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No More Lee-Enfield: Canada's Rangers To Get a Tech Upgrade
ControlsGeek writes The Lee-Enfield .303 rifle is being phased out for use by the Canadian Rangers, a Northern aboriginal branch of the Armed Forces. The rifle has been in service with the Canadian military for 100 years and is still being used by the Rangers for its unfailing reliability in Arctic conditions. If only the hardware that we use in computers could have such a track record. The wheels turn slowly, though, and it's not clear what kind of gun will replace the Enfields.
Wrong, stock will melt if left under vehicle curved window in summer. I speak from experience.
More accurate, don't jam as much in cold weather. If a Lee fails to fire, you can pull the pin back again without moving the bolt. If a bear is coming at me and the rifle fails to fire, do I want to pull a pin back and then it'll fire, or have to go through the drill of making the firearm safe, emptying the round from the chamber, then loading the next round then pray it fires that time around.
I've owned quite a few Rifles in my time. Wood stocks are superior to composite in every category but 1. Composite is lighter.
1. bolt action because you don't need 30 rounds rapid to drop a polar bear.
2. bolt action because automatics are high maintenance and require training for effective maintenance. A bolt action is just a case of unlock, remove bolt, clean bolt, shove a pipecleaner through the barrel and pull it through the breech. Done.
3. bolt action because they are as quick to clear a jam as it is to clean. Shed bolt, ramrod down the muzzle, bolt back in, cock it.
4. bolt action because jamming is an extremely rare occurrence.
5. bolt action because anything with any more complicated of an action is just n+1 more components that are liable to fail at exactly the wrong moment.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Yeah that seems...odd.
Nothing `odd' about it. Canadian Rangers aren't involved in an arms race. Bears and whatnot haven't evolved much since 1914, and they haven't been issued bear shaped body armor or fully automatic laser claws.
Thus, a reliable bolt action rifle remains sufficient. Traipsing around Arctic tundra with a heavy, high maintenance semi auto just to fend off the wildlife would be silly.
Bolt action rifles are still standard issue in the US military, ubiquitous in LE arsenals and remain wildly popular with civilians for whom new bolt action designs continue to appear. Once you exceed 5.56 NATO and 7.62×39mm calibers bolt action is by far the most common rifle action type for non-military applications.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The conditions and primary mission of the Canadian Rangers also drives the choice of bolt action vs a semi-automatic. Compared to more modern firearms, the Lee-Enfield is built with fairly loose tolerances, so the barrel and action can expand and contract in response to the heat of firing and the extreme cold often found in the Arctic without failing. (when shooting an attacking polar bear at less than 200m, making sure the weapon works is far more important than obtaining sub-MOA accuracy.) The weapon also has to be easily field-stripped even when wearing gloves. Being a Commonwealth country, we still have lots and lots of WW1 issue rifles, making their use very cost effective. The only reason the Canadian Forces wants to replace it is because nobody has made parts for them in decades, so things like firing pins and trigger springs are becoming scarce.
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Or, shit, how about the AI Arctic Warfare rifles serviced by the Swedish and Norwegian militaries, amongst others, specifically designed for use in the extreme cold... and also using fiberglass/kevlar composite stocks.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
AK-47, that swedish FNC variant, RK-62
Replace .303 British with an intermediate cartridge? For bear and moose?
Dude. Shut up. Stop typing stuff. Just stop.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
If you had read the article, you would have noticed that “the supply chain no longer has the parts to sustain this weapon long term.” This is because the weapon is old and - from a military point of view - obsolete, so spare parts are no longer manufactured. It'll probably be quite a bit cheaper to re-equip with a newer rifle than to re-establish a Lee-Enfield production line - especially considering they are likely to pick an off-the-shelf rifle to equip a rather small force.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Wood stocks are superior to composite in every category but 1. Composite is lighter.
Wood can warp.
And everyone who has played Counter-Strike knows that the AWP (http://counterstrike.wikia.com/wiki/AWP) is a great Arctic weapon.
And it doesn't have a wooden stock: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Bears and whatnot haven't evolved much since 1914
Actually there is a new species appearing due to global warming, the Pizzly bear, a cross between a Polar Bear and Grizzly Bear, so even bigger and thinks of people as food. It's new enough that the Inuit don't have a name for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Moose have terrible eye sight, if you're up wind of them they get curious as to what you are and can run you down unintentionally. I learned this the hard way in Gross Mourne when one chased me down a trail - would have run me over had it not been for the park ranger who scared it away (took 2 tries, after the first try it came back and started running at us again). It was not-rutting season and it was a female.
You understand that there's a difference between the RCMP and the Canadian Forces, right?
The Canadian Rangers' mandate is to provide a military presence and sovereignty patrols in sparsely settled and extremely remote (Northern) regions of the country. The force is made up of reservists, and they're issued a unique uniform -- CADPAT pants, bright red Ranger sweatshirt and baseball cap. The whole idea is to take a group of Northerners and leverage their wilderness and arctic skills. It's a much smarter and more cost-effective approach than attempting to train and equip a group of 18 year-old city kids for the tundra.
No, that's wrong on many accounts. The german reports of withering Lee-Enfield fire are from the first world war. And since the German army had extensive experience from the Lee-Enfield from the first world war, its capabilities weren't a surprise the second time around. Not by a long shot.
But that didn't matter since rifles were passe. The German infantry squad was armed with the Mauser (shortened version of the full length rifle of WWI) throughout WWII. But that didn't matter as the rifle squad had the newly invented general purpose machine gun to form around. It was even considered the sole reason for the squad's existence. (See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...). Note that only NCOs etc. were supplied with any kind of automatic weapons, in most cases the "Schmeisser" submachine gun. The rest of the squad was basically there to carry ammunition for the machine gun and to provide flank cover for the crew. And the German rifle squad could definately put more rounds on target than a British rifle squad of the time, the "mad minute" not withstanding.
The sturmgewehr 44 didn't come out until (you guessed it), 1944, and was never a standard rifle squad rifle. It's cartridge was emphatically not developed with any "only need to wound" factor taken into account. Instead it was recognised that most targets were human, and only 150m away or so (max 300). So much could be saved by developing a cartridge for that situation instead of a cartridge that could topple a horse at shorter ranges and a man at 1000m (the original design specifications actually hinged on the effectiveness against horses, as stopping a cavalry charge was still very much the order of the day). So instead the "kurz" round was developed to give rifle like performance out to a couple of hundred meters, but allowing the carrying of more ammunition both on the person and in the gun, and much lower recoil, which becomes important in a fully automatic weapon.
The "wound not kill" design parameters don't come into effect until 5.56mm NATO and the corresponding USSR rounds were introduced in the late sixties/seventies. (As can be observed by their abysmal performance in a full metal jacket to actually stop a man. They still kill without much problem.) Horses were out of the picture when 5.56mm NATO was developed, so that together with "wounding factor" (wound not kill wasn't really a factor when designing rifle ammunitio) is why they got away with such a weak cartridge. Which was actually weaker from the beginning but the Army kept insisting on being able to penetrate a steel helmet at 300m, so the case had to be lengthened and lengthened to fit enough propellant. That gave the unfortunate case dimensions that are with us still to this day.
Stefan Axelsson