The Flux Raider is a chassis system designed to turn the SIG P320 into a very compact PDW. The design concept began as a desire to improve the practical accuracy of a handgun by adding a collapsing stock while keeping the weapon holsterable. Flux’ first product, circa 2019, was a spring-loaded stock that could be attached to the back of a Glock pistol. This had some clear shortcomings, and it led to development of the MP17 in 2020. This was a SIG chassis, something made feasible by the use of a serialized fire control group in the P320 pistol. The MP17 used the same basic stock design as the original Flux brace, but added an optics mount and a space to store a space magazine.
Less than 400 MP17s were built before the design was refined into the Flux Raider, and the manufacturing changed from printing to molded polymer. Of particular significance was the choice of polymer compounds to use, as the typical glass-reinforced nylon is not rigid enough to keep a good optics zero. By opting for a much more rigid material (albeit a much more expensive one), Flux was able to remove the metal reinforcing in the chassis, lightening the system while still retaining an optics mount stable enough to hold zero under adverse conditions. The spare magazine system was also significantly improved in the Raider, and an ambidextrous manual safety added.
Today, Flux has partnered with SIG to produce the P320 Flux Legion. I am excited to see where Flux and SIG take the design from here!
Sorry, I am trying hard to be impressed, but just not getting there.
This is still a standard 9mm pistol, with the standard 9mm short barrel accuracy, with the standard 9mm semi-auto fire rate, with the standard 9mm magazine capacity. Okay you can quick load the second magazine. But is it really going to be so much quicker that it makes a difference in a tight situation?
I know there is much debate about the validity of the whole PDW concept. I just don’t see this system having any advantages to the pro-PDW side of the argument.
“(…)standard 9mm magazine capacity(…)”
According to https://www.sigsauer.com/p320-flux-legion.html it comes with (2) 30rd Mags so it is noticeable more than typical for P320 automatic pistol (17 for full-size 9×19 mm).
Magazine capacity helps. But I still think people try to do more with PDWs than they are capable of. I see their limits as taking on one or two adversaries when they are real close. PDWs are pushed beyond this into roles of low level combat. That is not what most firearms that at touted as PDWs are capable of. If you want something for this, stick to your grandfather’s M-1 or M2 carbine.
The disparity between practical, average human pistol vs. rifle accuracy far exceeds their mechanical-accuracy difference. Some Sailors fail the USN 3/7/15yd qual, and few would pass at the pistols’ spec range of 50 (where the M17 is capable of ~4″ groups).
Many shots wouldn’t even touch paper (I’ve seen a few miss the 3yd target!). Anyone could hit a torso from the shoulder at 50yds.
My one uncertainty with this one is the rigidity of the magic plastic connecting the optic to the frame (my optics mount is metal to metal). I don’t think it will make a big difference at realistic ranges, though it might wander over time.
The external slide to drop one or both magazines seems like it is just asking to get gummed up in the field and fail to move.
I’m not a fan either, but the extra mag(s) are less relevant given the accuracy advantage (and higher-cap first mag).
Indifference aside, the industry continues to innovate and many things continue to change in functionality and size from inception. Just seeing this stuff is cool. Practical? No idea. Interesting? Yes. Thank you again as usual Ian. Your reviews and musings are the best
Innovation always creates many “it looked good on paper” results before a truly good new thing comes along.
“(…)Flux Raider(…)”
This is clearly pun intended at new-fangled B-21 bomber, but I fail to comprehend it.
“(…)something made feasible by the use of a serialized fire control group in the P320 pistol(…)”
Wait… so what is actually fire-arm? Do you consider trigger-hammer group of Tokarev TT-30 automatic pistol to be fire-arm and all other parts of it non-fire-arm? Do you consider trigger-hammer group of Tokarev TT-33 automatic pistol to be fire-arm and all other parts of it non-fire-arm? If no, why similar thingy inside P320 is?
“(…)same Mission requirement(…)led to(…)MP7(…)”
Can it pierce body-armour at least as good as MP7 can?
In the Netherlands I have to shoot 18 times a year to keep my sportshooting license for my own firearm. A police officer has to shoot 4 (or 5?) times a year to be allowed “on the street”. That is not much! And their targets shoot back. So a 3 point contact stock like this will help a lot with hitting the right person.
So they’ve come up with yet another overweight, science-fiction-movie-prop add-on to tacticool a 9mm service pistol.
Hoop. Dee. Doo.
Of course, being a “semi-shoulder-stocked” pistol, it will incur the wrath of BATFET in the U.S. plus a $200 transfer tax.
And as the old saying goes, a shoulder stock turns a reasonable pistol into an indifferent carbine.
Sorry, I just can’t get excited or even mildly interested in crap like this anymore. If you want an improved service pistol, start with a better idea for the ammunition. 5.7 x 28mm was supposed to be that- but in an actual pistol-length barrel, it’s nothing more than a more expensive, centerfire version of .22 WMR.
4.6 x 30mm was also supposed to be an improvement; but even out of an 18cm (7″) barrel it only matches the FPE of standard-velocity 9 x 19mm commercial.
Both need MVs high enough to get MEs over 2000 FPE to achieve actual effectiveness. They’re only going to get there with conventional propellant powder.
Gentlemen of the design community, stop playing around with cyberpunk-wannabee frippery, get back to the drawing board, and come up with ammunition that outperforms 5.56 x 45mm in terminal effectiveness.
Then design a damned weapon around it.
clear ether
eon
That should be “they’re not going to get there with standard propellant powder.”
