The “Obsolete” American 60mm Mortar That Marines Refuse to Give Up
The first burst comes from a treeine about 400 yd out. And for a few seconds, nobody in the lead squad can tell whether it’s a machine gun or two rifles firing fast. Then the second burst answers from a different angle and the question resolves itself. The company is pinned in a shallow fold of ground with no cover worth the name and the enemy holds the high side of it.
A radio handset comes up. Somewhere behind the fold, a fire mission is going out to a battery that may or may not be free on a net that may or may not be busy for guns that may already be shooting for somebody else. That request will be processed. It will be prioritized. It will be answered eventually. But the company commander doesn’t wait for it.
He turns and calls out a correction to a crew that’s already dropping a base plate into the dirt 30 ft behind him. No request of battalion, no competition with another company’s mission, no queue. One man reads the terrain, one man sets the tube, one man drops the round, and the gunner adjusts by voice from a position close enough to see exactly what everyone else is seeing.
Rounds start landing on that tree line in under a minute, 3 lb a piece. Not enough to level anything. Enough to force heads down. Enough to break the rhythm of aimed fire. Enough to buy the squad on the left the eight or nine seconds it needs to get up and move. By the time the artillery request is acknowledged, the fight has already changed shape. That tube weighs 42 lb.
Five men carry it and feed it. Its maximum range is a shade over a mile, which sounds like nothing next to the guns that could have answered that call. On paper, it is the least impressive indirect fire weapon in the American inventory. And it has been written off formally, repeatedly by serious people making serious arguments every time somebody newer, heavier, or longer ranged has come along to make it look redundant.
The strange part is, who keeps refusing to let it go? Start with the argument for getting rid of it because that argument has never been stupid. Compare a 60 mm mortar to an 81 mm and the comparison is not close. The bigger tube reaches farther. It throws a heavier shell. It does more damage per round, holds ground under fire more convincingly, and covers a frontage the smaller weapons simply cannot cover.
If range and explosive effect are the measures that count, the 81 wins easily. That’s arithmetic. And arithmetic doesn’t care about sentiment. Then there’s standoff. The entire trajectory of modern ground warfare has been toward killing the enemy from farther away than he can kill you. And a weapon with a maximum range of a mile puts its crew inside a great many things that would prefer to reach out and touch them.
Technology has closed that gap in the wrong direction for the 60. Sensors see farther. Precision munitions strike farther. Loitering munitions can be carried by a small team, launched from cover, flown to a target the operator can watch on a screen and put onto a specific window or a specific vehicle rather than into a general area.
Against that, a man dropping a three-PB bomb into a smooth boore tube looks like something out of a museum. And there’s the honest structural problem. Ordinance boards have to justify every pound a rifleman carries and every dollar the service spends. A weapon that duplicates a capability held by a bigger weapon at shorter range with less effect crewed by five men who could otherwise be riflemen is a legitimate candidate for deletion.
Nobody has to be foolish or hidebound to reach that conclusion. They only have to be doing their job. Here’s the part that ought to settle it. That case against the 60 has been made recently in public, in writing by a serving officer in the United States Marine Corps. In a 2025 article for the Maneuverist, Captain Mitchell Tefi lays the argument out plainly.
The 81s have more range and more firepower. Technology gives better standoff. Loitering munitions are simply more attractive. And then he conceds something no advocate would concede lightly. In conventional employment, he writes, the 60mm mortar struggles to justify itself. Those are the words of a man who cares about the weapon, admitting that the case against it lands.
So the question isn’t whether the dismissal is reasonable. It plainly is. The question is why. Every time the paperwork wins that argument, the same objection comes back up from company level. To understand that, you have to understand what a rifle company commander is actually up against. And it isn’t a math problem about shell weight. It’s a clock.
A rifle company is a few hundred men with rifles, machine guns, and whatever else it can carry. It has no cannon. In any serious fight, it is going to need explosives falling on someone. And the moment it needs them, it has two ways to get them. Ask or shoot. Asking works like this. A forward observer or a company commander identifies a target.
The call goes up the net to a fire direction center. Someone there checks the mission against the rules in effect in the friendly positions on the map and against the other missions already in the queue from the other companies in the other fights happening at the same time. The battery computes data. The guns lay.
Rounds go out. Somebody watches where they land, sends a correction, and the whole cycle runs again. Every step in that sequence is a professional doing exactly what he’s supposed to do. And every step costs time. The competition costs more. Artillery belongs to the battalion or the regiment, and battalions and regiments have priorities that are not identical to the priorities of one company on one hillside.
