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The gravel belly is sort of the military equivalent to the Fudd.
Its why a bullet-proof rear sight on an M16A1 was changed to a fiddly one on the M16A2.
But it's older than that.
You should see the complicated sights we put on our infantry rifles.
Then go on to not bother teaching the troops how they work.
The people who wanted and needed the vernier caliper quality in the rear sights are people compete on known distance ranges.
As WW2 progressed, we asked the troops if they were using the adjustments in their sights. We interviewed captured troops. We exchanged information with our allies.
It was a rare soldier who bothered to adjust the range setting. It was nearly unheard of to change the windage setting.
So the Army responded by keeping the sights from the Garand and put them on the M14. Then they added adjustable sights to the M1 Carbine.
Bahwah?
I would love to have God's video tape to see if all those "the carbine couldn't penetrate a Chinese winter coat" were actually misses caused by the rear sight being easily adjustable now and knocked completely off zero by the soldiers absent minded fiddling around with it.
I think things are different now, but I do note that the back-up iron sights we issue all have a range setting and can be adjusted for windage without tools.
Yeah.
ReplyDeleteIt's a shame there's no effort made, because when you get a rifleman (or make one, because you see the value) who knows how to use his tools, you get Cpl. (later famously Sergeant) Alvin York.
And I say this as one of a moderately rare number of people having qualified expert with both the Army at Fort Knox, and five times with the USMC on both coasts and on Okinawa. Army "marksmanship" training spent most of the time teaching people - via minimally-qualified drill sergeants - how to ricochet short rounds into the plastic pop-ups rather than taking five minutes' time showing them how to adjust the sights properly. (Not least f which because that wears out the plastic centers even quicker).
The Marines, by contrast, spent three weeks just on riflery, and employed Primary Marksmanship Instructors whose sole purpose, 24/7/365, was to teach actual textbook marksmanship to people who'd never handled a weapon, and churn out a substantial number of dead-shot experts, and replace the paper targets every day, for every shooter, because they have this bizarre fixation that "hits count".
Nobody was "skipping rounds into shot-out plastic knock downs". They'd have set that guy on fire for doing that, then drawn and quartered the carcass, and fired the pieces out of field artillery. Then gone after his family.
Lack of proper marksmanship training, even with modern assists, is why there's no Iraq story of anyone accusing soldiers of executing people because their ACOGs were letting them get headshots at 300 and 400 yards.
If you're not going to teach proper sight use, take them off, and sharpen the bayonets.
Maybe weld a bore-sighted metal straw-sized tube to the receiver instead.
Or else give them a red-dot, laser, etc., but knowing that if it goes tits-up, or gets klunked, they're carrying a loud club.
Sights are good.
Knowing how to use them is better.
If we're not going to teach even that, do a proper work-around.
Or save money and just issue them blanks and tell them to absorb bullets to protect the machinegunners.
It comes down to institutional bias for or against infantry troops being effective, or just ancillary.
I'm not a fan of the Army treating infantry troops as a sideshow, but it's not my circus or my monkeys.
The guys the Army MTU actually trains and qualifies right, regularly take all-service championships, even against the Marines' team.
But if the competition was entire infantry platoon vs. infantry platoon (or similar-sized units) from each service, the bog-stock regular Army infantry platoon would likely place twelfth, behind the Coast Guard and the Air National Guard.
Just a hunch, but I'd love to see it tested IRL.
It would be illuminating.
That's why the Italians put fixed sights on later Carcano rifles, which bothered the Finns who liked to accurately zero their rifles https://www.jaegerplatoon.net/RIFLES6.htm
ReplyDeleteThe MAS36 also had simple sights with limited adjustment.