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Mechanized Infantry Squads and Platoons

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Let’s have a little fun with some military theory. How do we define a squad?

A squad can be thought of in a few ways. We tend to think of a squad as a basic combat unit, commanded by a single man. Working out span of command issues is a royal pain. Since we’re trying to keep this firmly academic, and since we don’t have a handy lab to test things, we’ll use a simple litmus test: the sports field. For example, American football tends to put eleven men on the field at a time per side. We’ll neatly sidestep any attempt to be dragged into discussions of a heap problem here, and simply check for a sport example as we work on numbers.

Our sports litmus test provides some nice options for us. Since this a mechanized squad, it’s important to think about the parent vehicle as well. Most IFVs hold six or seven men. We’ll take the lower figure, being cynical sorts. It’s also not especially clear what the CV9035’s capacity is; this tends to vary from six to eight based on configuration. Regardless, our first thought might be to take the squad as the sum of the dismounts of the vehicle and the crew needed by the vehicle, which gives us a size of nine or ten. This passes our sports litmus test. However, it’s been tried and rejected by several real-world armies. The issue seems to be that the dismount element is too small. We cannot guarantee that we’ll always have the vehicle to work with the dismount team, and given the realities of the battlefield (casualties, people on leave, casualties, people off on training assignments, casualties), the dismount team is likely to be quite a bit smaller in practice. We’d have to combine dismount teams across vehicles anyway, so we may as well formalize the organization and give the men practice at working together and rapidly forming up from the dismount.

With that settled, we come back to the question of how big the squad should be. Let’s look at some historical examples, bearing in mind we’ll have to fit them into to vehicles. The United States Marine Corps squad is probably the most successful, remaining a standard 13 men for over 70 years. This squad is comprised of three fireteams of four men plus one squad leader. This is also the largest squad that I’ve found good historical record of, so we’ll take it as a rough maximum. Give or take one or two is probably ok, since we’re trying to avoid stupid pedantry about heaps, but much bigger is probably a bad idea if we’re still going with the squad paradigm of a single commander. The US Army has had a couple squads since the Second World War. Until the late seventies, the US Army squad was eleven men: one squad leader plus two fireteams of five men each. Afterwards, the squad was revised downward to nine; the fireteams now consisted of four men. This reduction in size may have been to deal with reduced manpower in the wake of the end of conscription, or to better fight in vehicles.

Both the US Army and the USMC favored keeping the squad leader separate from the fireteams he commands, but not all armies saw it that way. Both the British and the Germans favored keeping the squad leader as an organic component of one of the fireteams. He functions as both squad leader and fireteam leader. The British Army of World War II featured a ten-man squad, though this was before they hammered out the four man fireteam concept. It has since been reduced to eight, again featuring two fireteams of four. During World War II, the Wehrmacht moved from a twelve man squad to a ten and eventually a nine man squad for reasons of dwindling manpower. They tended to feature an asymmetric, ad hoc grouping of machine gun(s) and assistant gunner(s) in one team and the riflemen in another. But we can note that most nations by now have moved to the four man fireteam, and then the squad is some multiple thereof. The Germans also use eight man squads now, usually.

Why the four man fireteam? Well, we might think about how small a team we can get in combat and be useful. One man is entirely too vulnerable. We can start with two, but we can quickly see that three men is a much more useful standard. More support, ability to work with the vast majority of crew served weapons, plus the ability to take a casualty and still be at least semi functional. Several forces have used the three man ‘cell’ as the basis of squad organization. The problem is that it doesn’t take casualties well, and will force frequent reorganization. Four men teams work better in terms of absorbing inevitable casualties, and this is borne out by the historical record. The Marine squad was originally a copy of the circa 1938 Chinese organization of a leader and three cells of three, but inevitable combat casualties forced them to add a fourth man to each team. More than four likely causes more difficulties for low-level, often improvised span-of-command, and doesn’t quite add enough to justify the trouble and logistical expense. The Rhodesian Light Infantry usually used four man squads, since this was all they could fit on their Alouette helicopters. They found this adequate for single taskings and tended not to remain in the field after multiple contacts, so the lack of casualty resistance wasn’t an issue. Fine for COIN, perhaps, but less than ideal for, say, Guadalcanal.

The question now becomes two or three fireteams, and whether we want the squad leader to be a part of a fireteam. We can see a generally downward trend in squad size, with the exception of the USMC squad. The USMC is still a light infantry force, which is to say they march to combat. Most other armies have to deal with some proportion of troops that have to fit in APCs or IFVs for their transport , and armored vehicle capacity isn’t very good, especially once you factor in all the equipment modern have and the body armor that they wear. So let’s return vehicle capacity.

