“Does The US Military’s New Combat Rifle Kinda Suck?”
Remember the U.S. Army’s Next Generation Squad Weapon, AKA the XM-5, AKA the XM-7, AKA 6.8 x 51mm? Brandon Herrera has managed to get Sig Saur to send him the prototype of the new weapon (the Sig Spear) to test, and…he has some reservations.
The caveat here is that this is not an actual 6.8 x 51mm XM-7, it’s chambered in 308 Winchester/7.62 x 51mm (two calibers that are extremely close but not exactly the same), so the ballistics and operation are likely to be slightly different. (To make matters worse, the civilian version of the round is being marketed as 277 Fury. As far as I can tell from looking at Gunbroker, 277 Fury ammunition is available now, but models of the Sig Sauer MCX Spear chambered for the round aren’t yet on the civilian market.)
Pros:
Short stroke piston doesn’t need a buffer tube, meaning that the gun can have a folding stock. “Actually pretty cool.”
Decent trigger.
“This little right side bolt release here. Kind of a fan. Feels a little flimsy, but I like the placement.”
Left side fold-out charging handle is good.
“Hand guard here offers a lot of space to mount whatever shit you want.”
Two gas settings.
Silencer works (even if not hearing-safe quality).
Likes the flat dark earth (FDE) finish. “In my opinion, it’s a pretty sweet looking gun.”
“Gun recoil impulse not bad.”
“Running it suppressed it’s not that gassy.”
Very reliable, at least over the initial 200 rounds.
The cons:
“It’s fucking heavy, dude!…Unloaded it comes in at 8.9 pounds. For reference that is one full pound, or 13% heavier, than a full-size SCAR 17, which is also a semi-automatic 308 with a 20 round magazine.”
Folding aside, the stock isn’t great and wants to slip.
“This charging handle in the back is borderline fucking unusable. It feels, really flimsy, like I feel like I’m gonna fucking break it. And it’s stiff. It is so
fucking stiff! ‘How stiff is it, Brandon?’ Joe Biden in a room full of school kids.”
Potentially the biggest combat problem: Overinsertion of the magazine. “If you put too much force on the magazine when you’re inserting it, you will actually run up past the magazine release and get the weapon jammed.” Yeah, that sounds like a huge problem, and Sig needs to get that fixed ASAP.
The spring is a bit hard to get back in.
Super expensive right now.
From the comments on the video: “The fact that he’s actually able to unironically hold up a Scar 17 as a lighter, more affordable option is just batshit insane.”
Yeah, looks like Sig needs some more work here before it’s ready to field…
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45 Responses to ““Does The US Military’s New Combat Rifle Kinda Suck?””
The whole program is based on a series of fallacies. Delusions, even.
The real deal is that you can’t effectively utilize the individual weapon for infantry much past around 400m. You’ll have exceptional cases where exceptional men can do better with it, but those are few and far between; the average tactical situation is such that anything out past around 400m ought to be addressed by either the machinegun or the mortar.
This is because a.) the human shoulder and average shooting ability do not allow for more effective use, and b.) because the target acquisition at that range means that if you see one, there is probably a fire team or a squad surrounding them. This means that if you’re shooting at that one guy with a precision rifle, you’re wasting an opportunity to kill the other five guys you’re not seeing that are sharing that beaten zone with him…
The idiots that came up with NGSW live in a fantasy world of Dan’l Boone frontier Kentucky Riflemen. That ain’t how combat works; the individual weapon needs to be light and handy enough to whip around and engage lots and lots of close-in targets that are dangerous to your MG and mortar teams, and who’re distracting your guys with the radios. That’s it; close combat. If you’re using riflemen to shoot at things out past 400m, you’ve fundamentally misunderstood how combat in this day and age work.
This may be changing, somewhat, with the advent of ubiquitous drone observation, but I honestly don’t think the changes are shifting in the direction of individual marksmen taking out single targets. If anything, we need rather better area weapons, and that means… Machineguns and mortars.
The idiots have essentially recapitulated the whole series of misconceptions and fantasies that drove the post-WWII program which resulted in the 7.62 NATO and the M14. Reality shows us that you cannot effectively address the individual weapon role and the support weapon role with the same damn cartridge; you have to have something like the .280 British/7.92X33/7.62X39/5.56X45 for the individual weapon role, and then something at least as big as the 7.62X51/7.62X54R for your support weapon. Dual-caliber is the solution; it’s been arrived at via the “desire path” methodology, validated by the Germans in WWII, the Soviets in the post-WWII era, the US in Vietnam, and general experience in combat. Everyone who has fallen for the “One cartridge to rule them all” fantasy has wound up having to come back to the dual-caliber solution. Everyone.
NGSW is a crock of shiite. They don’t know how modern combat works, and they don’t understand what is going on, what is necessary. Idiots telling their riflemen to engage targets past 400m are the same morons who don’t take tripods out with them, and who don’t understand the tactical uses and benefits of the things in the first place. You’d be horrified at how few MG teams are actually fully trained, and who know how to work with an observer to correct fires off a tripod; it’s f*cking insane. The NCOs don’t know it, the officers don’t know it, and if you try explaining to the idiots what the hell a tripod can and should be doing for them, they just stare at you as though you are quite mad, chewing their cud like so many cattle.
We’re running our MG teams off of tripods with a basic design dating back to WWI, whose features are predicated on static use from prepared defense positions. Unlike, say, the German Lafette tripod system that they copied from the Danes in the 1930s, and which is a system perfectly suited to dynamic use during movement out on open terrain. It’s nuts; the Germans had a periscopic sight system usable with the tripod, and a tripod you could get into action from about any position within literal seconds, while we were handing out a primitive POS that would require extensive earthwork to make functional on the same ground. Our guys have to expose their heads; the Germans are completely beneath the line of fire.
As well, we don’t get binos or rangefinders into the hands of the gun teams or their leaders. I’ve interviewed officers that had no idea that they could use the reticles in their issued binoculars (often left behind, because “weight”) to adjust MG fire from a tripod, or how that all worked. Nobody trained them because it’s a lost f*cking art, and nobody knows how to do it anymore.
The whole NGSW thing is a f*cking scandal; they didn’t identify the real problem, and their solution isn’t going to fix anything about it. Mark my words; the M4 will remain the preferred solution, as bad as it is, and the only thing that winds up being used will be the new MG, if that proves out. The rifle? It’ll be lucky to wind up as a DMR…
My favorite thing about the whole program was that they made a rifle that’s heavier than usual with heavier ammo that will result in less carried while giving it not one, but two charging handles. You know…because 2 is better than 1. The Army stayed at a Holiday Inn last night. Pinky swear.
Mark my words: It’ll be about like the deal with the M4 carbine, when it came along. It was supposed to be a “support arms only” kind of deal with that, and as soon as the Infantry bubbas saw it and tried it out… They immediately glommed onto it as superior to the M16A2. The guys out in the support branches never saw the damn things until twenty years later, when all the Infantry outfits had theirs.
It’ll be the same deal; the NGSW individual weapon is a recap of the M16A2, which was way too heavy and unwieldly for the guys doing the job. Same thing will happen, I guarantee you. They’ll try the NGSW out, find out it’s too damn heavy to carry and be effective with, and then there’ll be a bunch of “Urgent Need” memos done up, and Hey! Presto!!, we’ll be back to issuing the line dogs what they really need, the M4. A few NGSW individual weapons may be retained as DMR-roled rifles, but that’s about it.
@Drang,
We should be so lucky. This is yet another iteration of fraud, waste, and abuse of the taxpayer. I do not see it succeeding, at all; none of the small arms lessons of Ukraine indicate a need for this weapon. If anything, what we need is a friggin’ super-shotgun for taking out drones directly overhead of our troops…
I don’t think I’ve seen a single report of any issues with the existing calibers not working on body armor, or that even being a factor. The Ukrainians certainly aren’t screaming for different/better small arms; they’re doing just fine with things in 5.45, 7.62, and 5.56.
Handwriting on the wall, for any but our benighted brass morons. The sacrifices necessary to make NGSW work for the supposed issues of penetrating body armor simply don’t seem to be worth it, in the real world.
Grasp a rifle by its pistol grip, extending it at arm’s length for sixty seconds. If you can do this successfully, your rifle is light enough for all-day carry.