When the main effort is somewhere else, the guns are somewhere else. Support gets allocated to whoever the commander two levels up has decided matters most this afternoon. And if that isn’t you, the honest answer coming back over the radio is that you’re in line. Weather grounds aircraft. Ammunition runs low and gets rationed.
Nets get saturated in exactly the moments when everyone needs them at once, which is to say during the fighting. None of that is malfunction. That’s a large organization working correctly and a rifle company in contact is still stuck in a shallow fold of ground with the enemy on the high side of it waiting. Now consider the other option. The company owns a tube.
The commander wants fire, so he says so out loud and the crew shoots. Nothing else happens in between. There is no request because there is no one to ask. That difference is the entire argument and it is not an argument about range. The weapon the army settled on was in the most literal sense not an American design at all.
It came from Edgar Brandt, the French engineer whose mortar designs shaped nearly every light mortar of the era. American Ordinance took a license, adapted the thing to American manufacturing and American ammunition, and put it into service as the M2 in 1940. The tube was straightforward, 42 lb all up, barrel, bipod, base plate, broken into loads, a fiveman squad could hump, a squad leader, a gunner, an assistant gunner, and two ammunition carriers.
Elevation from 40° to 85, which is what lets it drop rounds behind terrain instead of through it. Maximum range about 1,800 meters, a bit over a mile. 18 rounds a minute at the normal rate, which puts a round on the target every 3 to 4 seconds. Onto ground, a rifle squad cannot reach at all. The ammunition mattered as much as the tube.
High explosive in the M49 A2, the standard round, 3 lb of shell. the M302 white phosphorus for screening, for signaling, and for its effect on anyone caught near it. And the M83 illuminating round, which turns a black hillside at 2 in the morning into something a machine gunner can actually shoot at. Three problems, one tube, no phone call.
The men who carried it gave it a name that describes exactly what it was for. Hip pocket artillery. Portability is the obvious half of that. The other half is that a man keeps in his hip pocket the things he intends to use without asking anyone. But the hardware is the part that gets remembered and the hardware is the part that matters least here.
Whatever the Americans added to this weapon, they added it organizationally on paper in the middle of a war. The tube came from a French drawing board. The idea of who it belonged to came from somewhere else entirely under the Marine Company organization introduced in April 1943. The 60 mm mortars lived in the weapons platoon.
A mortar section of 16 marines, three squads, a sergeant running the section, and corporals running the squads. That’s a sound arrangement. It groups the specialists together, keeps the training standard, and gives the weapons their own chain of command. It also puts one more link between the man who sees the target and the man who drops the round.
Under the 1944 F-series reorganization, the weapons platoon was deleted, redesated as the machine gun platoon with the 60 millimeter mortar section moved out from under an intermediate platoon and into company headquarters. 20 Marines now operating in combat under the direct orders of the rifle company commander.
Read that again because the phrase everybody quotes comes from that line in a table of organization. Somebody sat down, thought about where the delay was coming from, and wrote the delay out of the company. The commander’s artillery became literally his. His to order, his to correct, his to keep firing after the situation had changed twice.
Nobody rebuilt the mortar to accomplish that. They rebuilt the company around it. What that change bought showed up immediately in the kind of fighting where nothing else could arrive in time. Island fighting in the Pacific compressed everything. Frontages were short, terrain was broken, and the enemy was frequently dug into reverse slopes and folds where flat trajectory weapons could not reach him.
A machine gun cannot shoot over a ridge. A mortar can, and a mortar attached directly to the company could do it on a shouted order while the situation still looked the way it had when the order was given. The illuminating round earned its keep the same way. A company holding a position overnight has no answer at all for movement it cannot see.
And the M83 gave a commander the ability to light his own front on his own authority at the moment he suspected something rather than several minutes after he confirmed it. The same logic carried into Korea where the fighting ran up and down ridgeel lines and every hill had a backside. It carried into Vietnam where contact was frequently sudden and close and the enemy’s chosen ground was rarely convenient for anything with a flat trajectory.
Through all three wars, the M2 stayed in the company because the company kept needing something it did not have to request. No rifle company ever mistook that tube for the most powerful thing it could call on. What it routinely was was the most immediately responsive. That doesn’t mean everyone agreed about the hardware.
There’s a genuine period argument sitting in the record, and it’s worth looking at because it shows how hard these judgments actually are. A lighter successor was in development during the war. First as the T18 E6, later standardized as the M19. Stripped down, it was dramatically easier to carry than the M2, and accuracy suffered for it.