We’ve opted for the CV9035. The CV90 family is highly configurable as we’ve seen. One of the choices is how you configure the interior. Depending on choices for internal layouts, seating arrangements of six, seven, or eight are available. We’ll make whatever internal stowage or secondary systems sacrifices are needed to have eight dismounts, which neatly dovetails with a pair of standard, four-man fireteams. Given that the CV90 is about as big as a PzKpfw VI Tiger I, I don’t see that too much would need to go to accommodate the seats. As we’ll soon see, this means we can have fewer vehicles per platoon, which is a nice win for cost and maintenance. We’ll settle for strapping things to the outside if we must.

Eight man squads also clearly pass our sports rule of thumb check. One fewer than the baseball grouping of nine is very good. From a bureaucratic/cohesion standpoint, we might want to count the IFV and vehicle crew as part of the squad, and expect the dismounts to help with maintenance. In this case, we have eleven men in the squad, which is the requisite men on the field for American football. We’re good regardless of how we break this down.

Accepting an eight-man (dismount) squad, with integrated squad leader, would let us have three squads in a platoon with only three vehicles, rather than the four that the US Army mechanized platoon has for its nine-man squads. We could conceivably go up to four squads, but that’s a more unwieldy platoon for the young lieutenant. As it is, he can opt to give each squad an IFV, or group the IFVs together in a sort of light tank platoon. Here, he has four elements to command, though he might also opt to reorganize the nominally eight man squads, perhaps into two twelve-man units. Squad organization is mostly bureaucratic anyway. Lieutenants are expected to be flexible and aggressive if nothing else.

Later we’ll get to platoon and squad level equipment tables.

Duncan Sandys: Idiot or Cylon Infiltrator?

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The casual student of history might be forgiven for wondering what happened to the British aircraft industry. During the Second World War (which they won) the British gave us the Spitfire, the Avro Lancaster, the Hawker Tempest, the De Havilland Mosquito, and many other great airplanes. Now, they can barely collaborate with Germany, Spain, and Italy to produce an overpriced, overdue, tactical fighter that fails to win orders or live up to its own ad copy. But hey, at least the Eurofighter can beat a Bugatti an a drag race. So what happened?

Two words: Duncan. Sandys.

In 1957 he took the British aircraft industry out back behind the shed and shot1 it.

He wrote a white paper on defense2 that made two points. First, the British aircraft industry had to reorganize in big conglomerates, and only those conglomerates would get future contracts. Goodbye all of the companies that competed with each other, hello giant companies that are slow moving and risk averse. Also, the contraction in number of companies means there are fewer design-level engineering positions to go around. One big company needs fewer designers than two small ones. Nothing like encouraging all of that war-won design expertise to seek other work.

But wait, it got worse. Sandys posited that manned military aircraft were obsolete. Missiles were the way of the future. Missiles were all that was needed to win wars. Missiles could intercept bombers, so they didn’t need to build fighters or interceptors. Missiles could deliver big nuclear warheads, so bombers weren’t needed to deliver nukes. And everyone3 knew the massive power of nuclear bombs had made conventional weapons obsolete. On the off chance such things were needed, missiles could deliver conventional warheads too. Missiles could do it all, and do it cheaper than aircraft without risk to aircrews. Sounds great! And Britain had basically no money after the war. They stuck with rationing well into the fifties, and that fancy empire had fallen apart. Goodbye aircraft, goodbye aircraft industry, hello missiles and big savings!

Of course, history had other ideas. Nobody wanted to blow the world to tiny bits, since that means they’d die too, so nobody ended up using all of their big ICBMs. Or their big bad atomic bombs4 for that matter. Time and again, nations turned to conventional bombs, and yes Virginia, manned aircraft to deliver them. In the Linebacker and Linebacker II campaigns, the USAF showed that B-52Ds could bring the pain to Hanoi like their fathers in the Mighty Eighth. If you were ever wondering what heavy bombers can do that tactical fighters can’t, it starts with carrying one hundred and eight 500 pound bombs, and it ends with blowing the living daylights out of everything in a box about five eighths of a mile wide and two miles long. Yes, manned heavy bombers were darned useful in Vietnam. And this even during the Christmas Bombing of Hanoi, flying into the teeth of a massive air defense network supplied with the latest in Soviet-made hardware.