I can execute this drill with a “Trapper” model 94 Winchester but not with an M-4gery. My battle carbine is soon to be scheduled for barrel replacement to correct this shortcoming.
Given that the military has downgraded its physical performance standards, many of the troops will find the weight of this new rifle to be excessive.
There can be no solution to this problem until the quest for a automatic rifle/cartridge combination that shoots into an eight inch circle at 400 yards and retains 1,000 ft/lbs of energy is abandoned.
A preferable option is a select-fire carbine having a larger diameter projectile than the 5.56 NATO that can penetrate body armor out to 200 yards—easy to suggest but challenging to accomplish.
Grasp a rifle by its pistol grip, extending it at arm’s length for sixty seconds. If you can do this successfully, your rifle is light enough for all-day carry.
I can execute this drill with a “Trapper” model 94 Winchester but not with an M-4gery. My battle carbine is soon to be scheduled for barrel replacement to correct this shortcoming.
Given that the military has downgraded its physical performance standards, many of the troops will find the weight of this new rifle to be excessive.
There can be no solution to this problem until the quest for an automatic rifle/cartridge combination that shoots into an eight inch circle at 400 yards and retains 1,000 ft/lbs of energy is abandoned.
A preferable option is a select-fire carbine having a larger diameter projectile than the 5.56 NATO that can penetrate body armor out to 200 yards—easy to suggest but challenging to accomplish.
The 6.8x51mm Common Cartridge was primarily req’d to increase penetration of the latest personal body armors being fielded by Russia and China. Extended range of engagement was also touted, but a secondary consideration.
The Russian, Chinese, and U.S. forces have developed new body armors which cannot be defeated by M855 projectiles from any AR platform, at any range. It is thought that the M995 projectiles may be marginally effective against the new body armors, but only for a limited period of time into the future and at the great expense of consuming the entire world’s tungsten supply (which comes from China).
Like so many of your comments, 10X25mm? You’re out of contact with reality.
Nowhere has anyone actually encountered these super-plates. I seriously doubt they’re ever going to make it onto the battlefield in sufficient quantities to make them a major issue worthy of this solution. And, even if they do? Then what stops the next major step in improved armor to counter this already nearly-unusable cartridge?
How long does it take until we’re issuing .50 caliber individual weapons, with that rationale?
Raw fact is this: You take a hit with a current caliber in your chest plate, and you’re probably going to be combat-ineffective long enough for someone to get up close and personal enough to put another round between your eyes, assuming your buddies aren’t there to protect you. That fact means that the current individual weapon is “good enough” to provide the combat effects we need; the spall from the round hitting your vest/plate combo is going to do some damage to your limbs, and the blunt-force trauma will do enough to take you out of action to make current systems viable for a long, long time.
You’re still going to have people bleeding out from their femoral arteries ripped up, or anywhere in their upper torso that take hits. Hell, if anything, about all the plates do is make it a lot more effective, because you’re wounding someone badly enough to put them out of combat, and they have to be evacuated and treated. Which takes even more resources out of the system…
The whole paradigm this weapon system is founded on is fallacious as all hell. You’re not going to magically fix our small arms problems, which are mostly “software-related” via some magical new uber-waffe. The root problems we have stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of combat these days, which does not include individual marksmen all sniping their singular enemies at ranges past those they can actually do positive ID on them. That’s not happening; the fantasy that it will suddenly change, with this new weapon? LOL… Yeah; who’s developing the X-ray sights, again? The ones that’ll magically help you figure out what part of yonder ridge has enemy troops on it?
The idiots who came up with the NGSW seem to all think that the guys out on the line are all Dan’l Boone or Carlos Hathcock. Which they ain’t, and even if we knew how to turn everyone into those worthies, the effort would be so expensive and time-consuming as to be essentially worthless. We already don’t use our existing weapons effectively; what makes anyone think that “new and improved” weapons are gonna fix that?
It’s a software problem; I could fix nine-tenths of what we’re experiencing problems with via better MG training, some improved accessories for the gun teams, and proper training for the leadership, both officer and NCO. The other tenth? Ain’t worth the squeez, TBH… You could eliminate that with better, more realistic ROE. The problems we have aren’t going to be fixed by these new weapons; PFC Snuffy’s shoulder ain’t getting any more accurate, and his eyes aren’t getting any better at spotting the enemy in cover. The new weapons will still have all of those basic constraints at the end of the day, because nothing at all about them addresses the basic issues behind the problem.
My top materials engineering project – right now – is analyzing on the advanced Chinese body armor. It is real. It is in production. It is being distributed to troops. The M855 5.56mm round is stopped by it every time.
Body armor is one of DARPA’s top 7 development priorities. Because we are behind, well behind.
My top materials engineering project – right now – is analyzing the advanced Chinese body armor. It is real. It is in production. It is being distributed to troops. The M855 5.56mm round is stopped by it every time.
Body armor is one of DARPA’s top 7 development priorities. Because we are behind, well behind.
You just keep on telling yourself that. Those plates will be along just like all the other crap that the Soviets were going to get into production, and never quite managed.
Meanwhile, the corners out in manufacturing will be cut; the materials will be sidelined to sell elsewhere, and the plates that do get made will be frauded past quality control, ad infinitum.
Meanwhile, the very real issues that NGSW isn’t addressing will continue to exist, and will continue to create vulnerabilities that are only going to be exacerbated by the heavier, higher-velocity new weapons that are going to wear barrels out like crazy, which won’t be easily replaced in combat, resulting in even more deficiencies that will create more casualties.
The root problem here is that none of the assholes in charge of this crap have the first f*cking idea about the very real issues we do have, namely lousy training and piss-poor small arms doctrine. A WWII German Gebirgsjager company would have wrought havoc on the Taliban, even armed with the weapons they had, mostly because they had a working theory of the machinegun that they’d properly equipped themselves to put into action; a German gun crew of that era could be in action from a tripod and returning fire out to damn near two kilometers within seconds of taking fire, delivering it effectively enough to suppress the enemy while their elements moved up on the position firing on them. US troops in Afghanistan? No way to answer fire, short of calling in ROE-restricted inorganic fires, forced to rely on returning fire from their bipod-mounted MG teams, who’d never been trained to do their f*cking jobs because “Stupid Leadership” that ahistorically ignored all the “Lessons Learned” from the carefully-curated alpine warfare sources in the libraries at Fort Leavenworth.
Go interview the gun crews; ask what tools they had, what observation and rangefinding equipment they left the wire with. Ask their lieutenants and captains if they know how to correct fires off a tripod-mounted gun, or if they even know that that is a possibility. Ask them where the realistic training and qualification standards are, the ones that don’t reflect late-Korean War fixed defensive positional combat. Ask where the dynamic combat training with gun teams was conducted, in suitable mountainous terrain, before deployment.
All those are the real reasons we suffered from “overmatch” in Afghanistan. And, they’ll be the real reasons that NGSW is a total f*cking failure, at the end of the day; everything about NGSW fails to address those very real issues, and actually generates rather more issues to come, because the ammo is heavier, the weapons heavier, and the number of damned rounds carried will be far lower. Those supposed Chinese and Russian ballistic plates? They’re not even going to be the problem; the real problem will be that the idiots running our system don’t know how to fight, or what the hell the weapons are supposed to be doing: You DO NOT address individual targets out past 400m with your individual riflemen; that’s a fool’s game, and the fact that they’re even projecting that as a possibility is a blatant indicator that they don’t know what the f*ck they are doing; those are MG targets, because they’re AREA targets that should be addressed with a burst, because that one guy you can make out at that range ain’t there by himself; you shoot at him as an individual, you’re actually making things worse because you’ve just alerted his UNIT to the fact that they’ve been spotted; you need to KILL the UNIT, not the one idiot who exposed them by literally showing his ass for target acquisition.
The people who came up with NGSW are all of a similar delusional cant to the morons who created the M14 and the 7.62 NATO rounds. It will end in a similar fashion, with similar results: Dead soldiers, betrayed by their essentially and intractably incompetent leadership.
