New XM25 Grenade Launcher Announced by US Military

[Adios]

Charley is right, I do not shoot much. I simply am unable to shoot often.
I have looked through the entire thread and I still do not see where this quote from read much is located.

This guy's a real winner, ain't he? 

Oh, yeah.

[Phox]

On that note: We've missed you, CB. Not enough people slapping the newbs while you were away. 

[Adios]

On that note: We've missed you, CB. Not enough people slapping the newbs while you were away. 

This is a kinder, gentler me.

[Phox]

On that note: We've missed you, CB. Not enough people slapping the newbs while you were away. 

This is a kinder, gentler me.

Well, I guess i'll have to pick up the slack again.  Not that i mind that much.


In all seriousness though, it's good to hear from you again. 

[Adios]

On that note: We've missed you, CB. Not enough people slapping the newbs while you were away. 

This is a kinder, gentler me.

Well, I guess i'll have to pick up the slack again.  Not that i mind that much.


In all seriousness though, it's good to hear from you again. 

Thanks.

[Adios]

One day I told my son to try my 12 gauge. He didn't know I had slipped in a 3" Magnum buckshot load. It damn near dislocated his shoulder. 

Oh, and if you're wondering, he was 225 lbs at the time and a grown man.

[Phox]

One day I told my son to try my 12 gauge. He didn't know I had slipped in a 3" Magnum buckshot load. It damn near dislocated his shoulder. 

Oh, and if you're wondering, he was 225 lbs at the time and a grown man.

[Adios]

One day I told my son to try my 12 gauge. He didn't know I had slipped in a 3" Magnum buckshot load. It damn near dislocated his shoulder. 

Oh, and if you're wondering, he was 225 lbs at the time and a grown man.

We were always fucking with each other like that. He had me shoot his derringer once. I stupidly assumed it was a .22. It was a .45. We had to go look for it because it flew out of my hand and went over my head.

[Phox]

One day I told my son to try my 12 gauge. He didn't know I had slipped in a 3" Magnum buckshot load. It damn near dislocated his shoulder. 

Oh, and if you're wondering, he was 225 lbs at the time and a grown man.

We were always fucking with each other like that. He had me shoot his derringer once. I stupidly assumed it was a .22. It was a .45. We had to go look for it because it flew out of my hand and went over my head.

That happened to me the only time I ever fired a .45. 

[Adios]

Was it a derringer or a full frame?

[Phox]

Was it a derringer or a full frame?

It was full frame. But I thought it was a 9mm. 

[Adios]

 

Hurts, don't it?

[Phox]

Hurts, don't it?

I'm not allowed to shoot it anymore. 

[Adios]

Hurts, don't it?

I'm not allowed to shoot it anymore. 

[Cain]

LOL

http://exiledonline.com/xm25-gee-whiz-how-can-we-be-losing-with-such-cool-stuff/

My basic rule is that if Rick Sanchez said that water is wet, I'd start to doubt it, so I've got a couple of doubts about this story. First, it's very hard to tell if the XM25 works as well as we're hearing, because U.S. armed forces procurement is a big, sleazy business and involves more lies and propaganda than Stalin's show trials ever generated. There are proven cases of Army officers working with contractors from the big weapons companies to rig tests to make new weapons systems look good. If you take a look at this recent video of the XM25 putting on a show for the tame media, you'll see what I mean.

Most people have no idea how to read a video like this, so here are a few pointers to make you a smarter shopper next time you need to buy a weapons system. First, you'll notice that the reporters are told what's going to happen by Col. Tamilio, the Army's public-relations honcho for the new weapon. And he tells them, "You're not going to see anything" because the XM25 is firing dummy rounds, training rounds, non-explosive. After the soldier handling the weapon fires two rounds, Tamilio tells them the test went "two-for-two," but they're taking his word for it. All they actually saw was a guy shooting the thing twice.

