Is military equipment always this bad?

In My Humble Opinion
1

My brother sent me this link to point out the pix about the Shoulder Mounted Assault Weapon with thermobaric rounds. http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001944.html

If you click on the link “disintegrated a large one-storey…” in the story, you get a big .pdf file that evaluates various gear the Marines now use, good and bad. A lot of it is very good. A surprising amount of it is crap, and soldiers are substituting gear from home for some of it
I was never in the military (4F), so I don’t know if lousy gear is a fact of life there. Is it?

2

Just my humble O.

Military equipment is thought up outside the battle field, and made outside of it too. If it actually works well or not can only be seen in the field. Sometimes new uses for something can be found.

I recall a less then leathel ‘sticky foam’ device which when shot on a enemy would disable them much like a rat in a glue trap (or foam in this case). The actual use in the field was more like to make a instant barrior, like if you had to cross a opening in a wall you can fill in that gap w/ sticky foam then move hidden behind it and also preventing the enemy from usiing that hole to get behind you once you move past it.

3

In the report I linked to, they mentioned a rubber-coated shockproof laptop computer that overheated to the point where the keyboard was to hot to touch. Maybe I’m wrong, but somebody should have noticed that in the lab.

4

Unfortunately, thus has it always been. I’ve been around military-types my whole life, and I’ve always heard about how “If you want it to work, buy it yourself.” This is across the board. The military makes some things exceptionally well, and drops the ball horribly with others. I remember my roommate at the time, in Alaska, going through his winter camping gear before an exercise substituting good stuff for Army-issue. He said it made the whole thing tolerable. This from a career man, mind you.

Popular Mechanics had an article about 10-15 years ago about a Kansas Army National Guard artillery unit that bought their whole unit hand-held, card-programmable calculators that did the work of the big, loud, multi-million dollar central fire control computer, and did it silently, 10 times faster, and for less than $1000.

5

Was the lab in a 120+ degree desert, or an air-conditioned office building that would have been 45 degrees cooler then that? :slight_smile:

6

Well, I remember in the 70s when the M-1 series was being developed and tested, the press had a field day picking it apart as an inefficient, costly, gas-guzzling piece of high-maintenance crap that would be a deathtrap to American soldiers due to the ready availability of man-portable tank-killer rockets like the RPG-7.

They were partially right; it is a costly, gas-guzzling, maintenance intensive piece of equipment. Like any AFV outside of science fiction, it is more vulnerable in close-terrain and urban environments where infantry can sneak up close and fire man-portable anti-armor rockets, especially at the less protected flanks, rear, and top of the tank.

It also rules just about any battlefield you care to deploy it too (a trait shared with most modern MBTs, but the M-1 series was prominently tested in 91, and validated the design concept with flying colors). It was designed with a specific battlefield role in mind, unlike the Bradley series, which tried to be everything, with the result that it couldn’t do anything well (at more than twice the cost of “lesser” vehicles).

I’d say that the SMAW you speak of does its job very well; the problem lies not in its function or efficacy, but in the way it is employed.

A lot of “crap gear” lies not in the fact that it is designed poorly, but in the fact that it is several generations out of date, but still serviceable, and “adequate” to the task, so it is retained as a “cost effective alternative” to the lengthy and costly design and procurement process the DOD has.

For instance, the old L.B.E. (Load Bearing Equipment) was, IMO, crap. But my Grandad would’ve been proud to storm the beaches at Normandy with it, confident in the knowledge that it was a modern, efficient system for toting gear into battle with. 40+ years later, I was still dealing with the same equipment, and one of our chief complaints after GW I was the crappy, inefficient L.B.E. gear. We recommended a more modern “Tactical Vest,” which is sort what the military has now.

This is what I went to war with; just try getting through a narrow tank hatch quickly wearing that! What we wanted was something more like this.

7

99% of everything I do at work is for the DoD and I can tell you, most of it is crap. If it doesn’t fly, its crap. One of the prints I had to work off of was revision AN, that means 39 tries and it might actually be right this time. Most of the Army stuff is just crap, overdesigned in some areas and under designed in others, mismatched bolt holes, horrendous tolerancing, overly tight in some areas and way too loose in others. I think part of the problem is that once the original manufacturer has made the first run of a part, then it goes out for bid and the OEM is mostly out of the picture. Another problem that I see is that compared to a commercial application the production run is so small and short that problems are bound to occur. The long lifespan of most military equipment just multiplies the problem.

8

“Never forget that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder.” – Murphy’s Laws of Combat

9

Used to be that way anyway.

10

“All combat takes place at night in the rain at the junction of four map segments” - Robert Deniro, Ronin

11

So are the components used in commercial products.

12

If there was not so much corruption in the system, it would almost work.

13

Sorry, but I work in DoD acquisitions, and I can’t let this just slide by without a cite. There are bad apples like Darlene Druyun (and she’s a hell of an example), but overall, when a company like Boeing cheats on a contract, they get burned. I assert that the vast majority of DoD acquisition personnel are fanatical about their personal integrity and the integrity of the work they do. These people won’t let a contractor pick up the tab for a business lunch – where are you going to find that integrity in the private sector?

Yes, DoD-made field equipment generally sucks, because we’re Congress’ Army. We have to use what they buy us, and they have the following irrational market forces acting on them:

  • If it creates more jobs in MyState, it’s a better purchase
  • If a change in the development schedule meets this year’s budget (but costs twice as much next year) that’s great
  • If it blows stuff up, it’s a better program than one that provides support

So you end up with an Army full of stuff that maybe works, that hundreds of extra hands helped to build, and crappy broken-down support equipment sitting in the factory behind schedule and over budget.

14

So this is not a corrupt system in your opinion?

15

Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham recently resigned his House seat after admitting that he took over 2 million dollars from defense contractors in exchange for throwing contracts their way. I suppose he might be the only one, maybe, possibly.

16

Being Swedish, I obviously can’t comment on the military equipment used in the US, aside from hours of talking with my ex-marine brother in law. I can however comment on some of the equipment we use over here. I was a frogman in the Armed Services and have to say that there is no civillian dive-equipment that comes close to comparing to the stuff we had. High-end drysuits, very robust whole-face masks, the works. Didn’t really want to continue diving after my service knowing how fragile the normal divegear can be. Wouldn’t I wouldn’t give to be able to sneak back and take me home the stuff we had… sigh…

17

Is this a corrupt system in your opinion? And if so, why? It sounds like an inefficient system, but I don’t see why you’d call it corrupt.

18

The system is very uneven. The worst part is that no one does it better. Weird, eh?