Please Dear Readers, Don’t do this stupid stunt! Grumpy
Category: All About Guns
William Pickering was out of his depth. Born into poverty in the slums of Birmingham, England in 1758, he had rightfully expected to live out his days toiling in the ironworks alongside his father. Neither of the Pickerings had any real formal education.
It was the soul-crushing drudgery that had ultimately driven him from home. Bill Pickering reported to his local recruiting station, proved that he had the requisite minimum number of opposing teeth, and made his mark on the enlistment form. Now fourteen months later he crouched in a reinforced redoubt outside Yorktown, Virginia, under the command of Charles Cornwallis. He was fairly certain he was about to die.
The colonists advanced behind their bayonets, their heavy muskets silent. They hacked their way through the wooden abatis that Pickering and his comrades had felled to block the advances and began to scale the works. On the command of his senior NCO, William Pickering and 69 of his mates lined up their Brown Bess muskets and pulled their actions to full cock. At a range of 50 yards, his Sergeant gave the command to fire, and all 70 British weapons detonated in a single, ragged volley.
As the smoke cleared, Pickering’s blood chilled. The failing sun danced across dozens of American bayonets as the colonists kept coming. Pickering looked to his left and right before dropping his musket and throwing up his hands. The imminent prospect of cold steel rearranging a man’s entrails can be a powerful motivator. Three days later Cornwallis surrendered in absentia, claiming an illness.
William Pickering was treated surprisingly well by the victorious Americans. As a result, he was among the roughly 10 percent of defeated British soldiers who elected to remain behind in the new nation and start a fresh life. By the time of his death, he was a landowner with three sons and a modest plantation. Without realizing it, William Pickering’s story was the beginning of the American dream.
The Weapon
The British Brown Bess was first introduced in 1722. The formal appellation was the Land Pattern Musket, and it served until 1838. Both the British and their opponents used these weapons in dozens of wars across the globe. The Brown Bess evolved through several variations during its protracted service life.
Nobody is really certain where the term Brown Bess originated. There are lots of suggestions, none of which is completely reliable. The most likely is that the term Brown Bess somehow spawns from some forgotten bawdy harlot, an otherwise nameless prostitute who found herself unusually popular among British soldiers centuries ago. Rudyard Kipling’s 1911 poem titled, “Brown Bess” implied this to have been the case. The potentially vulgar origins of the term just add to the romance of the piece.
Tactical Details
The maximum effective range was listed as 300 yards. A skilled and drilled Redcoat was expected to get off four rounds per minute. In reality, the smoothbore gun was only really reliably effective at less than 100 yards, but it inflicted some truly ghastly wounds.
For close-quarters work at bad breath ranges, the Brown Bess was frequently loaded with buck and ball, a devastating combination of buckshot atop a musket ball. Imagine the Royal Navy repelling boarders in The Pirates of the Caribbean if you need an example. The bore was a gaping 0.75″, but the balls were a bit undersized to compensate for the inevitable muzzle fouling. As a result, the gun was innately inaccurate. The most common version of the weapon weighed 10.5 lbs. and was 58.5″ long.
Around four million of these old muskets saw service. To put that in perspective, using the most modern production techniques available at the time and operating at maximum capacity, American industry produced some 6,121,309 M1 Carbines via 10 major manufacturers during World War II. The guys who made these old muskets used machines powered by horses, water or steam. An original Brown Bess is typically both crazy expensive and quite long in the tooth these days.
Cutting-Edge Tech
While the Brown Bess is fairly archaic by modern standards, in its day it reflected the state of the military art. In the skilled hands of British troops, the Land Pattern Musket enforced the will of the English regent around the globe. A decent Brown Bess musket adds flare to any seasoned gun collection.
My Brown Bess was a proper fixer-upper purchased online. What came out of the box looked like it had been stored at the bottom of the ocean. The wood was worm-eaten and friable, though the metal bits retained ample character. However, it didn’t look much like a regal British military weapon. As a result, my kit included a new-made buttstock along with fresh screws and a few modern replica brass bits.
The new guns and ammunition the Army just married and is expected to issue to combat arms units within the next decade will require soldiers to carry an even heavier load.
But information on how those weapons should outperform the guns they’re replacing — the justification for troops to shoulder extra weight on top of mountains of gear already injuring soldiers — is classified.
In April, the Army announced that Sig Sauer will produce replacements for the M4 rifle and M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, or SAW, starting with a trial run of about 40 new guns late next year. Production is expected to ramp up when the Army opens a new ammo plant to produce the new 6.8mm rounds for those weapons around 2026.
