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 Totalwar1402 wrote:

Slipspace wrote:
A lot of the technologies mentioned by the OP are in use - we have armed drones and pinpoint bombs/missiles that can surgically target relatively small areas even with friendly troops close by. The fact remains we still need to arm our troops since we still need them to actually hold ground or clear people out of buildings or engage enemies otherwise too difficult to target with long-range munitions.

As everyone else already pointed out, rifle technology is basically a solved problem at this point and most of the issues you're bringing up are more related to cost and training than technology. More accurate rifles exist, more powerful rifles exist, lighter rifles with overall better performance exist and many of these are in use by militaries around the world. Fundamentally they all do exactly the same thing and the reason for that is we haven't found a better way to do it yet. It may be that we never will. Perhaps the most efficient way for soldiers to kill their targets at fairly close ranges is and always will be firearms?

Things like guided bullets may become a part of warfare eventually, but one of the things history has taught us about weapons development is that cost and ease of use are at least as important as the quality and features of the weapon, if not more so. The AK-47 works and is extremely cheap and durable. It's by no means the best at anything it does (save possibly not breaking) but that doesn't really matter. Rifles are now quite a small part of warfare anyway so that's why most R&D is sunk into weapons that make a difference like ships, planes and missiles/bombs.

Could infantry become marginal to the point of being irrelevant? If WW3 happened, for example, that conflict would revolve around ICBM’s hurling nukes at each other. You would never have the millions strong armies of infantry like you had in WW1 and WW2? Their role seems incredibly reduced in modern warfare, a bit like how the cavalry’s role became more and more marginal as time progressed? Until eventually they were seen as a suicidal method of fighting war kept on only out of romantic tradition?

Doubt it due to the nature of Conflicts atm, you require Infantry to fight against guerrila style insurgents.

In all likelihood WW3 would be fought with nuclear weapons, at which point the role of the infantryman becomes obsolete. That's another reason why rifle technology hasn't advanced, and it's been mentioned a few times so far. Militaries don't really need a better way to fling small bits of metal at each other. In fact, research has shown that even a well-trained soldier's accuracy in combat conditions is pretty low so the impact of any one individual is quite small. Most modern infantry combat doctrine revolves around suppressing fire, usually from a light support weapon, and flanking pinned enemies to take fairly close-range shots at exposed bodies. At that point long-range accuracy isn't important.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
I think you’re really underselling how much the rest of our technology has moved on since 1949. We replace every piece of technology within a few years. Why not guns like the AK?

It wouldn’t necessarily take a revolution in rifle technology to render the AK obsolete.

There are a lot of really well reasoned, articulated posts answering exactly this. Why are you reiterating the original question again?

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
Technology has been pretty much exponential over the past 200 years. We still had cavalry fighting with swords and lances in 1914; 51 years later we were dropping nukes on people. I doubt people in 1800 assumed the musket or cavalry would become obsolete or that war could be waged beyond the horizon.

I think WW2 would have ended substantially differently had we not actually dropped the bomb until 1965

Providing more examples isn’t restating the question. When you debate something you come up with examples and no honestly I don’t feel anyone has answered the question. Not everything can be spat out and addressed in a single sentence. Why has there been technological stagnation in infantry weapons when normally they would either be displaced by better systems or rendered obsolete. The statements people have made boil down to “its good enough”, “technology just hasn’t advanced”, “R&D has went elsewhere”, “you don’t get a good return on improvements”; those are answers which create additional questions. I think those questions are worth asking. If you don’t then why are here?

Oh sorry, 31 years from cavalry to atomic bombs. That actually makes the case stronger for technology advancing really rapidly over the years.. Also, I don’t actually mention Hiroshima so yeah.

That wasn't the original question, but I will try to answer it anyway.

Simply put, if you want to improve the lethality of an infantry rifle there are three ways it could be done:

More accuracy.
Greater damage, perhaps through higher velocity or explosive content.
Higher rate of fire.

Realistically, current rifles already as as accurate as they need to be. That's a completely valid argument. We can make rifles which will shoot accurately over a mile, but it's not a practical battlefield application for the ordinary soldier.