Fitting a conventional mount steadied the weapon and gave much of the weight advantage straight back. That trade sits underneath everything that follows because the first M19s reached troops in the summer of 1944 saw late war action and drew two American assessments that reached opposite conclusions at almost the same moment.
A seventh infantry division operations report from Lee judged the new mortar less efficient than the M2, less accurate, and accuracy is the whole point of dropping explosives near your own people. War Department observers, meanwhile, had gone to the European and Mediterranean theaters in early 1944 to watch demonstrations of the same weapon.
Their report went the other way. They found the lightness and the versatility genuinely appreciated in the field and reported that troops preferred it to the standard weapon. Same army, same year, same mortar. Two honest verdicts pointing in opposite directions. The M19 was standardized after the war anyway and went on to serve in Korea and Vietnam alongside the M2, which tells you how the argument actually got settled. Both weapons stayed.
Both went to the companies. The dispute over which tube was superior turned out to matter far less than the thing both tubes had in common, which was that a captain could order either one into action without asking anyone above him. In 1978, the M224 replaced both of them, and on paper, it made the whole debate look settled in the modern direction.
The M2 reached roughly 1,800 m, and the lighter M19 gave up range to get its weight down. The new tube reaches 3,490, a range increase that answers a good chunk of the standoff complaint by itself. Marine rifle companies fielded a section of three of them in the weapons platoon. and the arrangement looked permanent.
Then the structure moved again. Force design 2030 experimentation eliminated weapons companies and redistributed what they held. One proposed structure dispersed 81 mm mortars among the rifle companies, though the exact arrangement kept evolving between units and experiments. On the merits, that’s a real upgrade. A company with 81s has a bigger, longer reaching tube than it ever held organically before.
And the 60 became the odd man out. Redundant, smaller, outranged by the weapon now sitting next to it in the same formation. It got edged aside in Tifi’s description and left to rust in the arms room. Same story as always. The paperwork was correct. The paperwork is usually correct. What’s different this time is that the counterargument arrived in the present tense from inside.
from a Marine captain writing in 2025 to argue the weapon back into the company. His case doesn’t rest on nostalgia and it doesn’t dispute the arithmetic. He conceds the conventional comparison outright. What he argues instead is that the 60 can be employed in a way the comparison never accounts for. Handheld. Strip away the conventional bipod and the full base plate and what’s left is light enough to travel with a small team.
Two men dismount, drop into defilade, put H onto a target, and are gone before anything can answer. He’s candid that this is contentious among the people who’d have to do it. There’s very little middle ground on handheld employment. Troops either regard the 60 as the most versatile and underappreciated weapon in the rifle company’s armory, or they dismiss it as a dangerous and pointless gimmick.
Nobody seems to land between those two positions. His counter thesis is that handheld employment lets light and motorized infantry punch above their weight. That a small unit with almost nothing gets to do something that ordinarily requires a great deal more, which is what the weapon has always been for. Every argument against this mortar has been an argument about specifications.
Range, shell weight, crew size, standoff, precision. Each one measured honestly. Each one a real disadvantage. Each one adding to a case that has been correct on its own terms every single time it’s been made. And every argument for it has been an argument about ownership. Hit pocket artillery was never a claim that the tube compared favorably to a howitzer.
It was a claim about where the weapon lives. Fire the company owns is fire the company gets. Fire the company requests is fire the company might get from someone with other obligations at a time determined by circumstances the company cannot see and cannot influence. The 1944 reorganization understood that which is why it moved the mortars closer to the commander instead of making them better.
The men in the Pacific understood it and in Korea and in Vietnam. The Ley report and the War Department observers disagreed about which tube was superior, and neither side thought to question whether the company should have one at all. None of this makes the skeptics wrong. Loitering munitions really can offer greater reach and precision against particular targets.
The 81 really does reach farther and hit harder. If the question is which weapon does more damage at greater distance, the 60 mm mortar loses and it loses decisively and it will keep losing that comparison for as long as anyone bothers to run it. But that has never been the question a company commander is asking.
He’s asking what he can put on that tree line right now under his own authority before the situation changes into something worse. The American answer to that question started with a 42-P lb mortar in 1940, and nobody has yet found a way to take it away from him for good. The boards have declared it surplus.
The doctrine writers have moved on. The restructuring pushed it toward the arms room, and the arguments for doing so were sound, and the men who have to fight at company level keep making the same argument. Anyway, subscribe to Warfare Unclassified for more stories like this.