Army officials have touted that the new XM5, the M4’s replacement, and XM250, set to replace the SAW, pack a much harder punch and will improve the combat performance of ground troops. But thus far, the service has declined to disclose evidence that those weapons outperform the M4 and SAW, including how far they can shoot accurately. And it’s unclear whether the Army has verified the ranges at which those new weapons can engage an enemy before committing to a multimillion-dollar contract.
“During the prototyping phase of the program, the [weapons] demonstrated the ability to significantly outperform the M4A1 and M249 with lethal effects at all ranges,” Lt. Col. Brandon Kelley said in a statement. “Following production qualification testing and operational testing, the Army will establish and validate the maximum effective ranges.”
Prototyping and the Army’s selection of which vendor would supply its new weapons took only 27 months. For comparison, the service spent more than a decade developing its new fitness test.
A spokesperson for Sig Sauer declined to comment, directing Military.com to the Defense Department regarding questions on its weapons.
Information on the maximum distances other Army weapons can engage targets is no secret; it’s one of the first things a new recruit learns and is easily searchable online. According to Kelley, the new weapons’ capabilities eventually will be disclosed, but there is no clear timetable.
The M4, the Army’s current standard-issue rifle used in the post-9/11 wars, can effectively engage targets at 500 meters. The SAW can suppress targets at around 800 meters.
For comparison, the standard-issue rifle for the Chinese military is the QBZ-95, which has a maximum effective range of 400 meters for a target.
Those distances are critical for troops to be able to confront an enemy force accurately, and anything less could alter U.S. soldiers’ effectiveness and even require changes to tactics. An Army report in 2009 on U.S. troops’ performance in ground combat in Afghanistan found that the average gunfight was well beyond 300 meters and that any training or equipment not built for at least 500 meters would be “inappropriate.”
But holding those details close to the chest before weapons are distributed to the force might be done out of fear of the Chinese government getting a sneak peek at the new guns.
“You don’t want the Chinese getting it,” Kelley told Military.com. “They steal tech all the time. Let’s get ahead while we can.”
The plan is for the new weapons to be issued only to troops in combat arms units, such as infantrymen and cavalry scouts. The Army plans to buy 107,000 XM5s and 13,000 XM250s for active-duty soldiers and National Guardsmen. But that total purchase could take the rest of the decade. Eventually, the XM5 will be renamed the M5, and the XM250 will be designated the M250.
Yet when soldiers eventually get those new guns, they will carry significantly less ammunition, given the 6.8mm is much heavier than the 5.56mm rounds the M4 and SAW use. The idea is those heavier rounds will be more effective against body armor and light vehicles. However, the Army has not disclosed any evidence on that being the case.
The XM5 weighs 8.38 pounds, or 9.84 pounds with the suppressor, much heavier than the 6.34-pound M4. That new rifle will also use 20-round magazines, smaller than the 30-round magazines troops currently use. A soldier’s basic combat load will be seven of those 20-round magazines, a total of 140 rounds, weighing 9.8 pounds altogether.
The M4’s combat load, also seven magazines for a total of 210 rounds, is 7.4 pounds. In total, a rifleman with the XM5 will carry roughly four pounds more than today’s M4 rifleman.
“Hopefully, these are worth the bang for the buck,” one Army infantry sergeant major told Military.com on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press on the subject. “Asking [soldiers] to carry anything more than they already do, and having less ammo, that is a hard pitch.”
How ground troops pack is meticulously planned, with even an extra single ounce taken into account as their total load has ballooned in recent decades. Soldiers often carry between 30 and 80 pounds, or possibly more depending on the mission, lugging around batteries, radios, water, food, protective gear and grenades.
“Soldiers will carry less ammunition, but the performance of that ammunition provides an increase in lethality, accuracy and range across a broader range of targets,” Kelley added in a statement.
The XM250, however, weighs less, at 14.5 pounds, than the SAW, which weighs 19.2 pounds. That XM250 weight includes its bipod and suppressor.
But like the new rifle, light machine gunners will still carry that heavier 6.8mm ammo, and less of it. That could be a challenge, given a SAW gunner’s job is to fire a lot of rounds, quickly, to suppress enemy movement.
A soldier with an XM250 will carry a basic load of four 100-round pouches of ammo, weighing 27.1 pounds. SAW gunners carry three, 200-round pouches, weighing 20.8 pounds.
In total, future light machine gunners will carry 200 fewer rounds of ammunition and about one extra pound when accounting for the weapon and its ammo. It is unclear what the spare barrels for the XM250 weigh.