But it was not just the USAF that enjoyed success with manned aircraft. The Israeli air force has enjoyed great success with their fighters. In 1967, they executed a surprise attack that destroyed both the Syrian air force and the bigger Egyptian air force on the ground. Guderian may have been the first master of blitzkrieg, but he never did it as well as Rabin. In 1973, the Israelis had to deal with brand new SA-6 SAMs during the Yom Kippur war, and this reminded everyone that pilots, and by extension their manned aircraft are adaptable. Despite significant early losses, they managed to adapt and overcome, proving highly successful once again. Again in 1981, the Israelis succeeded in destroying the Osirak reactor in Iraq, despite the Iraqi air defense network.

Of course, Saddam’s embarrassment at this led him to beef up his air defenses again, but it would not stop (mostly) American airpower in 1991. Once again, B-52s were a big part of the strike package. Versatile manned aircraft carried improvised GBU-28 “Deep Throat” bombs to destroy heavily protected Iraqi aircraft shelters and command bunkers. And despite the large number of cruise missiles used, the opening blows were struck by Apache helicopters trashing an early warning radar, and only the stealthy F-117 was to operate over Baghdad.

Want more? Well, even England found a use for their old “obsolete” Vulcan bombers in the Falklands war. Operation Black Buck was a record setting 12,600 km bombing raid where Vulcans flew from Ascension Island to neutralize the runway on the Falkland islands and deny its use to the Argentinians. And during this time period, no Polaris missiles were used in anger.

It’s the versatility of manned aircraft during this time that has ensured their longevity. Lest you think other bombers are obsolete, all B-52Gs were destroyed as part of the START treaty. Even though they’ve been adapted for conventional missions and even close air support, they’re still an important enough strategic weapon to affect the nuclear calculus.

Of course, now people are at it again. Now drones are the future! Yay networking issues. Needless to say, keep pilots in the cockpit where they belong. Or else those terrorist Cylon bastards will win.

The only real Viper is a manned Viper. So say we all!

1.) Fun fact, people in England used to be able to own guns. Yes, real guns!
2.) He misspelled the topic, actually. One more thing he couldn’t get right.
3.) USAF included on this point. At least until Vietnam and “limited response”
4.) Singer Fred Kirby called them Hell Bombs in a 1950 song. Best name for them ever.

Je Suis Français

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A tous mes amis français, mes pensées vont vers vous et je vous souhaites courage et force afin de traverser ces moments difficiles.

(Having exhausted my high school French, I’ll continue in English). I sometimes mock the French. Sometimes because they disagree with me and many of my fellow Americans, and sometimes because of their unique quirks. As I am sure they sometimes mock me for my unique Americanisms. But as an American, I owe a debt which can never be repaid to the Marquis de Lafayette. And I admire the French, for their pride, and their stubbornness. I see a lot of myself in them, even in the worst of times. Today, we are all French. I know nothing I say can make the pain go away. But I will say it anyway, and pray anyway, because fourteen years ago, you did the same for me and mine. Be strong, my friends. Our thoughts and prayers go with you.

And, Lafayette, I’ll continue to pay my debts.

Four of the oldest warships in active service, as of November 2015

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I read earlier today that the US Navy’s new SSBN class is expected to serve until the 2080s. I wondered whether that was even remotely plausible. As American ships go, USS Kitty Hawk had a good run of it, hitting almost 50 years. I couldn’t find any American examples with a longer service life than that in commission and in active service today, but it turns out there are some out there. Here are four of the oldest warships in active service, by original commissioning date.

#3 – BAP Almirante Grau, formerly De Ruyter, Dutch-built cruiser in Peruvian service, November 18, 1953
Almirante Grau was laid down in 1939 by the Dutch, and launched in 1941 by the Nazis, so by that standard, she is indeed the oldest actual warship on this list. She’s also the most functional: a major refit between 1985 and 1988 gave her then-modern sensors and decoys, Otomat AShMs, and OTO Melara rapid-fire guns in place of her old Bofors mounts.

#2 – ROCS Hai Shih, formerly USS Cutlass, Tench-class submarine in Taiwanese service, March 17, 1945
Deserving of extra acclaim because she’s apparently still a reliably-submersible submarine built in the closing stages of the Second World War, she saw an actual war patrol in her days as Cutlass. She was transferred to the Taiwanese Navy in 1973, and has been in active service since. Her sister ship, ROCS Hai Pao, was commissioned in 1946 and transferred in 1976. They serve primarily as training ships and aggressors, and, incredibly, are still cleared to submerge 70 years after their commissioning.