Damn and blast WordPress, anyway.
clear ether
eon
Past bad breath distance, any “indifferent carbine” will outshoot any pistol in the hands of anyone who isn’t an expert pistol shooter. The gap will widen the further down the experience scale you go (i.e. the support branches who usually end up with pistols).
And no, a “semi-stocked” [braced] pistol will not incur those legal limitations.
Also, I’m sure everyone killed or maimed with sub-2000FPE rifles (e.g. every AK and AR-15 variant) would be quickly restored by news of their inadequate terminal effectiveness . There’ve been plenty of “improvement” efforts, all wasteful.
Thanks for noticing my other finger malfunction. I meant 1000 FPE, there, 5.56 x 45mm energy levels.
Seriously, I have doubts about the whole “carbine-izing” pistols thing. Mostly, that the kind of non-trained personnel you’re referring to are likely to be at least moderately disturbed by a pistol slide racketing back and forth a foot or less from their nose. Which sort of negates the putative advantages of the stocked sort of pistol.
More specifically, in a modern battlefield situation, as Kirk points out, there are no longer any actual “front lines” or “rear areas”. The “front line” is wherever you happen to be standing when somebody who is supposedly on your side turns out not to be. That’s a job for a rifle, not any sort of pistol.
The same holds true in law enforcement and by extension, civilian self-defense. Check out a few “police pursuit” videos. You’ll see that thanks to NHTSA regulations, modern auto safety glass (developed from birdstrike-proof cockpit glass for aircraft) is the next thing to old-time bulletproof glass. Most pistol rounds will not penetrate it even at 90 degrees incidence and under ten feet distance. What will? The 5.56 x 45mm round. Which is why most police agencies have replaced the shotgun in the cruiser with an AR-15 carbine. And why the AR is probably the best all-around civilian “home defense” arm today.
It’s interesting to note that our most advanced defensive and service pistols today all use cartridges that are anywhere from half-a-century to a full century old. The 9 x 19mm is actually slightly older than the .45 ACP (1906 vs 1910). The 10mm Auto introduced in the 1960s is really just the 1909-vintage 9.8mm Colt/Browning under another name. And the “youngest” of the practical Magnum revolver rounds, the .357 Maximum, dates to 1980. (I find the .500 S&W and .480 Ruger of questionable practicality for anyone much smaller than Dwayne Hudson.) And except for those super-powered revolver rounds, the ballistic performance hasn’t changed much since Belleau Wood.
As I said, we need a new generation of small-arms ammunition to deal with the modern structural and training environment. Ideally, we should have pistol ammunition which performs as much like HVSC (High Velocity Small Caliber) rifle ammunition as possible.
And able to do it out of a pistol that some average person can actually carry all day and hit something with.
On these counts, the tacticooled gadgetry just doesn’t measure up.
cheers
eon
This dates back to 2021, but it’s being brought back to life for some reason. Possibly, someone has suffered an epiphany or a few synapses have fired properly for once…
https://wavellroom.com/2021/03/10/the-rear-area-no-longer-exists/
The handwriting on this has been on the wall since at least the late 1940s. Nobody has paid the slightest attention. Even the initial proponents of it all, the Soviet/Russian military have lost sight of it all. Within the last 48 hours, a “key leader” in Russia was supposedly assassinated by Ukrainian operatives, in the center of Russian power, Moscow. They used an explosives-laden scooter, a technique pioneered by Soviet protege Viet Cong during the Vietnam War.
Do note that this is a two-way street: The Soviets got hammered by the same techniques they were teaching in the Middle East and Africa when they went into Afghanistan. The stuff they were teaching the various insurgencies, that the mainline Soviet forces ignored.
Where this comes into play regarding small arms is the same point I’ve been harping on for years: You have to be ready to fight at full-scale wherever and whenever the opportunity arises. If you leave your forces half-hard, with only specialist “combat soldiers” being the ones called on to fight, with everyone else budget-triaged into ineffectuality, guess what? You’re going to lose, because none of those combat troops will ever be engaged, and all your logistics guys are going to get gradually worn down by the effective “training opportunities” those forces are providing for the enemy, with the positive effects on their morale stemming from minor successes in overpowering inadequately equipped and trained “non-combat” soldiers.
This is why this crap is inherently a joke; if you’re not planning on putting the same weapons and training into the hands of your so-called “rear-area troops” that you provide your “combat soldiers”, you’ve fundamentally mistaken the nature of modern war, which is basically that it’s rank and arrant idiocy to fight fair by engaging the enemy’s combat troops alone. If those troops don’t have water, food, fuel, and ammunition? They’re not combat-effective for very long. Go after the parts of the organizations that provide that stuff, and you’ll win. Eventually. Fail to protect that stuff, fail to run the enemy to ground and destroy him every time he engages your forces, anywhere they pop their heads up? You’re following a losing strategy, the same ones the US and Soviets followed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Half-ass weapons lead to half-ass operations. You don’t give the rear echelon troops the tools, the training, and the willpower to go after the enemy wherever and whenever? You’re going to lose. Period.
This is why every time I see these joke weapons anywhere, all I can do is point and laugh. The people specifying, designing, and procuring them are utter morons, buying mo’ bettah cavalry mounts in an era when machineguns, tanks, and the internal combustion engine are already becoming dominant.
I agree that something like this should never be taken anywhere near to the front lines. This sort of weapon is more for police and special security purposes. But even with that, I think this particular example is just goofy.
Ideally, we should have pistol ammunition which performs as much like HVSC (High Velocity Small Caliber) rifle ammunition as possible.