The changes to the cartridge are not insignificant, iirc the 6.8 is supersonic past 800m. the NGSW includes a much more than just a really, including, finally, an improved MG and, most important of all, an improved optic that functions as a FCS for the infantryman. see this garandthumb video showing much an improvement, basically cheating the new sight is. https://youtu.be/f5YWXrZdNpA
The changes to the cartridge are not insignificant, iirc the 6.8 is supersonic past 800m. the NGSW includes a much more than just a really, including, finally, an improved MG and, most important of all, an improved optic that functions as a FCS for the infantryman. see this garandthumb video showing much an improvement, basically cheating the new sight is. https://youtu.be/f5YWXrZdNpA
Kirk Says is right: This => “Reality shows us that you cannot effectively address the individual weapon role and the support weapon role with the same damn cartridge.”
I don’t dislike the new 6.8x51mm cartridge for the GPMG role. As a former Infantryman, I very much want either 6.5 Grendel or 6.8SPC for both the squad LMG and individual rifle role. The longer, higher-velocity 6.8x51mm cartridge should be fielded in an M240 in the GPMG support role – a company-level weapon (whether task-organized to a platoon on a case-by-case basis, or not).
Dipshit accessions bureaucrats do not understand tactics and, coupled with the bean-counting accountants, always want one system to do two or three roles.
I have a question about accuracy. In the 2nd gulf war, the marines were being accused of shooting prisoners in the head by some news organizations. Turns out having everyone equipped with the red dots was turning joe average into Near Daniel Boone levels of shooting. Am I missing something here? I get why we don’t want to be lugging around the modern version of an M14. To heavy, bulky and less ammo can be carried. But I’ve also seen the difference between a 7.62X39 vs a 5.56 AP round. I know which one I would want to go thru armor with, and it sure as hell isn’t the 5.56 . Am I out to lunch?
“Well, Kirk, they might be incompetent, but at least they’re not laser-focused on fighting the last war.”
They weren’t “laser-focused” on fighting that war while we were in it, either.
NGSW is based on a set of fallacies based on what they erroneously perceived as “the problems” in Afghanistan’s mountains. Those problems are being addressed by solutions that aren’t actually going to answer those issues in any effective way.
News flash for you: You aren’t fighting the “last war” if you fought that war in a state of discombubulated idiocy, and then try to address it with solutions to problems that actually don’t exist.
Real deal was that we weren’t delivering effective return fires on the enemy. Why were we not able to do that? Because we were trying to shoot back at weapons systems past the effective range of a MG fired from the bipod off of a shoulder. Do you see a new tripod solution coming in with the NGSW? No? Then what the FUCK good is that weapon going to do? The inherent issues of delivering an accurate and effective MG burst to create a beaten zone have zip and shit to do with the cartridge; that’s all down to the stability of the firing platform. Inadequate platform? Inadequate beaten zone.
Exacerbated by the difficulty of trying to do fire control wherein you can’t tell the gun crew to dial their T&E up the 200 mils you see you need to in your binocular reticle, and left the 150 you get from that same scale, ‘cos you AIN’T GOT NO GODDAMN BINOCULARS OR RANGEFINDERS IN THE FIRST FUCKING PLACE.
You want to know why we were losing those engagements in Afghanistan? Had not one goddamn thing to do with the cartridges or the rifles; it was down to training, doctrine, and the accessory equipment that the gun teams did not have or carry with them. Which goes back to the fact that the peacetime training is unrealistic and the idiots in charge never, ever stopped analyze what was going wrong in actual practical terms. The majority of the fucking morons have never seen fires adjusted off a damn tripod in the first place; they’ve no idea at all that it can be done, or should be done while in the field on patrol; that’s why they don’t demand the binos, the rangefinders, or the tripods be carried.
Piss-poor leadership; you have no idea how many times I tried getting training with the guns for these conditions on the training schedule, but got overruled every fucking time because it wasn’t on the almighty “Mission-Essential Task List”.
The whole thing is a travesty, and an indicator which should serve to indict the entire system and all of its leadership going back fifty goddamn years. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of incompetence: You don’t train realistically on the guns, you go into combat, and then you can’t defend yourself. So, we need new guns, obviously!!
We aren’t using the ones we have effectively. They’re not going to use the new ones any more effectively, either. If anything, because of the increased weight/cost/recoil, the new hotness will likely be used even less effectively than what we’re doing now.
I’m curious if the author or any of the commentators own a Kestrel 5700 or has 4DOF on their phone? Or knows any competitive shooters? Running the numbers on my Kestrel 5700 and The 277 Fury is a much better cartridge than the 6.5 Creedmoor which is much better than the 308. It has a much bigger danger space and a larger wind bracket than the other cartridges which translates to a much greater hit probability and a much greater precision capability. This is a 1000 yard rifle and in the hands of an expert rated shooter, will give soldiers first round hits at 1000 yards. Or head shots out to 800 yards. It’s a huge leap forward over the 308 and 5.56! As for the rifle, it comes down to what the dispersion is over a 20 round group and how well the rifle and scope are put together so that the stacked tolerances are small. I’m glad the Army is going this way.
“I have a question about accuracy. In the 2nd gulf war, the marines were being accused of shooting prisoners in the head by some news organizations.”
News media organizations that are co-opted by the enemy and which then are actively propagandizing for them should not be paid the slightest heed.
However, most of those shots were taken well within the max effective range of the M4/M16A2, roughly 400m. The fact that they were more accurate, and the Marines were able to do headshots? Really immaterial, and (much as I admire it all, professionally…) really a waste of time/effort. Those guys would have been as effectively taken out of the fight if they’d have been shot in the damn torso or arm.
This is the essence of the mistake made with this crap: It’s not about the singular shot; it’s about the tactical effect. I keep having to make this point with people, because they just don’t get it. If you manage to spot someone out there past 400m, odds are very, very good that they’re part of a unit movement. There are more of them around that guy who broke cover; you do not, emphatically, engage that one guy. You want to engage the entire area around him, in order to deal with the entire unit. This is why we used to do what they called “volley fire”, where the officers and NCOs would be doing the spotting for an entire unit of riflemen, as was common going back to the mid-19th Century onwards. When the machinegun came in, that wasn’t a substitute for the individual rifleman shooting at close-in individual targets, it was a superior means of delivering those volley fire beaten zones we used to need entire platoons and companies to manage.
The essential flaw with the entire concept here is this: You want to kill the enemy. You don’t do that by shooting one guy at 500m; you need to take out the entire surrounding element he’s a part of, and if you shoot at him with your uber-rifle, you’re letting the other five or so guys around him get away… And, ohbytheway, learn a little something about camouflage discipline, which will make it even harder to get them later on.
This basic principle is why you don’t fight long-range engagements with individual riflemen firing at individually-identified point targets. It’s also why the “bullet-hose” MG34/42 family of machineguns had those “excessively high” rates of fire, because the WWII Germans were smart enough to realize that you need to drop a bunch of rounds at range as quickly as possible, in order to catch all those assholes while they’re still standing around… The low rates of fire we insist on having on our current weapons? Guess what? You hear the wheet of one of those bullets going by, you’ve got plenty of time to get down below the line of fire before you’re hit by the last round in that burst; if the guy on the MG has an MG42? You’re getting hit with the last round in that burst across the beaten zone before you realize what that sound was from the first one missing you and hitting your buddy…
Our idiot leadership really has zero idea about how to use machineguns. That’s been a brutally honest fact since WWI, I fear. Which is why we went into WWII with the money on small arms concentrated on the essentially meaningless M1 Garand, and then never procured an actual useful MG until the lamentable M60 of the early 1960s, which itself should never have been purchased without significant redesign and additional work on its entire system. We’re still issuing the same basic tripod we put under the M1919, back in the 1930s, and that was a primitive POS for the time then…
I believe the Taliban use of PKM’s was used to drive this rifle design. It doesn’t make sense to change your rifle to make up for a deficiency in your MGs.
“I don’t dislike the new 6.8x51mm cartridge for the GPMG role. As a former Infantryman, I very much want either 6.5 Grendel or 6.8SPC for both the squad LMG and individual rifle role. The longer, higher-velocity 6.8x51mm cartridge should be fielded in an M240 in the GPMG support role – a company-level weapon (whether task-organized to a platoon on a case-by-case basis, or not).
Dipshit accessions bureaucrats do not understand tactics and, coupled with the bean-counting accountants, always want one system to do two or three roles.”