New rifles could be designed with higher velocity, and/or explosive bullets, but there would be a trade-off in terms of size, rate of fire and recoil. See the WW2 anti-tank rifles and the modern Barrett sniper rifle. This is because of basic physics. Plus, modern protective body armour isn't strong enough to make this heavier kind of rifle necessary. If anything, armies might return to the higher power NATO 7.62mm round if body armour became more effective and widespread.

Higher rate of fire requires more ammunition and a changeable barrel, and so on. We've already got machine-guns to do this.

In short, the reason why the AK47 has not become obsolete is firstly that it's more or less as good as any other assault rifle produced since the mid-1940s. Secondly that the infantry rifle is only one element of combat, and probably not the most important.

This situation will not change until a startling new technology is developed. Let's imagine a barrel-less rifle shooting hypervelocity needle darts by electromagnetic field, with a cyclic rate of 6,000 rounds per minute. This would make all modern rifles obsolete compared on a one to one basis. Would it give you an automatic win if you had them and the enemy has AK47s? Probably not. Suppose the enemy had developed a network system of micro-drone reconnaissance which pinpointed all your troops in real time?

Here you go:-

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Weapon-Choice-Culture-Military-Innovation/dp/1849046506


His thesis is also available here for those who want something less well developed for free:-
https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/matthew-ford(dfb70d9a-7eca-4570-9f67-c78bd83d28c3)/theses.html

As an aside.

What is the current ratio between small arms rounds fired and rounds that actually hit?

In conflicts.

Very low.

Governments a few decades were experimenting with firearms that fired flechettes or other multi-projectile ammunition because rifles are generally as accurate as they need to be, the problem is target exposure time.

Flechette ammo never really took off so we’re down to flinging as much lead as possible via cyclic rate, which has tradeoffs to consider. The result is lots of ammunition fired with comparatively few hits as targets generally only expose themselves for a matter of seconds.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
Could infantry become marginal to the point of being irrelevant?

I don't know for sure, but my gut says you will always need dudes on foot to hold areas.

 Mr. Burning wrote:
As an aside.

What is the current ratio between small arms rounds fired and rounds that actually hit?

In conflicts.

Depends on who you ask but it's as high as 250,000 rounds fired per kill.

The US government has been interested in improving that for many decades - they've tried stuff like multiple bullets in one round, 2 rounds fired in a single trigger pull (within the space of a single felt recoil impulse), airbursting munitions, and so on - but cost\benefit always falls back to the status quo.

 Overread wrote:
And that's another aspect, most of the countries making heavy use of it are poorer nations. They don't have a huge R&D budget (if they have one at all); they don't have huge resources to pour into top end machining and equipment.They want a cheap, easy to maintain, decent killing weapon that is easy to get ammo for and supply. The AK 47 provides pretty much all those things and will still make everyone duck their heads when it fires and it will still kill people at decent ranges for combat.

Or they have some rather top-end machining but limited budgets. If the government wanted to drop the cash I'm sure Sako could produce a much-improved version of a 5.45 or 5.56 rifle for us. But the FDF runs on a tight budget and needs enough gear to outfit a large army of reservists. A civilian who likes guns can afford to drop 300€ more for a newer rifle, but an army that needs several 100K guns will have to evaluate what else they'll have to give up in order to upgrade to something new. And since rifles really aren't the main killer in battle it's not really the first priority. Our 7.62x39 rifles are good enough (and accurate enough) to make people take cover where they can be given a taste of some artillery fire. Vehicle-mounted automatic mortars, SPGs, mortars, traditional towed artillery, rockets...

 Totalwar1402 wrote:

I think you’re really underselling how much the rest of our technology has moved on since 1949. We replace every piece of technology within a few years. Why not guns like the AK?

1. Technological development is heavily lobsided.

Some tech has improved very little, and some a lot. If since 1945 firearms developed as fast as computers we would have Culture-tech death rays by now. As it so happens we have not. There are several reasons for that, first some branches of the tech tree have developmental plateaus, wheras some emerging tech like computing power grows exponentially because there is pressure to do so. Small firearms are a near static tech with few improvements because the tech goal has itself plateaued. By the late Victorian era we had already learned as much as we needed to know about design and manufacture of lethal smallarms. There is very little in terms of design resistance, with kevlar and equivalent materials being the only notable counter pressure in the last century, and Kevlasr will not stop rifle round even from a rifle from the turn of the 20th century.

