Virdea

There is an extremely embarrassing video of me, thankfully taken before Youtube but it received air time on the nightly news.  I was chasing a man through Leesburg Estates that we had a warrant on - he had several weeks before held up the gate guards at Fort Jackson and stole their M16A2 rifles and M9 pistols, along with cellphones, pistol belts, spare magazines, and gameboys. We were suppose to be delicate about the situation because they just wanted the rifles back without any press.  My partner and I saw the goofball on the list with another guy we were after - so I took after one and Gonzales took out after another.  The video shows this guy, whose pants were worn around his thighs, loose his pants and start hip-hoppity-skip jumping to get away from me.  The embarrassing part is he almost did - he put like a hundred meters between me and him (I was probably the world's worst road deputy and still wonder that I survived) before tripping and face planting into a curb.  I ran up and on the video yelled "quit resisting" as I put the handcuffs on and he replies he is not resisting, he swallowed several teeth.
 
Far from being a heroic cop, I looked like I was planning to apply for the Keystone division of RCSD but was lacking in skills had been made a junior member.

It is impossible to quarterback a police shooting without all of the data.  I know - I have done forensic analysis on 31 use of incidents in the past two decades and am a graduate of the SC police academy and 5 years of street work (part-time, but I was a full deputy).
 
On the one hand I agree with people who say police should be held to higher standards.  On the other hand - they usually are.  On the other other hand - some of the most egregious cases of police violence went unpunished.  Look up the real incident that lead to the creation of the TV show the Shield and the movie Traffic and tell me that police violence is not sometimes swept under the rug.
 
Police violence in the US won't be solved anytime soon because it is a double edged problem that requires two fixes.  The questions go hand in hand, but you cannot voice them in the same sentence to the same group without being called a name and shutting the conversation down.  The two questions are pretty easy to state.  #1 There are very very few cases of police shooting people who were not committing a criminal act followed by an aggressive posturing.  How do we teach people not to commit crimes and then charge police?  The second issue is similar.  Ambush of police is up across the board and across the United States.  If you are a cop and you are going to get killed in a crime, it will be when you are ambushed.  The current shoot / no shoot criteria is based on being right about the actions of a person you are facing 100% of the time or being quite possibly dead, so US police moved the shoot / no shoot line over - but then more people get killed.  How do we reduce ambushes allowing police to reset their shoot / no shoot point.
 
And a technological question.  Where is the ranged non-lethal weapon that will allow me to successfully deal with a 260 pound irate charging male before he enters by shoot envelope.  I was in a fight with such a man for nearly five minutes as he tried to get my gun, and you never know fear until you realize that your next mistake is your last and your wife and cats will never see you again.

I agree on the 40mm getting fins.  The long grenades could do it - with a small increase in propellant to keep your range.  The fins would spin deploy on the upward flight, then the smart nose would get its glimpse to the target.  Indirect fire means that the GL has to be smart as well as it have to tell the nose what the target looks like, but this is all easy.  
 
The weakness of the 40mm has been its miss circle, so anything that made it land closer to the intended target would get it back into the running.
 
The big advantage of the 40mm is that it might become universal.  Six guys lobbing grenades is going to be a lot of firepower if those grenades are landing within a meter of where they are aimed.

Oh, World War I. Yes, I buy that. I thought you meant the Red Army. The Imperial Russian Army in WWI was chronically short on weapons, hence the orders to the US, etc.

I have found many weapons get bad press rather than are bad weapons.  I fired a Chauchat last year, and know a number of owners of the weapon.  The weapon is reliable and accurate, and as a team weapon it caused the Germans to go so far as to put a stock on the huge 08 trying to get a weapon as effective into the hands of soldiers.  Its reputation was earned when it was chambered for an overly powerful cartridge using bad metric conversion tables and assigned to one man gun teams (it was designed for two) who were not told to clean it each day...  But if it was so bad why did the French make 175,000 of them and why did the French users love it so much?
 
