Is LSAT ready to be the Army's next light machine gun?
I've posted before on the Army's Lightweight Small Arms Technology program, a technology program designed to dramatically reduce the weight of the Army's guns and ammo by doing a ground-up redesign of both using plastic case-telescoped ammunition and/or caseless ammo.
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The program is maturing, and has successfully cut the weight of a light machine gun and ammo nearly in half. Military.com's KitUp! blog asks the question: is it time to get serious about LSAT?
With one major caveat, I think the answer is yes. Why? Consider:
- The M249 SAW is aging, and suffered some serious degradation during Iraq that only an intensive maintenance program helped. The Marines have started dumping theirs, but for an ill-considered auto-rifle that lacks the firepower of the weapon it replaces.
- Ammo stockpiles have never been lower, since stockpiles were depleted during Iraq as the ammo enterprise rushed to spool up, in some cases just barely making its requirements. Most ammo that is produced today is fired within a year or two. Given that the Army just switched to a new ammo configuration, it will take some time to rebuild a stockpile -- that funding could be diverted to new ammo.
- LSAT offers the opportunity to give every soldier the firepower of a SAW with the accuracy of a rifle, without a weight growth -- or depending on the tradeoffs, a weight reduction. The rest of the Soldier's kit is only getting heavier; some of that weight can offset network technologies like Nett Warrior.
- If the Army ever wants to seriously consider a caliber change to increase range, effectiveness, or other capabilities, the obvious time to do it is when the ammo configuration changes. The same tech in M855A1 can be applied in other calibers; in the LSAT configuration there's no particular reason to stick to existing caliber configurations. We did some analysis of alternative calibers at one point and found that we could achieve the range and penetration capability of a 7.62mm round at the weight of current 5.56mm systems by using a 6.5mm LSAT configuration.
- At least the Army would be investing in a new technology and capability, rather than reinventing the wheel.
The caveat? The declining defense budget. Retooling production for LSAT ammo would be a major investment: by some estimates it might cost as much as a billion dollars to set up for caseless ammo production (plastic case-telescoped could be significantly cheaper). That's real money in the small arms business, though admittedly it's less than the cost of buying new carbines for the entire Army, and even less than the cost of an overrun on the F-35. The investment would certainly be amortized over a long period of time -- the Army's likely to invest in a caliber change only once in a half-century or so. I'd suggest a few small arms programs that could be killed to pay the bill, like the IC competition, the XM806 lightweight .50, and perhaps the XM25.
So is it LSAT's time? Maybe, maybe not -- but perhaps it's time to run an operational assessment to answer the question.
