The French Saga…

PETALING JAYA: Almost every one out there, wonders how the French managed to sell almost everything to us. From ships to submarines to helicopters we have them all. And now the French are hoping to sell the Rafale to us.

But how is the French soldiers are faring? Based on this post from the Firearm Blog, it appears that most of that money went to the 1 per cent!.

The Firearm Blog
This guest post was written by Julien, a French TFB reader and gun enthusiast, in order to give us insight into the French Army rifle upgrade program. ]

First of all, forgive my quite miserable english, I’ll try to explain with my own words. I am a French firearms enthusiast and I spend a lot of time searching for news about it, both in French and English language.

Lately, I’ve read different things about the FAMAS replacement, especially in foreign forums and blogs, and obviously, nobody says the same.

I had the chance to shoot with this weapon when I was in the French army, so I’ll try to explain how is the Famas, from the grunt point of view to the financial considerations.

First of all, to understand what is at stake, we have to understand the context, that’s why there is different kind of informations in this small text. I don’t mention the well known informations about this rifle and the French army, but just the parts of the intel remaining dark for a lot of people.

I discussed this recently with French soldiers coming back from Afghanistan.

A machine gun operator showing me a picture of himself fully equipped and told me that he was wearing 3000 Euros of extra equipment.

I remember that I learnt to shoot with less than 50 cartridges, and instructor told us that 200 meters was the maximum reliable range with this weapon. This was ten years ago, and the Jeff Cooper / Chuck Taylor training methods were brand new (for us) and named NTTC (“Nouvelles Techniques de Tir au Combat” / “New combat shooting techniques”).

– Malaysian Defence