money: I googled it, found the highest price and then added about 100-200% for an estimate. Guess it doesn't transfer well to all military expenditures.

more useful against us...

[retchdog]

Wouldn't this weapon be more useful against an occupying force, than for them? That is, wouldn't urban "insurgents" have more and faster access to mostly-enclosed structures, while the occupiers would tend more to ad-hoc cover?

I suspect that we may regret introducing this, once it's copied and sold cheap by certain other nations which will go unnamed... Maybe it'll give us the advantage in a burned-out dust bowl like Afghanistan, but it would hurt us somewhere like Iraq.

Please correct me, I'm just a cynical jerk, not a tactician.

hard to see how this works

[ebonum]

The projectile is traveling say 1000 feet per second ( let's say that the target is 500m away starting behind a long stone wall ), then the projectile explodes. To kill someone it just passed, it will have to fire lots of large fragments backward and down ( or backward and sideways - if person is standing around the corner of a building ) at at least 1000-2000 feet / second to be lethal.

The physics on this is tricky. To do this, you need to meet the "for every action, an opposite and equal reaction" law. This means something of equal mass will fly forward at ~ 3,000 ft/sec ( this is wasted material not being aimed at anything except unsuspecting persons in the distance ) . In the end, you are talking about a round with what? maybe 20 fragments ( to increase the odds of hitting something ) and each fragment will have to 1) fly fast enough to penetrate and ideally cause hydrostatic shock and 2) be heavy enough to do damage. If the rounds are too big and heavy, a single gunner will have trouble firing the weapon ( bruising on the shoulder ) and won't be able to carry many rounds because of the weight.

For close range targets - 100m, the round is traveling at perhaps 2000 feet per second. Even if this thing blows up over someone's head, it seem most of the blast is going to continue forward, not towards the person behind the wall. Perhaps they hope the concussion wave will be strong enough to be lethal. A very high percentage of the metal fragments should blow forward due to the already high velocity of the round.

Keep in mind, this round is spinning, so the blast will go in all directions. It is not possible to tell the bullet to fire downwards when over the target.

note: a 22 cal bullet fires at bout 800-1200 feet per second. An M15, the standard round for the USMC, fires at about 2,700 to 3,500 feet per second and can have a range out to about 800 meters.

Re:Hope It Helps End the Fighting

[bumptehjambox]

Basically, I treated it like everything else the government buys for me with my money: I googled it, found the highest price and then added about 100-200% for an estimate. Guess it doesn't transfer well to all military expenditures.

Your methods are quite sound, I work for a major company mostly (almost completely) fueled by the defense industry and I can say that I have no reason to believe our government gets any type of discount whatsoever, foreign governments do, but it's widely known that Uncle Sam doesn't mind paying MSRP.

Basically, look at the lowest price you can find on a reputable AR-15, then take 10-20% off of that to estimate what the government is paying.

Why? I'm not trying to be a smartass but why would the government get 10-20% off? I've never seen an instance where a government organisation got a "bulk discount"

Also there is simply a weight consideration

[Sycraft-fu]

If you study guns, you'll notice that the most reliable ones fire larger, heavier, rounds and themselves are larger and heavier. Good reasons for this:

1) The tolerances don't have to be as tight. When things are large, there's more room for play. A bit of dirt doesn't matter nearly so much.

2) More recoil force and/or gas. When there's more pushing back against the action, it cycles better. Also you can load up heavier springs, to push it back harder, again making it more reliable.

That's what the M2 is still one of the most reliable guns out there. Shoots a big heavy round and is built with some room for error in it.

Wonderful, but you have to consider carried weight. Troops have to slug a lot around, gun and ammo weight matters. While it might sound nice to say "Just give them bigger guns with bigger ammo!" that isn't necessarily so practical.

Accuracy also comes in to play. Part of the AK's reliability comes form the action. If you've ever watched it in slow motion it positively slams shut, even flexing and vibrating a little. Well enough but at what cost? The cost is accuracy. It is not a good gun at range. "Spray and pray," are very much the operative words. The M4/M16, however, are much better. They aren't quite rifle accurate, but they aren't bad.

It is a tradeoff, and it is easy to pull the "grass is greener" type thing, look at the other gun and say "Well clearly that is better!" However if you used that, well then you might have a different opinion.

Re:Also there is simply a weight consideration

[shutdown -p now]

The tolerances don't have to be as tight. When things are large, there's more room for play. A bit of dirt doesn't matter nearly so much.

Larger caliber helps with that, but it's not a requirement. The caliber of AK-74 is smaller than that of M16, but the latter has looser tolerances, and is generally more reliable as a result.

Part of the AK's reliability comes form the action. If you've ever watched it in slow motion it positively slams shut, even flexing and vibrating a little. Well enough but at what cost? The cost is accuracy. It is not a good gun at range. "Spray and pray," are very much the operative words.