That would be the ideal, and I know that you are well aware, it isn’t possible.
you don’t have a large enough expansion volume in a pistol length bore to be able to transfer the energy of the powder to a small diameter bullet, and especially not at usable pistol operating pressures.
overcoming that problem is where ideas like Jon Ross’ lobbying S&W for the .500″ came from.
with that larger diameter bore, you get a larger expansion volume to help transfer the energy of a heavy charge of powder to a heavy bit of metal
you then need the shooting abilities of someone like a Jon Ross, to use the thing effectively.
the collapsible pistol stocks are getting into the same size range as the far more effective small 9mm SMGs, for example some of the later Spanish ones.
I can see the attraction of having two sorts of pistol calibre firearms, for the price and logistics overheads of one additional piece of plastic…
but, yeah
it’s less convenient than the plain pistol and far less effective than an M4 carbine, which in turn is more convenient but not as effective nor as reliable as a full length M16.
Ideally, we should have pistol ammunition which performs as much like HVSC (High Velocity Small Caliber) rifle ammunition as possible.
———–
I still say the long forgotten 7.62×25 Tokarev round is a good starting place for what you are looking for. Could use a rethink of its design, but does fit what you are looking for.
I didn’t say it was impossible, just that as long as you are stuck with conventional propellant powders, you can’t get there from here.
There are realistic alternatives. H&K came so close with the G11 rifle and its ammunition. A monolithic-grain propellant based on high explosives or even solid-fuel rocket propellant formulations could give a pistol-sized small-bore arm the kind of muzzle velocity needed to penetrate any reasonable defensive material (from Kevlar to “safety glass”) and still deliver decisive wounding characteristics on the far side of same, exactly as 5.56 x 45mm NATO does.
Where H&K went wrong was the whole “caseless ammunition” thing. Propellants like that need weather protection. They don’t do well when treated like Lego blocks or Play-Doh.
Liquid propellant is another possibility. Liquid rocket fuels like the hydrazines have much higher energy per mole than any smokeless powder ever formulated. The present trend toward “composite” plastic and metal cartridge cases would seem ideal for liquid propellant; Think of it as a miniature plastic soda bottle. (Tiny bottle of Mountain Dew with a major “kick”?)
There are realistic alternatives to tide us over until we get to man-portable rail guns or etc.
And even then, odds are the grunt with the rail-gun rifle will have a pistol with something like this in its magazines, for when the batteries run down.
cheers
eon
“(…)pistol ammunition which performs as much like HVSC (High Velocity Small Caliber) rifle ammunition as possible.(…)”
If you need this then use CBJ-MS PDW http://modernfirearms.net/en/submachine-guns/sweden-submachine-guns/cbj-ms-pdw-eng/
I’ve gone digging in that zone several times on the Web. .224 Boz, saboted bullets, extreme +P+ loadings. Ways to get carbine penetration from a pistol.
It means you have to choose whether to develop an entirely new round, an entirely new pistol, or both. Existing pistols & the rounds that fit them limit overall cartridge length to about 1.3 inches. If you compensate with a fatter cartridge, you need to bottleneck or use a sabot to retain the penetration from a skinnier bullet. But real-world users seem dissatisfied with sabots.
You could go to a tungsten core like Boz and CBJ did, but will there be tungsten supplies in wartime? You could even go to depleted uranium & good luck with the media reaction to that.
So far, no government has bitten the bullet, so to speak.
“(…)youngest” of the practical Magnum revolver rounds, the .357 Maximum, dates to 1980.(…)”
Wait… what about .327 Magnum designed at dawn of 21th century? Does it not count as defensive? Does it not count as practical?
It’s mostly a reiteration of the .32 H&R Magnum of forty-odd years ago. Which is another way of saying a modernized .32-20 Winchester Center Fire.
It’s a decent choice for a “trail gun” in a revolver, i.e. a small-game round that can, in a pinch, serve as a last-ditch, close-range defensive load.
A serious combat round, it just isn’t. Most obviously, it isn’t going to work well, if at all, in a self-loading arm. Its natural home in a repeating action other than a revolver would be a tubular magazine rifle, either a lever-action or a pump. This puts it firmly in the sporting cartridge category and out of serious consideration as a tactical round.
Ironically, if you make the modifications necessary to make it a practical tactical round, i.e. a rimless version that headspaces on the case mouth and thus suitable for self-loading actions, you end up with something midway between the .30 Pedersen device round of 1918 and the .30 U.S. Carbine round of 1940.
Meaning, you’re right back to century-old cartridge design.
cheers
eon
Eon,
Ah, 1000 makes a lot more sense; still high, but probably in the ballpark if we’re stuck with ball. .357SIG gets 818 out of my 6″ barrel. Maybe the more appropriate response would be to ignore an absurd convention to which we aren’t signatories rather than continuing cartridge contortionism.
The slide recoils into a plastic pocket and should be no more disconcerting than the cycling bolt of an open-top Carbine or Garand – probably less so when focused on a raised optic.
I also agree about “a pistol that some average person can actually carry all day and hit something with”, but a stock is the only way to do that, because anatomy and physics. Remember Ian’s ultimate [whatever the opposition of “damnation by faint praise” is] when he said Raider groups “start to open up after 125yds”? What non-Olympian is measuring pistol groups at 125yds, or even hitting paper?
And no, again, nobody ever said “Hey, there are safe rear areas now, so let’s replace rifles with PDWs.” The [very well documented, covered multiple times by Ian and others] truth is the exact opposite, both with the Carbine and again in the 90s: PDWs were developed as pistol replacements specifically because of the realization that there are not safe rear areas. Repetition of fuddlore doesn’t make it any more true.
