Lawmaker asking why Navy SEALs don't have enough rifles

[Wrabbit2000]

This is sad. Beyond Sad.... Pathetic.

I still see and hear many of my fellow Americans touting America as the best Military in the world, or the most capable. This.......used to be true. This....could still BE true, and we haven't lost the structure, numbers (generally speaking) or ability to train a fine edge to our people. We have just lost the collective desire to try or maintain it.

Navy SEAL teams don't have enough combat rifles to go around, even as these highly trained forces are relied on more than ever to carry out counterterrorism operations and other secretive missions, according to SEALs who have confided in Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif.

After SEALs return from a deployment, their rifles are given to other commandos who are shipping out, said Hunter, a former Marine who served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. This weapons carousel undercuts the "train like you fight" ethos of the U.S. special operations forces, they said.

Yeah, this is a great idea.... The rifles aren't lifetime items to start with, and they DO take heavy wear and tear. The Mattel toys they call M-16's are particularly susceptible to hard wear and tear, compared to...say...the venerable M-14.

Sharing rifles may seem inconsequential. It's not. The weapons, which are outfitted with telescopic targeting sights and laser pointers, are fine-tuned to individual specifications and become intensely personal pieces of gear.

"They want their rifles," Hunter said. "It's their lifeline. So let them keep their guns until they're assigned desk jobs at the Pentagon."

Sounds like a reasonable request to me, anyway....

One of the SEALs who contacted Hunter blamed a slow, penny-pinching bureaucracy that rarely seeks input from the service members who use the gear, according to a brief excerpt of his comments that the congressman's office provided to The Associated Press.

Delays of as long as three to four years paralyze the acquisition system, the SEAL said. Once an item has finally been approved for purchase, new and better gear may be available, triggering the same lengthy screening process to see if it's worth getting instead.

Source


I hope no one is under illusions of being able to meet an enemy in battle and fight a MAJOR war or a serious engagement where the other side has the ability and will to actually win for a change. We'd have a run for our money, I believe. At best.

[Chiefsmom]

Wow. Just wow.

Whomever isn't giving them the funds they need, so they can actually have their own gun, and keep it, needs to be fired immediately. This is beyond asinine.

  

[senona]

 


Waste in spending and poor management as to getting the money where it is supposed to go to.
Shameful.....but not surprising

[Wrabbit2000]

When I had read about the SEALs in the 1990's, they had a policy of personal choice between weapons, where realistic to do. In other words, they had their M-4 armory, but also had the freedom to have non-standard rifles they personally preferred over the Mattel toy. 

According to Richard Marcinko in the book he wrote about forming Seal Team Six and the later adventures they had playing 'Red Cell' operations against the US Government? At the time they formed, their ammunition training allotment to come online as the initial US Counter-terror team (Well, aside from Delta at around the same time) was greater than the annual allowance of the United States Marine Corps as a WHOLE. 

I think the United States HAS, past tense, enjoyed the most highly trained, fine tuned and well maintained military in the history of the world. However, that has been a force maintained at great expense of training, training, and more training. Training went down the crapper with sequestration, which Obama wrote into the budget deal clear back in the first actions of his Presidency. Compared to Social Security and Medi- programs? Military training is "discretionary" spending. Those entitlement programs are called that because they *WILL* be funded, by law, no matter WHAT. Defense, or most of it, does NOT fall under that category of protection. So sequestration killed little things like the Thunderbirds and Blue Angels training in the earliest days I recall...and ended up with training shortages of basic ammunition. 

We've also had a FEW missions now where hostages were killed by or in concert with Delta and/or SEAL teams trying to rescue them.

When Jimmy Carter and his people asked the founder of Delta Force (in relation to the Iran hostage rescue mission which was being planned then) what ratio of losses Delta could expect for hostages in a fluid and dynamic rescue? (This is in more than one book on the founding of Delta, by the way) The reply was something else..and it was classic American. "We do not lose Hostages, sir.". As I recall it written....

Until recently ... Until recent years .... America had held that record, to my knowledge, in near perfection too. How? Are Americans Supermen that Canadians or Germans or Russians aren't?? Hell no ...

More training ammunition allotted to ONE TEAM than to the entirety of the US Marine Corps...is how they could confidently say, with margins to spare "We DO NOT lose hostages". 

.......when the little crap slides, the big stuff follows ..and little stuff has been sliding since 2009, anyway.