My problem with the new NGSW cartridge in the MG is that it’s yet another “Do it all” solution shoehorned into two entirely separate roles, which as we all know from trying to overhaul an engine with a Swiss Army Knife, ain’t a good thing. The 7.62 NATO is a compromised cartridge in the MG role because it was designed from the outset to be biased towards being a vaguely acceptable individual weapon cartridge… We’ve just recapitulated that entire flawed process with the NGSW; the MG cartridge has to be credible in the individual weapon role, so…. It is really only a half-ass MG solution.
Reality is that you can’t do both roles with the same cartridge. The Germans learned that the hard way in WWII, right off the bat with the first intermediate cartridge. Then, the Soviets learned it; then, we learned it… Promptly forgetting it in the drive to create the “One Cartridge to Rule Them All”.
Does. NOT. Work.
I honestly doubt that the problem has anything to do with the procurement guys, either: It’s the proponent and unit commanders that drive the train, and they aren’t saying “Hey… Our MG support systems are what the problem mostly is, fix those…”
I’ve talked to those guys. The vast majority just look at you like so many cattle when you start talking training with the guns, getting the crews the tools they need, and when you try explaining the benefits of something like the Lafette tripods? Oh, man… They just can’t get it. They also don’t grasp that the qual standards shouldn’t be driven by fixed defense missions, either. Try setting up a range to go out into the hills and fire at dynamic targets; they lose their fucking minds over the safety issues: “YOU CAN’T DO THAT! THAT’S UNSAFE!!!!”
The machinegun is probably the most neglected and misunderstood weapon in the US military inventory. You can do so much with them, but you have to have trained on them properly to see the potential, and how to use them.
The bulk of our army ‘qualifies’ on individual weapons twice a year, and if it is more than dumping a few dozen rounds on a zero range, it’s an exception. Training is not involved, but all the correct boxes are checked on the training schedule.
“You want to know why we were losing those engagements in Afghanistan?“
With some very rare exceptions we simply didn’t lose any engagements in Afghanistan. I know, I was there. It was political, not effective range of the weapons that hamstrung us.
As far as one round to rule them all. I don’t believe the 6.8x51mm/.277 Fury is going to be the new “medium” machine gun cartridge, it looks like the .338 Norma has won that. However they may rebarrel the 240G to accept the new rifle cartridge. SOCOM and MARSOC have already gone to .338 Norma.
“The bulk of our army ‘qualifies’ on individual weapons twice a year, and if it is more than dumping a few dozen rounds on a zero range, it’s an exception. Training is not involved, but all the correct boxes are checked on the training schedule.”
Precisely this. They are trying to solve what is actually a training/doctrine issue with new toys, and it won’t work because they’re not actually addressing the problem.
See, here’s the thing: Individual riflemen don’t really make all that much difference, in combat. Go look at the actions in Iraq where you had the Army and the Marines taking on equivalent forces. Did the exquisitely-trained Marine riflemen really make a difference in those engagements? Not that I could see.
As far as my informants could tell me, it was much the same in Afghanistan. The real problem here is that we don’t effectively train our junior leaders how to fight their units, using organic small arms. If you’re a sergeant or a lieutenant, and you think that you should be engaging the enemy out past 400m with your riflemen addressing each target as though they’re so many pop-ups on the range…? You’ve been improperly trained. That’s just not effective combat operations; it’s like cockroaches in your kitchen. You see one? You know damn good and well there are another fifty you didn’t see, no? So, if you’re dealing with cockroaches in the kitchen, does it make sense to snipe the one or two you may actually see when they come out into the open, or do you go looking for the actual effective cockroach-killers like the spray can of Raid?
You shoot at individual targets exposing themselves past 400m, you’re that guy trying to handle his cockroach problem by stomping them one by one; what you want to be doing is using your small arms effectively to deal with the enemy in volume, and you do that not by having your riflemen shoot at the one or two guys they manage to spot (which ain’t easy, either…), you do that by having your MG teams light up those areas in the vicinity of those guys who exposed themselves. One way, you’re killing onesies and twosies; the other? You’re killing fire team- and squad-sized elements all at once. Which is more effective and which makes more sense?
The guys that focus on the riflemen are seriously deranged; that’s just not how combat really works. The MG and the mortar are what do the killing; the rifles are just there for security, and the entire package of the NGSW program assumes that the individual rifle is the key component of the tactical system, which just ain’t the case.
The US keeps defaulting to this erroneous idea that the MG is there to support the riflemen; that is just not the case. The MG is your most efficient killing system in the small arms realm; you have to use it as such. You don’t have your assault frontally; you work your guns in from the flank, then work the enemy over with the MG fires you can generate from there. Yet, we keep training and behaving as though “Every man a Hathcock…”, and wonder why the casualty rates are so goddamn high.
All these deficiencies have been masked for decades because of the plethora and plenty of our supporting arms. We went into Afghanistan, and the terrain combined with our idiotic ROE stripped those supporting weapons away, so that the small arms suddenly played a major role. And, we didn’t know how to really use them… The lack of tripods, rangefinders, and binos for adjusting MG fires are the telling things, here. Among other issues.
Shit didn’t work, yo…
Teal said:
“Heavy, clunky.
Watch the spec forces prefer the existing light compact 5.56s for as long as they are permitted to.”
Won’t just be SF; I guarantee you that the line units are going to take these things in, try them out, recognize that they’re another M16A2 disaster, and then the Urgent Needs Statements will flow like water, demanding that the M4 comes back, aside from DMR-roled rifles.
The whole thing is nuts, TBH. You can observe the reality of what the troops need and want by the debacle that was the M16A2. Ain’t nobody came out of Vietnam saying that the M16A1 was great, it just needed to be bigger, heavier, have more complicated sights, and all the rest of the questionable Camp Perry-esque “improvements” they put on that poor thing. As soon as the Infantry saw the first M4 carbines, which were never really validated or meant to serve as the primary Infantry small arm, they glommed onto those like there was no tomorrow. Why? Smaller, lighter, more “wieldly”, and far more in line with what they actually needed than the much-disparaged “musket”, the M16A2.
What they should have done, in order to recapitalize the individual weapon fleet? More like a 16″ barrel carbine with a mid-length gas system, (which would have enabled decent functioning of the original M855 cartridge), a collapsible stock, luminous night sights, and the rest of the stuff that guys actually said they needed. That didn’t happen; we “accidented” ourselves into the M4, which is an arguably flawed weapon firing ammo that wasn’t meant for it and which didn’t work until late in the GWOT.
Hell, despite all the problems with the M4 and M855, which reduced the lethality envelope to around 200m? We still made it work; what does that tell you about the idiocy of NGSW?
“With some very rare exceptions we simply didn’t lose any engagements in Afghanistan. I know, I was there. It was political, not effective range of the weapons that hamstrung us.”
With all due respect, I debriefed a bunch of those guys coming back from Afghanistan. You say “…we simply didn’t lose any engagements…”, and the first thing I want to know is how you’re defining “lose”, because the guys I talked to who were there sure as hell “lost” a bunch, because they encountered fire, and then stopped what they were doing and withdrew most of the time. They didn’t have a means of answering the PK fires, so they’d be out doing their thing, take some fire, and then leave off whatever mission they were on. That’s a loss, no matter that the enemy might not have actually inflicted casualties. When they’re making you do what they want you to? That’s a lost engagement. Period.
And, when you’re fighting an insurgency? Each and every time you fail to kill the stupid sumbitches shooting at you? That’s a loss; every convoy fired up, with the convoy bulling through, not developing the engagement to kill the enemy who dared shoot at us? That’s a loss, and we just provided a training/morale opportunity to the enemy.
Did the same stupid shit in Iraq. The brass has no idea how to fight these wars, and demonstrated that fact time and time again.
You do not allow an opportunity to kill the enemy to slide past you; you have a convoy shot up? You stop, you fix the enemy in place, you kill the enemy. That simple: The rule is, they shoot at you, they die. Anything else and you’re playing whack-a-more very ineffectively.
Used to fucking kill me, sitting there in the Headquarters in Iraq: All day, the line combat units would be out doing search-and-destroy, finding dry hole after dry hole… No contacts made, no enemy found.