The willful obtusity on display whenever this comes up is painful to witness. I’m thinking that the leading observation about this era of “military thought” in a few generations is going to be on par with the ones we ourselves make so dismissively of the WWI-era generals that thought élan could substitute for actual thought and/or realistic tactics.
The whole f*cking point I am making to you purblind fools is this: The implications of the observed fact that “there are no rear areas” anymore is this: Your precious, exquisitely equipped and trained “Combat Troops” are not the soldiers who are going to be engaged by the enemy. The enemy is going to avoid them. They’re never going to have operational effect, just like about 99% of the “combat troops” didn’t have any in Iraq. Why? Because they can’t kill an enemy that won’t fight them.
Meanwhile, the support and transportation troops that are getting the enemy contacts are the ones who’re getting constant engagements, limited ones, and the enemy is using them as training aids, finishing schools for their insurgency. They’re building confidence; the recruited insurgents are growing contemptuous of your vaunted “combat forces” because they can avoid the ponderous and dangerous combat troops, the non-combat troops aren’t ever willing to fight them at all, and the whole insurgency grows because you’re a f*cking idiot, with all your highly-trained military academy graduates sitting around the command post woefully discussing why the hell the enemy “won’t fight fair”.
You don’t equip your supposed “non-combat” troops or train them to fight? Why the hell would you expect them to do what is necessary, which is take the battle to the enemy whenever and wherever the enemy offers it?
That’s the flaw in all this “Let’s give the non-combat guys a cheaper, less capable weapon…” You’re basically giving them a license to avoid the fight, bypass the opportunity to engage the enemy: “I don’t have the weapons or the training; we’re blowing past this half-ass ambush these cretins set up…”
Which ignores the fact that by letting those “cretins” live and learn, helping train them? The next ambushes are going to be more effective, more deadly to your own men. Eventually, you’ll have done such a good job as OPFOR for the enemy that you’re going to find yourselves in yet another iteration of the same arrant moronicism demonstrated by the French Groupement Mobile 100 fiasco in Vietnam.
The enemy raises his head? You stomp his brains out. Period. If it’s the 101st Airborne’s elite infantry battalion he engages? You smile happily, and get to killing him. If it’s the 507th Maintenance Company? You stand, you fight, you stay stood and fighting until that enemy is run to ground, exhausted, and dead. You want all those bastards saying “Oh, dear God, do not attack those rear-area troops… They’ll kill you and everyone you know…”
If you don’t do that, you’re losing the war. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but the day will come when all those enemy soldiers you so carefully built and taught will be effective enough to take your “combat troops” on and win.
The whole point of this crap is to win the war. You don’t do that by half-assing it; you don’t do that by training the enemy’s forces for him. If some idiot decides to follow the ISIS recruiter off to war, you absolutely do not want him going home in six months telling the villagers he grew up amongst how much fun and glory he had fighting the “forces of evil” he thinks he is. You want his dead body rotting somewhere, and all his peers saying what a fool he was to ever listen to anyone about going to war in the first place.
This crap isn’t just applicable to the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Watch what happens going forward with the incipient insurrection we have going here in the US: Will people see what happened with the group that went after Brian Thompson and say “Wow, way cool… Look at that! I want to kill CEOs, too!!”, or are they gonna say “Look at those losers…”
If they say “I wanna join in…”, then you’ve lost the opening phases of the insurrection. If they say “Man, what fools…”, you’re winning.
The idiotic idea that there are ever situations that you can simply triage and say “Yeah, they don’t need real weapons…” is folly. It’s not so much the whole “Can they defend with pistol-caliber weapons” so much as it’s the attitudinal one: If the insurrectionists are ever left alive after an engagement, you’ve fundamentally screwed the pooch. If your troops are ever trained or conditioned (and, your choice of weapons to equip them with is a part of that) such that they do not or will not aggressively take the fight to the enemy, every time the enemy presents itself? You’re an idiot. Period. That’s how you lose wars. Just like we’ve been doing since Korea.
I don’t know how to get this crap across, apparently. It’s not the weapons so much as it is the mindset, the framing, the understanding… If you have a situation wherein the insurrection is observing your hard-ass combat troops drive by in their combat vehicles, and then seeing your raggedy, undisciplined support troops drive by in soft-skin vehicles, all casual and undisciplined? Guess what? You’ve just presented an operational flank to the enemy, and they’re going to exploit it…
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions (in this case, we all seem to agree with yours), but no one is entitled to his own facts.
Sure, but no one (here on Forgotten Weapons, or in any military or government) ever did, advocated, or said that. The Flux Raider is not cheaper or less capable than the M17. The P90 is silly-spaceagey and foolishly optimized for soft-armor defeat, but it isn’t less capable than BHPs or M9s – and it certainly isn’t cheaper. You’re tilting at strawmen.
No, Mike, I am not “tilting at strawmen”.
I’m addressing the basic reason that we’ve effectively lost every one of the wars we’ve been in for the last sixty f*cking years.
You people who advocate for these boutique little weapons like the entire class of PDW have zero comprehension of how to fight and win wars. You do not do that by effectively ceding battles to the enemy by way of mal-equipping your soldiers to fight, and then not bothering to train them to fight or inculcate the necessary aggression and will to win in them because they’re somehow “not combat troops”.
You’ve seen the evidence, and you’re still blind to it: Observe the reality of the 507th Maintenance Company, and the campaign-warping lunacy that proceeded from that. Had those soldiers not been betrayed by their higher leadership and civilian command authority, they’d have never been in that situation to begin with. They’d have been even worse off than they were, had your brilliant little ideas of economizing on weapons been prevalent, and all they’d had were PDW-class weapons.