The British PIAT was during WW2 hated because it would fail to recock, but it was a very effective weapon.  The M60 now has a reputation as a dog but performed very well for America for two decades.  The M14 was cancelled because it was the wrong rifle at the wrong time, but decades later it is well respected and back in issue.
 
I think the worst weapon ever issued, and it would be a problem for the Russians until the 1950s, was none at all.  Although often assumed to be a piece of fiction from movies like Enemy at the Gates, it was in fact a long standing requirement of the Russian military, Imperial and Communist.

Gewehr 242(f) - possibly the new G36 replacement?

Gewehr 242(f) - possibly the new G36 replacement?

Would it have something to do with ongoing military commitment in regions where halal food is a big deal?

The best reading bar none is to keep up with the Janes series of publication.  Defense weekly is a boring read for many, because it has lots of gossipy sounding tittle in the form of articles about this or that contract being cancelled or defunded, but it is the weathervane that everyone in the world literally picks at,
 
Defense News is another one, and it has Gannet backing it up.  It is on my weekly reading list and along with Janes I keep them both in my tracking files.  You would be surprised at how a few sentence summary of a seemingly boring article on a new logistics data project offering to change software capabilities for a minor NATO country can mean big information when compared with other stories rather than trying to digest the information alone.
 
Breaking Defense is one I have just in the past year started reading.  This one seems to get a LOT of information from horny congressional aids - or so I think, because otherwise I have no idea how they get some of the committee insider stuff.  I do know that a majority of leaks on military capabilities come from young congressional staffers who wander into bars in DC looking to impress everyone at how much in the loop they are.  As someone who is so far out of the loop as to require Hubble telescope to see the edges of known space where the loop exists, I cannot possibly know what it is like to be a hugely knowledgeable congressional staffer working for a guy whose primary skill set that got him elected was hair that stays reasonable in place, but this sort of data is priceless in understanding the modern defense world.  
 
The major way to understand defense is to realize that no one sums things up, they provide very close analysis of the type of bark in the trees nearest them, but few people truly synthesize - so the articles that seem boring, like a contract moving 6 RoRo ships from one part of the civilian fleet to another, may actually be a piece of evidence that indicates a return of significant REFORGER capability to the US infrastructure.  You then need to see an article on the US military spending millions on constant humidity warehouses, and another about the movement of some obscure logistics units before you have multiple opposing evidence chains that lets you say - years before any announces it to the press, that the US is coming back to Europe.
 
And be careful of general and open discussion sites on the web.  This group in this little haven are pretty smart and knowledgeable, but in the general Internet you have lot of, "I heard the post office is buying 7.5 billion rounds of hollow points, that means mailmen are coming to take our guns!!!" political nonsense.  For example purchase of halal rations by the Army, which was touted in many chat groups as proof that Obama was going to require the Army to adopt sharia law, was actually a bit of evidence of something much more mundane, but in the light of day, something much more important about Army planning.  There are articles here and there about those halal rations that never mention why they are being bought, but do give us hints of why they are needed (and the real answer is not a conspiracy, just common sense.)

The best reading bar none is to keep up with the Janes series of publication.  Defense weekly is a boring read for many, because it has lots of gossipy sounding tittle in the form of articles about this or that contract being cancelled or defunded, but it is the weathervane that everyone in the world literally picks at,
 
Defense News is another one, and it has Gannet backing it up.  It is on my weekly reading list and along with Janes I keep them both in my tracking files.  You would be surprised at how a few sentence summary of a seemingly boring article on a new logistics data project offering to change software capabilities for a minor NATO country can mean big information when compared with other stories rather than trying to digest the information alone.
 
Breaking Defense is one I have just in the past year started reading.  This one seems to get a LOT of information from horny congressional aids - or so I think, because otherwise I have no idea how they get some of the committee insider stuff.  I do know that a majority of leaks on military capabilities come from young congressional staffers who wander into bars in DC looking to impress everyone at how much in the loop they are.  As someone who is so far out of the loop as to require Hubble telescope to see the edges of known space where the loop exists, I cannot possibly know what it is like to be a hugely knowledgeable congressional staffer working for a guy whose primary skill set that got him elected was hair that stays reasonable in place, but this sort of data is priceless in understanding the modern defense world.  
 