It's accurate enough at most realistic ranges of engagement, especially AK-74: you can reliably hit man-sized targets at 200-300m. E.g. Russian soldiers are most certainly not told to "spray and pray" at a distance, but rather drilled largely the same way as you see US troops with M16 - well-aimed single shots.

This isn't to say that accuracy can't be better, or that this isn't useful. Most NATO weapons are more accurate than AKs. Thing is, most of them are also more reliable than M16, if not to AK standard - and that is largely due to looser tolerances (again, not as much as AK, but still), and overall different design (gas piston vs direct impingement).

Re:Also there is simply a weight consideration

[GooberToo]

That is true, but it is unclear how useful it is to give a weapon with such range to every single infantryman.

Its actually not questionable at all. Ask any infantryman who served before the M16 was issued. The M1 was accurate out to 1000 yards and was commonly used at those extended ranges in every war before Vietnam.

You also need some decent optics to shoot at such distances accurately, while hitting a man at 200-300m is perfectly possible with iron sights.

Actually, you don't. Its common for rifles to be issued with ladder sights which allow you to select your target's distance and it compensates in barrel rise. They also used a larger, more powerful bullet (.30-06/7.62), which made those distances even more practical than attempting to do so with a 5.56.

You need to keep in mind, most battle tactics include covering fire while you close the gap to more accurate ranges. If I can accurate engage you at 600-700 meters while you need to close to 300-400 meters to obtain the same accuracy, I have a huge advantage for 200-300 meters. That means I stand a good chance of completely stopping your force while receiving minimal causalities on my side.

In Russian army, and those modeled after it, the role of reaching out to those distances is delegated to what's called "designated marksmen" in US armed forces, armed with SVD.

Not really - but close. Their role is to provide suppression fire, allowing the rest of the squad to close the gap. Many mistakenly believe their role is that of a sniper. Its not. They are not trained as a sniper and their weapon comes nowhere near NATO sniper rifle specs (though with the right ammo you can certainly get 1 MOA accuracy with most rifles - SVDs anyways, out to around 600 meters). So which is more likely to move? A squad with an SVD/PSL in support or an entire squad with almost the same accuracy and a squad level weapon which typically meets or beats the SVD/PSL. Exactly.

That exact phrase and its variants often come up when discussing the reliability of AR platform. It's perfectly true, but also very misleading. As one of American troops who saw action in recent conflicts has put it, "It shoots very well when clean; but sometimes, it also needs to shoot when dirty, too". It's a good thing when your troops have enough time and no other worries to spend enough time on weapon maintenance, but war is war, and it's not always feasible. A front-line service rifle should be able to cope with that.

I was very careful to include that phraseology. ;) But, tactics have also been adapted to avoid extended, unsupported battles. I'm not saying the weapon never jams. I know it does. But, largely the worst case scenarios are avoided by a combination of mixed tactics; primarily including rapid deployment and extraction.

Re:Half a billion dollars

[phantomfive]

$400 million is nothing. If it keeps US soldiers alive and healthy, it might even save costs in medical care over a lifetime. One of the biggest military expenses is people, active and retired.

They likely won't use it.

[orphiuchus]

I know some of the guys who tested and rejected the SCAR, they said it was just too easy to break. I expect this to get to units who can afford it and be rejected as unreliable, or to be treated more like a mortar or heavy MG. I would be shocked to see this rifle get much use.

Where is my powered armor?

[Requiem18th]

Want to carry lots of heavy rounds and have high mobility in an urban setting? It's almost 2011, where is my fucking POWERED ARMOR!?

Ok maybe they aren't as practical in the so called "real world" but the terrorists will be so shit scarred they'll give up immediately!

We have had...

[JockTroll]

... Rifle grenades for a loooooong time and cover is still as important as ever. The important new features for the XM-25 are range (800m is double the range of a typical 40mm grenade launcher) and its airburst capability, sustained fire and relative ease of use. Using smaller grenades also means reduced damage, a desirable feature in CQB. However, there are and there will be countermeasures deployed: the device needs its laser rangefinder, so expect the use of particulate smoke to make ranging difficult. Like in all warfare conditions, the best defence is offence so if I expect my forces to go against XM-25 armed troops I'll have snipers deployed to take out soldiers carrying it - hopefully eliminating the weapon as well. It's a nice advantage to have but only the Nazi elite believed in miracle weapons to win the war, and watch where it has led them. Aggressive tactics and adaptability trump any technological wonder. The Russian campaign in WW2 should have taught us that, but I guess the iWar generation has taken over and will need some blood by the megagallon to understand it. I'd like to have one of those in my arsenal, but to believe one weapon will change the face of warfare is naive. Not even nukes did that.