Even the most advanced militiaries still stock small arms that are pre WW2. The M2 Browning .50 cal machine gun is still in service with the US army, and was actively used in Iraq, and the Browning Hi-Power was only discontinued in the last decade. So it is not just irreular forces or developing world militiaries that use older firearms.



2. Occassionally we lose skillsets.

This usually refers to technically obsolete equipment which has been replaced and is later found to be more reliable than the replacement; in some cases this can lead to situations where 'obsolete' technology is reintroduced and few to nobody can be found who can maintain it. This doesnt relate to the AK-47 but share common principles.

So the first lesson here is that if you need to go back to a technology it is not truly obsolete, ruggedness and reliability are valid factors.
Second, undercutting your tech tree is short sighted.

With that learned does the AK-47 have features not yet surpassed in terms of ruggedness and reliability. To that I would answer with a resounding yes, the AK-47 is still one of the most reliable firearms currently in service.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
Why has there been technological stagnation in infantry weapons when normally they would either be displaced by better systems or rendered obsolete.

This is the core of your problem. You're assuming some kind of RTS-style tech tree where you continuously add +1 to your weapons and there's always something better to upgrade to. In reality it doesn't work that way. There is no "normal" progression of improvements. Sometimes things improve very quickly because there is the right combination of new discoveries and pressure to improve, sometimes things get to a point where they're as good as they're going to get because we fully understand the problem and have optimized a solution. Guns are in that second case, we thoroughly understand the problem of how to fling bits of metal at someone and all of its design tradeoffs. The AK-47 has a good set of design compromises and is adequate for the job, so why spend R&D money when the chances of getting a significant improvement are low?

To give an example, consider accuracy. You might be able to spend tons of money on advanced materials and manufacturing techniques to improve the tolerances of every part of the AK-47, resulting in higher accuracy. Maybe you could even find new design optimizations that make a better rifle with even better accuracy. But the reality of the situation is that the AK-47 is already accurate enough at realistic engagement ranges that the limiting factor is the skill of the user, not the mechanical qualities of the gun. And by making all of the pieces more precise you might hinder reliability, trading a valuable asset for a negligible improvement.

Because it works, it's ten a penny and it's dirt cheap. Plus it's more difficult to teach a 10 year old how to strip and maintain an m4

The makers of the AK-47 knew someday that man would need something to fight Skynet.

Rifles are just delivery systems for bullets. Without a significant change if the projectiles we fire - there will be little change to the rifle.

If we came up with a new kind of propellent that could dramatically increase bullet velocity rifles might change then but there is a limit to what chemistry can do here. It's probably be maxed out.

Perhaps in the future we will have dudes running around with capacitors of their back with hand held railguns or laser rifles - or perhaps it will only be machines using them. That is probably the next step in rifle tech. Even then I don't think modern rifles would become obsolte. They will still have their job of being light weight battle rifles. Plus also really cheap.

 Xenomancers wrote:
Rifles are just delivery systems for bullets. Without a significant change if the projectiles we fire - there will be little change to the rifle.

If we came up with a new kind of propellent that could dramatically increase bullet velocity rifles might change then but there is a limit to what chemistry can do here. It's probably be maxed out.

Perhaps in the future we will have dudes running around with capacitors of their back with hand held railguns or laser rifles - or perhaps it will only be machines using them. That is probably the next step in rifle tech. Even then I don't think modern rifles would become obsolte. They will still have their job of being light weight battle rifles. Plus also really cheap.

Rail guns are probably the only way to do something like that. To increase the velocity of a bullet you'd need a higher velocity explosive, and then youre getting into high explosive, and that won't work for a bullet propellant as the breech would just explode.

 Ouze wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
This is partly because the weapons are already good enough.