The major way to understand defense is to realize that no one sums things up, they provide very close analysis of the type of bark in the trees nearest them, but few people truly synthesize - so the articles that seem boring, like a contract moving 6 RoRo ships from one part of the civilian fleet to another, may actually be a piece of evidence that indicates a return of significant REFORGER capability to the US infrastructure.  You then need to see an article on the US military spending millions on constant humidity warehouses, and another about the movement of some obscure logistics units before you have multiple opposing evidence chains that lets you say - years before any announces it to the press, that the US is coming back to Europe.
 
And be careful of general and open discussion sites on the web.  This group in this little haven are pretty smart and knowledgeable, but in the general Internet you have lot of, "I heard the post office is buying 7.5 billion rounds of hollow points, that means mailmen are coming to take our guns!!!" political nonsense.  For example purchase of halal rations by the Army, which was touted in many chat groups as proof that Obama was going to require the Army to adopt sharia law, was actually a bit of evidence of something much more mundane, but in the light of day, something much more important about Army planning.  There are articles here and there about those halal rations that never mention why they are being bought, but do give us hints of why they are needed (and the real answer is not a conspiracy, just common sense.)

Traditionally the U.S. called the calibre tune for NATO because major ammunition supply depots are funded by the U.S.  This causes a lot of gnashing of teeth sometimes (such as when the U.S. raids these piggy banks for elsewhere in the world. This is changing, so a new calibre is become more possible.
 
War stocks is a major consideration with calibre use.  Both the French and the Swiss maintained an unusual calibre for decades because they had a hundred days or more of war stock on hand and the potential replacement was no better than what they already had.  
 
WARNING - Long discussion the new logistics, ignore if you wish.
 
Most people who contemplate equipment use such as firearms for the military are shop window types, they consider what the weapon looks like in the window of a store, but not all the factors that it takes to get into the hands of a person who uses it.  Supply is an issue since the best weapon in the world is worthless without supply.  NATO is the master of supply, keeping dozens of nations both in the alliance and attached supplied around the world.  NATO is a master only because three of its member nations - the US, France (sort of member), and the UK are the kings of logistics bar none.
 
Computerization has meant that it is now possible though for supply to integrate new products more efficiently, Up until the 1990s supply requests in NATO in peacetime were based on a paper system that was push / pull.  A division would have a "unit of fire" of supply and would be pushed a regular allotment of supplied to a Corps depot, while subunits would indent for their supplies by supply requests to division, allowing for double entry style bookkeeping as pushed product met pulled requests.  This system was an American invention of WW2 and in pre-computer days it was the best in the world.
 
The problem came in with non-standard items and with unexpected use.  In the 1980s toilet paper was removed from the ration packs and U.S. soldiers started using more toilet paper - there is actually research on why this happened, but it started a period of nearly a decade when military units in Europe could not get adequate supplies of this product.  It became desperate when electronics started to demand lilon batteries of dozens of different types - and electronic manufactures are renown for not standardizing batteries as a marketing strategy.
 
This has been changing the last decade as NATO has developed a new supply system to deal with the War on Terror.  It is still  being standardized and moved into place, but it is based on the supply system used by Amazon and Best Buy.  
 
Go on the Internet and search for some looney decrying the US will be taking all their rights and as proof they point out that the Post Office signed a contract for 3.4 billion rounds of ammunition.  This is one of the aspects of the new system.  The Army will line up contractors for logistic items, and the contractors will specify their immediate and emergency capacity to supply product, along with their contract maximum (the absurd number of rounds listed in the contract).  When the Russians decide they want to threaten the Ukraine they start rolling thousands of trucks to build up their logistics foot print - their supply system is about as good as the US in the 1960s.
 
