The liberal blog The Carpetbagger Report has a post up this morning entitled They donÂ’t even have the right rifles, in which the author laments over National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers being re-deployed without enough time between deployments and without the right equipment.

The post is based upon this article in today's New York Times.

Now, it is perhaps deceptive enough that the blog dowdified the quote it chose to feature from the Times article to leave out certain critical information that David S. Cloud felt was important enough to dedicate the second paragraph of the article to—namely that a final decision had not been made to re-deploy these soldiers—but the blog then focused the rest of its post on lamenting that the soldiers don't have the "right" rifles.

Unlike the Carpetbagger Report treatment of the Times article, I'll provide you with their full rifle-related original commentary:

As if that werenÂ’t bad enough, thereÂ’s the equipment problem weighing heavily on the military. Maj. Gen. Harry M. Wyatt III, commander of the Oklahoma National Guard, told the NYT that one-third of his soldiers lacked the M-4 rifles preferred by active-duty soldiers and that there were also shortfalls in night vision goggles and other equipment. Capt. Christopher Heathscott, a spokesman for the Arkansas National Guard, said the stateÂ’s 39th Brigade Combat Team was 600 rifles short for its 3,500 soldiers and also lacked its full arsenal of mortars and howitzers.

Think about that — National Guard troops are training for another quick deployment, but some of these soldiers don’t even have the right rifles yet. Body armor and Humvee protection is one thing, but Guard troops don’t have the rifles they want?

ItÂ’s unfortunately part of a trend.

The Politico reported today that military officials have given lawmakers “a long list of equipment and reconstruction needs totaling nearly $36 billion, denied earlier by the administration in its $481 billion defense appropriations request for the new fiscal year.”

The Army and Marine Corps say they need more than 5,000 armored vehicles, another $153 million for systems that defend against the deadly improvised explosive devices in Iraq and $13 million in language translation systems.

In an annual exercise initiated by the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, the military service chiefs were asked to forward spending priorities for the new 2008 fiscal year that either Pentagon budget planners or White House budget officials struck from the servicesÂ’ original requests. Lawmakers use the list to gauge where military commanders see shortfalls and to justify additions to the appropriations. [Â…]

The ArmyÂ’s $10.3 billion list includes $2.2 billion for 2,500 special vehicles to better protect troops against roadside bomb attacks.

Murtha’s “readiness strategy” is premised on the argument that troops with inadequate training and equipment shouldn’t be sent to Iraq. With this in mind, expect today’s reports to play a big role in the congressional debate. I can’t wait to hear to hear war supporters argue that National Guard troops who currently don’t even have the right rifles should be deployed anyway.

Now that we've heard the complaint about having the "right" rifles, let's take a look at exactly what we're discussing.

This is the M4 carbine:

The most common variant is chambered to shoot 5.56X45mm NATO ammunition out of a 14.5" barrel, has a 14.5" sight radius, and has a multi-position collapsible stock. It weighs in at 5.9 lbs (empty). Bullets leave the barrel at 2,900 ft/sec and generate 1645 joules of energy at the muzzle (Data from Colt Weapons Systems).

The M4 is the weapon many soldiers prefer for its compactness, lower weight, and adaptability.

This is the M16 rifle:

The most common variant is chambered to shoot 5.56X45mm NATO ammunition out of a 20" barrel, has a 19.75" sight radius, and has a fixed stock. It weighs in at 7.5 lbs (empty). Bullets leave the barrel at 3,100 ft/sec and generate 1765 joules of energy at the muzzle (Data from Colt Weapons Systems).

This combat-proven basic configuration and its updates have been the primary combat rifle for the American military for four decades.

Now, the Carpetbagger Report has somehow determined, using some leap of illogic, that the "preferred" M4 is the "right rifle," though how they came to that conclusion is never explained.

The operating mechanisms, rate of fire (700-950 rounds per minute) and ammunition of these two weapons are nearly identical; the primary difference between the two weapons is the barrel of the M4 is 5.5" (27.5%) shorter than that of the M16.

The shorter barrel length and overall shorter weapon length of the M4 (also due to the multi-position collapsible stock) of the M4 makes the weapon extremely popular ("preferred") by many of our soldiers, as does it's lighter weight. But many does not mean all, and it does not mean right, and that shorter weapon has some serious drawbacks, among them, a serious lack of "stopping power."

Without getting to bogged down in the technical aspects, the M16 and M4 issued to our military use the standard 5.56x45 NATO round; the 5.56 being a militarized, higher pressure/higher velocity version of the .223 Remington cartridge. The .223 Remington is , as Wikipedia correctly notes, a slightly enlarged and higher velocity version of the .222 Remington.

What is the primary avocation of the .222 and .223 Remington rounds?

