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THE 5 WORST SERVICE WEAPONS THE US EVER ISSUED ITS TROOPS by Travis Pike

We’ve talked a lot about the service weapons utilized by the military here. We’ve covered rifles, SMGs, shotguns, handguns, and more. Typically the service weapons we cover are fairly good, or even revolutionary in their designs. Sometimes they are odd–and that’s fun too–but today we’re going in a different direction… Let’s discuss the five worst service weapons the United States ever issued in its 245-year run. The following weapons are presented from the best-worst gun to the worst of the worst.

Krag-Jorgensen

Underneath our starry flag. Civilize ’em with a Krag.

I want to be fair to the Krag-Jorgensen and say it wasn’t necessarily a bad design. It was reliable, had a very smooth bolt, and a magazine that was easy to top off. The primary reason why it was a bad service weapon is that it was literally outdated from the first day it was adopted.

As soon as the Krag went against contemporary Mauser designs, the Army realized they had a problem. The Mauser was more accurate, could fire faster, and leveraged more powerful rounds. The Krag’s design was weaker overall and, in particular, couldn’t handle high-pressure rounds.

In fact, the Krag was replaced by the Springfield 1903, which was a Mauser clone. The U.S. even paid a royalty fee to Mauser… right up until World War 1, anyway.

The Krag served for only 12 years, making it rather short-lived as far as service rifles go. That being said, if you ever get the chance to handle a Krag, do so. They are unique and fun guns to shoot.

Related: The strangest Spec-Ops firearms in SOCOM’s armory

The M14

Speaking of short service lives, the M14 served for only six years, making it the shortest-lived general issue service rifle in American history and one of the worst service weapons in general. People like to talk about how great the M14 was, but I think that can be largely attributed to nostalgia for wood and metal service rifles. The M14 was a big heavy rifle designed to replace the M1 Grand, the BAR, and the M3 Grease gun.

In reality, it was a clumsy, heavy weapon chambered in a round that was only chosen because the Army couldn’t break away from the 30 Caliber. While you may have heard legends of soldiers tossing their M16s in favor of old M14s, it’s far from true.

The Army did a survey among Marines who’d seen combat, and almost unanimously, they wanted the M16. The M14 wasn’t suited for jungle or urban combat by any means and, in general, required more labor to build.

The M14 promised to use Garand tooling, but that turned out to be a lie, so production quickly proved more expensive and problematic than expected. During an inspection of firearms from Springfield, H&R, and Winchester, the Army found not a single rifle was built correctly. In-country, when the rifle broke, it broke big. And, unfortunately, they broke often. It was the shortest-serving modern service rifle for a reason, legends or not.

Related: The Infantry Automatic Rifle is nothing new

The M50/55 Reising

The M50 and 55 Reising were SMGs issued to Marines in the Pacific. These guns were quite innovative for SMGs, utilizing a closed bolt and a delayed recoil system. They really had the potential to be great guns. They offered controllable, compact firepower, were extremely accurate and well-balanced guns, and maybe most importantly, they were much cheaper than the Thompson.

The problem was that they broke, and they broke often. Despite their forward-leaning design, many Reisings served more time as paperweights than as guns. Many of the gun’s fragile pieces needed hand fitting when replaced, so they could rarely be fixed in the field, especially when hopping from island to island.

But to be fair to these weapons, the M50 and M55 Reising were service weapons designed for stateside law enforcement, not the brutal rigors of an island-hopping campaign.

On top of the reliability issues, these weapons also came with very fragile sights that broke easily. The weapon needed to be cleaned often to avoid failures, but breaking them down for cleaning was complex and difficult. As a result, they were probably rarely cleaned, further exacerbating their reliability issues. The Fleet marines gladly got rid of the Reisings as soon as the opportunity arose, and they went on to serve the role they were intended for, as service weapons for police officers, Sailors serving on Naval guard duties, and the like.

Related: Suppressed machine guns: A worthwhile proposition

Colt New Model Revolving Rifle

Take a revolver–you know, the cowboy-type–stretch the barrel and add a stock, and you get the best thing since sliced bread! At least that sounded like a good idea in 1855. The service weapons of the era were percussion cap-based guns, so rifles were single-shot guns that took time to reload after each shot.

As a percussion weapon, making a repeater rifle was difficult. Percussion revolvers were successful, so Colt made their revolver into a rifle, and now a soldier could fire 5 to 6 shots before he had to reload.

Revolving rifle, percussion. AF*43495.

