The attempt to turn a basic rifle design into a sub-standard support weapon isn't unique to the UK. The US had a similar experience in the 1960's with the Stoner weapon system.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoner_63

That didn't work either.

Some comments on the past six pages…

IIRC the Bren was chambered for .303 and at some stage around SLR introduction time re-machined for 7.62. The weapon was extremely accurate as the Bren and I was told by some HSF that used it in both calibres that it was slightly less accurate in 7.62.

Fact. The Bren was often criticised by its users in WW2 as being too accurate.

The complaint, and this is probably extremely difficult for Falmschirger with his 20 years of Firefights to appreciate, is that if your machine gun is too accurate then when engaging a running target at 400m all the bullets either hit or all the bullets miss. To explain in a little more detail for those of us on crack but based on personal experience, five rounds fired in one second period will all go through a 1’ square box, which makes hitting a running man at 400m quite tricky. But a GPMG which is less accurate will, in the same second, put down around 7 rounds and these, courtesy of the Gimpy jumping around, put 7 rounds into a 2’ square box (e.g. four times a larger area). So a question then: Which weapon, when engaging running targets, targets at ranges difficult to work out and/or grouped targets, would you prefer to use?

Confusingly, on the range the answer will probably always be the LMG with its heavy wind resistant rounds and accuracy, but in the field without range markers the same rounds from a GPMG I think are far preferable.

Gravelbelly’s comment about the GPMG belts being 50 rounds at a time is of course correct (and speaking for the Royal Anglians, we never 'always' had a number two, in fact it was a rarity in FIBUA and plenty of other places. But we also practised defence which meant the number two nearly always appeared and you’d be constantly hooked up to at least 100 rounds. Likewise, for certain attacks, I seem to remember having a tonne of link in my smock snaking out of my chest, this did allow for around 200 to be hooked up. But really only once per attack.

As OOTS says and where Falmschirger may be accurate about accuracy and what may be colouring his opinions somewhat is Herrick (and maybe Telic, I don’t know), there, as far as I can see, is a lot of long range engagement and therefore I imagine that the LMG could make a difference over the Gimpy. But surely a 3 more L96’s per section would be an improvement over the IW too??

– Don’t give Labour another excuse to cut back on the infrantry.

Lastly, the USMC are looking at an LSW type weapon, this was covered elsewhere about a year ago, either way, they’ve identified a need for a weapon to deliver rapid fire at range accurately – this of course may be more because of their choice of m16 variant and its limitations rather than a green field site and perfect scenario.

For my part, I think the current mix of GPMG, LSW, SA80, UBGL, Minimi is probably quite enough for a section and provides a tool for almost every moment but if asked a further L96 and an sov-style RPG element would be the cherry on the icing on the cake.

Last edited by Mr Happy on Mon Nov 02, 2009 7:27 am; edited 1 time in total

WW2 Bren users like Sydney Jary would paint different scenarios to highlight the deficiencies of the Bren. In a defence scenario, f’rinstance, covering a track or wire obstacle with a mag-fed Bren (DOB -DOB – DOB – DOB – gunner changes mag – survivors scuttle away - DOB -DOB – DOB – DOB) is much harder than covering the same track with a belt-fed MG34 (deafening sound like ripping muslin goes on unabated for minutes at a time. Survivors? What survivors?). In attack, they faced the same problem that had surfaced at the beginning of the 20th C.

The Brits went through a steep learning curve on cam, concealment, personal skills and the effective application of fire in S Africa, at the hands of the Boers (my under-age Great Grandad’s first major adventure). In WW1 (my over-age Great Grandad’s second major adventure), the Hun called it “Die Leere des Gefechtefeldnis” (or similar) – meaning The Emptiness Of The Battlefield.

It happens because well disciplined soldiers deal with the threat of automatic weapons, by taking great pains to not be seen, whether in attack or defence.

That means soldiers in combat will more often identify an area from which the enemy is firing rifles/MGs, than they will actually see a person - recognisable point target – long enough to take aim and shoot him.

