Throwing Good Money After Bad

Approving the Defence Industrial Plan will Increase the deficit without defending The Realm. Why waste more money we don't have on an incompetent organisation?

The Ministry of Black Holes (known in government circles as the Ministry of Defence) is up to its old tricks again. Not content with splurging £6 billion or so on Ajax, the reconnaissance vehicle that shakes itself to pieces (a fiasco about which I have written many times, most recently here), it’s now setting the seeds for another expensive failure the moment it gets its hands on the cash promised in the Defence Industrial Plan.

Project Grayburn is the programme to find a replacement for the army’s SA-80 rifle. There are also Projects Troubler, Cairns and Shamer to replace machine guns and sniper rifles. That’s an awful lot of projects dealing with dismounted infantry’s firepower.

Background

The SA-80 is the personal weapon of all infantrymen and most of the rest of the Army, plus the Air Force (which includes the RAF Regiment) and Royal Navy (home of the Royal Marines). The SA-80 was first introduced in 1985, replacing the much loved Self Loading Rifle (the SLR, or “That Rifle”). The SLR replaced the legendary Short Magazine Lee Enfield, introduced at the turn of the last century. The initial versions of the SA-80 had major design flaws and manufacturing faults, which took a while to iron out. It’s now a reasonably adequate weapon.

The SA-80 introduced three major innovations compared to the SLR. Firstly, SA-80 had an optical sight with four times magnification, which transformed the infantry soldier’s ability to acquire targets and kill them. The sight was only issued to infantry; the rest used iron sights, essentially the same as the SLR (or any other rife without a telescopic sight).

Secondly, the SA-80 is very short thanks to a bullpup design, which puts the magazine behind the trigger and eliminates the stock. Short weapons fit more easily into the back of armoured vehicles and are handier in house to house fighting. The downside is that they are less effective with a bayonet – the infantryman’s weapon of last resort.

The final innovation was selectable automatic fire (when set to automatic the weapon continues firing until the trigger is released or it runs out of ammunition). Automatic rifles were not new to the world but were to the UK. Most other NATO countries equipped their infantry with automatic rifles, often known as assault rifles, as did the Soviet Union (in the guise of the legendary AK-47 and the not quite so ubiquitous AK-74). In contrast, the British SLR fired one round at a time. The SLR was based on the Belgian FAL (fusil automatique léger – the clue is in the name) with the automatic fire specifically removed.

Automatic fire in an assault rifle was and remains a controversial subject. If you miss with the first round, you will probably miss with the rest of the burst. Automatic assault rifles merely increase ammunition consumption with no additional battlefield benefit, as one hit on a person is generally enough to incapacitate. The infantryman must also carry more (heavy) ammunition, which will slow them down. An infantryman who runs out of ammunition can only fight with their bayonet; they’ve become the idiot who takes a knife to a gun fight.

Calibre

For the SA-80 the weight penalty of automatic fire was avoided by reducing the calibre from the NATO standard 7.62 mm to the (other, American) NATO standard 5.56 mm. A 5.56 mm round (the cartridge plus the bullet) weighs half as much as a 7.62 one, a reduction of over 4 kilogrammes for the average infantryman.

Switching to 5.56 mm forced the infantry section’s machine gun to change calibre too. (Infantry works in groups of eight men, called a section—unless you’re American and call such a group a squad.) In the SLR era, each infantry section had a 7.62 mm machine gun, the GPMG. In the SA-80 era the GPMG was replaced by the 5.56 mm Light Support Weapon (LSW). The LSW shared the SA-80’s bullpup layout and optical sight. It had a slightly longer barrel and a bipod, making it slightly heavier than an SA-80 but around 4 kg lighter than a GPMG. Like the SA-80, it was fed from a 30-round magazine. One LSW was issued per fire team (a section is split into two four-man fire teams); one GPMG was replaced by two LSWs.

The GPMG was belt-fed with rounds linked together by clips. Additional belts could be clipped onto the end of the belt without interrupting the GPMG firing, which is important. Changing magazines on the LSW takes several seconds, during which it can’t be fired . The LSW gunner isn’t even looking at the target; he’s looking at his magazine. Somehow this was not thought to be a bad thing at the time.

The SA-80 equipped infantry section lacked firepower compared to its predecessor and, as it turned out, the opposition. Events, particularly the Afghanistan War, demonstrated this; in 2003 the LSW was replaced by the belt-fed 5.56 mm Minimi under an urgent operational requirement (UOR) It has a higher rate of fire but still lacked sufficient range. UORs purchase equipment for the armed forces in minimum time with minimum scrutiny. They’re predicated on the assumption that the Army knows what it is talking about. In the case of the Minimi (and several other UORs of the Afghanistan era) it demonstrably didn’t.

