British Soldiers plus German Rifles equals Neutralized Terrorists

The London Daily Telegraph reports that troopers of Britain's Special Air Service (SAS) made a nighttime High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) parachute jump on the outskirts of Baghdad recently. The covert insertion was part of a mission to locate insurgent leaders and bomb-making factories.

It's interesting that even with all the talk about U.S. forces pulling out of Iraq, there still seems to be an active terrorist presence almost on the doorstep of the Green Zone. But enough of armchair strategy.

Here's the interesting part of the story: The SAS has now added Heckler & Koch's new battle rifle to its armory, the HK417. So now you have British soldiers using German rifles. Sir Winston Churchill might have been shocked, but actually it's nothing new. Everybody from the SAS to the british Metropolitan Police Force has used the German-built HK MP5 submachine guns for more than twenty years.

You may be familiar with H&K's 416, a M16 clone chambered in 556NATO, but the 417 is the big brother. It's chambered in 762NATO, has the same controls in the same places as the ubiquitous M16 (so it's easy for troops trained on the M16/M4/AR-15 platform to switch to the 417) but is also capable of being used as either a Close Quarters Battle (CQB) weapon, or as a precision rifle for long distance engagements (okay, so it's also a sniper rifle). Simply change the barrel from the 12 or 16-inch versions to the 20-inch barrel, and add a long-range scope. Voila!

When the M16 rifle was first fielded in Vietnam in the mid-sixties, the idea was that the 5.56mm cartridge was lighter than the 7.62 cartridge, so more of it could be carried into battle. While this was considered a good thing, it did not take into account a couple of other important factors: The 5.56 mm bullet does not fly as far as its heavier 7.62 mm counterpart, and the 55-70 grain projectile doesn't always put the other guy down as effectively as the 147 grain bullet in the 762NATO round. Arguably, this did not matter too much in the jungles of Vietnam, where enemy soldiers weighed about 110 LBS, wore only light uniforms, and were most likely engaged from zero to maybe a hundred yards or a bit more. And don't get me wrong, the 556NATO cartridge does put the bad guys down. It's just that the devil is in the details: does it do it at long distance? Does it take more than one solid hit?

However, the 762NATO round does a much better job than the 556NATO of penetrating barriers and unarmored vehicles like cars and trucks. During the U.S invasion of Panama in 1989 to arrest Manuel Noriega, the U.S. forces used the standard M16 rifle almost exclusively. However, when they came across heavily barracaded villas owned by Noriega's henchmen, they found that the 556NATO round was unable to shoot through the barriers. There were a few urgent calls placed stateside to fly down some mothballed, M14 rifles (chambered in 762NATO) to fix the problem. Ironically, the M14 was the standard U.S. service rifle early on in the Vietnam war (and was replaced by the M16) but with it's wooden stock, 7.62 caliber, and twenty-round magazine, was considered by some to be outdated when compared to the sleek little M16 with plastic stock and pistol grip, aluminum frame, and smaller 556NATO chambering.

So in the deserts of the middle east, where distances to targets can go from zero to a thousand yards (and those targets are a bit heavier built than Vietnamese people) it makes sense to use a cartridge that performs at extended distances. Particularly when, like the SAS on their Baghdad mission, you infil by parachute and don't have to hump a lot of ammo all day like the guys in Vietnam did on patrol.

Different strokes for different wars, I guess.