RED DIAMOND: Rifles

For our next series, we deviate from our normal rotation of interesting and fundamental aspects of ARs, ADPs and FMs and venture to AKs, RPGs and BDRMs. It’s a different but equally important aspect of military professional knowledge – threat capabilities. We call this, the Red Diamond Academy (see FM 1-02.2 if you don’t know why). We generally define threat weapons as those broadly issued by our strategic foes.

It’s something we don’t look at enough in the Army, and especially in the reserve components. We first noticed this gap at Maneuver Captain’s Career Course. There, the entrance exam puts a lot of emphasis on threat weapons. But, students quickly find just how little exposure they get to these concepts on drill weekends. In fact, that knowledge gap created the first kernel of an idea that became the DDOD.

We’re using data pulled from the WEG – The World Wide Equipment Guide. That resource is hosted by TRADOC, thus falls generally into the concept of doctrine. Per our policy, it is not CAC restricted, and is available to the public.

Today we start with the most fundamental, and probably most famous weapon found on the objectives of all battlefields: The basic infantry rifle.

Our analysis focuses on the key battlefield characteristics: Range, rate of fire, and ammunition. Much more than that is a lot to remember in an "over breakfast read" that the DDOD is set-up for. Also, we're limiting our comments to what matters on the battlefield. That your opponent has a folding stock is less important than the effective range.

US equivalent weapons are in blue, threat weapons, appropriately, are in red. As always, italics added for our emphasis, and […] indicates we cut out stuff we thought was fluff. And, as always: you’re smarter reading the pub (or web site, in this case) yourself to be exactly sure.

Weapon		Effective Range (PT)	Effective Range (Area)	Max Range	Sust. Rate of Fire	Sust. Rate of Fire
M-4 carbine		300m	500m		700-950rpm	700-950rpm
AK-47		350 m			40 rds/min	40 rds/min
AK-74		500 m	500m	5550	700 rds/min	700 rds/min