The “Obsolete” American 60mm Mortar That Marines Refuse to Give Up
The first burst comes from a treeine about 400 yd out. And for a few seconds, nobody in the lead squad can tell whether it’s a machine gun or two rifles firing fast. Then the second burst answers from a different angle and the question resolves itself. The company is pinned in a shallow fold of ground with no cover worth the name and the enemy holds the high side of it.
A radio handset comes up. Somewhere behind the fold, a fire mission is going out to a battery that may or may not be free on a net that may or may not be busy for guns that may already be shooting for somebody else. That request will be processed. It will be prioritized. It will be answered eventually. But the company commander doesn’t wait for it.
He turns and calls out a correction to a crew that’s already dropping a base plate into the dirt 30 ft behind him. No request of battalion, no competition with another company’s mission, no queue. One man reads the terrain, one man sets the tube, one man drops the round, and the gunner adjusts by voice from a position close enough to see exactly what everyone else is seeing.
Rounds start landing on that tree line in under a minute, 3 lb a piece. Not enough to level anything. Enough to force heads down. Enough to break the rhythm of aimed fire. Enough to buy the squad on the left the eight or nine seconds it needs to get up and move. By the time the artillery request is acknowledged, the fight has already changed shape. That tube weighs 42 lb.
Five men carry it and feed it. Its maximum range is a shade over a mile, which sounds like nothing next to the guns that could have answered that call. On paper, it is the least impressive indirect fire weapon in the American inventory. And it has been written off formally, repeatedly by serious people making serious arguments every time somebody newer, heavier, or longer ranged has come along to make it look redundant.
The strange part is, who keeps refusing to let it go? Start with the argument for getting rid of it because that argument has never been stupid. Compare a 60 mm mortar to an 81 mm and the comparison is not close. The bigger tube reaches farther. It throws a heavier shell. It does more damage per round, holds ground under fire more convincingly, and covers a frontage the smaller weapons simply cannot cover.
If range and explosive effect are the measures that count, the 81 wins easily. That’s arithmetic. And arithmetic doesn’t care about sentiment. Then there’s standoff. The entire trajectory of modern ground warfare has been toward killing the enemy from farther away than he can kill you. And a weapon with a maximum range of a mile puts its crew inside a great many things that would prefer to reach out and touch them.
Technology has closed that gap in the wrong direction for the 60. Sensors see farther. Precision munitions strike farther. Loitering munitions can be carried by a small team, launched from cover, flown to a target the operator can watch on a screen and put onto a specific window or a specific vehicle rather than into a general area.
Against that, a man dropping a three-PB bomb into a smooth boore tube looks like something out of a museum. And there’s the honest structural problem. Ordinance boards have to justify every pound a rifleman carries and every dollar the service spends. A weapon that duplicates a capability held by a bigger weapon at shorter range with less effect crewed by five men who could otherwise be riflemen is a legitimate candidate for deletion.
Nobody has to be foolish or hidebound to reach that conclusion. They only have to be doing their job. Here’s the part that ought to settle it. That case against the 60 has been made recently in public, in writing by a serving officer in the United States Marine Corps. In a 2025 article for the Maneuverist, Captain Mitchell Tefi lays the argument out plainly.
The 81s have more range and more firepower. Technology gives better standoff. Loitering munitions are simply more attractive. And then he conceds something no advocate would concede lightly. In conventional employment, he writes, the 60mm mortar struggles to justify itself. Those are the words of a man who cares about the weapon, admitting that the case against it lands.
So the question isn’t whether the dismissal is reasonable. It plainly is. The question is why. Every time the paperwork wins that argument, the same objection comes back up from company level. To understand that, you have to understand what a rifle company commander is actually up against. And it isn’t a math problem about shell weight. It’s a clock.
A rifle company is a few hundred men with rifles, machine guns, and whatever else it can carry. It has no cannon. In any serious fight, it is going to need explosives falling on someone. And the moment it needs them, it has two ways to get them. Ask or shoot. Asking works like this. A forward observer or a company commander identifies a target.
The call goes up the net to a fire direction center. Someone there checks the mission against the rules in effect in the friendly positions on the map and against the other missions already in the queue from the other companies in the other fights happening at the same time. The battery computes data. The guns lay.
Rounds go out. Somebody watches where they land, sends a correction, and the whole cycle runs again. Every step in that sequence is a professional doing exactly what he’s supposed to do. And every step costs time. The competition costs more. Artillery belongs to the battalion or the regiment, and battalions and regiments have priorities that are not identical to the priorities of one company on one hillside.
