Monday, February 13, 2012

Thoughts on the history of military hardware

This is well worthwhile.

This is a long winded post, and it is still an utter simplification of the true history behind weapons development. However I've made it as short as possible to look at a few points that have been made to me as an Infantryman and Leader of Soldiers. These are things that are in the back of my head when it comes to integrating multiple weapon systems into a single unit. The higher up you go in the chain the more firepower you get to plan for, but today I'm just going to write about small arms as would be found at the Platoon level.

In any video game reloading is pretty simple, press a button and it happens. Video games are really great at showing how the infantry closes with and destroys the enemy (except for that life meter thing, normally life is a binary meter in either the on or off state). Watching kids play "Call of Duty" is educational, some just blaze right into a room and start firing and hope they get more hits into the bad guys than the bad guys get into them. Loads of fun I assume (I don't play "Call of Duty" or any other first person shooter) but not good tactics.

In real life, the mechanics of reloading a firearm are a tad bit more involved than pressing a series of buttons. As I was familiarizing myself with the mechanics of loading a Garand (aka fiddling around with it for fun) I realized that there is a very distinct set of motions required to reload the 8 round En Bloc clips. Don't get me wrong, once proficient in the manual of arms for a Garand reloading with those clips can be VERY fast.

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