Yet resistance at the top to Minimi persisted. As early as 1988 the SAS had despaired of the SA80 family, and opted for the Minimi as its chosen suppressive firepower weapon. The weapon which everybody agreed they wanted to replace the LSW at fire group level was the Belgian-made 5.56mm Minimi light machine-gun. As the Kosovo crisis deepened in 1999, threatening war, the army issued an Urgent Operational Requirement (UOR) - demanding modifications to the SA80, identified by the German small arms manufacturer Heckler & Koch, to increase its reliability to 97%, and that of the LSW to 80%. Yet it is a painfully slow business to undo a mistaken procurement decision. These revealed that in extreme climatic conditions, the SA80 rifle's reliability fell to 20%, while the LSW attained a shameful 5%. Independent trials were conducted in Kuwait and Alaska. Only in 1998 was there a belated official acknowledgement that all was not well with the British army's infantry weapons.
NHL 2004 REBUILT LAUNCHER DENIED MOD
Despite the fact that the SA80 was deemed so hopeless that Mozambique was the sole foreign country to buy it, the MoD plodded on. When Parker subsequently retired, having failed to advance in rank, it was widely believed among his colleagues that his politically unacceptable exposure of the shortcomings of small arms, upon which every soldier's life depended, was a factor. Although there was a mass of anecdotal evidence to support his thesis, some of which leaked into the media, the report was deemed "delicate", and denied circulation. The only thing in its favour was that it was invented here, rather than by foreigners.Īfter the first Gulf war in 1991, Colonel David Parker, assistant director (operational requirements) at headquarters infantry, produced a report spelling out the disastrous failure of the SA80 and LSW in combat. This ridiculous weapon was manufactured by Royal Ordnance and issued wholesale to British soldiers.
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Yet the procurement executive was untroubled. Most people would perceive it as undesirable to equip the entire British army with a weapon which could not plausibly be used further afield than Calais. A second failing was that both the LSW and the SA80 became chronically unreliable in hot or cold conditions.įield testing of the new weapons seems to have been carried out exclusively on ranges at Aldershot.
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The LSW had an obvious defect: it was magazine- rather than belt-fed, and so could not sustain a high rate of fire. For the first time the British infantryman was given a fully automatic assault rifle, such as other armies had possessed for years.Įvery infantry section was also equipped with a bipod-mounted version of the SA80, designated the "light support weapon". The 7.62mm self-loading rifle, along with the GPMG, were supplanted by 5.56mm calibre weapons, whose chief virtue was that their ammunition was lighter, and soldiers could carry many more rounds. It was at this point, the end of the 1980s, that disaster struck British small arms procurement. The 7.62mm general purpose machine-gun (GPMG) which replaced the Bren was a heavy but adequate weapon, yet survived barely a decade of front-line service before being replaced. The Bren's reliability made it much-loved by soldiers, but its rate of fire compared unfavourably with the pace of a state funeral.
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The Bren gun, standby of the army for 40 years, remained in service until the end of the 1970s, and indeed there were examples of it being used in the Falklands in 1982. Firefights are usually decided in favour of whichever side can quickly generate the most violence, which means the greatest firepower. As far back as the second world war, British infantrymen lamented their lack of a section machine-gun capable of matching the formidable German MG-42, known as the Spandau. Rather than talk in such generalities, let us consider a specific case study: it is easier to illustrate folly at a micro rather than macro level.