NGSW, disruptive innovations, and the small military team?

[grayfox]

Army & Industry Teams Massively Modernize the Next-Generation Squad Weapon (NGSW) - Warrior Maven: Center for Military Modernization

[LRRPF52]

[grayfox]

Lot of acronyms '52, hope I followed that!

Or on an unmanned aerial system (UAS, right?), a small one (portable/man carried/launched) you could mount either cluster-type bomblets or self-propelled, or fin-guided dinky rockets/explosives... drop-launch then they fire off and go.
idea being to miniaturize since you could get "close" overhead, using an arc-trajectory - not a lot of recoil...?

I do like the idea of having that little mule or truckin' buddy to pack some of the gear for the guys...

The Navy is developing a drone-helo-carried anti-mine detector, capable of on-board sensing of underwater mines - which means detecting and interpreting electronic/emf/infrared/visible signals on-board, process with AI and then sending back identification and location to the "mothership" in real time. All the ship needs to do is prep and fire a countermeasure or avoid or whatever....
The day will come when anti-submarine detection will be done by these guys, or even over-horizon recon for small ship detachments.
The leap that the Navy tech is doing is this pod can do all the detect/identify/locate/range/ etc in real time, being carried by a drone chopper. No need to fly back to base and download it.

So what if the small-group's portable UAS (call it a sparrow-hawk) does real-time sensing, identification, location and transmit all that back to the unit, who then can send up a fire/forget load of correct type, to finish the enemy thingy off - or maybe that's already being done.

Maybe even combine the thermal/IR/NV sensing for use by our sparrow-hawk to uncover hidden but heat-signature targets, snipers, enemy squads, hidden gun emplacements...

[LRRPF52]

[LRRPF52]

[grayfox]

Good info, great reading, looks like I'm sorta late to the party, sorry about that!
The more I look at the ngsw, the more it looks like an over-extension of traditional small arms rather than a truly next generation leap of a disruptive innovation.

...If I were more pessimistic I'd say they were trying to eliminate mil-surp market and reloaders and such!

[LRRPF52]

[LR1955]

And that has been my point with the lethality thing for years. A guy in that forest can see only so far so to me it is better to develop a cartridge and weapon that is very fast to use and very lethal to 200 or 300 instead of a heavier, bulkier, weapon and ammo that is intended for 300 to X distance. I do not think any designer will come up with something equally good in both conditions so focus on the most likely scenario and give them something that really does give a quantum advantage over an enemy.