Free Republic

The Marine Corps will field its new, lightweight auto rifle this fall to five combat battalions preparing for war-zone deployments. Commandant Gen. James T. Conway gave Corps officials the green light in April to issue approximately 450 M27 Infantry Automatic Rifles, enough to replace every M249 squad automatic weapon in four infantry battalions and one light armored reconnaissance battalion. The limited fielding is a final test to find out if the Heckler & Koch-made weapon performs as well in an operational environment as it has in testing, said Charles Clark III, who oversees infantry weapons requirements at the Corps' Combat...

NDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- A former employee of an Indiana defense contractor has filed a whistleblower lawsuit claiming the company ordered him to approve parts for machine guns used by U.S. troops that didn't meet quality standards, and that he was fired for complaining about it...

If you are looking for the legacy of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, do not look in the concrete rubble of so-called safe house in Baqubah that became his final resting place. Instead, look less than 10 miles to the west, on the side of the road in the desert town of Hadid, for a pile of cardboard banana boxes. Inside those boxes were nine human heads. Some of the heads still had their blindfolds on. Iraqi police are still attempting to identify the murdered men. Days earlier, in Baquba, Iraqi police found another eight severed heads. One of those heads...

Duct tape kept some going. Zip ties did the trick for others. Needed: buckshot rounds. These were just some of the comments soldiers and Marines had for teams of researchers who fanned out across the battlefields in Iraq to find out which weapons were what the troops needed and which ones weren’t up to snuff. The war in Iraq tested not just the soldiers and Marines on the ground, but their gear as well. Two after-action reports from a Marine Corps Systems Command Team and an Army Special Operations Battle Lab collected comments recently to rate everything from uniforms to...

Several soldiers of the 507th Maintenance Company could not defend themselves or their comrades March 23 because their weapons malfunctioned while they sustained a lengthy fire attack by Iraqis near Nasiriyah, Iraq, according to a U.S. Army report on the ambush. The weapons that jammed or otherwise failed included a M-249 machine gun called a SAW (squad automatic weapon), a .50 caliber machine gun, as well as several M-16 rifles. The M-16 is the Army's standard issue weapon. The report is not conclusive about why up to three different kinds of weapons failed and suggests that the "malfunctions may have...

United States Marines Antiterrorism ForceSpecial weapons and tactics of this new elite brigade BY SCOTT R. GOURLEY Carefully adjusting the variable scope on top of the new sniper rifle, a unit marksman squinted toward the far end of the training site where a fellow Marine was removing his chemical protection mask. "This is sweet," he chuckled. "I can look down his ear canal with this thing." The next person whose ear comes in the crosshairs of the enhanced Designated Marksman Rifle (DMR) will get more than an impromptu earwax inspection. Already field-tested in Afghanistan, the DMR version of the 7.62mm...

Part one of two ARLINGTON, Va. — Army infantry troops deployed to Afghanistan are struggling to keep weapons clean and in good working order, with soldiers particularly concerned about the maintainability and reliability of the M-4 carbine and the squad automatic weapon, according to an Army report on lessons learned in Afghanistan. But soldiers also are more than pleased with the performance of other weapons, such as the M-240B machine gun, which won a 100 percent vote of confidence overall. And troops often described a love-hate relationship with the same weapon, such as the soldier who called his squad automatic...