#1 – BRP Raja Humabon, formerly USS Atherton, Cannon-class destroyer escort in Philippine service, July 26, 1943
The Philippine Navy is the oldest navy, on average, in the world; seven members of the Rizal and Miguel Malvar classes also date to before Hai Shih, and the Philippine Navy had two more Cannon-class ships before storms and whatnot sank them. Rajah Humabon is rather light on capabilities these days. Her ASW fit was removed due to lack of spare parts for Second World War-era sonars and depth charges; her gun director is no longer present; her weapons fit is exactly the same otherwise as in 1943.

Honorable Mention – U17 Parnaíba, Brazilian river monitor, March 9, 1938
After a brief huddle with parvusimperator, we decided that a river monitor is not a real warship, and doesn’t count. That said, Parnaíba is the oldest armed ship I was able to find in service with a navy, and deserves a spot on the list. She was commissioned before the next-oldest ship on the list, Almirante Grau, was laid down. She’s also definitively the oldest warship in service built by a yard in the country in which she currently serves, likely by at least two decades.

There you have it. A 65-year service life, as the Navy is proposing for the SSBN(X)-class, isn’t impossible, but it does seem highly suspect. All of these vessels were state of the art on their construction; the only one I wouldn’t instantly designate for scrapping is the Almirante Grau, and even with its modernizations, it probably isn’t worth the upkeep. 65 years from now, will the Navy’s new boomer be any different?

Pacific War and the recipe for compelling wargames

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Pacific War

This is Pacific War, a 1992 release by Gary Grigsby. I’ll come back to that.

I’m on something of a Pacific Theater kick, for an unusual reason: over at the Something Awful LP Archive, I’ve been reading an AAR by a guy called Grey Hunter. The game is War in the Pacific: Admiral’s Edition, the Grigsby/Matrix magnum opus, covering the whole war in excruciating detail. It’s the kind of thing I would love, if I wanted to drop the $80 on the price of entry, and the several hundred hours it would take me to actually get through the war. Fortunately, I can read the 1,320 entries in Grey Hunter’s AAR much more quickly than I can play the game myself, and so get a feel for the flow of things more than the day-to-day minutiae of supplying the twelve-man garrison on Rarotonga. I’ll come back to that.

One of my favorite wargames, as you’ll know if you follow Many Words Main in the slightest, is the Command Ops series. Its conceit is that, as the player, you have to deal with all the handicaps real field commanders had to deal with. Your orders have to percolate down to your subordinate commanders, and hours pass as they dawdle (from your perspective) to plan a simple attack on a defensive position. You tear out your hair, watching the map as they miss the enemy battalion just behind the hill and happily claim success after wiping out a poor company of engineers. You celebrate your own cunning when your men just finish setting up when an enemy attack lands. It is, as the title says, a compelling wargame. But what does that mean, really? ‘Compelling’ is one of those review words1 that doesn’t mean anything absent a better definition. Let me explain what I’m trying to convey.

Ian W. Toll, one of my favorite naval historians2, wrote a book about the first six months of the Pacific War. I’ve always regarded Toll’s biggest talent as immersion. He writes vividly, with a knack for putting the reader into the mind of the people who were there. Near the beginning, he quotes Chester Nimitz, on his experience in the first few months of the war: “From the time the Japanese dropped those bombs on December 7th until at least two months later, hardly a day passed that the situation did not get more chaotic and confused and appear more hopeless.” That gets at the crux of it, I think. I’m still in the first few turns (weeks) of my game of Pacific War, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt more despairing while playing a game. The deck is stacked so heavily against the Allies in the opening weeks: the Japanese are everywhere, and you categorically lack the planes, men, and ships to do anything about it. It has a very strong sense of place, and that is compelling. Command Ops has it, too: in the AARs in the archives at Many Words Main where I follow along in a history book, I find myself worrying about the same sorts of things as commanders on the field did. I find myself feeling exactly how CINCPAC Nimitz did.

I mentioned I’d be coming back to War in the Pacific. As I hinted, I don’t own the game, and I’ve never tried it. It’s possible I might find it compelling in the same way, but reading through Grey Hunter’s AAR, I think it’s not a settled thing by any means. In the course of spending forty-five minutes to an hour working through a single day, I think I might lose sight of the bigger picture, and games about the Pacific War are ultimately games about an entire theater. The sense of place flows out of watching the long arc of progress, and at a certain scale, that’s hard.