When NATO (in our new systems) decides that it wants to have forward combat capability to defend Estonia SACEUR makes a notional movement order in the supply system (the units mostly remain in place) that starts the supply system bulking up supplies, but these supplies movements are nonlinear.  A base in Germany gets 500 cases of toilet paper more than it needs and the system knows this, because it has internal smarts and it knows that this toilet paper will get married with other items and form part of the supply picture.  The bad guys in this case have no idea that NATO just changed its operational tempo because the system is programmed to avoid huge lifts of ammo and weapons to right next door to the trouble spot.  Computers make this all work.
 
This smarts means that if your unit uses .338 you can order it, and the system remembers and starts putting it on the list of supplies you need.  Back at the tail of the system the 27 units that use .338 get tallied together and that ammo is ordered JIT from industry, plus additional capacity for emergency surge is paid for.  When your unit moves to a new place the system moves boxes of .338 shift through the system virtually, following you without moving warehouses.  If your supply situation makes .338 supply an issues then sometimes there needs to be some cross decking so the .338 is moved to a new place that is more efficient to supply it to you.  Some products are important enough that JIT policy is removed and they get predictive chaos theory applied to them.  So perhaps .338 is hard to predict in usage since special operations soldiers move around the globe so much and operational tempo is not linearly predictive.  So the .338 gets over supplied and additional supplies are sent to warehouses that may not be predictive of current tempo, but may be predictive of future tempo.  Also, logistics covers are important.  Since many SO teams use .45 ACP and .45 ACP deliveries could be used as intelligence to predict their movements, .45 ACP may be purchased and shipped to random places to remove this as a potential source of intelligence.
 
The system is smart in that it knows how much it costs to lift a product, how much it costs to store a product, and the database collects data on its own mistakes to improve its own operation.
 
In 1990 creating a new calibre of ammunition required that millions of forms be discarded, thousands of square meters of warehouse space be opened, tens of thousands of logistics people be trained, and the logistics footprint of every unit in the military be recalculated to determine the changed supply lift and delivery needs - a process that could take five years.  Today using the new system a soldier handed a new rifle with an unusual ammo can have that ammo specified in the system in a few days.  In four months that ammo will arrive anywhere in the world where that soldier is without fail (although oddballs tend to require human staff time for the first year as they need the system occasionally to be overridden - which is why end users now can order supply like ordering from Amazon).

Traditionally the U.S. called the calibre tune for NATO because major ammunition supply depots are funded by the U.S.  This causes a lot of gnashing of teeth sometimes (such as when the U.S. raids these piggy banks for elsewhere in the world. This is changing, so a new calibre is become more possible.
 
War stocks is a major consideration with calibre use.  Both the French and the Swiss maintained an unusual calibre for decades because they had a hundred days or more of war stock on hand and the potential replacement was no better than what they already had.  
 
WARNING - Long discussion the new logistics, ignore if you wish.
 
Most people who contemplate equipment use such as firearms for the military are shop window types, they consider what the weapon looks like in the window of a store, but not all the factors that it takes to get into the hands of a person who uses it.  Supply is an issue since the best weapon in the world is worthless without supply.  NATO is the master of supply, keeping dozens of nations both in the alliance and attached supplied around the world.  NATO is a master only because three of its member nations - the US, France (sort of member), and the UK are the kings of logistics bar none.
 
Computerization has meant that it is now possible though for supply to integrate new products more efficiently, Up until the 1990s supply requests in NATO in peacetime were based on a paper system that was push / pull.  A division would have a "unit of fire" of supply and would be pushed a regular allotment of supplied to a Corps depot, while subunits would indent for their supplies by supply requests to division, allowing for double entry style bookkeeping as pushed product met pulled requests.  This system was an American invention of WW2 and in pre-computer days it was the best in the world.
 
The problem came in with non-standard items and with unexpected use.  In the 1980s toilet paper was removed from the ration packs and U.S. soldiers started using more toilet paper - there is actually research on why this happened, but it started a period of nearly a decade when military units in Europe could not get adequate supplies of this product.  It became desperate when electronics started to demand lilon batteries of dozens of different types - and electronic manufactures are renown for not standardizing batteries as a marketing strategy.
 
This has been changing the last decade as NATO has developed a new supply system to deal with the War on Terror.  It is still  being standardized and moved into place, but it is based on the supply system used by Amazon and Best Buy.  
 
