The Cucking of Guns By John Steele

     Colonel Jeff cooper, the father of American pistolcraft, some say, was as manly as they come, and this John Wayne toughness was reflexed in his writings in Guns & Ammo magazine, “Cooper’s corner,” and in his numerous books, including his modern version of The Art of War, Principles of Personal Defense:
  https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Personal-Defense-Jeff-Cooper/dp/1581604955

     This book is recommended reading as society heads ever-closer to chaotic violence from multiple causes of degeneracy. One interesting Cooper article appeared in Special Weapons magazine, 1984, “The Fighting Rifle, Forgotten but Not Gone.” Cooper, who while in the marines trained soldiers, came to profoundly dislike the M16, with its .22 round, the 5.56 X 45 mm. He described this round as a “poodle shooter,” and inferior to past weapons:

“When the Twentieth Century began, the soldier fought with that same Mauser (or something very similar) that he used at the close of the nineteenth, but as this century draws to a close we find him issued what is currently called a poodle-shooter – a small, clumsy, fully automatic, sub-caliber piece with a high rate of fire but very inferior in range, power, and practical accuracy. This is a large technological retrogression.

When we consider that the farmers who fought the Boer War shot weapons that were vastly superior to those issued to American or Russian soldiers today, we may well ponder the matter. How is it that we went rapidly forward for a hundred years, and then backwards to where we are now?”

     Cooper did not answer this question directly. Clearly, there is the stock answer that military strategy changed, such that the rifleman’s rifle became a mechanism for wounding soldiers, and tying up the enemy rather than killing them outright. But, the cost of this, seen in Vietnam and Afghanistan is that sometimes soldiers get caught in spaces requiring a more powerful weapon, and the 5.56 fails as does the rifle firing it in sand-swept environments:
  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/03/world/asia/03battle.html 
  https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/how-reliable-is-the-m-16-rifle/

     However, Cooper thought that the problem was deeper still and revolved around a decline in manhood, clearly shown by the politically correct state of the military today:

“I used to consider it embarrassing to train a modern soldier to the fine edge of physical conditioning and then hand him a .223 rifle with which to fight. Looking over the scene today it seems that maybe a .223 is about all he can handle. The notion that a man can carry more rounds of .223 and can shoot then faster than with, say, a .30-06, is meaningless when one remembers that all our soldier has to do is to hit two or three enemies solidly, with two or three shots, in order for us to win the war.”

     While that is true, we have come to discover that winning the war is not as simple as we once thought, and in complex games of deception, wars may no longer we things capable of being won, being rather intractable conflicts that generate an infinite regress of new conflicts, the sole purpose being mass migration to the West, and money to the military wing of the Deep State.