When the main effort is somewhere else, the guns are somewhere else. Support gets allocated to whoever the commander two levels up has decided matters most this afternoon. And if that isn’t you, the honest answer coming back over the radio is that you’re in line. Weather grounds aircraft. Ammunition runs low and gets rationed.
Nets get saturated in exactly the moments when everyone needs them at once, which is to say during the fighting. None of that is malfunction. That’s a large organization working correctly and a rifle company in contact is still stuck in a shallow fold of ground with the enemy on the high side of it waiting. Now consider the other option. The company owns a tube.
The commander wants fire, so he says so out loud and the crew shoots. Nothing else happens in between. There is no request because there is no one to ask. That difference is the entire argument and it is not an argument about range. The weapon the army settled on was in the most literal sense not an American design at all.
It came from Edgar Brandt, the French engineer whose mortar designs shaped nearly every light mortar of the era. American Ordinance took a license, adapted the thing to American manufacturing and American ammunition, and put it into service as the M2 in 1940. The tube was straightforward, 42 lb all up, barrel, bipod, base plate, broken into loads, a fiveman squad could hump, a squad leader, a gunner, an assistant gunner, and two ammunition carriers.
Elevation from 40° to 85, which is what lets it drop rounds behind terrain instead of through it. Maximum range about 1,800 meters, a bit over a mile. 18 rounds a minute at the normal rate, which puts a round on the target every 3 to 4 seconds. Onto ground, a rifle squad cannot reach at all. The ammunition mattered as much as the tube.
High explosive in the M49 A2, the standard round, 3 lb of shell. the M302 white phosphorus for screening, for signaling, and for its effect on anyone caught near it. And the M83 illuminating round, which turns a black hillside at 2 in the morning into something a machine gunner can actually shoot at. Three problems, one tube, no phone call.
The men who carried it gave it a name that describes exactly what it was for. Hip pocket artillery. Portability is the obvious half of that. The other half is that a man keeps in his hip pocket the things he intends to use without asking anyone. But the hardware is the part that gets remembered and the hardware is the part that matters least here.
Whatever the Americans added to this weapon, they added it organizationally on paper in the middle of a war. The tube came from a French drawing board. The idea of who it belonged to came from somewhere else entirely under the Marine Company organization introduced in April 1943. The 60 mm mortars lived in the weapons platoon.
A mortar section of 16 marines, three squads, a sergeant running the section, and corporals running the squads. That’s a sound arrangement. It groups the specialists together, keeps the training standard, and gives the weapons their own chain of command. It also puts one more link between the man who sees the target and the man who drops the round.
Under the 1944 F-series reorganization, the weapons platoon was deleted, redesated as the machine gun platoon with the 60 millimeter mortar section moved out from under an intermediate platoon and into company headquarters. 20 Marines now operating in combat under the direct orders of the rifle company commander.
Read that again because the phrase everybody quotes comes from that line in a table of organization. Somebody sat down, thought about where the delay was coming from, and wrote the delay out of the company. The commander’s artillery became literally his. His to order, his to correct, his to keep firing after the situation had changed twice.
Nobody rebuilt the mortar to accomplish that. They rebuilt the company around it. What that change bought showed up immediately in the kind of fighting where nothing else could arrive in time. Island fighting in the Pacific compressed everything. Frontages were short, terrain was broken, and the enemy was frequently dug into reverse slopes and folds where flat trajectory weapons could not reach him.
A machine gun cannot shoot over a ridge. A mortar can, and a mortar attached directly to the company could do it on a shouted order while the situation still looked the way it had when the order was given. The illuminating round earned its keep the same way. A company holding a position overnight has no answer at all for movement it cannot see.
And the M83 gave a commander the ability to light his own front on his own authority at the moment he suspected something rather than several minutes after he confirmed it. The same logic carried into Korea where the fighting ran up and down ridgeel lines and every hill had a backside. It carried into Vietnam where contact was frequently sudden and close and the enemy’s chosen ground was rarely convenient for anything with a flat trajectory.
Through all three wars, the M2 stayed in the company because the company kept needing something it did not have to request. No rifle company ever mistook that tube for the most powerful thing it could call on. What it routinely was was the most immediately responsive. That doesn’t mean everyone agreed about the hardware.
There’s a genuine period argument sitting in the record, and it’s worth looking at because it shows how hard these judgments actually are. A lighter successor was in development during the war. First as the T18 E6, later standardized as the M19. Stripped down, it was dramatically easier to carry than the M2, and accuracy suffered for it.