Go on the Internet and search for some looney decrying the US will be taking all their rights and as proof they point out that the Post Office signed a contract for 3.4 billion rounds of ammunition.  This is one of the aspects of the new system.  The Army will line up contractors for logistic items, and the contractors will specify their immediate and emergency capacity to supply product, along with their contract maximum (the absurd number of rounds listed in the contract).  When the Russians decide they want to threaten the Ukraine they start rolling thousands of trucks to build up their logistics foot print - their supply system is about as good as the US in the 1960s.
 
When NATO (in our new systems) decides that it wants to have forward combat capability to defend Estonia SACEUR makes a notional movement order in the supply system (the units mostly remain in place) that starts the supply system bulking up supplies, but these supplies movements are nonlinear.  A base in Germany gets 500 cases of toilet paper more than it needs and the system knows this, because it has internal smarts and it knows that this toilet paper will get married with other items and form part of the supply picture.  The bad guys in this case have no idea that NATO just changed its operational tempo because the system is programmed to avoid huge lifts of ammo and weapons to right next door to the trouble spot.  Computers make this all work.
 
This smarts means that if your unit uses .338 you can order it, and the system remembers and starts putting it on the list of supplies you need.  Back at the tail of the system the 27 units that use .338 get tallied together and that ammo is ordered JIT from industry, plus additional capacity for emergency surge is paid for.  When your unit moves to a new place the system moves boxes of .338 shift through the system virtually, following you without moving warehouses.  If your supply situation makes .338 supply an issues then sometimes there needs to be some cross decking so the .338 is moved to a new place that is more efficient to supply it to you.  Some products are important enough that JIT policy is removed and they get predictive chaos theory applied to them.  So perhaps .338 is hard to predict in usage since special operations soldiers move around the globe so much and operational tempo is not linearly predictive.  So the .338 gets over supplied and additional supplies are sent to warehouses that may not be predictive of current tempo, but may be predictive of future tempo.  Also, logistics covers are important.  Since many SO teams use .45 ACP and .45 ACP deliveries could be used as intelligence to predict their movements, .45 ACP may be purchased and shipped to random places to remove this as a potential source of intelligence.
 
The system is smart in that it knows how much it costs to lift a product, how much it costs to store a product, and the database collects data on its own mistakes to improve its own operation.
 
In 1990 creating a new calibre of ammunition required that millions of forms be discarded, thousands of square meters of warehouse space be opened, tens of thousands of logistics people be trained, and the logistics footprint of every unit in the military be recalculated to determine the changed supply lift and delivery needs - a process that could take five years.  Today using the new system a soldier handed a new rifle with an unusual ammo can have that ammo specified in the system in a few days.  In four months that ammo will arrive anywhere in the world where that soldier is without fail (although oddballs tend to require human staff time for the first year as they need the system occasionally to be overridden - which is why end users now can order supply like ordering from Amazon).

Traditionally the U.S. called the calibre tune for NATO because major ammunition supply depots are funded by the U.S.  This causes a lot of gnashing of teeth sometimes (such as when the U.S. raids these piggy banks for elsewhere in the world. This is changing, so a new calibre is become more possible.
 
War stocks is a major consideration with calibre use.  Both the French and the Swiss maintained an unusual calibre for decades because they had a hundred days or more of war stock on hand and the potential replacement was no better than what they already had.  
 
WARNING - Long discussion the new logistics, ignore if you wish.
 
Most people who contemplate equipment use such as firearms for the military are shop window types, they consider what the weapon looks like in the window of a store, but not all the factors that it takes to get into the hands of a person who uses it.  Supply is an issue since the best weapon in the world is worthless without supply.  NATO is the master of supply, keeping dozens of nations both in the alliance and attached supplied around the world.  NATO is a master only because three of its member nations - the US, France (sort of member), and the UK are the kings of logistics bar none.
 