That gives rise to the need to deliver effective suppressive fire (a lot of shots, delivered in a short space of time, onto an area actually occupied by the enemy, accurately enough to make him stop firing, and to prevent him moving) in order to enable a manoeuvre element to close with the enemy and kill him (or perhaps to buy time until CAS can wipe him out, dependent on ROE)

LSW/Bren are mag fed – the latter having a slow rate of fire as well, so prolonged, heavy weights of fire are not what they are good at, LSW and Bren were/are optimised for point targets, so they are not the best bit of kit for the area thing.

Disciplined troops know effective fire when it arrives: when bursts are striking your WMIK close enough for you to reach out and touch the damage, the fire is effective. Well-aimed and controlled bursts regularly striking 5 or 10 metres away are no more effective fire than is a Lebanese unload in your general direction. It is a hard lesson to teach ahead of time (at the very least, you need to debrief battle inoculation exercises, to point out that - close though the shooting might have felt, it was well within safety limits, and therefore ineffective. Likewise, time spent in the butts is useful for making Toms aware of the sound of fire passing safely overhead.)

What discussions to date have missed – being focussed on weapon characteristics and optics – is that the systems only work when the blokes using them are on the ball.

The standard training syllabuses of my time in Infantry units (1974 to 2001) devoted precious little time or effort to finding the enemy (I doubt that most infantry soldiers in those days would experience more than 1 'Finding the Enemy By His Fire" demo in a typical career), and to target indication. Both these skills were bread and butter to my Great Grandad’s Army, The Old Contemptibles. That is why, for so long, orrsifers carried canes, not rifles: their weapons system was the Platoon or Company – rifles were too tempting a distraction, and adopted by officers only after snipers (another trade revived by dust-bowl experience) began shooting jodhpur-clad cane-bearers with excessive regularity.

A quick read of the 1916 reprint of the 1908 Musketry manual - a real gem of a book, in its own way - will show you that observation and target indication were core infantry skills, and central even to competition shooting. It knocks the SAAM manuals of my time into a cocked hat.

Modern-day SAAM competitions engaging silhouetted targets at known distances, are post WW1 aberrations, better left to civilian gravelbellies: they do nothing to enhance the combat effectiveness of the average soldier’s skillset.

I only hope that our present generation of Infantry leadership will have more luck anchoring these core skills in the training syllabus than did their forebears.


Coincidentally, I made pretty much that point, about the load-bearing role of the smock, on a thread about combat smocks only a day or so back.(Baggy smocks became very much the ‘ally’ fashion in about 1982, after the Falklands war: prior to that ‘ally’ was skin-tight kit, tailored for comfort for wear in NI, under a flak vest, and a complete nightmare on Ex, as soon as you were issued a belt of 7.62mm and /or couple of 2” mortar rounds to stow somewhere. Happy daze)
========
Stonkernote:
The 7.62 LMG was issued for 3 reasons as I remember:
(a). For local defence, to non-inf sub-units (RE, RCT f'rinstance)
(b). To AMF(L) Infantry for Norway (some pansy Brit neurotic fear of ammo belts freezing: didn't seem to stop Fritz or the Finns in WW2, IIRC )
(c). For Internal Security ops in NI - based solely on seeing piccies of foot patrols in built-up areas in parts of rural NI, back in the '70s. There again, they might have been Cav/RA - in which case, see (a) above.

Excellent summation of the issues. Do you know where I can get a copy of the 1908 Musketry manual?

Thanks for the compliment. I wish that more of the COs I worked under had been smart enough to grasp and deal with said issues. Too many of them had that "When I . . " kind of mindset - if it hadn't happened to them personally, it might as well have never happened at all. An incurious and professionally very limiting way of thinking, and a very frustrating one under which to work.

The 1916 reprint being the book that Britain's massive Army used to train for the Somme and up to war's end, it ought to be pretty common, even now. It is a little square book, coloured a sort of Doc Marten's shade of oxblood, about an inch thick, and would fit - somewhat snugly - in a WW1 tunic pocket.