This greatly increased the rate of fire for the average soldier. It seemed like a brilliant idea and maybe it was, in theory. However, in practice, the revolving rifle was plagued with issues.

First, the gap between the cylinder and bore allowed a substantial amount of blast to escape, which could injure the shooter’s arm. To combat this, shooters had to wear special gauntlets or adopt an awkward shooting style that positioned their body parts out of harm’s way. Worse still, the paper cartridges of the era would leak black powder, and if that powder was ignited while firing, a chain fire could result. Six full chambers going off at once would seriously harm the user, and potentially cost them an arm or worse. It’s pretty easy to see why this technologically advanced (for its time) rifle went the way of the dodo as a service weapon.

Related: The weaponry of the future Marine Corps Rifle Squad explained

Chauchat Machine Rifle

The French-designed Chauchat Machine rifle promised to bring automatic fire to the average infantryman in World War 2 (just like the Marines are doing with the M27 today). The U.S. saw the potential in the weapon and adopted the Chauchat as a machine rifle, chambered in the famed .30-06 service cartridge. Unfortunately, the Chauchat turned out to be one of the least reliable machine rifles ever made. It was a finicky weapon that was plagued with issues.

First, it wasn’t made for the hot and heavy .30-06, and that created wear issues. Additionally, the construction mixed well-made, high-quality components with shoddy and sub-standard parts, oftentimes reused from other guns.

Side plates were held on with screws that became loose under consistent firing. The sights were a mess, and the open magazine invited dirt and mud, both common in the trenches, into the gun.

These magazines reportedly caused two-thirds of reported stoppages. The Chauchat was bad enough that American soldiers would (reportedly) really would ditch the weapon in favor of a bolt action Springfield. American inspectors at the Chauchat manufacturer rejected 40% of the guns off the line, and the rest worked just well enough to pass inspection. From the cradle to its early grave, the Chauchat was a mess.

The Worst Service Weapons

These weapons may have failed, but they often came with certain innovations or good ideas that would eventually find their way into later service weapons. However, good ideas and innovation only go so far when the gun hits the field. A failed service weapon may be a portent of better things to come, but that doesn’t make it any easier to manage in a fighting hole.

Read more from Sandboxx News

Travis Pike

Travis Pike is a former Marine Machine gunner who served with 2nd Bn 2nd Marines for 5 years. He deployed in 2009 to Afghanistan and again in 2011 with the 22nd MEU(SOC) during a record-setting 11 months at sea. He’s trained with the Romanian Army, the Spanish Marines, the Emirate Marines, and the Afghan National Army. He serves as an NRA certified pistol instructor and teaches concealed carry classes.

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Alexander Prokhorenko: The Russian Rambo by WILL DABBS

Don’t let the goofy youthful demeanor fool you. Alexander Prokhorenko was a stone cold warrior.

Author’s note: I penned this piece months before the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. While Vladimir Putin has shown himself to be a proper world-class villain, the story of the young Russian soldier depicted here remains nonetheless poignant. My prayers are with the brave people of Ukraine.

 

Why do soldiers fight? The movies and government propagandists would have us believe it is for grand causes. Young folk go to war to free people from oppression or defend their homeland against soulless invaders. To a degree that is true. Soldiers may indeed go to war for such stuff as this. However, what keeps them in the suck is invariably their friends.

The military wields misery as a tool to catalyze human behavior.

It’s tough to capture in prose the nature of the relationships you develop in the military. The Army is really, really good at this. As an institution the Big Green Machine takes young impressionable people, makes them collectively miserable, and then subjects them to some corporate threat. That threat can be a city full of bloodthirsty terrorists, a miserable protracted field exercise, or some sadistic drill instructor. This time-proven technique is what turns a mob into a tribe. A mob is a chaotic ineffective rabble. A tribe can become a shockingly efficient killing machine.

The brotherhood of warriors is a truly amazing thing. Young soldiers will do some of the most extraordinary stuff for their tribe.

This process is indeed timeless. Whether it is Leonidas’ Spartans arrayed at the Hot Gates or an SAS team on a Scud-hunting mission in Iraq, once you are part of the family there is literally no limit to the sacrifice some members of the tribe will make on your behalf. It’s actually quite the beautiful thing up close.

There’s no way old guys like me could be cajoled into doing stuff like this. When we were young, however, we were all over it.

There is a reason young people make the best soldiers. Old guys think too much. However, when you’re nineteen your entire world can be your friends and the moment. That can lead to some of the most extraordinary stuff.