Which if you think about it, isn't that kind of weird? it's almost 2020 and we're still mostly killing people with little pieces of flying metal. I was sure by now we'd have, you know, lasers and flying cars and robot butlers.

Futurists are universally bad at engineering. Little flying pieces of metal are extremely efficient at killing people at a distance. Lasers aren't. Flying cars are possible but incredibly energy inefficient (therefore expensive) and unsafe (due to the level of training required for a flying vehicle being beyond most of the population's means). As to robot butlers, everyone underestimated how hard making artificial intelligence really is, because we don't understand the basis for human intelligence.

While we live in an age of incredible technological and scientific progress, the laws of physics will always stymie the imagination of futurists, who ignore the practical benefits of technology over the idea that higher tech equals BETTER, which it does not. An infantryman's weapon needs to be simple to use, deadly, lightweight, easy to maintain and inexpensive. The AK47 ticks all those boxes.

I wouldn't want lasers to replace firearms, because when you miss with a bullet it generally smashes into a wall or something and that's it. A laser, OTOH, will almost certainly start a fire if it hits anything remotely flammable. An urban conflict using lasers will result in a city-wide inferno in short order.

It's just a combination of circumstances. The AK-47 (no longer in production, but the name stuck around) was on the leading edge of mass-produced semi-automatic/automatic assault rifles. Coincidentally it premiered the intermediate cartridge a little earlier than NATO on a massive scale. Also, the Soviet system at the time actually meant that the design and testing of the AK was a hugely successful process.

The arms procurement systems for the rifle consisted of 3-5 submitted plans. A round of testing would occur and the state would eliminate one. However, at that point the design of the failed submission would be turned over to the remaining teams to incorporate any good ideas. An idea completely incomprehensible in the West the way we do things. So by the time the Kalashnikov model was approved it had incorporated not only the thoughts of its inventors (yes, more than one person designed it despite the "Kalashnikov designed it on a notepad when he was in hospital" storyline) but ideas/processes/traits from the other weapon submissions.

In the West we were already into the major manufacturers competing for huge government contracts kind of thing. This is one of the few areas where the Soviets got it right. They ended up with a superbly designed firearm. Having owned both AR pattern and AK pattern rifles (having carried ARs on duty and personally running AKs for 10+ years in courses, training), the AK is by far the more smartly designed gun - while both perform very well.

The thing I generally tell people is that the (modern) AR is more reliable than people give it credit for, and the (modern, factory built) AK is far more accurate than people give it credit for - even moreso when chambered in 5.45x39.

I could do a mini-essay on why the AK pattern rifle is so reliable and well designed, but that's been beaten to death in books everywhere.
______________________

Short answer? As mentioned above, self-contained cartridges fired via firing pin is still the tech most commonly used. AK pattern rifles still do that. They do it cheaply, reliably, and accurately. There have been fantastic rifles that simply didn't catch on (mainly due to not landing large military/government orders). The AR and AK are just the two that caught on the most and became most prevalent. While modern plastic rifles with minor tech changes provide some nice changes to the manual of arms, none of them present something so fundamentally fantastic that they can unseat most military carbines/rifles (i.e. the benefits do not outweigh the cost of changing a firearm across thousand or millions of soldiers in arms).

I suspect the next big evolution in infantry weapons design will likely come about if we manage to perfect powered armour/exoskeletons. A lot of the restrictions militaries place on weapons and equipment are to do with weight and bulkiness. If some sort of powered armour came along allowing weight restrictions to be greatly increased you might see weapons technology take a step forward. Even then, the realities of logistics means things like exploding or guided bullets likely won't appear because it's so much easier to make and distribute regular dumb bullets.

Given the reasons why Kalashinikovs still around
.... it is relatively easy to make without the need of complex and well established manufacturum. as long as there's still ammo supply and enough materials to make more.

And the AK is known of durability. By the time M-16 was introduced. the weapon was plagued by easy jamming problems and the need of relatively complex maintenance tools and chemicals while it is said that Kalashinikovs can be cleaned easily with gasoline/diesel + soap ... providing that you or your faction have a good supply of both.

