[woodman]

I actually wrote an essay that dug pretty deep into this topic, many years ago, after I finished my enlistment as a Marine infantry machinegunner - likely the most overburdened MOS. I'm surprised this didn't get a mention in the article, especially considering the latest developments: women in combat roles. The significant difference between male and female upper body strength is going to be impossible to ignore under combat loads.

[potta_coffee]

I always felt bad for you weapons guys. We had a guy in our company that barely met the height requirement. He was like, 5'3" and 95lbs soaking wet. He was a machine gunner and he humped his heart out but it was painful to watch.

[woodman]

For a long time I was pretty irritated about landing in a line company instead of a mounted weapons company... but after a combat tour, where the majority of KIA was from roadside IEDs, I didn't mind walking so much. The loadout did get more and more ridiculous though - after some officer got shot in the heart through his armpit, we all got issued side SAPIs that added weight, interfered with room clearing mobility, and cut off circulation in our arms. Backpacker syndrome [0] was also pretty common.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachial_plexus_injury

[potta_coffee]

At the end of a deployment, I had such severe shoulder pain that I could barely carry a weapon. Of course, the corpsman "couldn't find anything wrong". That shoulder pain is still with me. I've been to a number of doctors and therapists, but haven't found anything conclusive.

[woodman]

Hopefully it gets better with time for you. My complaint wasn't with pain, but numbness. I developed this problem very early on, in SOI, and kept it to myself because I knew that it would get me medically discharged. Thankfully I never had to explain to anyone why I'd go to the lengths I did in order to avoid handling grenades. After 2 years of civilian life my knees and lower back stopped bothering me, but 15 years later: my hands still feel like they're falling asleep.

[potta_coffee]

I feel you. My toes went numb on a hump once and they've never fully come back. I've been out since 2012 and still have the shoulder pain and numb toes so I'm not holding out for that pain to go away.

[nerpderp82]

Have your Sciatic nerve looked into. I had a pretty bad bike crash (doored going 30mph, bounced on pavement with left hip). I would have burning sensations about the size of a fifty cent piece in my upper back, numb toes, etc. After 10+ years it finally subsided. Chronic pain is highly correlated with suicide. So best to get that fixed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sciatic_nerve

[gadders]

I just read Rob O'Neill's [1] book [2] and in it recounts an anecdote about when they were preparing to attack a building. They fired a couple of rockets at it, and were readying to attack when the guy responsible for carrying the ammo (who was also on the smaller side) asked if they could fire another one so he would have less ammo to carry back to base.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._O'Neill_(U.S._Navy_S...

[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Operator-Operative-Mission-Changed-...

[odn86]

The AAR is the best:

"Okay, so who made entry on this building?" "Carl Gustav"

[sandworm101]

What isnt mentioned is how this weight is dictated by modern combat doctrine. We expect troops on patrol to be ambushed and to fight back and win. That is new. It didnt happen in ww2 because, if ambushed, retreat was always an option, a good one considering you often had no idea how big the enemy was ahead of you. But today we assume the enemy is always six guys with guns. We expect our patrols to never retreat. So they are layered in armor and need the ammo to hold down a nest for up to an hour.

Ive done some work with specials. They dont carry as much because thier missions are different. If ambushed they arent expected to stand and fight every time.

[woodman]

I disagree. The USMC doctrine on this matter has remained the same for generations, so that doesn't explain the increasing loadout. Also, and I don't know what the official Army guidance is on matter, but we took over an AO where an Army unit had previously been responsible. They regularly got ambushed, and regularly broke contact.

One development that I heard about a couple of years ago, which should certainly ease the burden, is that the Corps dropped the M249 in favor of a heavy barrelled M16. That is a lot less weight, considering how every fireteam had previously been equipped with a belt fed machinegun (5.56, but still).

[Bahamut]

Not the M16, but the IAR (Infantry Automatic Rifle) - that gun has a tight spread for an automatic rifle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M27_Infantry_Automatic_Rifle .

I got to use it as my fire team's machine gunner before getting discharged in what was an unwinnable bureaucracy loop. It was a near total win over the SAW - not only was it more accurate & lighter, but it didn't breakdown anywhere near as much. The interesting shift though is that it sounds like every Marine is going to get an IAR, and not just the machine gunner for a fire team. This could have some ramifications on infantry tactics, since the machine gunner in a traditional fire team (i.e. fulfilling the suppressing firepower role) could switch depending on the scenario and yield some formidable advantages.

[woodman]

It sounds like you never got to use the original SAW barrel. We got issued those stubby paratrooper barrels while in Iraq, which are nice for maneuverability, but it was at the cost of accuracy. The M249 was always a piece of junk when it came to reliability, which is why weapons guys are there with 240s.

So long as the tempo is kept up for flanking maneuvers, and everybody doesn't try to establish a fixing base of fire simultaneously, it sounds like a warrant officer had a really good idea in returning to something resembling the WWII pacific loadout (minus the flamethrowers).

[dingaling]

The irony is that the Minimi ( M249 ) was originally developed by FN as a Baby MAG ( M240 ) to bring GPMG firepower to the squad. It was originally chambered in 7.62x51

It was rechambered in 6x45 and then 5.56x45 for the US SAW competition. It never seemed to adapt well to the smaller rounds, less power for the mechanism.

[woodman]

I think you're right about the lack of power being the biggest contributor to the problems we had - which remained even after they tried to reduce the feature set (emergency magazine-well, user selectable gas tube aperture).

I think it was a poor idea in the first place to push a beltfed machinegun down to the fireteam level. People generally have a misconception about what machineguns are for - while volume of fire certainly figures into effective suppression, accuracy is more important. An effectively employed machinegun should be treated like some kind of sniper shotgun, where you can put 50% of your shots into a vehicle sized target a mile away. You aren't going to be doing that while playing the I'm-up-he-sees-me-I'm-down game.

[dsfyu404ed]

Traditionally giving the individual soldier a giggle switch (aka full auto) has been a wash offensively but a great asset in defensive situations at the expense of burning through a lot more ammo (better to have spent brass than dead bodies though so it's worth it). I don't see what's changed in the last ~70yr that would change that.

[sandworm101]

It is a subtle change. In the past, a patrol was expected to move in stealth. The goal was to find the enemy and then decide whether to engage. That started to disappear in Vietnam. Today, patrols do not focus on stealth. They move in the open. Often the goal of a patrol is to be seen. First contact isn't 'finding' but being fired upon by the enemy. Being ambushed isn't considered a failure. It is the plan, the primary means of identifying an enemy position. Under that mentality, every soldier becomes a tank.

[Cthulhu_]

Isn't the current location where fighting is happening a factor either? Europe had a lot more forests, while the footage I'm seeing from Afghanistan, Iraq etc seems like a lot of open spaces with the odd building / wall. You don't want to turn your back to the enemy in retreat in an open space like that.