At night? Every goddamn log convoy moving would be taking hits, and the loggies would just blow on through as though the overall mission was playing trucker, instead of killing the enemy and pacifying Iraq. Did any of the brass ever think that this set of facts was representative of insanity? Oh, hell no… You’d try and get it across to them that the contacts the loggies were getting were the only thing on offer, and if you want to kill the enemy, you do it then, when they pop up. Infantry and Armor thought it beneath themselves to do escort, and the loggies couldn’t even be bothered to report contacts or IED strikes because it wasn’t their job… Suggested that we start running troops with the log convoys, and the loggies one and all protested that it wasn’t their job to fight, and if the convoys fought the enemy, then the enemy would target them more…
None of those fucking idiots ever studied the Bush Wars in South Africa, or understood the nature of what was going on around them. You’d try and point these things out, and they would stare at you as if you were mad, and then go right back to doing more planning, planning, planning to generate more dry holes during the day, and more IED/small arms strikes on our movements at night.
Frankly, it’s my opinion that we’d have been better off handing the entire war in Iraq off to a small committee of corporals and sergeants and then telling them that they were getting a bounty for every insurgent killed. The officers certainly weren’t earning their paychecks, so far as I could tell.
I do believe the 6.8x51mm is a solution in search of a problem, but like all engineering there is no perfect answer. At least as far as killing 180 lb hominids 5.56×45 is arguably too little and 7.62×51 or any full powered battle rifle cartridge (including 6.8×51) is arguably too much. Of course with a switch is the juice worth the squeeze?
We ran to the sound of gunfire, we didn’t flee. We didn’t walk away, run away or drive away from getting shot at. We didn’t shoot at anyone more than 300m off and usually under 150. We closed with them to root them out and make those distances shorter. A PKM is largely worthless out past 600, but once again range was never the issue.
We do lots of long range hunting of tahr and chamois. Believe me, it isn’t the cartridge….it’s the fore end rest and the Leica range finder that determines success.
There is nothing a .308 can’t do vs a 6.8…the differences appeal to theoreticians and gun magazines.
We’ll have to wait and see if the 6.8’s 90,000lb + psi chamber pressures cause undue throat wear in the new rifle. We could’ve gotten the muzzle velocities to attain the desired armor piercing effects by going with a 5.56 out a 20” barrel
Did we fight those wars stupidly and did the brass’s risk aversion play a factor, yes, but it had very little to do with our engagement TTPs. A low intensity insurgency is a tough row to hoe no matter how you slice it. In a country that has been at some form of war for 45 years and with an average age of death of 35, dying just isn’t that scary. Fatalism doesn’t do the attitude justice, nihilism is closer to the reality. Short of doing what we are unwilling to do and killing nearly every male in that country there is no taming it.
“We ran to the sound of gunfire, we didn’t flee. We didn’t walk away, run away or drive away from getting shot at. We didn’t shoot at anyone more than 300m off and usually under 150. We closed with them to root them out and make those distances shorter. A PKM is largely worthless out past 600, but once again range was never the issue.”
It’s unfortunate that you and your commanders were in the minority. And, a part of the problem is that there were, just like Vietnam, a bunch of different sub-theaters within Afghanistan, and the fact that just about every tour was different for different guys. I honestly don’t know what the hell the people behind NGSW used as their baseline for data, but they sure as hell weren’t talking to the people I did coming out of theater. What I’ve been saying is based on the guys I debriefed and talked to informally, some of whom I trained on the MG at points earlier in their careers. I made a point of looking for those guys, when I could.
It’s a deeply-rooted problem, going back to doctrine and training. Were you ever, at any point, taken out into the field with live ammo, given targets out past 600m, and then required to engage them while taking corrective guidance from gun crew leaders and the chain of command? Did anyone ever teach you how to correct fire while using a tripod outside of the context of a fixed defensive position?
Hell, did anyone ever even tell you it was possible, to do such a thing? Did you ever train on it? Were your leaders properly equipped with rangefinders and binoculars with the proper mil reticles, down to the gun crew leader?
I ran into one lieutenant who took his issued M22 binos to the field with him regularly. He used them solely for artillery fire and observation. Had not a f*cking clue about using them with the MG teams until he overheard me talking to one of his MG gunners, and going “Hey, waitaminute… What? How do you do that?”, inserting himself into our conversation.
Machinegunnery is a lost art in the US Army. It’s a vanishing art in the Marine Corps. How do I know? Go look at the Marine MG manual; it’s got the same illustrations from the 1940s-era MG manuals with totally different reticles from binoculars that went off-issue back before the Korean War, showing how to do this task… I called up their proponency agency when I noticed that, a few years ago. They were entirely uninterested in the error, and seemed to think it was no big deal that a long-obsolete illustration was in the current manual, which would confuse the living snot out of anyone using it to actually try learning how to do this task.
Which, ironically, I was taught by former Marine veterans of Vietnam. No idea how they picked it up, because they weren’t exactly people who were prone to late-night reading of any manuals besides Playboy and Penthouse… True artists with the machinegun, though.
My honest opinion, not backed in anything at all factual, is that the 5.56mm isn’t heavy enough for the individual weapon role, and the 7.62mm isn’t heavy enough for the man-portable support weapon role. That’s merest opinion; I have no objective facts to support those opinions.
That said, I’d say that the old 6mm SAW or the .270/.280 British are good starting points for the individual weapon cartridge, and that the support MG round ought to be something like the old 8X63 Swedish MG cartridge.
The .338 just strikes me as too damn heavy for the man-portable role; vehicular? Why not go up to the .408 Cheytac?
Note that none of this is backed by hard numbers, because ain’t nobody got the numbers, nor are they trying to get them. It’s a vacuum, filled with pure projection and supposition.
Which is what really irks me, TBH. You could at least make the attempt to rationalize this stuff, put it on some semblance of a scientific basis, but… No, we’re not gonna do that.
I defy anyone out there to explain to me the theoretical framework all this crap is hung off of; what the weapons are supposed to be able to do within the tactical framework, and how they work together. You start asking those questions and what you wind up hearing as answers is a whole lot of very fuzzy thinking that’s very poorly expressed, and then mostly as vague platitudes about “overmatch”.
As an example of what I’m talking about: There are finite physical and biological limits on the general capacity for a human being to fire a weapon accurately. That’s what is going on with the whole “800m maximum effective range from the bipod” and “1800m maximum effective range from the tripod”. You don’t have anyone looking at the hard numbers for why these factors exist, or how they interrelate for tactical purposes.
You ask the average lieutenant what his riflemen are supposed to be doing? He’s going to tell you all sorts of nutty things about how “The primary mission of the Infantry battalion is to close with the enemy by means of fire and maneuver. Its purpose is to destroy or capture him, to repel his assaults by fire, close combat, and counterattack, or all of these…”
Note the essence, there: Close with and destroy by means of fire and maneuver. Shoot and move; shoot first, move later.
This is the antithesis of WWII German tactical technique, which was typified by the phrase “Flaechen und Luekentaktik“, the tactics of surfaces and gaps, wherein you maneuver first to obtain advantage, and then fire.
There’s a whole theoretical framework missing, here. One that nobody bothers to think about, because the sad fact about it all is, they tend to teach everyone to handle each and every tactical situation and problem as though it were an ambush they encountered, and assault through the damn thing frontally. Which is, frankly, insane.
You try to get these guys to think about things in terms of “Let’s unhinge what the enemy is doing…”, and they’ll very often stare at you as though you were quite mad. They don’t think that way; they don’t perceive ideas like “Hey, what if we prevented something like the IED campaigns of 2003-2008 by being, y’know… Prepared for them?” as being rational responses.
This also explains why they approach these things like new rifle and cartridge designs as though they were unitary, one-time purchases that we’ll never, ever make again. Gotta blue-sky everything, demanding insanity like “100% improvement in lethality (whateverthefuck that is…)”.
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Kirk said: “Were you ever, at any point, taken out into the field with live ammo, given targets out past 600m, and then required to engage them while taking corrective guidance from gun crew leaders and the chain of command? Did anyone ever teach you how to correct fire while using a tripod outside of the context of a fixed defensive position?”
Simply put, yes. I was trained on light, medium and heavy machine guns to engage unknown distance Ivan targets out to 850m and beyond, in bipod, both tripod and vehicle mount with a T&E. Vehicle and area target engagement out to longer distances. I have walked through Afghanistan with with a 240 tripod slung on my back. I have instructed at Basic Officers Course, Warrant Officers Basic Course Infantry Officers Course and Gunners at Infantry Weapons Officers Course on how to shift machine gun fires using mil reticle binoculars.