Computerization has meant that it is now possible though for supply to integrate new products more efficiently, Up until the 1990s supply requests in NATO in peacetime were based on a paper system that was push / pull.  A division would have a "unit of fire" of supply and would be pushed a regular allotment of supplied to a Corps depot, while subunits would indent for their supplies by supply requests to division, allowing for double entry style bookkeeping as pushed product met pulled requests.  This system was an American invention of WW2 and in pre-computer days it was the best in the world.
 
The problem came in with non-standard items and with unexpected use.  In the 1980s toilet paper was removed from the ration packs and U.S. soldiers started using more toilet paper - there is actually research on why this happened, but it started a period of nearly a decade when military units in Europe could not get adequate supplies of this product.  It became desperate when electronics started to demand lilon batteries of dozens of different types - and electronic manufactures are renown for not standardizing batteries as a marketing strategy.
 
This has been changing the last decade as NATO has developed a new supply system to deal with the War on Terror.  It is still  being standardized and moved into place, but it is based on the supply system used by Amazon and Best Buy.  
 
Go on the Internet and search for some looney decrying the US will be taking all their rights and as proof they point out that the Post Office signed a contract for 3.4 billion rounds of ammunition.  This is one of the aspects of the new system.  The Army will line up contractors for logistic items, and the contractors will specify their immediate and emergency capacity to supply product, along with their contract maximum (the absurd number of rounds listed in the contract).  When the Russians decide they want to threaten the Ukraine they start rolling thousands of trucks to build up their logistics foot print - their supply system is about as good as the US in the 1960s.
 
When NATO (in our new systems) decides that it wants to have forward combat capability to defend Estonia SACEUR makes a notional movement order in the supply system (the units mostly remain in place) that starts the supply system bulking up supplies, but these supplies movements are nonlinear.  A base in Germany gets 500 cases of toilet paper more than it needs and the system knows this, because it has internal smarts and it knows that this toilet paper will get married with other items and form part of the supply picture.  The bad guys in this case have no idea that NATO just changed its operational tempo because the system is programmed to avoid huge lifts of ammo and weapons to right next door to the trouble spot.  Computers make this all work.
 
This smarts means that if your unit uses .338 you can order it, and the system remembers and starts putting it on the list of supplies you need.  Back at the tail of the system the 27 units that use .338 get tallied together and that ammo is ordered JIT from industry, plus additional capacity for emergency surge is paid for.  When your unit moves to a new place the system moves boxes of .338 shift through the system virtually, following you without moving warehouses.  If your supply situation makes .338 supply an issues then sometimes there needs to be some cross decking so the .338 is moved to a new place that is more efficient to supply it to you.  Some products are important enough that JIT policy is removed and they get predictive chaos theory applied to them.  So perhaps .338 is hard to predict in usage since special operations soldiers move around the globe so much and operational tempo is not linearly predictive.  So the .338 gets over supplied and additional supplies are sent to warehouses that may not be predictive of current tempo, but may be predictive of future tempo.  Also, logistics covers are important.  Since many SO teams use .45 ACP and .45 ACP deliveries could be used as intelligence to predict their movements, .45 ACP may be purchased and shipped to random places to remove this as a potential source of intelligence.
 
The system is smart in that it knows how much it costs to lift a product, how much it costs to store a product, and the database collects data on its own mistakes to improve its own operation.
 
In 1990 creating a new calibre of ammunition required that millions of forms be discarded, thousands of square meters of warehouse space be opened, tens of thousands of logistics people be trained, and the logistics footprint of every unit in the military be recalculated to determine the changed supply lift and delivery needs - a process that could take five years.  Today using the new system a soldier handed a new rifle with an unusual ammo can have that ammo specified in the system in a few days.  In four months that ammo will arrive anywhere in the world where that soldier is without fail (although oddballs tend to require human staff time for the first year as they need the system occasionally to be overridden - which is why end users now can order supply like ordering from Amazon).

Glocks can be ordered with manual safeties by police departments.  It is a stupid feature that I do not know of anyone ever taking advantage of.  The safety physically blocks the striker.

Laughing aside, a true story.
 