That single event alone militates towards trying anyone advocating for PDW-class weapons for treason and malfeasance of office.
Here’s a truth that people like you had better embrace, and embrace it quickly: THERE ARE NO REAR AREAS; THERE ARE NO SUCH THINGS AS “NON-COMBAT SOLDIERS”.
You think otherwise? Plan on continuing to lose wars and people in them. You do not comprehend how to fight and win, which implies you have no goddamn business at all even commenting on this subject.
Your mentality in this regard is as if a farmer continually walks by the weeds growing in among his rows, until they’re “big enough” to bother with. Well, guess what? By doing that, said idjit farmer is allowing the problem to get bigger, harder to deal with, and further allowing it to spread seeds. It’s like your doctor looking at that PET scan and saying “Well, these tumors aren’t big enough to bother with… We’re wasting our time, doing anything right now… We’ll wait until they’re bigger…”
This is precisely how Iraq and Afghanistan went out of control. They allowed little things to go by, without effective response. Because (ta-da!!!) the forces engaged by the enemy were not “combat troops”, the mentality was that the enemy needn’t be engaged and run to ground. The “non-combat troops” were allowed to blow through ambushes, ignore assaults, and all the rest of what were actually “confidence-building exercises” for the enemy.
You stupid bastards simply do not grasp the facts here: If the enemy engages, then the enemy must be destroyed. Period.
To do that, then every single soldier in the theater and anywhere else the enemy might find them to engage absolutely and positively must have the confidence, the aggression, the skills, and the equipment to take that enemy down, utterly and permanently.
The entire concept of a “PDW” militates against it; it is, by definition, a “Personal Defense Weapon”. You do not win wars by defense alone; you have to aggressively attack the enemy and be able to defeat him whenever and wherever you encounter him. You do not do that by having your forces avoid combat; you do not do that by virtuously ignoring the ambushes and attacks on you, the way most of our logistics types did in Iraq. Combat isn’t a separate job; it’s the only goddamn job, and if you avoid it, you’re losing the war.
About the only place a PDW is even vaguely acceptable is for civilian noncombatants who might be targeted by the enemy. Even then, I have my doubts about the idea.
Your problem is that you want a happy little solution to a problem that demands a heavy-duty and unpleasant response. Paul Fussell had a quite excellent opening chapter to “Wartime”, one that you all really ought to read and internalize. He titled that chapter “From Light to Heavy Duty”, and in it he excoriated all the precious little fantasies held about things like jeeps towing 37mm cannon to go up against German Mk IV tanks and 88mm cannon. He does an excellent job of pointing out the idiocies, and it’s unfortunate that more people didn’t internalize the lessons he pointed to.
The entire concept of “PDW” is a war-loser. If you’ve got people you want to issue those weapons to, then you’re actually talking about people who shouldn’t even be in uniform in the first goddamn place; they’re effectively noncombatant civilians, and should be treated as such.
If you have any interest in facts rather than petty ad hominem, consider why – 80+ years after the Army agreed with you and actually delivered a solution so effective that the infantry wanted it for themselves – have carbines not even come close to replacing pistols? Why did pistols even exist when rifles are “better”? Is it simply because every military leader in the world except Kirk is a “stupid bastard”?
Physical Realities divides us into riflemen, and people whose jobs don’t leave hands (or vehicle space, etc.) free to carry a three-foot clunker all day every day. Many in this latter group (myself included) are combat arms types, but not issued rifles for the same reason infantry aren’t issued miniguns or GMGs: because most can’t / won’t carry the damn things. Just like micro-compacts for civilian CCW, the defensive weapon you carry 24/7 is better than the perfect weapon left in your arms locker or CHU.
Ugh, formatting / lack of edit button
I wouldn’t say that I’m smarter than every idjit in the military. Just that I see quite clearly what they do not, which is that they’re delusional in their approach to war.
The handwriting has been on the wall since WWII, on the Eastern Front. The Soviet Union found a way to counter the high-tech, high-mobility way of war that the Germans developed, and that was a diabolically clever idea: Attack everything but the combat troops. It worked. The rear area battles became serious issues for the Germans, and they only began to counter the problem once they started doing exactly what I’m pointing out as the only really rational solution: Fight them.
I can’t help the fact that the vast majority of our idjit class leadership missed the point of what was going on; you aren’t going to find any such things as any sort of erudite scholarly studies done about the effects of rear area battle on the German forces in the East, nor are you going to find anyone who bothered to look at exactly what the Germans eventually did to counter them. Those issues are far too prosaic; the bright lights of our ground and air forces would far rather concentrate on all the sexy crap, like the tank battles and the vast aerial armadas going at each other.
Reality was, the Germans had to learn some hard lessons, and totally revamp their doctrinal approach. They eventually started doing exactly what I’m telling you is the key factor: Fight the enemy wherever you find him, whenever you find him. You can’t do things by half-measures; if your railway troops get attacked on a job site, then they have to down tools and be infantry until they either get replaced in the fight, or they exterminate the enemy. There are no other options, if you want to win.
Part of the problem is that the Germans didn’t win, because their political masters took on too much of a fight with the rest of the world. The fact is, however, they managed to get a lot further than they should have, and keep what they took for far longer. How they did that? Well, they sure as hell didn’t do it by saying “Yeah, those are support troops, they only need to defend themselves…”
The issue isn’t the PDW itself; the issue is the mindset that comes up with a solution like the PDW and then says “Yes, we’ll issue it out to the non-fighting types…”; the failure isn’t the weapon, but the idea that there are any such things as “non-fighting” soldiers.