Last time I saw one on a bookseller's shelf was in a used/antiquarian book shop on the edge of Woking town centre (opposite a cycle shop), about 6 years ago - they had several copies on the shelf that day.

That said, such bookshops are increasingly rare (the one that used to grace the London Road shopfronts in Camberley binned it around 2001, to trade online - which is probably your most promising hunting ground).

Abebooks.co.uk ought to bear fruit eventually, but you'd do better, I suspect, to look for specialist traders in military books and manuals, and start to visit the fairs at which they parade their stock-in-trade (coincidentally, I stumbled on just such a one online, only last week. Sadly, not being in the market for any more books, I'm buggered if I can remember his details)

From memory,, about 10 years ago - when I was trying to use MM 1908 to point up the utter bollox that the SASC had packed into a new policy on APWT and field-firing, I think I scanned some parts of my copy (a gift from my Dad when I was not yet 10, along with a toy cap-firing rifle. Never read it until I was over 40, and him long dead - so it ain't going up for sale, ever).

Let me know by PM if that scanned material would be of interest. Since I never ever throw data away, I could trawl my old hard drives for it, but with no guarantee of success or even of 'delivery' timeframe. Failing (or perhaps in addition to) that, I may still have that unpublished diatribe - it quotes MM1908 quite a bit - again, PM if interested.

www.emilitarymanuals.c...-1920.html

This site sells all types of Military Manuals, in CD or PDF.

There seems to be a vast range of subjects as well.

Sequence of Musketry Training, 1917 (Paperback) Is it this one?

SK

If this was the replacement of the 1980s vintage "Shoot to Kill" (to the young 'uns, this was the era of being able to pass your APWT based only on shots fired from the prone position), with the mid-1990s "Operational Shooting Policy", I'd think you were promoting excellence as an enemy of "good enough".

Yes, the OSP may have had its flaws at introduction, but I'm sure you'll agree it was a huge improvement on what went before. Suddenly, non-gravelbellies were being mandated to actually train their Jocks, not just keep putting them through the APWT until they scraped a pass.

At the time, I wrote a paper on the subject - which said that OSP was worthy, and used justifiable statistics to show that if TA Inf was to adopt it to the letter, it would become the training ME, absorbing at least a third of all training (I've still got it somewhere on backup, if anyone is actually sad enough to want to see it. I know that Bde forwarded it to Sch Inf and SASC...)

I will admit starting out by trying to prove that there wasn't actually the range space in Scotland to carry out the mandated training for all resident units. But there was.

I agree that "static silhouette targets" are an unrealistic training mechanism, and also feel that comparatively too much emphasis is given to firing on static ranges; the real measure of training has to be LFTT. This wasn't because we spent too much time on Gallery Ranges, it's because we spent too little time on Field Firing.

On the other hand, the only way to get the basic skills down pat is to put in the range time - once you have them, you're not thinking "please don't let me ND" on the LFTT range, you're thinking "aim a bit low left from the kneeling for a good hit" or "give it a bit of right, there's a wind blowing".

As for manuals, my Mum gave me a 1942 copy of Lt.Col. Barlow's "The Elements of Rifle Shooting"; while it's somewhat Bisley-centric, what is interesting is how the ARA was trying to make service rifle competition relevant; it describes the gas-mask shoot, and shows the use of landscape targets that don't involve silhouettes.

In a word, no.

I have no idea what happened after AOSP was introduced: I moved away from Inf Bn stuff, and into MoD not long after it blighted my life as a TA Training Major. I do know that at the time of introduction, it included paragraphs in red ink, signifying that they were mandatory - and therefore to be skimped only if you wanted to retire early and in disgrace - which were intended to be advisory, rather than binding, yet no guidance was included as to what flexibility one might exercise at unit level..