Does Kalashinikov family weapons still have rooms left for improvements so it could make the so called 'Millenial Assault Rifle' design unneccessary?

I'm gonna guess the design doesn't have strong legal protection and is simple enough that almost anyone could manufacture one.

If modern rifles are anything like any other modern product I suggest legal red tape and opaque design prevents them from being as prolific as they could be. Modern stuff in a wider context is also infamous for being less durable than classic designs. I suspect that is the case here too.

Just my uninformed guesses.

nareik wrote:
I'm gonna guess the design doesn't have strong legal protection and is simple enough that almost anyone could manufacture one.

To be fair, the countries that manufactured Ak-47 copies are countries that even today treat IP rights as something to be circumvented rather than managed

If modern rifles are anything like any other modern product I suggest legal red tape and opaque design prevents them from being as prolific as they could be. Modern stuff in a wider context is also infamous for being less durable than classic designs. I suspect that is the case here too.

Doubt it. Functionally, the M4 only differs from the M16 in the most insignificant of ways. They're practically the same gun with different attachments. The successors to the AK47 (AKM, AK74, AK100) aren't that different from the original weapon. The biggest change was the switch to smaller caliber starting with the AK-74 but it's still basically the same gun otherwise. The M2 Browning today is only slightly different from the M1919.

Even modern firearms are functionally not that distinct from their predecessors from 50 years ago because there's no practical need or benefit to replacing them. It has little to do with IP rights or design quirks. The prominence of the early model Kalashnikov's and their near identical knock offs (differing usually only in the quality of the manufacturing) is pretty much entirely down to cost. There's a bajillion of them, so they're cheap. They're mechanically simple so they're durable and reliable. Even a cheap crappy gun is as lethal as the next one to the poor sod getting shot.

One might as well ask a Medieval knight why they're still using swords, to which the answer would be "it's stabby enough."

One thing to keep in mind with regard to the original AK-47 (whose more modern equivalent is the AKM, etc.) is that most foreign produced models aren't actually knock-offs. During the Cold War, the Soviets intentionally farmed out AK-rifle machinery to any country willing to consider communism, or massive trade agreements etc.

Now some of these countries produced their own stocks, or some components, but a lot of the fundamental machinery was "legally" shipped abroad to sweeten various political deals and military alliances. Some countries did reverse engineer and modify the basic AK structures, but plenty of them are legitimate arsenal produced rifles.

The AK evolved over the years going back and forth a few times between milled receivers (original), and then to stamped receivers (better, lighter, cheaper) and then some places kept milled receivers (particularly on heavier RPK style models etc.). Several minor changes occured but the basic guts of the rifle and the operating system remained more or less intact.

The AK fell behind in modern times not from function, but from adaptability when the ex-Soviet Russians were bankrupt in the 90's - a time when a lot of general advancements were showing up for the modernization of the AR platform (stuff as simple as weapon mounted lights, more frequent combat optics, the introduction of rails, laser-designators, etc.). At this point Russia was dealing with lack of pay for soldiers, mass desertions, etc. So, as in many military areas they lost a good 10-15 years on the West before an oil/energy back resurgence started in the mid-to-late 2000's.

The guts of every modern rifle that fires a self-contained cartridge are more or less one of two or three designs. Around that internal packaged (bolt, barrel, operating system, magazine feed, recoil mechanism) is any number of fancy bodies, stocks, receivers, controls etc. But the fundamental concept of a triggered self-contained cartridge is the same.

If we skip the garbage prototypes that got US soldiers killed in Vietnam, the basic M16 that eventually surfaced:


Is, on the inside, more or less identical to modern fighting versions of the AR pattern rifle:


Likewise, the original AK-47:


Is, on the inside, more or less the same as something I'd term the MFAK (Modern Fighting Automatic Kalashnikov):


(Yes in the case of the latter I used a picture of a 5.45 rifle, but you get the idea).

