U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

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U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

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Weight remains a major obstacle for the U.S. Army as it tries to equip soldiers with all of the gear needed to remain safe and connected to other soldiers on the battlefield.

"I tell people in my office, 'Stop hanging stuff on the kids like they're Christmas trees,' " Brig. Gen. Peter Fuller said Oct. 12 at the 10th Annual C4ISR Journal Conference in Washington, D.C. Fuller is head of Program Executive Office Soldier.It is time to integrate soldier gear, Fuller said, showing photos of soldiers and Marines worn out from the enormous amount of weight they are carrying.

He said the service hopes to address the problem by integrating soldier systems so that they perform multiple functions. He cited the use of separate eyepieces, one for night vision and another to provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

Part of the problem, he said, is that various Army offices provide soldiers gear without enough coordination. Fuller's office provides basic kit, but then soldiers get additional specialized gear depending on their military occupation.

A recent study showed that medics and mortar operators in Afghanistan are carrying the most weight: roughly 133 pounds for a three-day mission.

"The soldier is thinking, 'I have a lot of kit; what do I really want to carry?' " Fuller said.

The biggest problem is batteries, which account for 3 percent of a soldier's total weight. Although technological advances are allowing batteries to carry more power per pound, demand for power is also increasing, he said.

A prime reason is the Army's top-priority drive to link dismounted soldiers to battlefield networks, so they can get more information about their surroundings. But more sophisticated communications gear requires more power.

The simplicity and ease with which Americans use smart phones has led to the misperception that getting individual dismounted soldiers good intelligence information is easy, said Fuller. He said he has to remind people that the individual phone is not doing all of the work, but that the nearby cell tower is essential.

"It is rocket science to get C4ISR at the dismounted level," he said.

However, the Army is trying to get that "last, most disadvantaged soldier into the network," he said.

The latest integrated set of soldier gear, originally called Ground Soldier System and recently renamed Nett Warrior, will suck 14 percent less power than the older Land Warrior system. That means carrying two 2.2-pound batteries per day, not three, said Fuller.

Besides being heavy, batteries are high-density energy sources, which, when people are shooting at you, can be like having an IED right on your body, he said. The Army is evaluating whether it's safer to place batteries behind or in front of soldiers' protective Kevlar plates, he said.

There is a change of focus going on within the Army from thinking about the soldier as the centerpiece of every formation to focusing on the tactical small unit, said Fuller.

Now, rather than each solider, Army leaders are starting to ask: How much power does a squad need? This could change power requirements and therefore the weight each soldier is carrying, Fuller said.

Last month, Robert Scales, a former major general and commandant of the Army War College, gave an impassioned talk to reporters at the Brookings Institute, saying ground forces, specifically small units, are not getting the resources they need to be dominant in Afghanistan.

Scales said that without access to intelligence, small units are often fighting blind in Afghanistan, unable to see over the next mountain ridge.

He made a plea that the Pentagon devote more science and technology money to focusing on the small ground unit, giving it as much attention as it does major weapons platforms.
The biggest problem is batteries, which account for 3 percent of a soldier's total weight. Although technological advances are allowing batteries to carry more power per pound, demand for power is also increasing, he said.

A prime reason is the Army's top-priority drive to link dismounted soldiers to battlefield networks, so they can get more information about their surroundings. But more sophisticated communications gear requires more power.
However, the Army is trying to get that "last, most disadvantaged soldier into the network," he said.

The latest integrated set of soldier gear, originally called Ground Soldier System and recently renamed Nett Warrior, will suck 14 percent less power than the older Land Warrior system. That means carrying two 2.2-pound batteries per day, not three, said Fuller.
So even though increasing the amount of technogadgets the soldiers carries increases the weight, which they're trying to decrease, they're still going to press on with GSS/NW/LW, even though that system requires 2kg of batteries. Right, so where are they going to cut weight then? I don't see them reducing the amount of armour, by not requiring side plates to be worn (for example).
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by Zixinus »

Foot soldiers always have this problem: carrying too much. You see, they essentially live off everything they have on their back. Food, water, shelter. Any camper can tell you that this isn't easy when going cross-country. Then you add the weight of weapons, then ammo, then armor... it's a problem that is unlikely to be ever completely solved.

Hell, even in video games like Stalker, you end up carrying loads of useless crap. No wonder it's almost impossible in real life.

Now, unto the OP, it seems the problem is some sort of devil cycle than can only be cut by saying "sorry guys, we could give you this, but we want to spend that money on another tank rather than outfitting an entire army with an accessory that only has incremental". I wouldn't be surprised that part of the problem is due to how the US army (and perhaps marines) get their stuff in the first place.