When the Gewehr 98 first came out it was given a huge bayonet that actually embarrassed the German army, who immediately called for it to be replaced by something a bit more useful.  The reason was a simple mistake.  The G98 was shorter than the preceding rifles it replaced and the specification for rifle+bayonet length was not changed in contracts -- and no one questioned the absurdity of the bayonet being twice as long as that adopted in 1884 - until they saw the first test rifles with this pig sticker sticking out.  Then they immediately moved to change to a shorter bayonet (and eventually, and even shorter K version of the 98 rifle).
 
The British though saw this bayonet and the British press went nuts.  British manhood was under attack.  The Tuetons were building bigger battleships, but this was the law straw - a bigger bayonet could ruin the British empire in a fortnight.  A British lawmaker stated in parliament that "length matters when two men face each other on the field of honor, and I would not want to face another man who has five inches on me!"
 
Longer bayonets were designed for the Lee Enfield, and Britain went to war with a pig sticker that made the short Lee Enfield the envy of the world.  Only by then the Germans no longer had many long bayonets.  

I've wondered about this as well: from what I've heard the evolution in insurgent small arms (which represent a sort of support-free version of infantry tactics) has been towards squads with more RPGs and machine guns than rifles (something along the lines of 2-4 RPG gunners, 1-2 ammo carriers with ARs, 1-2 LMG gunners and perhaps a dedicated marksman). If this trend is accurate, then the future might involve rifles being used in the same capacity as SMGs or DMRs - as relatively specialised weapons meant to complement the core firepower provided by other weapons.
 
I'd also put money on cheap guided munitions coming into their own in a big way, making something like a small missile launcher the default infantry weapon.

Was the loss of officers to the Bourbon restoration really that severe? While Ney and other Marshals were killed others were spared and even held positions in the restored government - Davout, St Cyr, and Soult being the particular stand outs. There were a couple further revolutions after Napoleon's final defeat though so I'd think those would also account for why the French army ended up having amnesia - by 1870 French politics was such a mess that I think the French army had trouble remembering who exactly they were fighting for by this point.

The one thing I do not understand is why no one is designing a good, portable, heavy grenade launcher.
 
The problem with every rifle is paradigmatic.  Modern western military forces needs a weapon to create an exclusion zone to 500 meters around an infantry unit.  At 500 meters delivered ordnance takes over and as it gets smarter it has dominated the battlefield.  Under 500 meters danger close fire missions are life and death only for good reason, the failure rate of even the smartest munitions is simply too high.  
 
So what we need is an explosive device with simple smarts launched from the shoulder to a range of 250 - 500 meters.  The French make this work by having a recoiless gun and a huge number of rifle grenades in each unit, but tests of the 20mm grenade from the OICW and even the 40mm grenade show that the blast radius for each weapon is too low - the M203 has a larger miss circle at 200 meters than the blast radius x2 of the weapon.
 
However we know from lots of AARs that weapons like the old British 50mm mortar carried a big percentage of an infantry unit's firepower.
 
So how about finding a way to take the AC58 and boost its effectiveness then hand three to everyone in a squad but the GP and DM gunners.  All of the effort to reach a perfect rifle seems like all the efforts people made to reach the perfect bayonet in WW1.  Dump the 20mm OICW - they cost too much and are too heavy and not effective enough, and throw the 40mm grenades down after them.  Having a rifle squad with 30 weapons that have 4-7 times the explosive power of a 40mm would represent the initial fire power of the unit, allowing the close in battle to be accomplished during the time that on call artillery is getting its act together. The soldiers would still have their rifles after that.  

Just another note: Studies of Napoleonic eras revealed that bayonets only caused about 2% of the casualties, and that bayonet charges were largely mythical in nature.
 
And when I say mythical I don't meant that entire battalions didn't charge with bayonets drawn - they certainly did. However, the charge was usually conducted when the defender was already wavering and the charge itself was just one massive bit of posturing to put them to flight. If the defender didn't run then the result was the attacker usually taking an entire volley at point-blank range resulting in the attacker getting routed instead.
 
