Army interested in new Designated Marksman Rifle -- poor investment?

According to a Military.com article "Army the Army's Next Infantry Squad", the Army is interested in replacing the M14 Enhanced Battle Rifle it has procured in small numbers for overseas Squad Designated Marksmen with a shortened version of its M110 Semi-Auto Sniper Rifle.  In my view, it's fixing the right problem with the wrong solution.

M110 SASS. US Army photo/PEO Soldier.The Designated Marksman concept is a good one in theory -- have a rifleman in each squad capable of taking long range or low-percentage shots to take out high value targets.  Practice has never quite matched up to theory, though.

In typical Army fashion, we blame our equipment.  "Our rifle isn't good enough", we complain, "We need a purpose-designed DM weapon."  So we do some experimentation and discover a few things that help, like two-stage triggers and magnified optics.  But we're still not good enough, so "we need a new rifle, but with longer range!"

That begot the M14 EBR, which was just a rack-grade M14 battle rifle upgraded with a rail-equipped stock so it could take accessories and a scope.  The troops felt good because they had a 7.62mm rifle with longer range -- in theory.  In practice, the EBR's accuracy really wasn't any better than the base M14, which isn't any better than any other battle rifle -- good to 300m, occasionally good to 600m, rarely beyond.  (Before some Camp Perry shooter flips out, let me say that yes, you can build a fantastically accurate rifle out of an M14 if you work at it, which is what was done to build the M21 sniper rifle.  But we didn't do that with the EBR.)  But since the EBR looks like a sniper rifle, soldiers expect it to act like a sniper rifle -- and that's not what they get (I've seen the range data and I travelled around Afghanistan specifically collecting feedback on the EBR, so if you're a one-shot one-kill wonder with an EBR, good on you, but you're not the average DM).

The next step down that line of insanity is to give the DM an actual sniper rifle (or, to reduce visibility, a shortened sniper rifle like the article linked above supposes).  That's a bad idea for two reasons.

First: cost.  An M110 cost about 10x a standard rifle.  That's OK when you're equipping snipers, who are relatively low density; not so good when equipping individual infantry squads.  I'll even set aside the logistics argument of mixed ammo in the squad for the moment, or the question of whether at squad level you even need to engage at 600-800 meters range, where the enemy generally can't touch you except with heavy weapons and nothing else in the squad can support.

Second: effectiveness.  Putting a 1 MOA (minute-of-angle, for those non-shooter types, a measure of accuracy equal to 1" spread at 100 yards) gun in the hands of a 10 MOA soldier does not a Designated Marksman make.  The cost of buying short-M110s would be far better placed against more range time and more effective training for the DM soldiers themselves.

Here's the case study.

When I worked at Ft Benning I was involved with a Designated Marksman experiment evaluating options for new DM rifles.  We went to a brigade getting ready to deploy who would get the rifles, and asked for their 25 best shooters who were going to be Designated Marksmen.  The plan was to get a baseline by having them shoot a standard qualification course with their issue weapon, then run them through the Designated Marksman program of instruction and get a performance baseline, and then begin to switch out weapons and compare their performance, using design-of-experiments to randomize the design and try and control variables as much as possible.

Except that 7 of the 25 shooters failed to qualify on the baseline qualification course.  7 of the BCT's best shooters -- bolos.  Retrain, requalify.  We then ran the DM course, and no one qualified -- including a B4 sniper.  We ran the entire DM course again (burning a lot of extra range time, and ammo), and finally on the second go-round got eight guys qualified, which was enough to run the experiment and get the data we needed (the other 17 went back to their unit as better shooters but still not DM material).

My lesson: invest in training.  It's generally cheaper, easier, and more effective than giving a soldier a piece of equipment without the training to fully employ it.  You want sniper-like performance and 800 meters range?  Give a troop a sniper rifle without sniper training and that's exactly what you won't get.

But instead all we want to do is buy equipment like it's a magic bullet.  Someone probably wants to know what rifle won the DM shootout.  I'll tell you, but you won't believe me: the standard rack-grade M4 with an ACOG.  We did have a modified M16 with match ammo that performed exceptionally, until it ran out of match ammo and we fired it with standard issue ball, at which point it shot worse than the issue rifles.  The M14?  Dead last out of four, by a long shot.  Yep, the standard M4 with a well-trained soldier, a decent sight and regular ol' green time could consistently print a man-sized target at 600m.  Sure, a sniper rifle it wasn't -- but it was good enough to answer the DM mission.

We sent the results up the chain with a recommendation to buy more ACOGs and invest in more training.  The Army bought more M14 EBRs instead.