The Mortal Crisis of the U.S. Military’s Personal Weapons Today

(Analyst's note:  This is extremely troubling.  Please look at definitive report via the embedded URL.)


by C. Austin Burrell

This week, I reviewed a forward of a definitive report on the immoral crisis confronting our serving military soldiers and officers in the U.S. Army, the Marine Corps and the SEALS coming from the appalling performance of their personal side arms, rifles, and crew served automatic weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan. The PowerPoint was absolutely the most comprehensive of its kind I have ever seen, with 175 pages of snapshots of specific performance and non-performance of virtually every weapon in our national inventory. This report came on the heels of a battle last week in Afghanistan in which a strong point was overrun by Taliban terrorists, resulting in the deaths of nine U.S. soldiers and 27 wounded. 

How did this happen? Their weapons jammed with moderate use, they fouled, they overheated, and they just plain didn’t perform to the levels for which they were reportedly tested. In the name of a tainted bureaucracy, our men and women exposed to close combat are being given second-rate, inadequate weapons that may save chump change, but only at the price of unnecessary deaths of our most valuable assets – our people.