Background

This adorable little guy grew up to be a legit Russian military hero.

Alexander Prokhorenko hailed from the village of Gorodkhi in Orenburg Oblast. He completed secondary school in 2007 and was accepted into the Orenburg Higher Anti-Aircraft Missile School. A year later the Missile School closed and Prokhorenko transferred to the Academy of Military Air Defense of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation where he thrived. He graduated with honors and assessed into the Special Operations Forces of the Russian Federation as an advanced aviation gunner. Alexander Prokhorenko was a Spetsnaz operator.

The Air Force JTAC is the guy with the direct line to the Close Air Support assets. These guys wield chaos on a whole different scale.

Prokhorenko was likely what we might call a JTAC (Joint Terminal Attack Controller) for tactical aviation. In the US military organization, organic forward observers are artillery troops whose mission it is to call for and direct artillery fire at the whim of the ground force commander.

Back when I wore the uniform there were also Brigade-level ALO’s (Air Liaison Officers). I have no idea how they do it now, but in my day ALO’s were typically Air Force pilots who, for some unfathomable sins, were assigned to Army units to help coordinate air support for ground troops. One of the most effective I ever knew was actually a B52 pilot. The JTAC is the guy on the ground with a radio who talks the strike assets onto targets taking care to avoid hitting friendly forces. Everybody loves the JTAC. They are the guys who bring the serious pain.

Modern combined arms operations are better choreographed than a Broadway production and more destructive than toddlers with chainsaws.

Modern combined arms military operations are incredibly complex. To be maximally efficient the overall commander synergistically employs armor, rotary-wing fire support, fast movers, artillery, and a dozen other major components of the overall whole to close with and obliterate the enemy. During Russian military operations in Syria in 2016 Alexander Prokhorenko played a part in one of these overarching missions.

The Setting

Syrian troops like these are engaged in ongoing combat operations.

I’ll not attempt a detailed explanation of the geopolitics behind Russia’s involvement in Syria. Part of that stems from the observation that this is a complex region characterized by alliances of both convenience and blood that reach back millennia. More importantly, however, is the fact that I don’t understand it well at all myself.

Despite his cherubic benevolent visage, Bashar al-Assad is actually an old school despot.

Bashar al-Assad is a really bad guy who has even used chemical weapons against his own people in a ruthless bid to remain in power. Oddly, Bashar al-Assad is trained as a physician. His title is President of Syria, but he’s really a king. He inherited power from his father, Hafez al-Assad, in 2000 and has since done literally whatever it took to retain his throne.

This is the guy who was supposed to rule Syria, but he had the bad grace to be killed in a car crash.

Bashar went to med school in Damascus and did a residency in Ophthalmology in London. His older brother Bassel was being groomed for the dictatorship but died unexpectedly in a car crash in 1994. This unfortunate turn of events forced young Bashar to give up a promising career in eye surgery to join the family despot business. The Russians are aligned with al-Assad’s regime.

Behold ISIS. In a world bereft of proper Nazis, these guys are the alpha villains.

Arrayed against them, among a few others, was ISIS. There were and are scads of revolutionary splinter groups trying to throw off the al-Assad mantle of tyranny, but ISIS was the 400-pound gorilla in the room. ISIS hates pretty much everybody. They are the agents of chaos. They just want to watch the world burn.

If your dark god is telling you to murder innocent people or burn folks alive for political advantage it’s a fair bet that you’re worshipping the wrong one.

Interestingly, one of the reasons ISIS is just so bloody horrible is that they want to see the entire planet turn against Islam. This seems counter-intuitive, but to their warped corrupt calculus the more persecution they can foment against Muslims the more Muslims they can radicalize to their dark satanic cause. Like the Japanese fanatics against whom we fought during the island campaigns in WW2, the most efficient way to address ISIS combatants on the battlefield is just to blow them away and be done with it.

LT Moaz al-Kasasbeh was a Jordanian pilot captured by ISIS and subsequently burned alive for propaganda purposes.

You really don’t want to get caught by these guys. ISIS has a nasty habit of publicly decapitating their POWs or, for truly special occasions, burning them alive in cages to create gory snuff films for their adoring audiences back home. When he deployed to fight in Syria with Russian Federation forces in 2016, Alexander Prokhorenko knew all this.

The Event

Russian attack helicopters like this Mi-35M are heavily armed and armored airborne pain dispensers.

