Posted on 12/01/2010 8:59:49 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The Academy Award-winning film The Hurt Locker has a particularly memorable scene involving a standoff between an American sharpshooter and an Iraqi insurgent, where both have each other pinned down behind cover. The American sharpshooter wins the standoff — but doesn’t realize it for hours, only moving after it becomes clear that the insurgent died from a well-aimed shot earlier in the day. Imagine the same scene, but with a weapon that can actually find a target behind cover and detonate without air or artillery support, and what that would mean for US forces engaged in urban or guerilla warfare.
Actually, we don’t have to imagine it. The XM-25 has been deployed to Afghanistan, where infantry units call it a “gamechanger“:
It looks and acts like something best left in the hands of Sylvester Stallone’s “Rambo,” but this latest dream weapon is real — and the US Army sees it becoming the Taliban’s worst nightmare.
The Pentagon has rolled out prototypes of its first-ever programmable “smart” grenade launcher, a shoulder-fired weapon that uses microchipped ammunition to target and kill the enemy, even when the enemy is hidden behind walls or other cover.
After years of development, the XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System, about the size of a regular rifle, has now been deployed to US units on the battlefields of Afghanistan, where the Army expects it to be a “game-changer” in its counterinsurgencyoperations.
“For well over a week, it’s been actively on patrols, and in various combat outposts in areas that are hot,” said Lieutenant Colonel Chris Lehner, program manager for the XM25.
CNN reported on the weapon almost a year ago, when the Pentagon still had it in tests. Watch this video report from former CNN reporter Rick Sanchez to get an idea of what this weapon can do, both for US forces and for innocent civilians in the immediate area of gunfire:
This report worries about the problem of the weapon falling into the wrong hands, but that’s more or less the problem with all new weapons systems. As soon as they get deployed, they will fall into enemy hands when the enemy manages to win a skirmish and capture one or more of them. A bigger problem will be the knock-offs created by other nations once they learn the design. Eventually, the Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, and others will have their own versions and put them up for sale, most likely as a result of US arms sales to our allies, and then the weapons will be available to terrorists and “freedom fighters” in every corner of the world. The only way to prevent that is to stop designing weapons systems, which is hardly realistic.
The larger problem will be the adaptations this forces onto the Taliban in Afghanistan and other such insurgencies in future wars. This makes a stand-up fight even more suicidal than it is now. Instead of being able to hit forces under cover at 500 yards, there simply won’t be any significant targets at all. The enemy will likely resort to IEDs almost exclusively, with an occasional and relatively massive frontal assault on smaller fortifications to attempt to hold ground. That will degrade the Taliban’s ability to control territory, but in the end perhaps save more of their fighters from certain death and extend their ability to fight in a much more limited fashion.
With some luck, the sheer hopelessness of an IED war will convince most of the Taliban fighters to lay down their arms before an XM-25 round finds their rock first. It’s a great weapon and a gamechanger, but it may not be a war-ender.
If everything about this new weapon is true, it should never be put in the hands of anyone other than US Military. In other words, this weapon should never be sold outside the United States.........to anyone, friend or foe.
On my Christmas list!!!!!
The ammo is the key. They can get a gun, but it won’t work without the ammo.
Don’t sell any part of it to anyone. Nada, nothing. It should stay here.
Excellent. Until as one commenter says, wikileaks publishes plans showing the Taliban how to build their own....
Within a year or so there will be other manufacturers making munition delivery systems doing similar things. This is not super-high tech.
This looks to me like an expensive boondoggle. It may tip the odds a bit, but I’m guessing it’s not quite the game changer they’re making it out to be.
Chinese will build one at a tenth the cost and sell it
to whomever. This will be a gamechanger for about a year,
until loincloth-wearing tribesmen in Sudan have them.
A “game changer” like the Me262, V2, King Tiger....
Seems some madman was convinced that each one of those was a “game changer,” and he had all of them.
I wasn’t suggesting that we sell the gun. What I meant was the enemy might get hold of one on the battlefield or through theft of some sort. But they still have nothing, unless they have the ammo. The high technology is in the smart projectile, not the gun.
What I meant was the high technology is in the smart projectile. They could steal a gun or get one on the battlefield—but they can’t reproduce the ammo. At least yet.
And why is the MEDIA telling everyone in the world this?
I understand what you meant. I just get tired of us selling our top weapons to others and then they get turned on us. It’s my understanding that these weapons cost us $35,000.00 apiece. Is this true and is it worth it?
“And why is the MEDIA telling everyone in the world this?”
Psych Ops, it’s demoralizing to the enemy.
A silly statement. Sooner or later, all innovations are copied. It's the sincerest form of flattery. Eventually, any given doo-dad will wind up in your enemy's hands. The only way to prevent him from catching up to you is to keep designing different weapons and tactics. The only consistent advantage it's possible to have in warfare is for your society to be a consistent innovator, so that your fighting men consistently have the most effective innovations first.
That's one of the many reasons free enterprise is essential to our national security and our political freedom: It's the system that spawns the innovations that win wars for us.
The logic for "smart ammunition" was thought out a good 10 years back. One my articles on the question is buried somewhere in FR archives.
This makes it rather difficult for the enemy to "use" unspent ammunition against you, and even if they manage to copy everything over, you can have lebenteengazillion character long magic identification codes that are, in this universe, effectively uncrackable. Put everything you can into cache and nothing into magnetic memory helps too. You pull your weapon from the armory, the IS is loaded in the ammunition and firing base, and then it's disappeared forever. You run out of bullets, or battery power, it disappears too.
There are a lot of variations on a theme ~ I thought about using this technology to make bullets that would target only peripheral points like arms, legs, feet ~ and leave the shiny spot (your eyeballs) alone. That way you could leap out of bed, open fire on an intruder, and probably not kill your kids slipping in late from a night on the town.
Is the CIA on vacation? Why is that guy still using up carbon credits that algore could be wasting?
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