So, for me, compelling wargames capture a sense of place. That doesn’t preclude them from being grognardy, but it does preclude them from swamping the feel with detail. Pacific War is just about right, I think—accurate enough to yield plausible results, broad enough in scope to engender the emotional investment I crave.

Pacific War is freeware, courtesy of Matrix Games. You can find it at their website, or at my mirror.

  1. See this video, starting at about 3:00, or 4:30.
  2. Objection, your honor. Relevance3.
  3. Overruled. I want to see where this is going. Counsel, make your point quickly.

Stop Whining and Love the SCHV

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When I set out to work out what sort of small arms I wanted for Borgundy, I decided to start, rather sensibly, with the caliber for my infantry arms. And I was all set to write something full of hate for the 5.56x45mm NATO round and how inadequate and lame it is. But when I thought about the gun-writer orthodoxy, I started coming up with some problems. So let’s go back, and start from where we can all agree on things. Namely, World War II. The greatest of them all. First, we figured out that full-power rifle cartridges (which I’ll call ‘full power cartridges’ from here on, because I’m a lazy typist), have too much recoil energy to be fired from a normal infantry rifle (usually about 9 or 10 lbs). Somewhat satisfactory results could be achieved in the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle, but that weighed about 24 lbs. Second, we knew that rifle cartridges possess sufficient power (for some definition of power that I’ll leave deliberately vague) to kill a man out to distances of over a kilometer. However, for most soldiers, such hits will never happen. Statistical studies showed that 90% of infantry engagements took place at ranges less than 300 meters. But why should this be? Clearly, sniper exploits would tell us that one can see much further than 300 meters in most parts of the world.

Consider that a rifle bullet will need about one second to reach a distance of 600 meters from the shooter. In that time, a reasonably fit man who is aware that he is being shot at can sprint 5-9 meters, in any direction he pleases. It will probably be from cover to cover, but we could think of this as in some random direction that would certainly be unknown to the shooter. So the chances of hitting the target at such distances are very low, unless the target is unaware or you can fill the area with bullets with your machine guns. For this reason, the Germans sought an effective range of about 500 meters or so for the 7.92x33mm round, the first of what I’ll call the “Short Rifle” rounds. This gave them a bit more range than they thought they’d need, but because they didn’t need the power of a full power round, they could make the bullet lighter and manageable on full automatic. And fully automatic fire is a great force multiplier. Submachine guns were very popular and effective weapons, but they have a very short effective range of 50m. The German StG-44 pointed a way forward, trying to bridge the gap between a service rifle and a submachine gun, and by all accounts was very successful.

After World War II, we know that NATO stuck with full power rounds with the 7.62x51mm NATO, and eventually changed over to 5.56x45mm NATO, which is a classic example of a small caliber high velocity (SCHV) round. Currently, “everyone” (or at least every chairborne commando gun-writer) says that the 5.56mm round is inadequate, and that we should move to something in the 6.5-7mm range. However, the extant examples of such rounds, the 6.5 Grendel and 6.8 SPC, not to mention the .300 Blackout, resemble the short rifle rounds with somewhat better external ballistics. Certainly as far as weight and recoil energy are concerned. Which brings up an interesting point if we look East. The Soviets adopted a short rifle round, the 7.62x39mm, shortly after WWII, as did the Chinese. If the modern 6.x proponents were correct, we’d expect at least one, but probably both of these major powers to have stuck with something similar in the short rifle round. But they didn’t. The Soviets went to SCHV with the 5.45x39mm round in the early 1970s, and the Chinese went to the 5.8×42 in the 80s. Let’s see if we can’t reason out why.

The Soviets and the Chinese would have had access to M16 rifles and their associated 5.56mm ammunition as a result of the battles of the Vietnam war, and weapons were almost certainly taken from captured stocks in North Vietnam for further study. And they found a lot to like. 5.56mm weights about half as much as full power rounds like 7.62mm NATO, and about two thirds as much as short rifle rounds like 7.62x39mm. This means that a soldier can carry more ammo for the same weight (because no one ever actually reduces the soldier’s load, despite every utterance to the contrary. Sorry S.L.A. Marshall). More ammo was a boon for the war planner. Not only does it allow units to hold a position for longer, but units that have fought through a chance contact or ambush aren’t in dire need of resupply. What’s more, smaller rounds are easier to make in bulk, and easier to ship. Perfect if you have a big army that is going to need tons upon tons of ammunition to slay the foreign devils.

