Army Still Wants a Precision Infantry Weapon to Destroy the Enemy From Behind Cover
It is great to see the Army focus on the Infantry. For my 9 years in the infantry our weapons and kit was almost static. That started to change after 9-11 and has picked up the last 4 years.
he XM25 program may be dead, but Army maneuver officials at Fort Benning, Georgia, still want to arm infantry squads with a precision weapon that can destroy enemies hiding behind cover.
"There are certain aspects of a firefight or a gunfight that have not changed and probably will never change," Col. Rhett Thompson, director of the Soldier Requirements Division at Benning, said during a National Defense Industrial Association's Armaments, Robotics and Munitions conference Thursday. "One of our challenges continues to be counter-defilade because of one thing that happens when you start the firefight ... everybody goes down, everybody goes to ground."
Army officials hope to find a solution to the problem by 2028 with the Precision Grenadier program, Thompson said. Currently, two infantrymen in each squad are armed with an M4A1 carbine with an M320 40mm grenade launcher attached for engaging enemy in defilade or behind cover.
During the past decade, the Army tried to field the XM25 Counter-Defilade Target Engagement System to expand the infantry squad's effectiveness at killing enemies behind cover.Maneuver officials did not discuss details about potential prototypes for the Precision Grenadier effort, but they hope to equip squads with a counter-defilade weapon in the "near term," Thompson said.
The Army is currently conducting the Platoon Arms and Ammunition Configuration Study, which will look at the enemy the service will face in the future and help inform the requirements for a new counter-defilade weapon, said Thompson, who did not provide details about how long the study is expected to last.
It will "also look at who might need this capability; it's not necessarily a one-size-fits-all" effort, Thompson said, adding that soldiers in combat support and sustainment units won't likely have a need for such a weapon.