A B-52/B-1 navigator? Wonderful. Great stuff.
But how, exactly does that experience relate to the best tools for infantry combat?
I congratulate you on your long and apparently multifaceted service - but long, wordy descriptions of that service doesn't get us back to where this debate started - the nightmare that was the initial fielding of the M-16. Your very long-winded response didn't enlighten me - or whomever you thought you were speaking to - as to where the flaws in the R&D and acquisition world failed us.
BTW, my father and both of my uncles served in the USAAF in WWII. All of them had that odd sense of superiority that they figured a nice way out of "fighting down in the mud". None of them served in the 8th Air Force, which might have made them reassess that decision.
BTW II: "combat is bracing"? What planet are you from?
Apologies to the forum for slow replies.
We live in a rural area, where thunderstorms play the very devil with satellite links (the only kind we can get, beyond the land-line phone).
I’ve not been trying to second-guess Chainmail’s experiences in action.
I have been attempting to shed a bit of light on the limits of conventional thinking and “common sense.”
There are several common conceits in the uniformed military; they operate across the board. Here are some relevant to the discussion:
1. Only those who have seen action can understand “the truth” of armed conflict; therefore they possess the only moral authority to define what the military does, how it does it, and what it buys to do it with.
1a. There’s a hierarchy among those who’ve seen action: ground combat tops the list, followed by sailors and then aviators.
2. Military service is about ego and one-upmanship, not about service to the country, nor effectiveness in action. This one is observed less often and less explicitly in public, but operates just below the surface all the time. And not everyone believes in engaging in it every minute: it afflicts the officer corps in greater percentage,and tends toward universal among those climbing to highest ranks. They are so ambitious, so egotistical, that they are incapable of forgoing competition. And they deem fellow high-rankers as the only worthy competition.
Sometimes (2.) takes the form of a sort of reverse machismo: whoever has survived the most intense action, the grimmest field conditions, gets one-up on the others.
3. In quintessentially American fashion, we insist on universalizing it all: given our inability to resist “timeless truths” and “unchanging verities,” a combat veteran becomes the ultimate authority on all things military, no matter the era, no matter the location, no matter the weaponry nor the politics of the moment. But in reality, combat is utterly particular and generalizations are of more help if formulated with more care.
Don’t know where Chainmail got the idea that I was defending M16 development. I’ve thought of it as singularly mishandled and misdirected: blunders that have plagued other systems too.
Have heard the sentiment Chainmail detected on the part of his uncles, from a great many other veterans, and not all of them served in USAAF. The idea of flying into action instead of walking into it struck them as a practical advantage, a move they could make, as mere individuals caught up in the biggest war ever. If Chainmail feels better by casting aspersions on their motives 75 years on, that is of course his privilege, but it ultimately tells us nothing about the relative contributions of this or that armed service, nor what priorities we ought to place on this or that system, or doctrine.