A shedful of the book was intended to be open to interpretation: given that barely 40% (from memory) of the ranges in the UK were capable of meeting the APWT requirements it laid out (for want of distance alone - the percentage went down another 10% if you looked for ranges properly licensed for automatic fire using weapons without bipods), that would have been unavoidable - yet it gave no hint as to who might exercise their judgement, or how you could compare an APWT fired on one range with one fired on another.

It was - without a doubt - the shoddiest piece of staff work I have ever come across. And the bit that pi$$ed me off more than anything was that the Cabbagehead author[s] thought that putting pegs in the ground to mark 'bounds' in a shoot on a gallery/ETR.CGR range somehow resembled combat.

It was utter sh1te.

AOSP was what you get from transferring limited-career-prospect Cpls to the SASC, promoting them prematurely (and without experience) to WO2, keeping them in 'Schools' and away from operations for the rest of their career, then declaring them to be more expert than the Infantry in the operational use of firearms, and finally (from this sheltered background, with no preparation worth the name) promoting them from WO to Staff Officer (do not pass QM, do not collect £300) , to write Army-wide policy - in the case of AOSP, in response not to a clear operational requirement, but - in time-honoured Brit fashion - to the whim of a passing D Inf.

Ab-so-fecking-lutely bananas.

All types of Military Manuals?

No - all types of American Military Manuals.

MM 1908 - being Brit - is not among the manuals catalogued.

Could you upload it via pdf Stonker?

Here it is (and my recollections are slightly flawed - it is dated 1909, and known as Musketry Regulations).

This site is selling a facsimile of the 1914 reprint, but it will be substantially the same as the 1916 edn. Cost: £11.50

www.naval-military-pre...s1914.html

A 1910 Edition of Pt. 2 can be found here in multiple formats, can't save the pdf tho.

Should there be a link in that last post of yours, Rampant?

I think this is the intended link:
www.archive.org/detail...02greauoft

I have downloaded the PDF without difficulty, it takes a while because it is 11 MB,. This is due to it being scanned as pictures rather than text.

I also tried the EPUB; that is smaller but it is unedited optical character reader (OCR) output plus the plates. Some of the text is very poor, but can generally be understood.

Part 2 is how to build ranges, some interesting things about targets, but have not read it all yet.

I remember back when I was cadet I tried, unsuccessfully, to interest the unit is using the harmonisation setting on the No 8's sights to shoot at landscape targets.

I have ordered a copy, along with the manual SKJOLD found. If I get it by the weekend I will read it then, otherwise it could take a while.

What an excellent thread this is.

Can't help getting a feeling of deja-vu when I red Falss's posts. His thinking is the same as ours was 30-40 years ago, so I can well understand his frustration with some posters. I used both LMG (Bren) and GPMG on operations, the LMG was good in the jungle, the GPMG more suited to desert and more open terrain (again as Falls's experiences confirm).
I remember having it drummed into us when we converted totally to GPMG that "It's an area weapon." And so it was though our gun teams practiced like crazy to accurately engage point targets at longer ranges too, by perfecting the double tap. The SASC frowned on that... bursts of three to five rounds being their preference (except when they arrived to coach our shooting teams for the likes of CENTO, Prix LeClerc, etc. Told you I was old!).

I was a little disturbed when I read, years ago, that the GPMG was no longer the infantry section's FSW and fully appreciate why the Paras insist on keeping them as such.

BTW. The Para Bns sensible decision to take as many GPMGs as they could lay their hands on to the Falklands was as a result of SF experiences in Dhofar. How I wish the powers that be would listen to combat experienced soldiers in this day and age.

Fascinating stuff Stonker, Falls - watch your blood pressure Bro'!

With all this debate between the L4, the GPMG, and the LSW, I wonder about the thinking of the (new) LMG - fulfilling the role of putting a belt fed weapon in the section, whilst maintaining the maneuverability of the LSW/L4. That said, the extra hitting power of 7.62 is always welcome... I think I'd like to have GPMG's (and a LSW/DMR in 7.62) available.. but at what level? Section? Platoon? Company?