Another helpful advantage is the flat trajectory that simplifies aiming at combat ranges. With the right zero, a soldier does not need to adjust his sights or his aim to be able to hit targets within combat tolerances from 0 to 300 meters, or across the practical range of the soldier. We might think that a flatter trajectory would let us get reliable hits at ranges beyond 300 meters, but this is not the case. In addition to the problems of evasive targets mentioned previously, it is very hard to distinguish targets at ranges beyond 300 meters when they do not wish to be seen. While it is easy to spot and engage nice big silhouette targets at ranges of up to 500 meters even without optical sights (see the USMC rifle qual), soldiers who are trying to live to see another day by using cover and camouflage to hide themselves are very difficult to spot at longer ranges. So the SCHV rounds make basic combat shooting easier, but they don’t remove the requirements for fancy optical sights and marksmanship skills at longer ranges.

But what about lethality? Are SCHV rounds effective enough to justify making a switch? Admittedly, I’ve sold the accounting guys already, but let’s continue all the same. Lethality is a pain to talk about, because it’s not readily derivable from a number. For small arms though, you armchair physicists out there can shut up about kinetic energy–momentum is a better zeroth-order proxy for lethality. But that’s not a very useful proxy; it’s only good if you want a number to play with. Reality isn’t nicely quantifiable–it’s complicated. Gel tests are better, especially since the no-good treehuggers will get mad at us if we try to do more pig testing. Anyway, the idea of gel (a proxy for flesh) is that we want a cavity that is deep and wide. Deep, because (if you recall your high-school anatomy course), your heart is not on the skin, and we may have to shoot through things that are in the way (arms holding a weapon in firing position, gear carried on the vest, etc.) We want it wide because we want the best chance of damaging something important, like the heart or the central nervous system. Were we civilians hunting, say, wild hogs, we’d choose a nice, controlled-expansion soft- or hollow-point bullet. This would give us great expansion and penetration, and thus plenty of dead hogs (and tasty bacon!). But soldiers are forbidden by various treaties and conventions to not use such bullets. So let’s move on. The best we can hope for is that the SCHV bullet will hit the target in such a way that it will tumble rapidly, losing velocity. If the initial impact velocity is high enough (usually, above 2,700 feet per second for most standard military ammunition) the tumbling will cause the bullet to tear itself apart. Even though this is a tiny bullet, this causes some really nasty wounds. If you can only get tumbling out of your bullet, that still makes for a big, destructive wound channel. The worst case (well, from the perspective of effectiveness–it’s still pretty sucky.), is the “ice pick” case, where the bullet goes straight through, minimizing the wound channel size.

So now we get to the historical cases. In Vietnam, complaints about the M-16 were generally about issues with maintenance. No complaints about lethality were heard–in fact the lethality was praised by the troops, and damned by the red cross. In Afghanistan, the Russian 5.45mm earned similar praise from the Soviet troops and infamy from the mujahedeen, who called it the “poison bullet”. In Somalia, and again in Afghanistan complaints started to come up occasionally about lethality issues. Now, the skeptics among you might have some issues here. Can a soldier, who may not have an optic with magnification, be sure of how many hits he scored and where? Were these hits really center of mass shots? Did he hit at all? And why were the complaints not universal? Why were some soldiers, often in the same units, totally satisfied with the performance of their 5.56 rounds? Further, in Afghanistan, many would point out the longer engagement range as further proof of the failures of the 5.56. However, the Soviets had no complaints from their 5.45mm rounds. So what’s different? Well, we have a bunch of asinine restrictions on fire support missions in Afghanistan that prevent timely assistance to infantry. And, to no one’s great surprise, eventually the enemy figures this out and exploits it with snipers attacking infantry. In Vietnam, the enemy tried to get as close as possible because they feared our artillery. We can also note two more issues with the “5.56 is crap” theory here. First, if 5.56mm was so useless at range, why would SOCOM make the Mk 12 SPR in 5.56mm? Special forces can pick their gear–why would they use such a weapon if it is so ineffective? And use it they did; SOCOM units registered plenty of long distance kills with the Mk. 12. Second, if we are using Afghanistan as our instigator for change, we’re saying that we are expecting to fight more wars in that sort of terrain. Even if I wasn’t designing a force around a conventional war, I would find this a dubious proposition. I might be more swayed by arguments in favor of preparations for urban warfare in that case–but those would almost certainly favor shorter range rounds.