The whole thing seems like a logistical headache. They get stuff and they give it to the soldiers. But soldiers don't need it or can't carry it, so they put it on a truck/storage to mostly rot except in certain conditions. Other people need it, so they instead put the stuff in a central storage and the unit has to request it to get it. That's paperwork, distance and time, so units probably want to hang on to this stuff ,which creates a conflict of interest. So ops have assign the stuff per mission, which leads to problems with expertese and time, especially on a battlefield... so soldiers just end up carrying the stuff anyway.

Trouble keeps going back to asking: just what is in an average soldier's pack and what can you lose from that?
The latest integrated set of soldier gear, originally called Ground Soldier System and recently renamed Nett Warrior, will suck 14 percent less power than the older Land Warrior system. That means carrying two 2.2-pound batteries per day, not three, said Fuller.
So, their improvement is carrying 1.6 pounds less?

* checks metric4us*

That's... 0.7 kilograms. While good, I would hardly call it that much lighter for someone that's carrying, what? 40 kilograms, with weapons and armor alone?
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by Phantasee »

That's a .7 kilo saving per day of operations. And that's two kilos of batteries per day of operations, too.

For one system.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by Master of Ossus »

The very idea that you can solve a problem by trimming some of a system that collectively constitutes 3% of that problem is ridiculous. I'm willing to bet that the article just talks a big game when it's really only focused on one particular military program and not some all-consuming desire to reduce weight carried by all infantry men. It reads like the writer was asked to write a story on how new tech is reducing the weight of information technology systems for soldiers and then asked something like, "Why is this important?" And then he got sidetracked completely by concerns about weight in general, rather than the main article, which should be about GSS.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by adam_grif »

I was once told that a contemporary soldier carries a heavier load than a Medieval knight did in full armor. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but they certainly do carry a whole lot of shit around with them. But we all know how to fix this, don't we?

Big Dog is the motherfucking answer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHJJQ0zNNOM
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by Sea Skimmer »

Master of Ossus wrote:The very idea that you can solve a problem by trimming some of a system that collectively constitutes 3% of that problem is ridiculous. I'm willing to bet that the article just talks a big game when it's really only focused on one particular military program and not some all-consuming desire to reduce weight carried by all infantry men. It reads like the writer was asked to write a story on how new tech is reducing the weight of information technology systems for soldiers and then asked something like, "Why is this important?" And then he got sidetracked completely by concerns about weight in general, rather than the main article, which should be about GSS.
Barring some radical change in technology, incremental improvements in weight reduction are all that’s fucking going to happen. So yeah, they matter. All the more so when the reduction is in a vital system, not something in the backpack which could be dropped or abandon with no short term loss of combat effectiveness.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by Ariphaos »

adam_grif wrote:I was once told that a contemporary soldier carries a heavier load than a Medieval knight did in full armor.
The knight isn't carrying much of his own supplies, presumably - he has assistants or horses for that.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by PeZook »

Well, in battle a knight would be expected to either do charge after charge after charge, or engage in hand-to-hand combat for hours at a time, so it's not like they had it much easier :D
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by Raxmei »

adam_grif wrote:I was once told that a contemporary soldier carries a heavier load than a Medieval knight did in full armor. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but they certainly do carry a whole lot of shit around with them. But we all know how to fix this, don't we?
Full IBA with SAPI, DAPS, and ESBI weighs about 45 pounds (20kg), which is in the same ballpark as full plate. Both fighters would drop any baggage they're carrying to fight if possible.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by PeZook »

Only exceptionally well made plate weighed 20 kilograms, though I'd imagine as metallurgy techniques improved the protection per kilogram would go up.

And of course a knight fighting on foot would have a somewhat different way of expending energy: he'd do a lot of waiting, then a few hours of horribly tiring hand-to-hand combat, then (if he survived) - back to a camp nearby.

Firefights play out a bit differently: there's less hacking and slashing and constant repeated blows to everywhere you can imagine, but a lot more running, noise and explosions and shrapnel and concentrating on tiny human figures 400 metres away, so direct comparisons of weight carried don't really translate.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by Enforcer Talen »

http://www.amazon.com/Soldiers-Load-Mob ... 853&sr=8-2

This has been an ongoing theme for centuries. We might trim a few pounds here and there, and then we get a new tech widget (flak and kevlar, or GPS, or whatever), and we are back to square one. For me, we mostly operated out of humvees - ie, non immediate stuff like food or gas masks were in the cabin, and immediate things like armor and a few magazines of ammo were kept on the person. The grunts generally trim on their own, regardless of policy. I think we had one bayonet in the platoon, and I know I was carrying just 4 mags by the end of the tour.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

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adam_grif wrote:I was once told that a contemporary soldier carries a heavier load than a Medieval knight did in full armor. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but they certainly do carry a whole lot of shit around with them. But we all know how to fix this, don't we?

