Date: June 18, 2004

Customer Satisfaction…Picatinny Style

PICATINNY, N.J. -- Three visitors clad in desert BDUs enter a bombed-out palace complex here in Tikrit, Iraq that currently is occupied by U. S. troops. It’s July 14. 2003.

The trio approaches a small group of sand-encrusted soldiers cleaning their M16s and introduce themselves.

Like the soldiers, they are Americans – two Army officers and one Army civilian. They have come to Iraq to find out how well the soldiers’ weapons are holding up in the country’s extreme conditions. They speak in hushed voices to avoid disturbing some soldiers who are sleeping nearby.

The soldiers respond candidly to the visitors’ questions. They discuss reliability, cleaning , ammunition, magazines, cases, lubricants, and optical sights. The visitors listen intently, asking questions, examining rifles and taking notes.

Ninety minutes of conversation pass quickly. When the interview is finished, the visitors thank the soldiers, wish them luck and head off to their next destination.

By the time they leave Iraq, the team of visitors and another like it will have spoken with more than a thousand infantry and logistics support troops, collecting forty pages of handwritten notes along the pay.

The visitors first arrive in the war theatre via Kuwait’s Camp Wolfe on Jun. 9 after a thirty-two hour plane ride. Their full team consists of Capt. Dave LaFontain, Majors Mike Williams, Roy Manuis and Kevin Finch and Army civilian John Resch.

" The team’s first stop is Camp Arifijan where they meet with their contacts, make logistical arrangements, and lay out a plan. Their purpose is to evaluate the reliability and performance of individual soldier weapons and ammunition under combat conditions.

" Over the next 30 days, the teams will visit Camps New Jersey and New York in Kuwait and the cities of Tikrit, Mosul, Erbil and Baghdad, as well as a side visit to Afghanistan.

They travel throughout Iraq and Kuwait interviewing infantrymen, tankers, snipers, and military police. The soldiers tell gripping stories of field contacts and battles with the enemy. Mingling with their “customers,” the visitors listen to the what the soldiers have to say about their weapons systems – the good and the bad.

Traveling desert roads in temperatures exceeding 130 degrees in the shade, the team marvels at the number of stone and marble structures, plentiful building materials in a country where trees are rare and wood is prohibitively expensive.

They pass dozens of Iraqis, some with enthusiastic smiles and waving hands, others with grim stares that clearly say that the Americans are unwelcome.

The visitors quickly realize how valuable items like water and sunglasses are in this desert environment. Traveling in convoys, they scan the horizon looking for dust devils, the small tornado-like wind swirls that can instantly blind drivers.

The ever present danger of mortar and rocket propelled grenade attacks forces the team to roar through intersections, ignore occasional traffic signals, and cast their wary eyes upward at any overpass.

The civilian member of the team, John Resch, is a highly regarded weapons development engineer from the Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center in Picatinny, N.J. He is an expert in small and medium caliber weapons design.

The other team members call Fort Benning, Ga. Home. They support the Army’s Project Manager for Soldier Weapons, also located at Picatinny, which is responsible for small arms development and procurement.

On a Monday morning several weeks later, Resch and Finch are in a Picatinny conference room where thirty fellow technologists and project officers have gathered to listen to them tell of their experiences.

The audience is a mixture of young engineering interns, veteran engineers, project managers and soldiers. With the aid of photographs and slides, hardware samples, and statistical charts, the two men enthusiastically share their lessons-learned, warts and all, with the attentive group that’s gathered.

The audience listens carefully and asks many questions. Questions and answers are filled with the distinctive jargon of armament design.

During the presentation, a plastic baggie filled with desert sand is passed around the room. Engineers squeeze and shake the bag, fascinated byits talcum powder-like consistency.

The session represents an important process in the crucial feedback loop from front line soldier to the weapons design community. Developers first tap the data flow through electronically published “lessons learned” compiled by forward commanders and distributed widely within the military.

Valuable as this data is, it is necessary to dig deeper to discover even more important tacit knowledge that may lie between-the-lines. Picatinny’s network of personal and military contacts allows Army weapons developers to dig deeper into weapons systems performance and identify shortfalls in the front’s urban and desert environment.

The team’s visit to Kuwait and Iraq yields some valuable lessons. Among these is the realization the soldiers want to talk. U. S. troops were happy to sit and talk with the stateside visitors about their rifles, their pre-Iraq training and even how much they missed their loved ones.

The team also found that front-line inventiveness is alive and well. It saw first-hand how soldiers had found a way to remove ammunition from their vests while lying prone in sand by cutting the vests in half and strapping each half to a leg.

M4 and M16 weapons functioned as designed. Field research found that the use of different types of lubricant did little to prevent weapons jamming. Regular, disciplined cleaning, the soldiers admitted, was the way to avoid jamming problems.

Troops reported that ammunition magazines were occasionally not properly feeding. The team observed that soldiers would often hoard a supply of old magazines, reluctant to turn them in when issued new ones. Spring mechanisms in these older magazines compressed to the point where they became incapable of exerting sufficient force to properly push the round into the firing chamber and caused weapons to jam.

Soldiers confirmed that optical sights instills greater confidence in acquiring and engaging targets. As combat veterans know, placement of a shot sufficient to take down an enemy requires chest or head area contact.

In Iraq, it’s easy for a soldier to be suddenly surrounded by a crowd that could prove harmless or dangerous. During those uncertain first few moments, troops are reluctant to live fire into a crowd where one round might literally pierce three people. Depending on the situation, a non lethal ammo round could be the shot of choice.

While Picatinny has fielded Non Lethal Kits to Iraq, two findings were evident: kit demand exceeds supply, and they are often stored away from front. Long storage periods in the heat also degrade some kit items such as sponge grenades which may deteriorate due to sealant/glue drying out. Lesson learned: Allow troops to break up pre-packaged kits and retrieve specific items needed such as ammo rounds, and relocate more kits forward.

Resch says that the team’s visit to Kuwait and Iraq has proven to be invaluable.

“We gathered a considerable amount of important data,” he said. “And the trip also served as a significant public relations initiative to let U. S. soldiers know that weapons developers are keenly interested in what they think and have to say.”