The operating systems may be lightly tweaked, maybe feature new materials for coating, or lightening cuts, maybe reworked gas ports, etc...but the "core" of the gun is the same. The advances have more or less come in ergonomics, controls, optics, weapon lights, mounting hardware, muzzle brakes/compensators, suppressors, etc. The fighting gun itself has come a long way, but the basic principle is still the same. The AK happens to carry out that principle in an easier, more robust fashion with fewer parts...and that's a plus (particularly when viewed from a purchasing angle - considering a rifle for basic infantry soldiers to carry. You have to trust an 18 year old kid with learning the rifle and how to keep it running in the field).

Do bear in mind that both the Colt M1911 .45 caliber pistol and the Browning M2HB .50 caliber heavy machine gun are older than the AK-47 and still in wide use today. Indeed, the M2 remains the standard heavy machine gun of the U.S. army, even if it has been updated.

Not to mention...

Two points here;

1) These weapons are used by human beings. The main limiting factor here is already the human being here, not the rifle. There is little point in improving your rifle if you are giving it to a human who can't get the most out of it.

Back at Waterloo, the musket was a huge leap forward from what had come before it, but the musket was still very much the limiting factor. An actual rifle was moe accurate, but slower to reload, so you'd only bother giving rifles to people with a good enough aim to make use of that accuracy, and muskets were a rate-of-fire weapon. Later, they found ways to automate the loading of all weapons, and so they gave rifles to everyone, as they could all reload just as fast

2) The idea of marginal gains - when something is basic, you can get good improvements for marginal investment of time and resources. Once something is better, it requires a bigger investment to improve it.

Technology has advanced at an exponential rate, but that is not true of each individual invention. You invent something, improve it rapidly, perhaps even exponentially, but eventually that exponential curve eventually turns into an s-shape curve and the progress levels off.

It's more likely that development of remote machines (robots) or exo-suits might well lead to advances in rifle designs. If you can build a power armour exo-suit that allows far high precision in battle and absorbs far more of the recoil of a gun, then you can go past the limits that a human has in terms of a weapons performance.

Of course such technology is a long way off being battle-ready and from what I recall exo-suit development was only really being considered in terms of the support side of warfare. Ergo being able to use people and suits to lift munitions onto aircraft or such in small airfields of the kind that you might pop up in a dense warzone - working with things such as helicopters and the like (ergo vertical take off so no runway needed).

 John Prins wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
This is partly because the weapons are already good enough.

Which if you think about it, isn't that kind of weird? it's almost 2020 and we're still mostly killing people with little pieces of flying metal. I was sure by now we'd have, you know, lasers and flying cars and robot butlers.

Futurists are universally bad at engineering. Little flying pieces of metal are extremely efficient at killing people at a distance. Lasers aren't. Flying cars are possible but incredibly energy inefficient (therefore expensive) and unsafe (due to the level of training required for a flying vehicle being beyond most of the population's means). As to robot butlers, everyone underestimated how hard making artificial intelligence really is, because we don't understand the basis for human intelligence.

While we live in an age of incredible technological and scientific progress, the laws of physics will always stymie the imagination of futurists, who ignore the practical benefits of technology over the idea that higher tech equals BETTER, which it does not. An infantryman's weapon needs to be simple to use, deadly, lightweight, easy to maintain and inexpensive. The AK47 ticks all those boxes.

I wouldn't want lasers to replace firearms, because when you miss with a bullet it generally smashes into a wall or something and that's it. A laser, OTOH, will almost certainly start a fire if it hits anything remotely flammable. An urban conflict using lasers will result in a city-wide inferno in short order.

Yes but the same sentiment was used historically to argue that it was impossible to make:

- Cheap mass produced rifles that could reload quickly
- Ships made of steel
- Submarines
- Planes
- Tanks

Plus similar arguments were also used to dismiss the importance of technology in changing how wars needed to be fought and that “time tested methods” would no longer work. People in the 16th century trying to fight as Knights against pike and shot, men in the 18th arguing for the pike over the musket, men in the 19th for the bayonet against the rifle, WW1 for massed infantry and cavalry against barbed wire and machine guns. It’s the line of thinking that war is purely about “proper soldiery” and not seeing them as industrial methods of killing; in which technology plays a huge role. There was a story I recall where a British cavalryman around 1900ish with the attached machine gun remarked to his officer that with them all in the open he could probably get them all. The man was called a fool and sent on his way because the professionals knew best and these quaint gadgets weren’t that important.

