Where we need help is in two areas: One, which is the continual bete noir for the budget-conscious, is in training and the provision of sufficient ammunition to do that training. The second is improvement in sighting and command/control systems.

Nine-tenths of the reason you don’t get the optimum effective fires out of your element on the ground is down to two things: One, observation–There may only be one guy who can see the enemy, or the enemy may be entirely obscured. Two, ranging–Most soldiers are absolutely horrible at assessing ranges, and that’s down to, again, inadequate training and lack of realistic training. Range estimation is something that emphatically can be learnt, but the problem is that not enough time or emphasis is put on it–Try to get a block of time on your training schedule for “Range estimation training” sometime, and you’ll see what I mean. Nobody in the senior ranks sees it as a vital issue, so it gets half-assed.

Not only that, but whatever range-finding gear you might have is hardly ever trained on or used in daily field operations. The laser rangefinder, should you be so fortunate as to have one on your MTOE, rarely if ever leaves the Arms Room, usually due to its specialized batteries not being available and/or other issues.

Even the basic stuff, like binoculars for the MG teams, are not seen as being important. You can’t use a reticle to range the target, if you don’t have one. And, the odds that if you do have one, by some accident of fate or foresight, the guy carrying the damn thing likely won’t know how to use it effectively.

The other part of all this is the bit where you spot and positively identify the enemy. You need to know what they look like, and you need to be able to spot their movement accurately, as well as ensure that you’re not actually observing friendly forces. So, situational awareness and spotting skills need a great deal of training and emphasis that they don’t normally get.

No, you want to improve this “lethality” thing, there are a bunch of other things you should be doing long before you change out your weapons: First, train better and harder. Second, procure sighting and communications gear such that you can communicate easily between members of the rifle squads about where the targets are.

“Better” weapons don’t mean squat, if you don’t direct their fires more effectively at the right targets. The low-hanging fruit here is in the training, sights, and command/control/communications/intelligence realm, not the ballistics.

The ballistic solution that came out of the XM-25 program would have been great, were it fired off a tripod on full auto. Off a shoulder, semi-auto? LOL… WTF? Do these people think we have hordes of Carlos Hathcocks waiting outside the recruiting station every morning, or something…? Do they think we can manage to fire enough live ammo with those weapons to get everyone to instinctively understand the flight characteristics of those grenades, estimate ranges, and then be able to fling them around effectively under combat conditions…? At what those damn things cost?

There are inherent limitations of precision with regards to what sort of ballistic solution Johnny can actually be effective with off of his shoulder. That’s a fact of life, one which I think all too many of these programs hand-wave away. One 25mm grenade with a complex air-burst fuse in it can’t carry enough of a payload to make the whole thing work worth a damn. That’s a fact of life, inherent to the physics and chemistry involved. Just like the inherent accuracy limitations inherent to shoulder-fired weapons–Both of which militate against anything like this working with current technologies.