Fitting a conventional mount steadied the weapon and gave much of the weight advantage straight back. That trade sits underneath everything that follows because the first M19s reached troops in the summer of 1944 saw late war action and drew two American assessments that reached opposite conclusions at almost the same moment.
A seventh infantry division operations report from Lee judged the new mortar less efficient than the M2, less accurate, and accuracy is the whole point of dropping explosives near your own people. War Department observers, meanwhile, had gone to the European and Mediterranean theaters in early 1944 to watch demonstrations of the same weapon.
Their report went the other way. They found the lightness and the versatility genuinely appreciated in the field and reported that troops preferred it to the standard weapon. Same army, same year, same mortar. Two honest verdicts pointing in opposite directions. The M19 was standardized after the war anyway and went on to serve in Korea and Vietnam alongside the M2, which tells you how the argument actually got settled. Both weapons stayed.
Both went to the companies. The dispute over which tube was superior turned out to matter far less than the thing both tubes had in common, which was that a captain could order either one into action without asking anyone above him. In 1978, the M224 replaced both of them, and on paper, it made the whole debate look settled in the modern direction.
The M2 reached roughly 1,800 m, and the lighter M19 gave up range to get its weight down. The new tube reaches 3,490, a range increase that answers a good chunk of the standoff complaint by itself. Marine rifle companies fielded a section of three of them in the weapons platoon. and the arrangement looked permanent.
Then the structure moved again. Force design 2030 experimentation eliminated weapons companies and redistributed what they held. One proposed structure dispersed 81 mm mortars among the rifle companies, though the exact arrangement kept evolving between units and experiments. On the merits, that’s a real upgrade. A company with 81s has a bigger, longer reaching tube than it ever held organically before.
And the 60 became the odd man out. Redundant, smaller, outranged by the weapon now sitting next to it in the same formation. It got edged aside in Tifi’s description and left to rust in the arms room. Same story as always. The paperwork was correct. The paperwork is usually correct. What’s different this time is that the counterargument arrived in the present tense from inside.
from a Marine captain writing in 2025 to argue the weapon back into the company. His case doesn’t rest on nostalgia and it doesn’t dispute the arithmetic. He conceds the conventional comparison outright. What he argues instead is that the 60 can be employed in a way the comparison never accounts for. Handheld. Strip away the conventional bipod and the full base plate and what’s left is light enough to travel with a small team.
Two men dismount, drop into defilade, put H onto a target, and are gone before anything can answer. He’s candid that this is contentious among the people who’d have to do it. There’s very little middle ground on handheld employment. Troops either regard the 60 as the most versatile and underappreciated weapon in the rifle company’s armory, or they dismiss it as a dangerous and pointless gimmick.
Nobody seems to land between those two positions. His counter thesis is that handheld employment lets light and motorized infantry punch above their weight. That a small unit with almost nothing gets to do something that ordinarily requires a great deal more, which is what the weapon has always been for. Every argument against this mortar has been an argument about specifications.
Range, shell weight, crew size, standoff, precision. Each one measured honestly. Each one a real disadvantage. Each one adding to a case that has been correct on its own terms every single time it’s been made. And every argument for it has been an argument about ownership. Hit pocket artillery was never a claim that the tube compared favorably to a howitzer.
It was a claim about where the weapon lives. Fire the company owns is fire the company gets. Fire the company requests is fire the company might get from someone with other obligations at a time determined by circumstances the company cannot see and cannot influence. The 1944 reorganization understood that which is why it moved the mortars closer to the commander instead of making them better.
The men in the Pacific understood it and in Korea and in Vietnam. The Ley report and the War Department observers disagreed about which tube was superior, and neither side thought to question whether the company should have one at all. None of this makes the skeptics wrong. Loitering munitions really can offer greater reach and precision against particular targets.
The 81 really does reach farther and hit harder. If the question is which weapon does more damage at greater distance, the 60 mm mortar loses and it loses decisively and it will keep losing that comparison for as long as anyone bothers to run it. But that has never been the question a company commander is asking.
He’s asking what he can put on that tree line right now under his own authority before the situation changes into something worse. The American answer to that question started with a 42-P lb mortar in 1940, and nobody has yet found a way to take it away from him for good. The boards have declared it surplus.
The doctrine writers have moved on. The restructuring pushed it toward the arms room, and the arguments for doing so were sound, and the men who have to fight at company level keep making the same argument. Anyway, subscribe to Warfare Unclassified for more stories like this.