The enemy is not going to take on your exquisitely trained and equipped combat troops; that’s a recipe for their own defeat. They’re instead going to go after the “soft underbelly” sort of soldier, the ones who aren’t as combat-capable. If you don’t “expose that flank” by having such nonentities around, then you’re not going to be vulnerable to that form of attack, the enemy doing the recruiting out in the countryside is going to have a lot harder time recruiting, and you’re going to strip away his cadres capable of doing that recruiting and training. Anything else? Idiocy. You’re basically just running a training program for him, and providing OPFOR to boot.
You’re going to look long and hard for any formal recognition of what’s been going on; it hasn’t been studied, it isn’t at all appreciated by anyone… But, it’s still been going on, and even the Soviets have had to deal with the fallout from teaching all their little insurgencies these techniques. Which is ironic as hell, but still yet another sign that many of the people we’ve put in charge of the various armed forces around the world are not all that bright.
I mean, you stop and think about it: The Soviet military/intelligence complex was quite literally teaching this crap to people around the world. Absolute truth; you can see the tactics, techniques, and operational stuff in action throughout conflict zones stretching from Southeast Asia to Southwest Africa. Same stuff, same playbook… Yet, when the invasion of Afghanistan went down, what happened when those same techniques were applied against the Soviets? Did they have countermeasures in place? Nope. Hell, you’ll look long and hard for anyone even acknowledging what had happened, just like you’ll look long and hard for anyone in the US military acknowledging that what happened in Korea happened in Vietnam, and that there was clear continuity between the two, right down to the present day.
The entire concept of the PDW is a product of this delusional thinking; it is a weapon that should only be issued to people doing things like USAID work. Everyone in a military uniform needs to have the mindset of “Oh, someone is shooting at me! Now I get to go kill people!!!”
Our enemies should rue the day they decided to engage any of our troops, anywhere. They should dread the idea of so much as firing a weapon in their general direction, because that brings down the wrath of an angry, heavily armed element whose sole purpose in life has just become killing everything in sight that opposes it. You have to have a situation wherein the local leadership immediately sticks a knife in the back of anyone even suggesting ambushing American soldiers, because the last time that happened every man and woman under arms died horribly. You want them to remember those occasions as the nightmares that haunt their sleep, and you want them to do everything possible to stop them from happening ever again.
You don’t win wars unless you achieve that. All you do is get lots of people killed to no good purpose, and the cruelty of doing that does you no good at all, either for yourself or the populations who set themselves up as your enemies.
The whole mentality behind the PDW is the problem. You don’t win by “defending”; you win by winning, and that means that when the enemy engages you, wherever and whenever he does that, he’s going to be engaging the best you have to offer, with the best, most capable weapons, and you’re going to win because you’re better trained, better equipped, and a thousand times more aggressive.
Kirk,
Again, not “non-fighting types”; people without hands free for a carbine including many combat-arms folks currently stuck with pistols.
Contrary to your earlier statement, I want them [us] to get a less cheap, more capable weapon. So does every PDW advocate I’ve ever heard. So do you. Literally the only difference between our positions is that I think the choice with the highest likelihood of success is the choice that balances effectiveness with the highest likelihood of consistent on-body carry.
Mike, the sad fact is this: If you procure a PDW, then they’re going to have to justify buying the damn thing by issuing it to all and sundry who can’t effectively resist having it imposed on them… “If you buy it, it must be issued”.
The whole issue boils down to mindset; the PDW fantasy is of a piece with the entire flawed conception of how modern battle works. You give them the inch, in terms of accepting the proposition that a PDW-class weapon is worth issuing, then they’ll make it happen and wonder why we lose wars.
Trust me on this: The root problem here isn’t necessarily the weapon, but the flawed ideas about warfare. Encourage the PDW? You’re encouraging the flawed ideas.
We were telling them that we needed armored route clearance gear in the early 1990s. We told them that logistics vehicles needed up-armor packages, and that we’d have to fight to get logistics through. Nobody listened.
Not until 2003-05, and then it was “Oh. Yeah, we shoulda bought some of that stuff…”
The raw fact is, the people running our military do not understand what the hell they’re doing. Note the utter lack of permanently-constituted Personal Security Detachment elements being made a part of the Tables of Organization and Equipment, despite the copious lessons afforded in Iraq, Afghanistan, and about everywhere else. You’re going to have to fight in order to get your commander’s out and about observing the battlefield; that means they’re going to have to have a bodyguard element to enable that, and they shouldn’t be taken out of hide for the line units. There’s zero recognition of this fact, anywhere that I’ve seen. Just as there’s zero recognition that UAV and UGV operations are going to have to be integrated at every level.
They’re not going to learn until there’s a Kasserine Pass sort of event, and I’d really rather they didn’t do that to the poor bastards that are going to be holding the bag when it goes down… Which is why I keep railing on this crap.
From my worms-eye view, looking up? I don’t see much in the way of comprehension or action about the issues I keep raising. So, I’ll keep right on raising them…
Interesting about the PSDs. My ship’s CMC was a security type who’d served on PSDs for Admirals (who need them much less than ground generals in the sandbox).
Of course if you bought PDWs you’d have to use them – as one for one replacements for the much less effective pistols many troops are still issued to go into harms way today.
Something I didn’t address in my previous reply: I agree that winning requires a “taking the fight to the enemy” attitude, but as a wise man notes all the time (it’s you!) nobody has defeated a peer adversary by taking rifle fire to the enemy in over 100 years. Tankers, artillerists, Hornet pilots deliver much more lethality than 5.56 ever could, and they have the requisite aggressive attitude regardless of what their secondary, last-ditch smallarm is.