Big Dog is the motherfucking answer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHJJQ0zNNOM
Because nothing helps in a war-zone like a robotic donkey that's slow, doesn't navigate very well, can only carry 345 lbs of stuff, and emits a high-pitched droning sound that will be drawing the attention of everybody in a kilometer, right?

I could see Big Dog being useful, but in a "decoy people out with this bizarre thing while your guys sneak up behind them to cap them in the head" sense, not in a "rely on this damn contraption to carry our supplies" sense.


You can get significant weight savings if you have a truly dedicated team of people whose job it is to go over every single piece of whatever you need to be lightened whose job it is to be completely anal about shaving off every odd 80 grams they can here and there without compromising performance. Just ask Lotus, for example.

It won't be cheap, though. Often that sort of weight savings involves using some exotic material that weighs less for the same (or even sometimes superior) performance, and costs ten or twenty times as much. Then of course you get problems where your weight-savings guys tell you to do something and the Army resists because of inertia: like recommending a newer, lighter firearm which armed forces resist because M-16s are as synonymous with America as baseball and apple pie.

It could be done, I've no doubt about that. But it almost certainly won't be done.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by Simon_Jester »

Master of Ossus wrote:The very idea that you can solve a problem by trimming some of a system that collectively constitutes 3% of that problem is ridiculous. I'm willing to bet that the article just talks a big game when it's really only focused on one particular military program and not some all-consuming desire to reduce weight carried by all infantry men. It reads like the writer was asked to write a story on how new tech is reducing the weight of information technology systems for soldiers and then asked something like, "Why is this important?" And then he got sidetracked completely by concerns about weight in general, rather than the main article, which should be about GSS.
My reading of the article didn't leave me thinking "this guy thinks that's the whole solution to the weight problem." As for 'getting sidetracked,' I don't think he was. The sheer physical burden of a soldier's kit is arguably a bigger problem than "we don't have absolutely perfect networking software for every man in the army." It's certainly one that merits attention.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by The Dark »

PeZook wrote:Only exceptionally well made plate weighed 20 kilograms, though I'd imagine as metallurgy techniques improved the protection per kilogram would go up.
Sure - inferior plate was 25 kilograms. Plate armor really wasn't that heavy. Quint drums can weigh 55 pounds or more, and carried on a harness that does not distribute weight well (the vast majority projects ahead of the body around the hips), yet I've seen guys sprint at respectable speed in them, and go at a high level of energy use for relatively long periods of time, so that level of weight should not be an issue. That said, anything that can be done to lighten gear will be done - even with those, we had guys that would strip some of the harness padding to save maybe a pound. Anything to make gear lighter is a good thing.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

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Sea Skimmer wrote: Barring some radical change in technology, incremental improvements in weight reduction are all that’s fucking going to happen. So yeah, they matter. All the more so when the reduction is in a vital system, not something in the backpack which could be dropped or abandon with no short term loss of combat effectiveness.
GSS is a vital system? For everyone, not just platoon and/or squad leaders?

Enforcer Talen wrote:http://www.amazon.com/Soldiers-Load-Mob ... 853&sr=8-2

This has been an ongoing theme for centuries. We might trim a few pounds here and there, and then we get a new tech widget (flak and kevlar, or GPS, or whatever), and we are back to square one. For me, we mostly operated out of humvees - ie, non immediate stuff like food or gas masks were in the cabin, and immediate things like armor and a few magazines of ammo were kept on the person. The grunts generally trim on their own, regardless of policy. I think we had one bayonet in the platoon, and I know I was carrying just 4 mags by the end of the tour.
Did you start wearing less armour, if the threat level allowed it, or did everything have to be worn all the time?
ShadowDragon8685 wrote: It won't be cheap, though. Often that sort of weight savings involves using some exotic material that weighs less for the same (or even sometimes superior) performance, and costs ten or twenty times as much. Then of course you get problems where your weight-savings guys tell you to do something and the Army resists because of inertia: like recommending a newer, lighter firearm which armed forces resist because M-16s are as synonymous with America as baseball and apple pie.
Reduce the weight of the weapon too much and felt recoil will increase, which will decrease accuracy, resulting in an increase in amount of ammunition carried.