Physics

That’s due to basic physics and was entirely predictable. The chart below shows the kinetic energy of various bullets as they leave the gun. The performance of a bullet is largely determined by its weight and the velocity at which it exits the barrel; the more, the better. The lighter 5.56 mm round has much less kinetic energy (i.e. killing power) than the 7.62 mm. For infantrymen in the back of an armoured vehicle dismounting to clear a house or fight at close quarters, that’s perhaps not a problem. It is a huge disadvantage for an infantryman closing with the enemy on his feet, as happened in Afghanistan. The equivalent Russian bullets are included for comparison.

Note also the 5.56 mm SA-80 is outgunned by the world’s most widely available assault rifle, the Kalashnikov AK-47, much used by the Taliban. If you love trivia, you will enjoy knowing that the Russian 7.62 mm round is smaller than the NATO one because of the difference in the way they measure the calibre of a rifle. The Russian measurement of a barrel’s diameter, which is what the calibre is, runs from the bottom of the groove to the bottom of the opposite groove; the NATO measurement excludes the groove.

The range problem persisted; Newtonian physics is immutable and immune to wishful thinking. In 2009 British Army introduced the beguilingly named Sharpshooter rifle, which is 7.62 mm calibre. In 2018, it accepted reality and replaced Minimi with the old GPMG. The British Army section now comprises one GPMG, one 7.62 mm sharpshooter and five SA-80, two of which have 40mm grenade launchers.

Concurrently, the 6.5 mm Creedmoor bullet became a military bullet when it was adopted as a sniper round by some US Special Forces. The Royal Marines and the army are now upgrading their L129 sharpshooter rifles from 7.62 mm calibre to 6.5 mm Creedmoor, even though, as the graph shows, the benefit over 7.62 mm is marginal. Some now advocate 6.5 mm as the ideal calibre for the SA-80 replacement.

Those advocates overlook the inconvenient truth that the Creedmoor safety template is larger than the 7.62 mm one; many ranges that are safe for 7.62 mm are not safe for Creedmoor. The danger is the bullets landing on civilian land beyond the range boundary. Fixes might be expensive or compromise training or both. The Creedmoor crew also forget that we already have 7.62 mm manufacturing plants and stockpiles. Building war stocks of 6.5 mm and the plant to make it won’t be cheap.

Finance

There is no money. Courtesy of the bond markets, there’s even less now than there was when the Defence Industrial Plan arrived in the Treasury. They will rightly question whether the need to replace SA-80 (the premise of Project Grayburn) is genuine and urgent. Certainly the 5.56 mm round has been found lacking on the battlefield and certainly having two calibres of ammunition is an expense and an inconvenience, particularly if the calibre is flawed. So the need is genuine.

It might be urgent, but if the Army were wise, it would argue the economic attraction of eliminating 5.56 mm ammunition from UK stockpiles, which simplifies logistics and reduces costs. Returning to a 7.62 mm army would save money and increase effectiveness. While the Creedmoor chorus will (rightly) claim that their darling is better, particularly at long range, the reality is that most infantry fighting is at closer ranges. The expense of introducing a new calibre for a marginal gain in an extreme case is prohibitive, so Creedmoor is out, as is 5.56 mm.

The answer to Grayburn is to pick a 7.62 mm assault rifle from the plethora currently available and put an optical sight on it (without doubt the best bit of the SA-80). That would deliver a better weapon and, with a bit of creative accounting work, at a nugatory cost.

Unfortunately the Army is not wise. Project Grayburn seeks a weapon that will also have a carbine (shorter barrelled) version for some non-infantry soldiers and another version for cadets. Why? – They have entirely different needs. While some, indeed most, non-infantry soldiers have the space available to have the same weapon as the infantry (possibly without the optical sight), some don’t, notably tank crews and helicopter pilots. There aren’t many of them (about 2,000), and they’ll only be doing dismounted combat if they have had a bad day of battle and been shot down or blown up. If they can’t find space for the new rifle, give them a Glock pistol or let them use an Uzi sub-machine gun (both 9mm calibre, already in service).

As for the cadets, there is little merit in developing a version for them. Either they learn to shoot using .22 rimfire (non-military) rifles, or they get whatever the rest of the Army has in 7.62 mm calibre. Or they carry on with the cadet version of the SA-80 that they currently have. There is no merit in a cadet learning to shoot on a service rifle; if you can shoot straight with one rifle, you can shoot straight with them all. Learning to operate a new rifle doesn’t take long and it will be covered in basic training anyway; not all recruits have been cadets.