Of course once you ignore that “absurd convention” you give others carte blanche to do likewise. At which point you buttsore Amis start whinging about being victims of ‘war crimes.’
Martin Tyrsegg,
The whole point of expanding bullets is to kill cleanly and quickly; as Kirk has pointed out before, they are required for hunting for that reason. Of course, it’s practically irrelevant for rifles because modern tumbling, fragmenting ammunition delivers similar results while being exempt from the pointless (in a world where it’s perfectly legal to deliver similar effects from fragmenting munitions, set people on fire, etc.) rule. It only really matters for handguns, which do a tiny fraction of wounding and killing (but matter a lot to the people who are stuck with them).
Two thumbs up eon. I still like the 7.62×25 round for handguns and submachine guns. It has a flatter trajectory, thus better accuracy at range. The issue with it is over penetration in a crowded setting with people you don’t want shot hanging around. Perhaps tinkering with the powder charge and using a new design of slug that has better expansion would make this round more useful.
The performance specs you give would seem to be for a full sized rifle/carbine. The issue that this oddity is trying to address is more about one-on-one close range personal defense. And I agree with you that this oddity is not any improvement for that situation.
If you like 7.62 x 25mm, consider this;
.22 Reed Express cartridge
https://www.fivesevenforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=4091
A 7.62 x 25mm necked down to .22. Designed to work through the (formerly inexpensive) surplus Vz52 pistol. It used .224 inch bullets, and has a different (steeper, squarer) shoulder angle. In fact, it looks remarkably like a half-length 5.56 NATO round.
With 30-grain bullets, it could achieve MVs around 2,700 f/s and MEs around 550 FPE (.357 Magnum ballistics). With heavier 45 to 50-grain bullets, MV drops to 2400 f/s but ME goes up to 640 FPE or so (high .357/low .41 Magnum territory).
The designers, Fred Zeglin and Ron Reed, specifically intended it to defeat body armor and auto glass in police use. Note that basically any 7.62 x 25mm-chambered arm can be converted by a simple barrel change. So it would change an old Vz24 or Vz26 SMG into a PDW with near- 5.56 NATO capabilities.
Couple that with improved propellants, and we might have something.
(Data; Cartridges of the World, 13th ed. 2012, p. 182.)
cheers
eon
That’s basically what the .22TCM is (though shorter COAL limits heavier projectiles). I used to be a big fan, but had no luck trying it in four very different pistols. I’m pretty sure the issue is the pressure curve; maybe it would do better in something like a properly tuned MPX.
“(…)7.62 x 25mm-chambered(…)Vz24 or Vz26(…)”
Halt sofort. Said cartridge come started existing in 1930, therefore it is possible that 1924 or 1926 could use it.
vz24 and vz26 refer to;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa_23
The odd-numbered members of the clan were 9 x 19mm. The even-numbered ones were 7.62 x 25mm.
The number was not the year. It simply identified the weapon’s place in the series the Czechoslovakian armed forces had studied for adoption since the Versailles treaty in 1922.
cheers
eon
“(…)vz24 and vz26 refer to;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa_23
(…)”
Then ise true names, that is Sa 24 or Sa 25 and not hoax made to make in order to make impression that Czechoslovak fire-arm is few decades ahead of actual ability.
If you put in the 30-round magazine, do you get to call it the Flux Capacitor?
in what sense is “improved propellant” supposed to work
asking for a friend
Presumably, smaller case volumes would be possible.
Alternatively, you could posit the Holy Grail of a working caseless propellant, that was dimensionally as stable as brass/steel, and which did as good a job of obturation until the last moment when the action opens up, burning up entirely right before the lock opens.
In other words, it’s likely a physical/chemical impossibility until materials science and chemistry catches up to fantasy.
Frankly, I think the whole thing is rather like the debate between “bow & arrow” and the earliest firearms: The actual reality is that the sexy new thing isn’t actually all that much better than the old boring thing, and that the old boring thing will continue soldiering on until you get your fantasy-BS ideas to actually, y’know… Work.
I don’t see any near-term improvements in chemistry becoming mass-manufacturable any time in the near future. Or, the medium-term future; the majority of improvements that we’d need to see in order to do any such thing as revolutionize the rest of the combat firearms equation are simply in the “too hard to do on a mass basis” box, and are likely to remain there until there’s been some sort of breakthrough in engineered energetics. Something that does not appear to even be on the horizon, really.
I guess I’m not enough of a visionary. Because I don’t think we’ll ever see a high-energy propellant that is dimensionally stable and physically tough enough for caseless applications.
If you ever look inside a solid-fuel rocket casing, you see what is basically a very large rifle cartridge case. The solid rocket fuel grain itself is generally a cast solid.
(ICYDK, “grain” is the correct term regardless of size. Each of the two SRBs on the Rockwell STS were made up of four segments of 125 tons each, not including their casings. Each 125-ton section was still called a “grain”. They were the most powerful Solid Fuel Rockets- SFRs- ever used for any purpose, BTW; 15,000 kiloNewtons apiece, specific impulse 246 Newton-seconds.)
Anyway, the “grain” is generally secured inside the casing so that it doesn’t touch the walls of same, to prevent heat transfer working its way up the “stick” too fast. Too much gas generated too soon can split the casing open.
The casing is sealed against outside weather effects (heat, cold, change in humidity, etc.) at the factory. The seals, like the one at the nozzle (back end) are literally burnt away instantly when the grain is ignited and starts burning and producing exhaust gases and thrust.
Just like a rifle cartridge, except of course in a rifle round the “seal” that gives, the bullet, is at the front end.
