American Rifle - Alexander Rose [210]
In September 2002, despite several successful tests, these disadvantages were considered too onerous to overcome, and the program was split in two: an XM8 rifle component and a separate XM25 airburst component that would be developed independently. The XM8, it was assumed, would be America’s next rifle for the coming generation.3
This daring scheme to sunder a once-unified weapons program and perfect its modules separately was intended to blast a shortcut through the jungles and mountains of red tape that constituted the Pentagon’s traditional development and acquisitions process. If all worked out well, then at some point—say, when technology and materials science had matured sufficiently to allow major weight and cost reductions—the XM25 and the XM8 would be fused together again as the XM29.4 Even if no such progress was made, however, the army would still end up with a superb rifle in record time—a prime consideration when an invasion of Iraq looked increasingly likely in early 2003.
This innovative technique was known as “spiral development,” and it was diametrically different from the army’s time-tested—but time-consuming—approach that called for releasing a full-fledged, working weapon and then fine-tuning it as bugs, kinks, and flaws were subsequently discovered. (The story of the M16 is a case in point.) Given time, the weapon would, theoretically at least, achieve the pitch of perfection. The ethos of spiral development, on the other hand, could be summarized as “build a little, test a little, build a little,” and its primary advantages were speed and flexibility.5 The spiral method tended to be preferred by those officials bestirred by the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) or “force transformation”—among whom numbered then–defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.6
Following the end of the Cold War, Pentagon theorists conceived the RMA concept to justify a military metamorphosis that would be equal in impact to that executed by President Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of War Elihu Root at the turn of the twentieth century. Under Roosevelt and Root, commanders had grappled with the conversion of the U.S. Army from its small, mobile structure and Indian-fighting duties into a large, European-style force committed to defending the homeland and its imperial possessions. Their successors wished to reverse the process: to transform the lumbering Cold War army, built to fight the Soviets in Europe, into a compact force that could be rapidly dispatched to world hotspots to stop trouble, protect American interests, and terminate the practitioners of “asymmetric warfare” (known as Indians in the days of Custer).
The Revolution in Military Affairs would be televised, quite literally—upon banks of networked monitors enabling “perfect situational awareness” of enemy positions and intentions in the designated “battle-space.” Robots would be deployed into dangerous areas. “Smart” bombs would hit their targets precisely. Force would be applied exactly to the right spot, minimizing civilian casualties and military wastage. Many of the RMA’s technical prognostications did come true—the Predator drones circling menacingly, invisibly overhead in Iraq and Afghanistan offer concrete proof of success—but the conceptual basis of “force transformation” would come undone in the Middle East.
While the RMA’s advocates boasted that they looked to the future, they were in fact rooted deeply in the past. The RMA, in short, was little other than the return to power of the army’s progressive school. Its exponents could even be considered the heirs of William Conant Church, the NRA founder and Creedmoor marksmanship enthusiast. In his case, the extravagant bloodiness of the Civil War and the technological innovation of the telescopic sight (which permitted one man to target a single officer) directed him to posit a future in which war was limited and “clean.” When conducted by automonous specialists, not dragooned hordes of frightened youths pushed toward cannons