LAND 125 Soldier Enhancement — Small Arms & Lethality Assessment

Client: Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) / Australian Army
Program: LAND 125 Soldier Enhancement Project
Period: 2010
Focus: Weapon systems, lethality and capability assessment

The Australian Army’s LAND 125 Soldier Enhancement Project was a multi-phased developmental program intended to optimise capabilities for dismounted close combat at individual and section level, including the linkages to the wider combat unit.

Phase 3 of the program focused on enhancements to command, control and communications, lethality and survivability. The overall objective was to improve the combat soldier’s ability to train and operate effectively on the future battlefield, including improvements in information exchange, lethality, survivability, sustainability and mobility.

In 2010, IGOR again worked with DSTO in support of LAND 125, this time with the Land Operations Research teams and the Weapon Systems Team. The work examined small arms being considered for the future soldier capability, with particular emphasis on their potential lethality and contribution to the overall combat capability.

IGOR brought specialist subject-matter expertise into the assessment. The IGOR specialist had spent a career working as a weapon-systems consultant and brought detailed knowledge of both legacy and contemporary weapons systems. This enabled the assessment to compare proposed systems against previous and current weapon capabilities rather than considering individual weapons in isolation.

The resulting position paper provided DSTO with an informed assessment of the weapons under consideration and their implications for the future soldier capability. The work contributed specialist evidence to a much larger, multi-dimensional capability development program in which weapon performance had to be considered alongside the other elements of the dismounted combat system.

This was characteristic of IGOR’s approach: bringing the right depth of specialist expertise to a complex capability question, while retaining an understanding of how that specialist issue contributed to the performance of the wider system.

IGOR’s contribution: IGOR provided specialist weapon-systems expertise and comparative capability analysis to support Defence’s assessment of small arms and lethality within the LAND 125 Soldier Enhancement program.