I just think it’s a dangerous thing to downplay the importance of technology in war and lose perspective on how dramatically things can change in a short space of time. In fact, I suspect the reason people in the 60s thought we’d have cities on Mars by 2000 is because they and their parents had lived through equally dramatic changes. It’s not that they were stupid.

Well, despite the gulf of time and technology separating the first hand gonnes from the AK47, they both use a chemical propellant to launch a metal projectile down a barrel which gives it impetus and a direction of flight.

There arguably is a smaller difference in logic between a hand gonne and an AK47 than there is between a hand gonne and a longbow.

So let's ask the question another way.

What is the emerging technology which will replace the modern infantry weapon?

Why would this new technology replace the AK47 and not replace the M4?

 Totalwar1402 wrote:

Yes but the same sentiment was used historically to argue that it was impossible to make:

- Cheap mass produced rifles that could reload quickly
- Ships made of steel
- Submarines
- Planes
- Tanks

Plus similar arguments were also used to dismiss the importance of technology in changing how wars needed to be fought and that “time tested methods” would no longer work. People in the 16th century trying to fight as Knights against pike and shot, men in the 18th arguing for the pike over the musket, men in the 19th for the bayonet against the rifle, WW1 for massed infantry and cavalry against barbed wire and machine guns. It’s the line of thinking that war is purely about “proper soldiery” and not seeing them as industrial methods of killing; in which technology plays a huge role. There was a story I recall where a British cavalryman around 1900ish with the attached machine gun remarked to his officer that with them all in the open he could probably get them all. The man was called a fool and sent on his way because the professionals knew best and these quaint gadgets weren’t that important.

I just think it’s a dangerous thing to downplay the importance of technology in war and lose perspective on how dramatically things can change in a short space of time. In fact, I suspect the reason people in the 60s thought we’d have cities on Mars by 2000 is because they and their parents had lived through equally dramatic changes. It’s not that they were stupid.

At the same time, it is important not to slide into deterministic views where one expects technological advances in every field to keep on occurring which make an item quantifiably better in every respect.

To use an example from your list up above, nobody reinvented the pike. The bladed weapon was developed in a multitude of ways, shapes, and means, each with it's own advantages and disadvantages. There were minor advances in affixing the blade, the metal composition of the blade, maintaining the blade, and so on. But ultimately, a sword from 100 AD stabs you roughly as well as a sword from 1500 AD, and would have functioned roughly as well.

Blades were replaced by the gun, the blade didn't evolve into it. You could make the same comparison between horse carts and lorries, or physical letters and the internet.What tends to happen is that a new technology edges an old one out. But there's no new technology which has emerged which makes it easier to kill a person 1v1 as of yet than a gun. We can fiddle around the edges of the technology, but like the sword in 1800, we have its measure. Until some new way of killing people more easily at short range appears (I dunno, psychic powers or something?), the gun will remain the primary small-arm.

And that's more or less the answer to your question.

It's not that "Firearms ability to deliver bullets" technology has stagnated. It's the bullet technology that has stagnated. We are using the same basic technology in the smokeless metallic cartridge for over 100 years. We will not see a dramatic change in small arms until we see a dramatic change in the nature of ammunition, or directed energy source.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:

I just think it’s a dangerous thing to downplay the importance of technology in war and lose perspective on how dramatically things can change in a short space of time. In fact, I suspect the reason people in the 60s thought we’d have cities on Mars by 2000 is because they and their parents had lived through equally dramatic changes. It’s not that they were stupid.

Counterpoint: We're still happily using the wheel, the screw, the pulley, the lever, the wedge. New technologies will appear, but some old ones will remain relevant and may never be replaced at all.

There's good reason soldiers didn't trust technological innovations. Trying new things in warfare gets you killed most of the time. It isn't like testing things out at a range under controlled conditions. Soldiers don't get 'do-overs' and will tend towards conservatism because that's how soldiers stay alive. Once a soldier was shown that things actually worked, they were generally for anything that would help keep them alive.