Next, notice that after the first round is fired, a civilian in a baseball cap comes up, tinkers with the XM25, and whispers something in the shooter's ear. I'd bet my lunch that's a consultant from the companies that produced the XM25, telling the shooter how to baby the weapon to make it look good. You have to realize that in a lot of American high-tech businesses, everything from hip-replacement surgery to weapons testing, a lot of the the hands-on work is done not by doctors or soldiers but by industry guys who never get mentioned in the official reports. So this is not a combat-style firing by an ordinary GI; not only does the shooter have industry help right over his shoulder, but the shooter is identified as a major, and you can bet he was hand-picked for this demonstration.

It's a matter of money—big money. Defense contracts are the sweetest you can imagine, which is why defense contractors bribe the hell out of everybody from congressmen to foreign dictator's nephews to get them to buy. If you want a classic example of what defense procurement sleaze looks like, take a look at the career of former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, now better known as "Federal Inmate Cunningham." There are thousands of lobbyists and "consultants" who spend their whole lives greasing the Federal procurement process. Naturally the weapons nuts who follow news like the XM25 don't have a clue about this stuff, but the real grownups in DC pay very close attention to it.

The XM25 has a typical history for a big-money American weapons system. By the time suckers like Rick Sanchez get brought to the proving range to see it shown off, this weapons system has been through a career as sleazy as Duke Cunningham's. It all starts when one or more of the Armed Services comes up with a "need" for a new weapon. In this case, Plan A was a fantasy weapon called OICW, "Objective Individual Combat Weapon," that would combine the power of an automatic rifle and a grenade launcher. That program failed, and was split into two parts: one for a new rifle to replace the M4, and another for a rapid-firing grenade launcher, Program XM29, which ended up with the XM25. Along the way, the program ran into more corporate and political interference than you can imagine, especially because some of the competitors were foreign companies. Colt Industries, the company that makes the current M203 grenade launcher, actually called in a rule that the Defense Department had to use American corporations in certain cases, so they could get a piece of the procurement pie.

That's pretty standard  Defense contractor behavior: if you're losing out to a foreign competitor, and you can't just bribe some tool like Rep. Cunningham to step in on your side, then play the "Buy American!" card.

Sometimes good weapons come out of all this sleaze, sometimes not. And even when the results are good, you can count on the fact that some contractor who loves to wave the flag made some obscene profits by gold-plating the winning weapons system, loading it up with expensive options. It's not hard when the armed-services officers in charge of signing off on the money know they can go right to work for the contractor as soon as they retire.

So maybe, just maybe, the XM25 will do what it's supposed to do. But even if it does, it won't be a "game-changer" in either of our wars, because irregular wars like Iraq and Afghanistan aren't decided by superior weaponry. If they were, we'd already have won both those wars about a million times over. The Taliban use old Soviet AK rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and get to battle on foot or bouncing along in the back of Toyota pickups. But in spite of this humongous gap between our tech and theirs, the senior British commander in Afghanistan went on record in 2008 saying the Taliban will not be defeated militarily–and he should know, because the Brits have been fighting the Pashtun irregulars for two centuries now.

Let's take the best-case scenario and say that this new weapon, the XM25, makes every American infantry squad so lethal that the Taliban and the Iraqi insurgents lose a huge number of men and can't afford stand-up fights any more. What that would do is force an accelerated evolution in the same direction guerrilla war's been evolving for more than 100 years: away from trying to fight the invading army on its own terms and toward assassination, bombs, betrayal—all the ways insurgents love to fight and conventional armies hate. In practical terms, that means more Taliban enlist in the Afghan Army and wait for the chance to mow down the Western soldiers who are supposedly their buddies. Or more Taliban go home and wait until we lose interest and go home, then dig up their buried guns and go stomp their less-militant neighbors. Or, worst and most likely of all these scenarios, more Taliban forget about chancing a firefight and stick to IEDs.

According to the U.S. Army's own newspaper, the Army Times, IEDs now account for 75 percent of American casualties in Afghanistan.

Most of our GIs are not dying or being wounded in the kind of firefight the XM25 is designed to win. They're dying in a much nastier way: getting blown up by remote control while they patrol rural Afghan dirt roads.

And unfortunately, the only effect a gee-whiz weapon like the XM25 is likely to have is raising that figure closer to 100 percent.