Curzon cites an AP story that leads off with the claim that the US soldier’s M-4 carbine is no match for the old-fashioned bolt-action rifle of the Taliban sharpshooter — which is almost true.
My comment:
The word coming back from Afghanistan is that we should forget the fables about Afghan marksmen, because the current crop of Taliban can’t shoot straight. The “kids these days” prefer to “spray and pray” with automatic fire from AK-47s loaded with mixed and matched old ammo of dubious quality.
Certainly the Taliban can field some old-school snipers — and some machine-guns — so there’s a movement to take back the infantry half-kilometer by training and arming American soldiers more like the Marines, who qualify at longer ranges using the longer-barreled M16; by training and arming more designated marksmen; and by potentially moving away from 5.56 mm to 6.5 mm or 6.8 mm.
That brings us back to the question of why American soldiers shoot a glorified .22 in the first place. After WWII, Operations Research showed that soldiers with full-auto weapons were much more likely to fire their weapons at all, that enormous numbers of rounds were fired per actual casualty scored, and that most engagements were at short range — so a light round with low recoil and decent short-range performance made perfect sense.
As much as I enjoy discussing weapons, this really is a perfect example of amateurs studying tactics. Only a tiny fraction of US casualties are from fire-fights, and the counter-insurgency doesn’t revolve around combat either.