The Warsaw School of ballistic thought

In the beginning, there was the Russo-Japanese War, in which Japan... didn't exactly win, but managed to make the Russian Empire lose. After that came the Russian Civil War, in which the Vechists decisively did win; and once the Vechist government had shored itself up enough at home, it addressed the fact that it was also at war with almost all of its neighbors.

There was, first off, a war in the Caucasus, which dealt a humiliating defeat to the by now space-filling (probably Turkic) empire that picked up where Constantinople left off. And after that there was the war in Armenia, and the war in Georgia, and possibly some struggles with the Sorani dynasty that took over most of Persia the last time the Russians had fought around there. There was, of course, that issue in Karelia that ended about a thousand days later.

And then there was the European theater. And the first opponent, as usual, was the Polish-Ruthenian Commonwealth. Here ends the backstory; let's move on to the gun porn.

Poland-Ruthenia was painfully outclassed during the war, enough so that Saxony and the Baltic republics both threw in to assist them because Poland-Ruthenia's fall would have rather frightening consequences. It was a grueling and narrow victory. First and foremost, that the Commonwealth's small arms were painfully obsolete.

When it was introduced, and for a few years thereafter, the Polish-Ruthenian 9.8mm was the most efficient cartridge possible, and it served them handily in a small war. [details?] The only problem was that a few years later the rest of the world converted to smokeless powder - and because they didn't have the budget to get something cutting-edge, Poland-Ruthenia converted their new, newly obsolete guns to smokeless as well. A number of militaries followed this route, either converting blackpowder cartridges (Austria-Hungary did IRL) or designing new ones to work within the limits of early smokeless powders; so while Poland-Ruthenia's guns were obsolescent from the very start, they were at least serviceable.

By 1903, however, it wasn't serviceable any more. All those three-line armies gave rise to a second generation of smokeless cartridges, working with higher case pressures, higher velocities, and spitzer bullets. They were head and shoulders above any rifles before, to say nothing of the machine guns. Poland-Ruthenia was clearly behind the times, and at long last the High Command set up a panel to develop something new.

IRL France had the same problem at about the same time. In Andalusada, it played out in about the same way: a solution was found, but a poorly-timed war (see above) forced them to stop the production to keep what they already had supplied. It wasn't enough; the Eastern Front got hot enough that the Saxons and Pomeranians had to pitch in as well, supplying enough hardware to establish a substitute standard. Enough of that hardware survived that after the war, when Saxony did what Saxony does best and started building a bloc, Poland-Ruthenia didn't have enough money to decisively go its own way and started getting pulled into the nascent Wehrverein. All those decades-old guns were finally being phased out.

It wouldn't be Poland-Ruthenia, though, if somebody didn't vociferously object every time the government tried to implement a good idea. That objection is called the Warsaw School, and its arguments are (to me, at least, but I'm a gun nerd) interesting.

The Warsaw School's arguments

Why does Poland-Ruthenia need to upgrade? All arguments about logistics of common defense aside, the reason is that its guns are obsolete: they're too old, too heavy, too bulky, and ballistically inferior to the "second-generation" Saxon/Baltic weapons.

The Warsaw School acknowledges the first three problems (and emphasizes the issue of bulk) - but on the last charge, ballistic inferiority, its opinions range from the softcore "So?" to the hardcore "NO." Based on the Polish-Ruthenian experience in the Russian Wars (and, more generally, on the general experiences of the Great War), the Warsaw School resists the rising Wehrverein military bloc, claiming that in modern warfare the alleged benefits of second-generation cartridges do not matter.

The reason second-gen is irrelevant is because indidivual riflery is overrated:

• While second-gen rifles allow for shots long thought impossible, training soldiers to take those shots is more time- and resource-intensive than it's actually worth. Only a few armies can shoot as well as their rifles on the proving grounds, and in actual combat none of them do.
• As evidence, the Warsaw School cites their experience fighting on the Dneiper. [details?] The Ukrainian front's heavy losses weren't because of superior Russian firepower, but civilian casualties (not least the most recent Battle of Kiev), coupled with the aggressive Russian maneuver. (That maneuver was actually aided by the fact that the Russians were traveling rather light.)
• By contrast, where the Russians didn't have the ability to bring overwhelming numbers into play (the war in the Pinsk Marshes, for instance), [details?] they reliably took more losses than they caused, even though the ranges were such that the "superiority" of their second-gen rifles should have been clear. (A certain amount of national chauvinism plays into this; most of the Warsaw School probably agrees that the deadliest part of a loaded Russian rifle is, now as ever, the bayonet.)
• The Thousand Days reinforced this claim, as did the Franco-British conflicts, in which both sides were issued second-generation guns:
• As a general rule, most of the casualties were caused by super-heavy machine guns and ordnance, rather than by firefights. Rate and weight of fire, rather than precision, consistently carried the day.
• Especially in urban theaters, few combatants even attempted shots at what would have been considered normal battlefield ranges by prewar standards.
• All sides reported lots of overpenetration, which resulted in wounds being less lethal.

The flip side of the argument was that Second-generation ballistics involve too much gun:

• The superiority of second-generation ballistics assumes a comparable overall length to first-generation rifles, i.e. a barrel of 1000+mm. This, however, was established based on tactical assumptions that are no longer true or valid; i.e. massed formations with fixed bayonets.
• In particular, this barrel length was found to be too much gun for urban warfare; during the Thousand Days, both sides started to saw down their rifles.
• Because second-generation ballistics rely so heavily on velocity for their kinetic energy, shorter barrels directly translate to less damage, as well as a number of other undesirable features (more ballistic drift, enormous muzzle flash, and barely-controllable recoil.) The Polish 9.8mm, relying more heavily on mass, wouldn't be affected as much by a reduced barrel length.

Based on this, the Warsaw School's proposals are for something like so:

• A retention of the 9.8mm ball, which after all is completely adequate.
• A completely new cartridge for it. Modern smokeless powders would make it trivially easy to replicate the old 9.8mm ballistics in a shorter case, allowing in turn for a shorter gun action overall.
• A thoroughly redesigned gun, duplicating or approximating first-generation 9.8mm performance from a much shorter barrel. (Possibly a pump-action or even semiautomatic.)

IRL, infantry weapons went in two different directions: the SMG (using pistol ammunition) and the assault rifle. As a rule, assault rifles use "intermediate" ammunition, less powerful and usually of the same or smaller caliber. What the Warsaw School is proposing would be a kind of intermediate cartridge that IRL never actually existed: one that's bigger than a full-power rifle bullet. (Such a thing was possible given period technology - Dieselpunks covers a gun that used one such caliber, the Winchester 1907, which was actually adopted by some militaries - but never actually took off.)