Syria is a simply ghastly place. I’ve never been there myself, but I have friends who have and to a man they agree. In March of 2016 the Syrian Arab Army launched an offensive to retake Tadmur, a strategically significant town near the ancient ruins of Palmyra in central Syria. While Syrians were doing most of the dirty work during this tidy little bloodletting, Russian air support is what kept things lively. Alexander Prokhorenko was tasked to keep the Russian ground attack assets cycling in support of Syrian Army troops.

Alexander Prokhorenko voluntarily chose death over surrender.

Prokhorenko was set up on high ground doing his job when he was discovered by ISIS militants. Surrounded, low on ammunition, and out of options, he called in an airstrike on his own position. Prokhorenko was killed along with his attackers.

The details of LT Alexander Prokhorenko’s sacrifice spread around the world.

There was a purported transcript of Prokhorenko’s final transmissions that made the rounds on the Internet. This has since been reliably discredited. The Russians are notorious propagandists. However, this in no way diminishes Senior Lieutenant Prokhorenko’s selflessness and dedication.

The Weapons

Those early AK74 rifles featured wooden stocks and orange polymer magazines.

The story of the Kalashnikov rifle should be holy dogma was anyone reading stuff like this. While the AK47 and subsequent 1956-era AKM did indeed reflect the state of the art for their day, by the 1970’s the Kalashnikov and the relatively heavy 7.62x39mm round it fired were getting a bit long in the tooth. The answer was the AK74 and the 5.45x39mm cartridge.

The 5.45x39mm round fired by the AK74 is indeed a diabolical rascal.

The 5.45x39mm round fires a long, skinny 53-grain bullet to around 2,900 feet per second. While the Russians have fielded a variety of rounds in this chambering, the 7N6 is likely the most common. This bullet includes a small mild steel penetrator followed by a lead core all wrapped in a jacket made from gilding metal. Gilding metal is a form of brass that is much higher in copper than zinc. The manufacturing process leaves a small air space in the nose of the projectile underneath the jacket.

The 5.45x39mm was the Combloc answer to the American 5.56x45mm.

The aggregate effect is to place the center of gravity well to the rear. This causes the bullet to tumble viciously upon impact with a soft target and creates simply epic wounds. The Mujahideen who first faced this round in Afghanistan after the 1980 Soviet invasion thought the bullets contained explosives.

The AK74M, shown here mounting a GP-34 grenade launcher, is a mature and effective infantry combat weapon.

The most common assault rifle used by the Russians in Syria during this time was the AK74M. A modernized version of the original AK74, the AK74M featured a side-folding polyamide stock and a variety of tweaks to the original design to include a smooth top cover. The AK74M in Spetsnaz service frequently sported an underbarrel GP-25, GP-30, or GP-34 grenade launcher. These launchers were philosophically similar to the American M203 but loaded from the muzzle.

The Rest of the Story

The Kurdish YPG is currently estimated to field some 50,000 fighters. YPG literally translates “People’s Protection Units.”

Kurdish YPG forces eventually recovered Prokhorenko’s body more than a month later. There is a rumor circulating that the Russians traded several captured fighters for Prokhorenko’s corpse. The young warrior’s body arrived in Moscow on April 29, 2016.

These images are simply heartrending. War is undeniably horrible.
Like literally countless soldiers who had come before, Alexander Prokhorenko had his entire life ahead of him.

At the time of his death, Prokhorenko was married, and his wife was pregnant. A street and school have been renamed in his honor in Orenburg. In 2016 musicians from St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater orchestra played in the Roman Theater at Palmyra in Syria. ISIS had used this same site to execute Syrian soldiers before they were crushed by the accumulated combat power of pretty much the entire planet. The concert was dedicated to the hallowed memory of Alexander Prokhorenko.

The Russian Federation has rightfully venerated LT Prokhorenko.

Admiration and accolades poured in from around the globe. Prokhorenko was posthumously awarded the Hero of the Russian Federation, Russia’s highest award for gallantry in combat. In September of 2017 a marble statue of Prokhorenko was unveiled in the Park of Honor and Dishonor on the shores of Lake Vagli Sotto. Prokhorenko’s legacy will no doubt motivate young Russians to go off and fight and die in their own wars for generations to come.

LT Alexander Prokhorenko exhibited the patriotic fervor characteristic of most young warriors.

I get it. There is little I would not have done had my country asked back when I was young and full of fire and vinegar. Above all else this is the reason our politicians must make sober responsible decisions concerning the application of military power. Our young soldiers are indeed our most precious assets.

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