Army Fields $277,000 XM-25 Individual Airburst Weapon Systems

[unhappycamper]

unhappycamper note: Since the ‘Pentagon’ (Righthaven LLC?) has ‘requested’ that I only post one paragraph from articles on Army Times, and Airforce Times, I’ve decided to give ya’ll an unhappycamper summary of the article and a link to the OP. To keep in that same (new) tradition, I will also do the same for articles on Navy Times, Marine Corps Times, stripes.com and military.com.To keep in that same (new) tradition, I will also do the same for for articles on Navy Times, Marine Corps Times, stripes.com and military.com.

To read the article in the military's own words, you will need to click the link.

Read all about Fair Use here. It sure is beginning to smell like fascism.

unhappycamper summary of this article: Another Future Combat Systems escapee. $277 grand seems to be a bit much for this 'thing'.

The $277K number is interesting as Wikipedia reports these things are 'only' $25K each.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM-25






Army Sending New Airburst Gun to 101st
October 15, 2010
Military.com|by Christian Lowe

The Army agreed to set aside $10 million to purchase 36 of the airburst weapons. PEO Soldier Weapons has five XM-25s on hand and will send those, along with two civilians who will help maintain the weapons and teach Soldiers how to operate the gun.

[Javaman]

1. Freaking Buck Rogers in Camo. nt

[Poll_Blind]

2. I'm not saying I like it but that gun is a revolution in firearms. A troubling one.

I've seen articles about this thing and a couple of videos. The "bullets", IIRC, are tiny little computer-controlled grenades. The main "trick" this thing can do is control exactly when that little grenade explodes. Mostly this allows a person with that weapon to kill people who are behind cover of some sort (like in a barricaded house or behind a wall) but which has some clear path where the bullet/grenade can get into or around the cover- and then detonate.

So, you could have 1 person standing behind an 8 foot tall, 8 foot wide brick wall, and fire one of these bullets either over the top or to the side. The weapon's laser range finder programs the bullet to go off just after it's cleared the distance between the firearm and the obstruction. The bullet/grenades are high-fragmentation explosives and since the gun is fully automatic, someone with this weapon could send a three round-burst of munition over a wall or to the side of it and kill the person behind the wall.

Same with a person inside a house or any other structure with some sort of window- which is pretty much all of them. Fire a few of these through the window timed to explode in flight, say, six inches past the window frame and it doesn't matter where the people are inside that room- they're going to get hit by the high-fragmentation shrapnel.

For our soldiers this is "great", whatever that means. I guess it means if less innocents die in wartime because of more precise munitions, that's a good thing.

The problem is this technology in the hands of a police force, because I have no doubt this is on the boner-list for a lot of cities. Supposedly it will make use of lethal force much more precise but it's a crock of shit in reality. A decade or much sooner from now expect to see custom-designed police munitions including mini-flashbangs, gas-dispersants, etc.

It's just like predator drones: You can have an exotic unmanned weapons platform flying over Afghanistan and remotely-controlled from a Nevada bunker (as they are in real life) and you can tell that drone to fire a Hellfire missile which it will do with stunning accuracy. But the problem is still between the ears of the person pressing the button. Which is why we have turned so many Afghan wedding celebrations into open-air graveyards.

PB