With Grayburn reduced and almost cost free the Treasury mandarin could turn to Project Shamer, the search for a new sniper rifle. In the infantry world snipers are very high status – their combination of fieldcraft and marksmanship is the very essence of being an infantryman. A battalion of 600 typically has eight sniper pairs (no one moves alone on a battlefield). The current rifle is ageing, apparently.

The British currently have two sniper rifles, the L115 and the L118, both manufactured by Accuracy International, who have been supplying British Army snipers since 1985. The L118 and L115 both evolved from earlier versions. Surely this evolutionary process can continue. The requirements are specialist, and the volumes are low. If there is no compelling case for change, remanufacture what you already have. Project cancelled.

That leaves Projects Cairns and Troubler. The former seeks a replacement of the venerable GPMG in the mid-2030s, and the latter wants a lightweight machine gun in 5.56 mm calibre now. The GPMG works well, as it has done for decades. There are some machine guns that claim efficacy at longer ranges, but a dismounted infantryman should not be in combat at long range. The age of its design is irrelevant; the Bundeswehr’s MG3 machinegun, still in service today with no replacement in sight, is based on the World War Two MG42, itself an evolution of the MG34 (designed in 1934). There is no money, and there is no operational need. Why are highly paid procurement staff wasting time (and our money) on seeking a solution to a non-problem? Project Cairns should be cancelled.

Project Troubler seeks a lightweight 5.56 mm machine gun. The very existence of this project demonstrates that the Army has learned precisely nothing since it’s failed procurement of the Minimi, withdrawn from service less than a decade ago. The GPMG exists and works. Sure, it’s a bit heavy, but soldiers (including me) have been hauling it around for decades. Dismounted infantry should do more press-ups and squats (which cost the taxpayer nothing) and spend less time seeking flawed solutions to non-problems. Project Troubler must also be cancelled. Whoever produced or supported the requirement should be sacked; the Army isn’t (or shouldb’t be) a refuge for idiots.

Getting Real

How is it that these ridiculous projects exist? Who approved them? Why are they still employed by the taxpayer? There are clearly enormous problems in the core of the MOD and in the military parts. Until they’re resolved, throwing cash at the MOD is pointless.

The SDR and its spending plan should be cancelled. That might not deter Russia, but it would cheer the bond markets, which are rather more vital to our national security than our weakened, neglected and mismanaged armed forces. We could assuage President Trump’s demand for more NATO firepower by ordering more frigates more quickly (we have good ones already in production).

A competent government (ha!) which cared equally about defending The Realm and spending taxpayer’s cash wisely would initiate a new review called “Getting Real”. It would identify and resolve the weaknesses in the MOD’s staff and structure that are exemplified by these absurdities. A sensible government would be implementing a profound review of the MOD. How is it that we have two full generals, six lieutenant generals, 40 major generals and 150 brigadiers when the entire army has a strength that could be commanded at war by just one lieutenant general, five major generals and about 20 brigadiers? Why is it that the military experts are seeking to reintroduce a light machine gun concept that has already failed? Above all, who (precisely) has learned the lessons of the Ajax farce, or any of the other myriad procurement failures?

The awful truth is that the MOD could barely be more ineffective. The good news is that means that any radical reform is low risk; The Realm can hardly be less defended than it is – we can’t even keep the Red Arrows airborne. That’s the perfect opening for a bold minister of defence, trusted and supported by the prime minister and able to convince MOD civil servants and officers (not just the senior ones) that the status quo is unacceptable, improvement is an imperative and it starts now. Cardwell did it after the debacles of the Crimean War, inter alia, ending the purchase of commissions. After the Boer War, Haldane (the best Prime Minister we never had, according to contemporaries) completed and extended the Cardwell reforms, delivering the best army in the world – as the Kaiser’s troops found out the hard way at the Battle of the Marne, where the British Expeditionary Force broke the Schlieffen Plan and denied Germany the quick win in the West that it needed.

I don’t see any Cardwells or Haldanes in the current Labour Party. John Healey is, I’m told, a good man – but he’s achieved nothing. Like his boss, he turns the handle on a broken procedure pump and is surprised when the results are disappointing. The SDR will not reform the MOD, so all that will happen is the government will be throwing good money after bad.

The real current threat to the nation, the bond markets, won’t like that. As the Blairites didn’t sing (but should have) “Things ain’t going to get better…” Brace for tough times.

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