I never took “Shoot, move, communicate” or “Close with and destroy the enemy through fire and maneuver” as a fixed order of operations, but more as things you were supposed to do concurrently. As in shoot when you can or should, move when you can or should and always be talking, but maybe that’s because I’m just a big dumb grunt that doesn’t get language.
By the by, .338 Norma is 8.6x63mm, very close to the 8x63mm Swedish machine gun caliber that is an 8.2 diameter bullet. 14.87mm vs. a 12.43mm base, 300 gr vs. 219 gr bullet weight. Nearly fits in the same footprint.
regarding the machine gun. iirc, 408 cheytec is a marksmen/bench shooters cartridge it is know for burning out barrels, think sub 1000 rounds closer to 500. weight wise: the machine gun is about 20 lbs so if you can man handle a 240 you can take the mg338. in the need to fight weight if 338 does the job no need to add more system weight and spin up a new production line.
The whole program is based on a series of fallacies. Delusions, even.
The real deal is that you can’t effectively utilize the individual weapon for infantry much past around 400m. You’ll have exceptional cases where exceptional men can do better with it, but those are few and far between; the average tactical situation is such that anything out past around 400m ought to be addressed by either the machinegun or the mortar.
This is because a.) the human shoulder and average shooting ability do not allow for more effective use, and b.) because the target acquisition at that range means that if you see one, there is probably a fire team or a squad surrounding them. This means that if you’re shooting at that one guy with a precision rifle, you’re wasting an opportunity to kill the other five guys you’re not seeing that are sharing that beaten zone with him…
The idiots that came up with NGSW live in a fantasy world of Dan’l Boone frontier Kentucky Riflemen. That ain’t how combat works; the individual weapon needs to be light and handy enough to whip around and engage lots and lots of close-in targets that are dangerous to your MG and mortar teams, and who’re distracting your guys with the radios. That’s it; close combat. If you’re using riflemen to shoot at things out past 400m, you’ve fundamentally misunderstood how combat in this day and age work.
This may be changing, somewhat, with the advent of ubiquitous drone observation, but I honestly don’t think the changes are shifting in the direction of individual marksmen taking out single targets. If anything, we need rather better area weapons, and that means… Machineguns and mortars.
The idiots have essentially recapitulated the whole series of misconceptions and fantasies that drove the post-WWII program which resulted in the 7.62 NATO and the M14. Reality shows us that you cannot effectively address the individual weapon role and the support weapon role with the same damn cartridge; you have to have something like the .280 British/7.92X33/7.62X39/5.56X45 for the individual weapon role, and then something at least as big as the 7.62X51/7.62X54R for your support weapon. Dual-caliber is the solution; it’s been arrived at via the “desire path” methodology, validated by the Germans in WWII, the Soviets in the post-WWII era, the US in Vietnam, and general experience in combat. Everyone who has fallen for the “One cartridge to rule them all” fantasy has wound up having to come back to the dual-caliber solution. Everyone.
NGSW is a crock of shiite. They don’t know how modern combat works, and they don’t understand what is going on, what is necessary. Idiots telling their riflemen to engage targets past 400m are the same morons who don’t take tripods out with them, and who don’t understand the tactical uses and benefits of the things in the first place. You’d be horrified at how few MG teams are actually fully trained, and who know how to work with an observer to correct fires off a tripod; it’s f*cking insane. The NCOs don’t know it, the officers don’t know it, and if you try explaining to the idiots what the hell a tripod can and should be doing for them, they just stare at you as though you are quite mad, chewing their cud like so many cattle.
We’re running our MG teams off of tripods with a basic design dating back to WWI, whose features are predicated on static use from prepared defense positions. Unlike, say, the German Lafette tripod system that they copied from the Danes in the 1930s, and which is a system perfectly suited to dynamic use during movement out on open terrain. It’s nuts; the Germans had a periscopic sight system usable with the tripod, and a tripod you could get into action from about any position within literal seconds, while we were handing out a primitive POS that would require extensive earthwork to make functional on the same ground. Our guys have to expose their heads; the Germans are completely beneath the line of fire.
As well, we don’t get binos or rangefinders into the hands of the gun teams or their leaders. I’ve interviewed officers that had no idea that they could use the reticles in their issued binoculars (often left behind, because “weight”) to adjust MG fire from a tripod, or how that all worked. Nobody trained them because it’s a lost f*cking art, and nobody knows how to do it anymore.
The whole NGSW thing is a f*cking scandal; they didn’t identify the real problem, and their solution isn’t going to fix anything about it. Mark my words; the M4 will remain the preferred solution, as bad as it is, and the only thing that winds up being used will be the new MG, if that proves out. The rifle? It’ll be lucky to wind up as a DMR…
My favorite thing about the whole program was that they made a rifle that’s heavier than usual with heavier ammo that will result in less carried while giving it not one, but two charging handles. You know…because 2 is better than 1. The Army stayed at a Holiday Inn last night. Pinky swear.
I was under the impression they already dropped it.
@Andy Markcyst,
Mark my words: It’ll be about like the deal with the M4 carbine, when it came along. It was supposed to be a “support arms only” kind of deal with that, and as soon as the Infantry bubbas saw it and tried it out… They immediately glommed onto it as superior to the M16A2. The guys out in the support branches never saw the damn things until twenty years later, when all the Infantry outfits had theirs.
It’ll be the same deal; the NGSW individual weapon is a recap of the M16A2, which was way too heavy and unwieldly for the guys doing the job. Same thing will happen, I guarantee you. They’ll try the NGSW out, find out it’s too damn heavy to carry and be effective with, and then there’ll be a bunch of “Urgent Need” memos done up, and Hey! Presto!!, we’ll be back to issuing the line dogs what they really need, the M4. A few NGSW individual weapons may be retained as DMR-roled rifles, but that’s about it.
@Drang,
We should be so lucky. This is yet another iteration of fraud, waste, and abuse of the taxpayer. I do not see it succeeding, at all; none of the small arms lessons of Ukraine indicate a need for this weapon. If anything, what we need is a friggin’ super-shotgun for taking out drones directly overhead of our troops…
I don’t think I’ve seen a single report of any issues with the existing calibers not working on body armor, or that even being a factor. The Ukrainians certainly aren’t screaming for different/better small arms; they’re doing just fine with things in 5.45, 7.62, and 5.56.
Handwriting on the wall, for any but our benighted brass morons. The sacrifices necessary to make NGSW work for the supposed issues of penetrating body armor simply don’t seem to be worth it, in the real world.
“Unloaded it comes in at 8.9 pounds.“
Grasp a rifle by its pistol grip, extending it at arm’s length for sixty seconds. If you can do this successfully, your rifle is light enough for all-day carry.
I can execute this drill with a “Trapper” model 94 Winchester but not with an M-4gery. My battle carbine is soon to be scheduled for barrel replacement to correct this shortcoming.
Given that the military has downgraded its physical performance standards, many of the troops will find the weight of this new rifle to be excessive.
There can be no solution to this problem until the quest for a automatic rifle/cartridge combination that shoots into an eight inch circle at 400 yards and retains 1,000 ft/lbs of energy is abandoned.
A preferable option is a select-fire carbine having a larger diameter projectile than the 5.56 NATO that can penetrate body armor out to 200 yards—easy to suggest but challenging to accomplish.
“Unloaded it comes in at 8.9 pounds.“
Grasp a rifle by its pistol grip, extending it at arm’s length for sixty seconds. If you can do this successfully, your rifle is light enough for all-day carry.
I can execute this drill with a “Trapper” model 94 Winchester but not with an M-4gery. My battle carbine is soon to be scheduled for barrel replacement to correct this shortcoming.
Given that the military has downgraded its physical performance standards, many of the troops will find the weight of this new rifle to be excessive.
There can be no solution to this problem until the quest for an automatic rifle/cartridge combination that shoots into an eight inch circle at 400 yards and retains 1,000 ft/lbs of energy is abandoned.
A preferable option is a select-fire carbine having a larger diameter projectile than the 5.56 NATO that can penetrate body armor out to 200 yards—easy to suggest but challenging to accomplish.
The 6.8x51mm Common Cartridge was primarily req’d to increase penetration of the latest personal body armors being fielded by Russia and China. Extended range of engagement was also touted, but a secondary consideration.
