84mm Carl Gustav APERS round

The M3 Carl Gustav 84mm one-man portable recoilless rifle is a great system, if a bit heavy at 18.75lbs empty with a wide variety of ammo. Ammo choices include HE-frag, dual-mode fuzed HEDP, tandum-HEAT (>500mm penetration), WP and illumination. However it lacks by the far the most important, IMHO, RR round: fletchet/APERS. I would estimate an 84mm APERS round, based upon the 106mm version, should have perhaps 5,000 fletchets; PLENTY!!! Such a round should be developed ASAP and teh M3 Carl Gustav, now limited only to Rangers, should be widely fielded to all US Army units, at least 1 per rifle squad if not 1 per fire team.

Expanding the cargo hatch for more guns/gunners.

This is a fairly simple affair. Simply cut out most of the space behind the cargo hatch and some in front of it (don't go under space that could be covered over by a copula-turret) to make it twice as long as it is currently. Now make a copy of the cargo hatch and it's hinge - if you don't do it yourself or contract a civilian than ask a maintenance unit - and attach it to the one that came with the M113, but make sure it can swing the second-hatch forward as it has no need to swing back. Now attach your new double-hatch to the rear of your newly expanded rear hull hole. Now to make your it doesn't go flying about and only opens in a predictable manner - vital on the battlefield - weld a AL dowel, perhaps in the 3/8 inch range - under the front "lip" of the forward cargo hatch (new one) and then weld a pair of "U-rails" along the full length of new cargo hatch hole for the dowel to slide back and forward along, this controlling it's movement to a sort of "scissors" movement (see pic).

Interim Gavin Assault Ladder

This is my "expedient" means of using an M113 as a urban "siege engine" to scale walls up to 3rd-4th floors.

Ladder works as follows: Ladder is attached to M113's cargo hatch, and in normal operation would swing back with said hatch, but because of it's hight would certainly not allow the hatch to swing all the way back. Now drive M113 beside a building you wish to assault with cargo hatch closed, and attach 'D' to 'E' and then unlock ladder from cargo hatch by two locks on the hatch, all by internal means. Now the D-E points act as a hinge, so then if a line is pulled from the interior (how this functions wile still allowing cargo hatch to open w/ ladder on top is unclear) that will pull ladder out, extended and wide-step rungs from parallel with ladder length to perpendicular so as to allow soldiers scaling ladder to theoretically need zero hands to ascend, and two hands for weapons/debrise.

This is the "baton" type less-lethal version of the below mentioned Rifle Hand Grenade.

This grenade may even work against targets wearing body armor!

Bullet-Catch Rifle-Hand-Grenade

It seems to me useful for our military to have a grenade that is longer-ranged than hand grenades and has the 'point-n-shoot' quality of something like an RPG. This weapon would look like a miniature mortar round, maybe only equivalent to 40-45mm, and either no more potent or only somewhat more so than a regular hand grenade. It could be either pulled over an unmodified assault rifle's muzzle and use what I'll call a "bullet-catch" mechanism with standard 'ball' ammo to project it or could be twisted or have a pull-cord (sounds more complex) like the old German "potato masher" to be hand thrown. This would have a flat-trajectory range of only 200-300m and an indirect - with great inaccuracy - in the 500-1000m range. It would only need to be fired to say lay smoke in front of a dismounted formation or shoot grenades into trees/windows/basements ect, things you couldn't do with a hand grenade (at least as easily) yet firing something like an RPG or AT-4 would be overkill. Also my "HRG" (Hand Rifle Grenade) would not fully replace spoon-type hand grenades or 40mm-type grenades but would replaced them in most of their current use. The HRG would also in no way replace something like an RPG or AT-4, only to be these weapons' "little bro." The HRG would come in a wide variety of variants, such as:

An other way of looking at it's size may be analogized to the size of a cylindrical-grenade with bullet-catch-mechanism-containing aft tube with fins.