Switching over to telescoped cases or caseless would offer quite substantial ammunition weight savings.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by Zixinus »

Big Dog is the motherfucking answer.
I have a better one:
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Unlike Big dog, it's cheaper, doesn't need batteries, hell of a less noisy, can eat almost anything and might actually have more sense. Oh, and in case of an emergency, you can eat it.

Of course, I'm not surprised at it being proven, low-tech and perfectly sensible* the idea would be thrown out faster than money.

*For foot soldier units only mind. Not talking about armored vehicles.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by PeZook »

And it also requires specialized vehicles for transport, an entire support infrastructure equal or greater than that of a soldier, needs to sleep and graze and no, it's not quiet unless properly trained.

I agree Big Dog is not the answer, but it's just a technology demonstrator.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by Zixinus »

PeZook wrote:And it also requires specialized vehicles for transport, an entire support infrastructure equal or greater than that of a soldier, needs to sleep and graze and no, it's not quiet unless properly trained.
Fuck it then, give them bikes and these:

Image

You can always pedal harder. :P
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by Sea Skimmer »

[R_H] wrote: GSS is a vital system? For everyone, not just platoon and/or squad leaders?


The way warfare is going we may have every single solider controlling a robot or laser designating for dozens of micro guided bombs (various models from 13-40lb are in the works) with a system like that in ten years flat. Just look how quickly UAVs coated the battlefield once people realized how vital they could be in 2001-2002. Its been less then ten years and now we have entire UAV attack wings and thousands of new airframes with enough bombing capability to replicate most of desert storm. Networked warfare really is transformational and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what can be done. Extending the network to every man is the only way to fully exploit the process. The sooner the better, especially for a place like Iraqistan in which enemy electronic warfare is minimal and very few people need to cover a vast area of terrain. A bunch of other people are working on the exact same kind of gear and have in some instances fielded it more quickly then we did. So yeah, it’d say its vital for everyone. Certainly even if it is not vital this very minute to have it, it is vital that planning from the moment onward provides margins for weight bulk and power for every man to have gear like that, so that by the time it becomes not just vital but indispensable we aren’t fucked.

As we speak the Army has a brigade in Nevada training with the first increment of FCS and Land Warrior spawned systems intended for actual service, which includes the solider networking gear and various ground relays which extend the range of the network. The next stop for that stuff is combat in Afghanistan early next year.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by ShadowDragon8685 »

[R_H] wrote:
ShadowDragon8685 wrote: It won't be cheap, though. Often that sort of weight savings involves using some exotic material that weighs less for the same (or even sometimes superior) performance, and costs ten or twenty times as much. Then of course you get problems where your weight-savings guys tell you to do something and the Army resists because of inertia: like recommending a newer, lighter firearm which armed forces resist because M-16s are as synonymous with America as baseball and apple pie.
Reduce the weight of the weapon too much and felt recoil will increase, which will decrease accuracy, resulting in an increase in amount of ammunition carried.

Switching over to telescoped cases or caseless would offer quite substantial ammunition weight savings.
I am aware that you can't lighten the weapon too much, but I'm also led to believe it's the biggest bitch to carry. I was also thinking of just how you could significantly lighten a weapon and the weight of the ammo was the first thing I thought of.

It makes me wonder if there's any material capable of replacing the brass used in ammunition cartridges that's significantly lighter. Of course, caseless would be superior still, so I wonder why everybody hasn't been clawing their way over everybody else to get caseless designs.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by Zixinus »

Of course, caseless would be superior still, so I wonder why everybody hasn't been clawing their way over everybody else to get caseless designs
Because then you would have to throw out the god-knows-how-many-tons of standardized NATO ammunition already in stock.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by Sea Skimmer »

ShadowDragon8685 wrote: I am aware that you can't lighten the weapon too much, but I'm also led to believe it's the biggest bitch to carry. I was also thinking of just how you could significantly lighten a weapon and the weight of the ammo was the first thing I thought of.

It makes me wonder if there's any material capable of replacing the brass used in ammunition cartridges that's significantly lighter. Of course, caseless would be superior still, so I wonder why everybody hasn't been clawing their way over everybody else to get caseless designs.
The Army is working on caseless ammo and as a backup plastic cased ammunition under the Lightweight Small Arms Technology program. The ammo will also be telescoped. Either concept could bring a weight reduction of more then 25% over conventional brass ammo but if the caseless ammo worked out well enough it could be a 40% reduction. This ammo would of course require entirely new weapons which also provides a chance to make the weapons lighter using every new plastic-composite technology we have, currently effort is being a focused on a light machine gun because if the ammo will work in a machine gun with its high heat load, then it will surely work in a rifle. The basic problems with caseless ammo are that the case removes heat from the gun. The gun must now be designed to function with a much higher heat load and that process WILL hit hard limits. Also the brass case seals the breach, now the gun has to be self sealing (it took a century to invent the case to do this in the first place), and the case provides mechanical protection to the ammo in storage. Now the ammo must be strong enough not to be damaged while its forced into a magazine or carried in a box, and yet still made of a material which will fully combust upon firing. Not easy.