The Russian, Chinese, and U.S. forces have developed new body armors which cannot be defeated by M855 projectiles from any AR platform, at any range. It is thought that the M995 projectiles may be marginally effective against the new body armors, but only for a limited period of time into the future and at the great expense of consuming the entire world’s tungsten supply (which comes from China).
Like so many of your comments, 10X25mm? You’re out of contact with reality.
Nowhere has anyone actually encountered these super-plates. I seriously doubt they’re ever going to make it onto the battlefield in sufficient quantities to make them a major issue worthy of this solution. And, even if they do? Then what stops the next major step in improved armor to counter this already nearly-unusable cartridge?
How long does it take until we’re issuing .50 caliber individual weapons, with that rationale?
Raw fact is this: You take a hit with a current caliber in your chest plate, and you’re probably going to be combat-ineffective long enough for someone to get up close and personal enough to put another round between your eyes, assuming your buddies aren’t there to protect you. That fact means that the current individual weapon is “good enough” to provide the combat effects we need; the spall from the round hitting your vest/plate combo is going to do some damage to your limbs, and the blunt-force trauma will do enough to take you out of action to make current systems viable for a long, long time.
You’re still going to have people bleeding out from their femoral arteries ripped up, or anywhere in their upper torso that take hits. Hell, if anything, about all the plates do is make it a lot more effective, because you’re wounding someone badly enough to put them out of combat, and they have to be evacuated and treated. Which takes even more resources out of the system…
The whole paradigm this weapon system is founded on is fallacious as all hell. You’re not going to magically fix our small arms problems, which are mostly “software-related” via some magical new uber-waffe. The root problems we have stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of combat these days, which does not include individual marksmen all sniping their singular enemies at ranges past those they can actually do positive ID on them. That’s not happening; the fantasy that it will suddenly change, with this new weapon? LOL… Yeah; who’s developing the X-ray sights, again? The ones that’ll magically help you figure out what part of yonder ridge has enemy troops on it?
The idiots who came up with the NGSW seem to all think that the guys out on the line are all Dan’l Boone or Carlos Hathcock. Which they ain’t, and even if we knew how to turn everyone into those worthies, the effort would be so expensive and time-consuming as to be essentially worthless. We already don’t use our existing weapons effectively; what makes anyone think that “new and improved” weapons are gonna fix that?
It’s a software problem; I could fix nine-tenths of what we’re experiencing problems with via better MG training, some improved accessories for the gun teams, and proper training for the leadership, both officer and NCO. The other tenth? Ain’t worth the squeez, TBH… You could eliminate that with better, more realistic ROE. The problems we have aren’t going to be fixed by these new weapons; PFC Snuffy’s shoulder ain’t getting any more accurate, and his eyes aren’t getting any better at spotting the enemy in cover. The new weapons will still have all of those basic constraints at the end of the day, because nothing at all about them addresses the basic issues behind the problem.
My top materials engineering project – right now – is analyzing on the advanced Chinese body armor. It is real. It is in production. It is being distributed to troops. The M855 5.56mm round is stopped by it every time.
Body armor is one of DARPA’s top 7 development priorities. Because we are behind, well behind.
My top materials engineering project – right now – is analyzing the advanced Chinese body armor. It is real. It is in production. It is being distributed to troops. The M855 5.56mm round is stopped by it every time.
Body armor is one of DARPA’s top 7 development priorities. Because we are behind, well behind.
You just keep on telling yourself that. Those plates will be along just like all the other crap that the Soviets were going to get into production, and never quite managed.
Meanwhile, the corners out in manufacturing will be cut; the materials will be sidelined to sell elsewhere, and the plates that do get made will be frauded past quality control, ad infinitum.
Meanwhile, the very real issues that NGSW isn’t addressing will continue to exist, and will continue to create vulnerabilities that are only going to be exacerbated by the heavier, higher-velocity new weapons that are going to wear barrels out like crazy, which won’t be easily replaced in combat, resulting in even more deficiencies that will create more casualties.
The root problem here is that none of the assholes in charge of this crap have the first f*cking idea about the very real issues we do have, namely lousy training and piss-poor small arms doctrine. A WWII German Gebirgsjager company would have wrought havoc on the Taliban, even armed with the weapons they had, mostly because they had a working theory of the machinegun that they’d properly equipped themselves to put into action; a German gun crew of that era could be in action from a tripod and returning fire out to damn near two kilometers within seconds of taking fire, delivering it effectively enough to suppress the enemy while their elements moved up on the position firing on them. US troops in Afghanistan? No way to answer fire, short of calling in ROE-restricted inorganic fires, forced to rely on returning fire from their bipod-mounted MG teams, who’d never been trained to do their f*cking jobs because “Stupid Leadership” that ahistorically ignored all the “Lessons Learned” from the carefully-curated alpine warfare sources in the libraries at Fort Leavenworth.
Go interview the gun crews; ask what tools they had, what observation and rangefinding equipment they left the wire with. Ask their lieutenants and captains if they know how to correct fires off a tripod-mounted gun, or if they even know that that is a possibility. Ask them where the realistic training and qualification standards are, the ones that don’t reflect late-Korean War fixed defensive positional combat. Ask where the dynamic combat training with gun teams was conducted, in suitable mountainous terrain, before deployment.
All those are the real reasons we suffered from “overmatch” in Afghanistan. And, they’ll be the real reasons that NGSW is a total f*cking failure, at the end of the day; everything about NGSW fails to address those very real issues, and actually generates rather more issues to come, because the ammo is heavier, the weapons heavier, and the number of damned rounds carried will be far lower. Those supposed Chinese and Russian ballistic plates? They’re not even going to be the problem; the real problem will be that the idiots running our system don’t know how to fight, or what the hell the weapons are supposed to be doing: You DO NOT address individual targets out past 400m with your individual riflemen; that’s a fool’s game, and the fact that they’re even projecting that as a possibility is a blatant indicator that they don’t know what the f*ck they are doing; those are MG targets, because they’re AREA targets that should be addressed with a burst, because that one guy you can make out at that range ain’t there by himself; you shoot at him as an individual, you’re actually making things worse because you’ve just alerted his UNIT to the fact that they’ve been spotted; you need to KILL the UNIT, not the one idiot who exposed them by literally showing his ass for target acquisition.
The people who came up with NGSW are all of a similar delusional cant to the morons who created the M14 and the 7.62 NATO rounds. It will end in a similar fashion, with similar results: Dead soldiers, betrayed by their essentially and intractably incompetent leadership.
[…] I CERTAINLY HOPE NOT: “Does The US Military’s New Combat Rifle Kinda Suck?” […]
The changes to the cartridge are not insignificant, iirc the 6.8 is supersonic past 800m. the NGSW includes a much more than just a really, including, finally, an improved MG and, most important of all, an improved optic that functions as a FCS for the infantryman. see this garandthumb video showing much an improvement, basically cheating the new sight is.
https://youtu.be/f5YWXrZdNpA
basic background for the NGSW program.
https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/return-of-the-rifleman-the-next-generation-squad-weapons-program/
Well, Kirk, they might be incompetent, but at least they’re not laser-focused on fighting the last war.
The changes to the cartridge are not insignificant, iirc the 6.8 is supersonic past 800m. the NGSW includes a much more than just a really, including, finally, an improved MG and, most important of all, an improved optic that functions as a FCS for the infantryman. see this garandthumb video showing much an improvement, basically cheating the new sight is.
https://youtu.be/f5YWXrZdNpA
basic background for the NGSW program.
https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/return-of-the-rifleman-the-next-generation-squad-weapons-program/
Kirk Says is right: This => “Reality shows us that you cannot effectively address the individual weapon role and the support weapon role with the same damn cartridge.”
I don’t dislike the new 6.8x51mm cartridge for the GPMG role. As a former Infantryman, I very much want either 6.5 Grendel or 6.8SPC for both the squad LMG and individual rifle role. The longer, higher-velocity 6.8x51mm cartridge should be fielded in an M240 in the GPMG support role – a company-level weapon (whether task-organized to a platoon on a case-by-case basis, or not).
Dipshit accessions bureaucrats do not understand tactics and, coupled with the bean-counting accountants, always want one system to do two or three roles.
6.5 Grendel or 6.8 SPR. A Senator from Texas urged Army to look at them 10 years ago.
And an improved way to open the bolt closed on a jam.