We’ve established that 5.56 can be an effective round at longer ranges. Something to note here is that the choice of the bullet itself for long range shooting is a little different from the NATO usual M855. The Mk. 12 is usually used with Mk 262 rounds, which are match bullets designed for their long range performance. I’m sure the shooters among you are thinking that I’ve cheated by looking at match rounds. To them I grunt, Belichick-style. They’re missing the point. I can choose whatever rounds I want to disprove the claim that “5.56 is useless at range”. If that claim was true, then I could load whatever rounds that I please, and should get the same piss-poor results. If the argument is that using basic service rounds I’ll get poor range performance, then I would say, did you miss all of those earlier paragraphs? Scroll up, actually read them this time, and come back. I’ll wait. Bullet design is pretty important, and I’m just not a big fan of M855. Given the choice, I actually prefer Vietnam-era M193, since it fragments more reliably. M855 is sort-of-armor-piercing, with a steel cap, but not a steel core. It’s not super helpful, except for telling you which Level III plates are cheap and lame. Soft flak vests can be dealt with by just about any 5.56 with its high velocity, and hard plates will need the fancy, tungsten-cored M955. And we can totally do better than your father’s M193 with modern bullet design. Something more like M855A1 (don’t let the designation fool you–it’s really an entirely new round) or Mk. 318 SOST. The key is getting a bullet that will tumble upon impact regardless of the nature of this impact (so minimize the impact of “Fleet Yaw”), and both of these bullets do this. M855A1 also takes advantage of modern, more consistent, less temperature sensitive propellents to up the chamber pressure. We can get away with this, because said modern powders won’t dramatically increase pressure in a hot bore. I’d prefer bullets themselves that use proper lead (because the “environmentally friendly” bullet gripe is dumb), but the example is good. The point is that these are excellent examples of effective, good 5.56 rounds, and SOST has gotten rave reviews in the ‘Stan. So we can find “infantry grade” rounds that are plenty effective at infantry distances.

So now we come back to those “6.x” intermediate rounds. Specifically, I’d like to look at 6.8 SPC and 6.5 Grendel, because those actually exist. While they’re somewhat handicapped by having to fit in an M4 magazine, this means there’s no weapon weight penalty, and it keeps the ammo weight about as low as we can. However, we’re still paying quite the weight penalty–each loaded magazine weighs about half again as much as a comparable 5.56 mag (with a 30 round magazine for each case). What does this weight/higher cost of ammunition get us? Well, 6.8 SPC was designed to explicitly give us better terminal performance than 5.56, and it delivers, even when we compare modern, fancy rounds. But these modern, properly designed rounds certainly give us nothing to really complain too much about in 5.56, in a lighter, cheaper, more controllable package. So there’s no reason to switch (and SOCOM agrees with us–they’ve basically got rid of any plans that they might have had to switch over). 6.8 SPC at least delivers what it claims to out of a standard carbine barrel. Out of a long (24″) barrel, 6.5 Grendel delivers phenomenal ballistic performance, but if you put it in a regular carbine barrel, performance suffers. There are also as yet unsolved issues with stuffing a longer tracer round into that case, or trying to make it work in a belt-fed weapon. Some might say that this doesn’t matter, but if you’re actually trying to have one cartridge to rule them all and any hope of reducing weight like proponents claim (do the math though–you fail), you’ll need to replace a full power round like 7.62 NATO in the support weapon role, which means belt fed. And that’s if you buy into bulky drums for the squad machine gun–I don’t. So the Grendel doesn’t deliver the goods on a perfect intermediate cartridge round either. Are 6.x rounds good? Sure. For military use, do they have advantages over 5.56 that offset the penalties of cost and weight? No.

So, the infantry will continue to carry light, reasonably effective 5.56x45mm NATO rounds. Next, we’ll choose a carbine to launch it.

Pop-Culture Civility

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I am a conservative on the Internet, and I play games, read speculative fiction, and watch TV. People who produce the media I consume, by and large, are either in vocal disagreement with me on almost every substantive issue, or silently disagree with me on almost every substantive issue. I maintain this is not a bad thing.

I certainly don’t take the progressive view, which frequently declares certain pursuits, views, and luxuries anathema1. See handwringing over the movie adaptation of Ender’s Game, for one, or the occasional calls for boycotts of business which support gun rights, or who are accused of being too capitalist in their outlook, or the case of Brendan Reich of Mozilla, or various fora with a leftist bent whose progressivism extends to the progressive erosion of the Island of Acceptable Opinions2. This censorial impulse is frequently served with a side of disappointment or regret: “I really enjoy this thing, but the people who provide this thing are the scum of the earth, so I can’t have it!”