This is the reason why the M16 persists. Sure we could replace it right now and save a little weight and gain some reliability. But it’d have to use existing ammo as no acceptable caseless ammo has been perfected, and we’d spend billions of dollars to do it, ensuring that radical new weapons with new ammo get pushed even further down the line to the year 2035 or what have you. So the M16 and M4 are going to keep chugging along until one program or another can finally provide that radical reduction we all desire. As it is LSAT has been running for seven years, and it typically takes 10-15 years to perfect a wholly new automatic weapon and ammo design. That’s why so many weapons in the armada of post Cold war assault rifle designs guns just recycle the action from an existing AK-47 or AR15 or the G36 (which is a recycled AR-18 anyway) rather then going to something really new. For real progress you've got to wait.

Now with new electronics like the land warrior gear, the situation is different. We don't have millions of perfectly good computers to replace or anything, its a new system with little production, so making upgrades on the fly makes sense before we really settle down on a true mass production configuration.

As a random note, you could save weight over brass ammo right now by using steel, this is done for some automatic cannon ammo. But of course steel will rust (using stainless steel would get really fucking expensive) so that’s not good for infantry ammunition which is bound to get wet at some point in storage or while being carried. The Germans used a lot of steel cases in WW2 and found themselves having to wax the metal inside and out to have an acceptable shelf life even under high ammo consumption war conditions.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by Enforcer Talen »

R__H wrote:
Did you start wearing less armour, if the threat level allowed it, or did everything have to be worn all the time?
We all had the basic front and back armor, but some guys chose to use or not use the side sheaths. I used them, but traded out weight elsewhere. Our turret gunners also had full length sleeves, which I didnt use. The unit also experimented with pants and riot gear masks, but we didnt find those ones worth the effort.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by ShadowDragon8685 »

Sea Skimmer wrote:<Massive infodump>
Wow, thanks. That's a pretty good discourse on the reasoning.

I thought that an acceptable caseless ammo had already been come up with, though - or was I mistaken?

As for using steel, could you use steel that was painted or electroplated with something that won't oxidize, or would that be unacceptable? I can see how painting could be problematic because of worries of uneven application in a tight-tolerance situation.
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Re: U.S. Army Looks to Lighten Troops' Load

Post by Sea Skimmer »

ShadowDragon8685 wrote: I thought that an acceptable caseless ammo had already been come up with, though - or was I mistaken?
The Germans made it work in the G11 which was a 4.6mm weapon. Making small caseless ammo is easier then bigger rounds because of the mechanical strength problem. To make up for that low firepower meanwhile the G11 featured a nifty three round burst at 2000rpm feature, which increased overheating problems inherently. Meanwhile the single shot performance was what you'd expect out of a tiny bullet, not very competitive. Regular automatic fire acutally had to be pretty slow at 450rpm in ordered to make it safer to fire and overheating and cookoffs. Mind you these cook off problems took place in a central Europen climate, not a 110 degree desert. It'd be interesting to know if the G11 ever even attempted desert trials. It died as a peace dividend in 1991, but its future was already uncertain.
As for using steel, could you use steel that was painted or electroplated with something that won't oxidize, or would that be unacceptable? I can see how painting could be problematic because of worries of uneven application in a tight-tolerance situation.
Painting wouldn't be very good for small arms and it could chip off. Electroplated ought to work but I have no idea as to the cost of doing that for the roughly 1 billion scale cartridges the US Army buys every single year. I've handled Yugoslavian 7.62x39mm steel cased ammo which was steel and the whole cartridge had clearly been dipped in lacquer or something similar, but it had also sat its whole life in some Yugoslavian bunker before ending up in an ammo box in my house so nothing would have worn it off. I'd imagine NATO standards which are set by the US are higher for durability, Yugoslavia churned out lots of junk alongside some good ammo. You can also get problems in some guns from the steel being nearly as hard as the metal of the gun action. That means a lot more abrasion on the weapon when it fires compared to brass, and while steel wont melt easily, it doesn't carry away as much heat brass will leading to more rapid overheating. So its generally a problem not seen as worth solving.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
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