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seamusTX wrote:

rzym20 wrote:Respectfully, that's only partially true. I used to do RadHard work at Motorola Semiconductor. Radiation-hardened electronics are perfectly capable of surviving an EMP attack. Military communications grids were designed with this in mind. As for the rest of society, yeah they'd be having a bad day.

I would hope that the military is prepared for an EMP event.

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- Jim

When I worked in military procurement in the mid 1990s, EMP requirements were dropped from a lot of avionics and communications contracts since the threat was deemed much lower after the East Bloc collapsed; this enabled the military to take advantage of commercial electronics, which made things much cheaper and often/usually rendered better performance. In GPS in particular, unit costs of equipment dropped radically both due to this and the natural prices drops as an industry gets more experience with a new product.

I assume/believe that certain systems, e.g. nuclear weapons systems, probably certain comm systems, retained rad-hard requirments, but I believe that most other systems went to commercial electronics if at all possible. I don't know if this has changed in the last few years, but there will be a lot of non-EMP protected components out there for years to come.

seamusTX wrote:It's a mature technology. ...

- Jim

I think this is one of the reasons the AR platform is still the military's main longarm -- there are rifles and carbines that are better, e.g. more reliable, more lethal at combat distances, etc, but the military doesn't see the improvement as big enough to change the whole logistics tail (which is the major part of the expense). So they go for the quantum leap with the Objective Combat Weapon and similar programs. When I worked in military acquisition, it seemed we either ran "commodity" type acquisitions -- i.e. buy more of the same from the most cost effective bidder (the least expensive one that meets the spec) or we swung for the fences (which is a much bigger acquisition effort). As long as you were going to gen up for the effort, you might as well try to get a big leap out of it. Those that can escape the main stream acquisition process, like SOCOM, go off and buy improved AR-style weapons, wristwatch GPSs and the like.

As far as firearms in general go, I agree it is hard to see something really radical coming as long as firearms means powder, bullet, barrel. Some interesting semi-radical ideas include caseless ammo (which the military is working on). That would be a significant change, much more so than yet another caliber/cartridge.

A fully ceramic gun would be kind of cool and scare the bejabbers out of the non-2A crowd. Especially if fired caseless ammo and had Seamus's compact suppressor on it...