Shooting creatures like these guys:

As you may well imagine, a cartridge developed from a family of cartridges designed to shoot small, lightly-armored woodland creatures has developed a reputation as having problems stopping much larger and occasionally armored humans. That problem is compounded in shorter-barrelled weapons such as the M4:

There has been much criticism of the poor performance of the round, especially the first-round kill rate when using firearms that don't achieve the velocity to cause fragmentation. Typically, this only becomes an issue at longer ranges (over 100 meters) but this problem is compounded in shorter-barreled weapons. The 14.5-inch barrel of the U.S. military's M4 Carbine can be particularly prone to this problem. At short ranges, the round is extremely effective, and its tendency to fragment reduces the risk to bystanders when used at close range. However, if the round is moving too slowly to reliably fragment on impact, the wound size and potential to incapacitate a target is greatly reduced.

I've spoken with several soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg shortly after they returned from deployments to Iraq, and the lack of stopping power of the M4 was a significant complaint. On soldier I spoke with had just completed a tour in Ramadi, and mentioned that he had shot one insurgent in the chest three times as he advanced, and it took a fourth shot to the head to finally end the threat. He was armed with an M4, and despised the weaponÂ’s poor stopping power.

Also armed with the M4 were the soldiers of the "Deuce Four" Stryker Brigade Michael Yon wrote about in Gates of Fire, where:

Prosser shot the man at least four times with his M4 rifle. But the American M4 rifles are weak - after Prosser landed three nearly point blank shots in the man's abdomen, splattering a testicle with a fourth, the man just staggered back, regrouped and tried to shoot Prosser.

Prosser then engaged the man in heated hand-to-hand combat before finally prevailing over a man he'd already shot four times. The terrorist, 50% less fertile than before, was captured, and survived his wounds.

The simple fact of the matter is that the M4 may be "preferred" by some troops, but because of its record of dubious stopping power, it is not the favorite of all, leading to some soldiers preferring the M16, while others prefer modernized variations of the Vietnam-era M14 battle rifle. Because of the M4's anemic stopping power, there has been rushed special operations development of more powerful cartridges for elite forces, including the 6.8 SPC, 6.5 Grendal, and the .50 Beowulf, to pick up where the 5.56 M4 falls short.

Clearly, there is a huge gap between "preferred" and "right," and millions of dollars have been poured into the development of weapons and cartridges precisely because many in the military community feel that the M4 is not the "right" rifle as the Carpetbagger Report argues from a position of ignorance.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:08 PM | Comments (21) | Add Comment
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Michael Yon has a question for his readers: What the heck is this?

As the Drudge link seems to have fried Yon's server momentarily, here's the low-resolution version he emailed me this morning as he was trying to ID it.

Photo property of Michael Yon. Swiped pending permission.

Funky, isn't it?

It looks fearsome, but don't plan on buying one: this homemade weapon was pulled from a captured ammunition cache in Iraq.

What is it? Here is what I told Mike this morning when he asked for my opinion:

I want to start by saying that without being able to get other angles and actually take the thing apart, what follows is purely unadulterated speculation, and perhaps laughably wrong.

That out of the way, I think my original, joking assessment calling this a potato gun might not be too far off.

This appears to have a crudely manufactuered wood front grip and stock, and the size of the holes in both to me suggest that they might have used nuts, bolts and washers to put this thing together... we're not talking a weapon designed by experts, or a weapon designed to handle much in the way of pressure. The welded together scope mount is probably not "true," and if you tried to adjust it, it would probably pull you off target. Based on what I can see, I'd suggest the scope is mostly for show, not performance.

The plunger-type trigger to me suggests a friction ignitor, once again suggesting a potato gun, as does the larger of the two tubes, which suggests a combusion chamber leading to the smaller front tube, which is the barrel.

With nothing else to go on, I really think it is a tater gun, though perhaps one with serious intentions.

If you've got a tube of sufficient strength to handle a decent amont of propellant without detonating, I'd guess it could be used as a crude launcher, perhaps being used to toss molotov cocktails a little further or with a little more velocity or accuracy. If it wasn't found in a cache, I'd think it was a complete joke.

Feel free to drop your guesses of what it might be used for in the comments.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 04:22 PM | Comments (17) | Add Comment
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So a 77-year-old Minnesota farmer and local Township Board member by the name of Kenneth Englund has been charged for taking the law into his own hands, chasing down a thief and holding him at gunpoint until police arrived.

A lot of us would like to do what the farmer did in this case, or are at least supportive of such actions, but civilians are simply not allowed to do what this man did.

As the sherrif said:

Sheriff Mike Ammend said people can't take the law into their own hands, and that Englund's actions were "an invitation to a shootout. There's so many things that could have gone wrong here."

Englund has been charged with second-degree assault.

Which brings me back to this.

Paul Hackett did almost the exact same thing in Ohio. The man who drove through his yard has already been sentenced.

Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters decided not to charge Hackett.

Apparently, vigilante justice is just fine in Hamilton County.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:01 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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