Some conservatives do yield to that impulse, but since I’ve already mentioned I enjoy consuming the products of the entertainment industry, I can’t. My choices are separate the work from the people, or live under a rock, and the latter is not a particularly charming option. Of course, separating the work from the person altogether is impossible. Maybe Green Eggs and Ham is a work without a message, but once you move beyond that level of complexity, almost every piece of art says something, whether or not the author had something in particular in mind to say.

That, then, is why it’s a good thing that a lot of storytelling I enjoy comes from people who disagree with me. We live in an age of echo chambers and isolation. We can go through life effectively avoiding exposure to people who don’t think the same way, but media has a way of sneaking in and showing us someone else’s opinion. Reading a novel colored by a communist utopian author’s perspective isn’t apt to turn me into a communist utopian, but it does tend to present a case, implicit or explicit, for communist utopianism. As wrong as I think that case may be, seeing it presented keeps me from lumping communist utopians into the Nameless Other category—though perhaps guilty of poor reasoning, they’re still humans.

Which finally brings me to the title of the post. We staunch conservatives with a fondness for pop culture have practice with that viewpoint, because the entertainment industry is so overwhelmingly leftist. Staunch leftists have a lot less practice in that realm3, and so I most often see them as the perpetrators of pop-culture incivility: angry proclamations that authors like Jerry Pournelle, Larry Correia, or Orson Scott Card are unfit to read, not because of the quality of their writing4, but because of the views they hold. That, I think, is definitely bad: it subverts media’s role in humanizing the other side, and depoliticizing life and rehumanizing the other side is an extremely important part of avoiding a society of cells of harmonious agreement in violent disagreement with all the other cells.

1. A word with a religious origin used advisedly. Humans like telling other humans what not to do. Progressivism rejects the thought that the traditional institutions which tell other humans what to do are worth much, and has to fall back on telling other humans what to do on their supposed merits when read through a progressive lens. “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow the consensus leftist view” lacks something of the original’s verve, though.
2. Obviously, what I’ll term ‘my side’ doesn’t have the cleanest of hands, either, but I’m more qualified to nitpick about people I disagree with, so I don’t have any specific examples.
3. Though more, perhaps, in the personal realm. I hear a lot more about leftists surrounded by conservative family or friends than the other way around, but that might just be the sorts of circles I run in.
4. Which may be good or may be crap. Of these three, I’ve only ever read Card’s solo work, which ranges from good to crap all on its own.

…

It strikes me that I could probably apply this mode of thinking to the #GamerGate flap, but I’m not sufficiently thick-skinned to deal with the potential response to a whole post on that topic. The short version: the ‘death of gamers’ articles which helped push the movement more mainstream were examples of the same sort of cultural excommunication I spent this post condemning, and the #GamerGate people are guilty of declaring some games journalists unfit to read because of their politics. Both sides may be guilty of other things, and I don’t claim to capture every facet and every nuance of either side’s position. That’s why this is a paragraph below the footnotes instead of a fully developed post of its own.

Complaining about someone complaining on the Internet

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This morning’s target of my ire is this tumblr1, whose function seems to be to complain about Steam tags being spammy or mean or whatever.

Now, the tumblrist2 has a valid point, in a very limited sense. New games, or games with small communities, are likely to see a much less useful set of tags. The rest of the blog is just silly, though, and it boils down to this: “In the middle of this useful set of categorizations for this game, someone tried to be funny!” Or, equally present, “The random member of the gamer hoi polloi is not entitled to have opinions about art games!”

The first one—people trying to be funny—is going to happen everywhere on the Internet all the time. That’s just how it goes. The second complaint gets my blood up, because it’s grounded in the intolerable premise that Real Art Is Inscrutable, and You Can’t Understand It, and that’s utter baloney. Here’s a thing to try, if you find that people aren’t getting the message you’re trying to communicate in your games: make better games, or suck it up and deal with the critique that your art-game isn’t actually a very engaging piece of interactive entertainment.

It seems to me that a vein of entitlement runs through the arts nowadays. At some point in the last century it became sufficient to just have a message to be taken seriously, and we lost the idea that artists ought also to be in the business of creating beauty. That’s why I can name a half-dozen movie soundtrack composers, and not a single composer-composer after Shostakovich; one of those categories makes pretty, accessible music which ends up having a message anyway, and the other makes music with a message that’s dull and uninspired.

I doubt I’ll change anyone’s mind with this rant, but it was cathartic.

1. Entitled ACTUAL STEAM TAGS, because cruise-control for cool.
2. I like this word, although tumblrer is more fun to say.