The point is that SRB type propellant should be readily adaptable to what we’d call conventional cartridge design, while giving noticeably improved ballistic performance in otherwise conventional cartridges. Granted, you’d have to design around higher breech pressures, but that’s mostly a matter of metallurgy, and the space guys (the “steely-eyed missile men”) have been handling that for decades. (They have good reason; nobody wants another Challenger.)
The metal cartridge case and the SRB propellant would seem to be a natural combination to achieve higher MVs in small arms. Just don’t let the visionaries get carried away with their caseless dreams. We’ve already fallen off that bridge too many times.
cheers
eon
If you need higher-powered propulsive material then use Nitropenta-Gewehr-Röhren-Pulver which was used in V-Patrone variant of 7,9 x 57 https://weaponland.ru/publ/legendarnyj_7_92kh57_mauser_chast_i/13-1-0-1603
That thing serves no useful purpose. If you need a pistol, get a pistol. If you need a small long gun, get a small long gun. If you need a proper long gun, get a proper long gun.
People have been putting stocks on pistols for about 300 years. And did so a lot from the Borchardt and C96 through the Stetchkin. There’s a reason no one did this for the last 70 years (exempt the VP70 and B93R, but they were hardly successes). I’ve shot some (ditto mini-SMGs). I’d always have preferred a bigger gun – an SMG/P90/MP7.
Where I might differ in emphasis, perhaps, with Kirk is that your “rear echelon” or “second line” troops need to be trained to fight, and expect that they will have to do so, irrespective of what small arms they are given.
And train/exercise on real war. Just parking your howitzers, trucks, or whatever on a nice flat open field “beyond the front line” is suicide. Hide, dig-in, camo, get AAA, establish perimeter defence, etc etc.
Finally, I don’t care if some cool guys have bought a few. I love the cool guys, but being able to run 20 miles fast in full kit, or parachute into the sea at night (things I could never have done) does not make you experts in small arms. It makes you cool guys with (usually) big and unchallenged budgets.
Respectfully, Geezer, I’m not too clear on what point you’re trying to make, here:
“Where I might differ in emphasis, perhaps, with Kirk is that your “rear echelon” or “second line” troops need to be trained to fight, and expect that they will have to do so, irrespective of what small arms they are given.”
If you’re saying that those “rear-echelon troops” which I would argue no longer actually exist, in terms of actually being “rear-echelon” need to be prepared to fight regardless of how they’re equipped, I quite agree. However, I would also submit, at the same time, to expect them to do so when not equipped at least as well as the supposed “front-line troops” are is a bit of nastiness. You want them to fight the first-line opponents that are going to be targeting them, when any sane enemy does so? Then, they have a moral right to the same equipment and training that their “front-line” peers get. Anything else is criminal, just as what the leadership of the Army did to the 507th Maintenance Company was.
Notably, nobody who was actually culpable for that entire fiasco had the slightest hint of action taken against them, mostly because they were safely unidentifiable up in the hierarchy that made the actual disastrous decisions that ended with Jessica Lynch’s capture. That was a “Whole-Army” failure, I fear.
The dichotomy in thought/conception about war that is indicated by the idea that there is any such thing as a predictably linear battle area. The battle area is the world and extends, these days, into high Earth orbit. If you want to win, you have to engage the enemy wherever and whenever they raise their heads; they can reliably be guaranteed not to take on your first-rate troops unless they have no other choice; their targets of choice will always, always be where you’re least prepared and most vulnerable. If you’re prepared and ready to fight, then they won’t take you on simply because they’re not stupid; they’ll go looking for soft underbelly somewhere else.
This is the lesson that the people who keep thinking that any such idea as a PDW is even remotely acceptable need to get into their heads; something akin to a PDW might work out, over the big picture and long haul, for a use-case where there aren’t any actual uniformed or formally-organized combatant personnel. You think you’re going to get away with equipping your fantasy-island “rear areas” with such things, then you’re going to lose.
It’s a mindset issue, more than anything else. If you’re going to go to the expense of deploying combatants anywhere, then you need to ensure that ALL of those combatants are ready, capable, and eager to engage the enemy. If not? Hire civilians; at least that way, you have the optics of the enemy slaughtering unprepared civilians working for you. Somewhat.
The raw facts of modern war do not militate towards half-hard ideas about strict dichotomies between “combat” and “non-combat”. All men and women in uniform are combatants, and they need to be ready to carry the fight to the enemy and win. You don’t do that by giving them half-ass weapons and saying “Just defend yourselves; you’re not really real soldiers like the infantry…”
The correct model here is the 291st Engineers, an American Combat Engineer unit assigned as a Corps-level asset doing logging and sawmill operations in the forests around Malmedy when the Battle of the Bulge began. Instead of doing what everyone else was doing, which was mostly bugging out in front of the German assault, the 291st downed tools, picked up weapons, and put a halt to the entire advance towards Antwerp. Joachim Peiper was left pounding the hatch coaming of his panzer, screaming incoherently about “…the damned engineers…” when the 291st blew the last bridge almost in front of him.
That’s how you do “rear echelon troops” right. The 291st was not ever assigned to a front-line mission from the day they got off the landing craft at Normandy right up until they helped breach the Rhine; yet they stopped a major German armored assault dead in their tracks when they had to, and fought effectively as Infantry when called upon.
So, don’t tell me it isn’t possible. It is; you just need the will and the wit to do it.
Gaylord Fokker.
Sig U.S Army thing, forgot that; Haenel eh dumped Hk for ze new kraut gun, ze Germans not playing games anymore…