Via VOA News:

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has expressed concern that the slow process of approval for U.S. arms sales is forcing some countries, including Iraq, to buy weapons elsewhere. VOA's Al Pessin reports from Santiago, Chile, where Secretary Gates is visiting.

Frustration over the slow approval process resulted in a $100 million Iraqi arms purchase from China, announced in Washington Wednesday by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. The light weapons are for Iraq's police forces. Secretary Gates says that causes him some concern.

"We have been concerned that our process is taking too long. On the other hand, the first request we received from the Iraqis for weapons was in January. We have already delivered over $600 million worth of weapons," he said.

Secretary Gates says another two-to-three-billion dollars worth of Iraqi purchases are in the process of being approved. The secretary says he is not particularly concerned that the Iraqi police purchase went to China, but he says the United States needs to improve its Foreign Military Sales Program for all its customers.

"This is an issue that we have to look into and see what we can do in the United States to be more responsive and to be able to react more quickly to the requirements of our friends," said Gates.

If his Wikipedia bio is accurate, Robert Gates has never had any sales experience, which explains a lot. Let me take this opportunity, as someone who had sold a weapon or two, to explain what probably really happened here.

The slow procurement process may have been a good excuse, but for this particular $100 million small arms purchase from China, an excuse is probably all it was. The truth is that U.S. small arms are inferior for Iraqi needs.

The primary U.S. military assault rifle these days is the M4, a variant of the decades-old M16. It shoots a 5.56mm, .22 caliber bullet.

The M4 features a much shorter barrel than the M16, which means that the small 22-caliber bullet doesn't build up that much velocity or power. The result? Bad guys often don't go down even when shot multiple times, and are often quite capable of still fighting back. Because of this poor performance from short-barreled rifles, various other calibers are being tested as a replacement, including the 6.8 SPC and 6.5 Grendal.

In addition to stopping power issues, the M4/M16 family of weapons, while typically quite accurate, require diligent maintenance, and if they aren't take care of, quickly become inoperative. As a result, variants of the weapon with completely different operating systems are under development, and trials to replace the entire weapons system ebb and flow around the obsolete design.

Compounding all of this is that fact that these are not inexpensive firearms, with variants potentially costing into the thousands of dollars for a single firearm when all the bells and whistles are added, and the magazines (which are considered consumables), parts and cleaning kits are also costly over the life of the weapon.

By contrast, the AK-pattern rifles popular in Iraq and elsewhere are favored for a number of obvious reasons. They are quite inexpensive to produce and purchase, require far less maintenance than most comparable weapons systems, and fire a far more effective cartridge(7.62x39) than the 5.56 NATO, which also happens to be far more readily available and less expensive on the open market.

If you have $100 million to spend to arm a police force composed primarily of new recruits who will get only moderate (and uneven) training, are unlikely to practice a diligent maintenance schedule, who live in harsh environment when sand and grit will constantly be introduced to their weapons, and prefer that the people they shoot act like they've been shot, which weapon would you choose?

If I'm in charge of procurements, I'm going for the more reliable, powerful, less expensive weapon every time, a decision not made any more difficult by any gratuities that may result of this already no-brainer decision.

We've got an antiquated weapon system requiring far too much TLC that fires an anemic round.

That we're delivering it slowly isn't exactly our greatest problem.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:14 AM | Comments (16) | Add Comment
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