In fact, Jomini - one of the big Napoleonic references of the period - claimed that he in fact never witnessed a battalion ending up in a melee with another battalion. One side or another always broke first. The bayonet injuries, when they do happen, tend to happen to men who are running and are caught by the pursuit charge; or they occur during smaller charges by skirmishers (usually of only a few dozen men) fighting each other for good positions. That the French had to study the Civil War to find out the dubious utility of bayonets when their own Grand Armee actually hardly relied on it goes to show how institutions can easily end up mythologizing its own past into unsound doctrines for the present.

Here is an example founding document, just enough to get play going to allow the system to get developed.  This is mine from A Crack in Time, but I would be happy to share or help you make your own.  Note that the actual CIT book is much more complex and already moving forward as it has an ironmongery catalog, an adversaries book, and a more complex chargen. 
 
http://www.virdea.net/gamesys.pdf
 
One of the biggest and most important theory of game publishing that all of my friends agree on is that a game that is written is better than one that is being debated, and that you can never please the pundits - your game will always be hated by everyone - hate is what the Internet is about.  70% of the Internet states they hate iPhones and McDonalds.  Note that both of these groups sell a crap load of products.

The one thing I do not understand is why no one is designing a good, portable, heavy grenade launcher.
 
The problem with every rifle is paradigmatic.  Modern western military forces needs a weapon to create an exclusion zone to 500 meters around an infantry unit.  At 500 meters delivered ordnance takes over and as it gets smarter it has dominated the battlefield.  Under 500 meters danger close fire missions are life and death only for good reason, the failure rate of even the smartest munitions is simply too high.  
 
So what we need is an explosive device with simple smarts launched from the shoulder to a range of 250 - 500 meters.  The French make this work by having a recoiless gun and a huge number of rifle grenades in each unit, but tests of the 20mm grenade from the OICW and even the 40mm grenade show that the blast radius for each weapon is too low - the M203 has a larger miss circle at 200 meters than the blast radius x2 of the weapon.
 
However we know from lots of AARs that weapons like the old British 50mm mortar carried a big percentage of an infantry unit's firepower.
 
So how about finding a way to take the AC58 and boost its effectiveness then hand three to everyone in a squad but the GP and DM gunners.  All of the effort to reach a perfect rifle seems like all the efforts people made to reach the perfect bayonet in WW1.  Dump the 20mm OICW - they cost too much and are too heavy and not effective enough, and throw the 40mm grenades down after them.  Having a rifle squad with 30 weapons that have 4-7 times the explosive power of a 40mm would represent the initial fire power of the unit, allowing the close in battle to be accomplished during the time that on call artillery is getting its act together. The soldiers would still have their rifles after that.  

Broad historical trends that he made up, or...?

Maybe in the 19th Century the Noble Savage idea was taken more seriously or something?

In the basement of H and K, dozens of military scientists are yelling.  Finally the VP for operations broke it all up.  "Shut up, just let us know what our options are.  There won't be anymore Belgium guns arming German soldiers."
 
"Well, we have some ideas, how about this?"  The scientist held a rifle up.  It has bunny ears on it.  
 
"That is just a G3"
 
"But it has advanced modification."
 
No, I do not think we can pass that one.  What else do we have."
 
Another rifle came out.  It was pink.
 
"That is an AK?"
 
"Us, we call it a KA."
 
"Its pink!"
 
"Urban camo."
 
"No lets see what else."
 
Out came a little rifle from a box that said, Boondoogle, 1991.
 
"How about this."
 
"Needs some modifications."
 
"We can paste some stuff on it."
 
"Good - I think the G11 is ready to come back."

I don't think he'll mind too much if I out him as not that Steve Jackson, and no, not that other Steve Jackson either.

I have been directed to this page because of my own expertise in this area.  My name is Steve Jackson, and I am a game designer.  I have written about twenty different game supplements, and published my own game.  The request placed at my feet was to aid in your endeavor.
 
I am about six months into design concept for a new game called "A Crack in Time."  The game includes sub-titles called "Crack in Time: 1960," "Crack in Time: 1860", and so forth.