I have a question about accuracy. In the 2nd gulf war, the marines were being accused of shooting prisoners in the head by some news organizations. Turns out having everyone equipped with the red dots was turning joe average into Near Daniel Boone levels of shooting. Am I missing something here? I get why we don’t want to be lugging around the modern version of an M14. To heavy, bulky and less ammo can be carried. But I’ve also seen the difference between a 7.62X39 vs a 5.56 AP round. I know which one I would want to go thru armor with, and it sure as hell isn’t the 5.56 . Am I out to lunch?
QRS said:
“Well, Kirk, they might be incompetent, but at least they’re not laser-focused on fighting the last war.”
They weren’t “laser-focused” on fighting that war while we were in it, either.
NGSW is based on a set of fallacies based on what they erroneously perceived as “the problems” in Afghanistan’s mountains. Those problems are being addressed by solutions that aren’t actually going to answer those issues in any effective way.
News flash for you: You aren’t fighting the “last war” if you fought that war in a state of discombubulated idiocy, and then try to address it with solutions to problems that actually don’t exist.
Real deal was that we weren’t delivering effective return fires on the enemy. Why were we not able to do that? Because we were trying to shoot back at weapons systems past the effective range of a MG fired from the bipod off of a shoulder. Do you see a new tripod solution coming in with the NGSW? No? Then what the FUCK good is that weapon going to do? The inherent issues of delivering an accurate and effective MG burst to create a beaten zone have zip and shit to do with the cartridge; that’s all down to the stability of the firing platform. Inadequate platform? Inadequate beaten zone.
Exacerbated by the difficulty of trying to do fire control wherein you can’t tell the gun crew to dial their T&E up the 200 mils you see you need to in your binocular reticle, and left the 150 you get from that same scale, ‘cos you AIN’T GOT NO GODDAMN BINOCULARS OR RANGEFINDERS IN THE FIRST FUCKING PLACE.
You want to know why we were losing those engagements in Afghanistan? Had not one goddamn thing to do with the cartridges or the rifles; it was down to training, doctrine, and the accessory equipment that the gun teams did not have or carry with them. Which goes back to the fact that the peacetime training is unrealistic and the idiots in charge never, ever stopped analyze what was going wrong in actual practical terms. The majority of the fucking morons have never seen fires adjusted off a damn tripod in the first place; they’ve no idea at all that it can be done, or should be done while in the field on patrol; that’s why they don’t demand the binos, the rangefinders, or the tripods be carried.
Piss-poor leadership; you have no idea how many times I tried getting training with the guns for these conditions on the training schedule, but got overruled every fucking time because it wasn’t on the almighty “Mission-Essential Task List”.
The whole thing is a travesty, and an indicator which should serve to indict the entire system and all of its leadership going back fifty goddamn years. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of incompetence: You don’t train realistically on the guns, you go into combat, and then you can’t defend yourself. So, we need new guns, obviously!!
We aren’t using the ones we have effectively. They’re not going to use the new ones any more effectively, either. If anything, because of the increased weight/cost/recoil, the new hotness will likely be used even less effectively than what we’re doing now.
I’m curious if the author or any of the commentators own a Kestrel 5700 or has 4DOF on their phone? Or knows any competitive shooters? Running the numbers on my Kestrel 5700 and The 277 Fury is a much better cartridge than the 6.5 Creedmoor which is much better than the 308. It has a much bigger danger space and a larger wind bracket than the other cartridges which translates to a much greater hit probability and a much greater precision capability. This is a 1000 yard rifle and in the hands of an expert rated shooter, will give soldiers first round hits at 1000 yards. Or head shots out to 800 yards. It’s a huge leap forward over the 308 and 5.56! As for the rifle, it comes down to what the dispersion is over a 20 round group and how well the rifle and scope are put together so that the stacked tolerances are small. I’m glad the Army is going this way.
Richard L Parker said:
“I have a question about accuracy. In the 2nd gulf war, the marines were being accused of shooting prisoners in the head by some news organizations.”
News media organizations that are co-opted by the enemy and which then are actively propagandizing for them should not be paid the slightest heed.
However, most of those shots were taken well within the max effective range of the M4/M16A2, roughly 400m. The fact that they were more accurate, and the Marines were able to do headshots? Really immaterial, and (much as I admire it all, professionally…) really a waste of time/effort. Those guys would have been as effectively taken out of the fight if they’d have been shot in the damn torso or arm.
This is the essence of the mistake made with this crap: It’s not about the singular shot; it’s about the tactical effect. I keep having to make this point with people, because they just don’t get it. If you manage to spot someone out there past 400m, odds are very, very good that they’re part of a unit movement. There are more of them around that guy who broke cover; you do not, emphatically, engage that one guy. You want to engage the entire area around him, in order to deal with the entire unit. This is why we used to do what they called “volley fire”, where the officers and NCOs would be doing the spotting for an entire unit of riflemen, as was common going back to the mid-19th Century onwards. When the machinegun came in, that wasn’t a substitute for the individual rifleman shooting at close-in individual targets, it was a superior means of delivering those volley fire beaten zones we used to need entire platoons and companies to manage.
The essential flaw with the entire concept here is this: You want to kill the enemy. You don’t do that by shooting one guy at 500m; you need to take out the entire surrounding element he’s a part of, and if you shoot at him with your uber-rifle, you’re letting the other five or so guys around him get away… And, ohbytheway, learn a little something about camouflage discipline, which will make it even harder to get them later on.
This basic principle is why you don’t fight long-range engagements with individual riflemen firing at individually-identified point targets. It’s also why the “bullet-hose” MG34/42 family of machineguns had those “excessively high” rates of fire, because the WWII Germans were smart enough to realize that you need to drop a bunch of rounds at range as quickly as possible, in order to catch all those assholes while they’re still standing around… The low rates of fire we insist on having on our current weapons? Guess what? You hear the wheet of one of those bullets going by, you’ve got plenty of time to get down below the line of fire before you’re hit by the last round in that burst; if the guy on the MG has an MG42? You’re getting hit with the last round in that burst across the beaten zone before you realize what that sound was from the first one missing you and hitting your buddy…
Our idiot leadership really has zero idea about how to use machineguns. That’s been a brutally honest fact since WWI, I fear. Which is why we went into WWII with the money on small arms concentrated on the essentially meaningless M1 Garand, and then never procured an actual useful MG until the lamentable M60 of the early 1960s, which itself should never have been purchased without significant redesign and additional work on its entire system. We’re still issuing the same basic tripod we put under the M1919, back in the 1930s, and that was a primitive POS for the time then…
Ummm….
“…send him the prototype of the new weapon…”
SOooo…he gets a, checks notes, prototype…and bases all of his assumptions off of said prototype?
I imagine the prototype of the M1, M14, M16, AK-**, et al weren’t exactly perfect.
He states that up front. You can only evaluate what’s in front of you, not what prospectus says will exist at some point in the future…
I believe the Taliban use of PKM’s was used to drive this rifle design. It doesn’t make sense to change your rifle to make up for a deficiency in your MGs.
Rick Taylor said:
“I don’t dislike the new 6.8x51mm cartridge for the GPMG role. As a former Infantryman, I very much want either 6.5 Grendel or 6.8SPC for both the squad LMG and individual rifle role. The longer, higher-velocity 6.8x51mm cartridge should be fielded in an M240 in the GPMG support role – a company-level weapon (whether task-organized to a platoon on a case-by-case basis, or not).
Dipshit accessions bureaucrats do not understand tactics and, coupled with the bean-counting accountants, always want one system to do two or three roles.”
My problem with the new NGSW cartridge in the MG is that it’s yet another “Do it all” solution shoehorned into two entirely separate roles, which as we all know from trying to overhaul an engine with a Swiss Army Knife, ain’t a good thing. The 7.62 NATO is a compromised cartridge in the MG role because it was designed from the outset to be biased towards being a vaguely acceptable individual weapon cartridge… We’ve just recapitulated that entire flawed process with the NGSW; the MG cartridge has to be credible in the individual weapon role, so…. It is really only a half-ass MG solution.
Reality is that you can’t do both roles with the same cartridge. The Germans learned that the hard way in WWII, right off the bat with the first intermediate cartridge. Then, the Soviets learned it; then, we learned it… Promptly forgetting it in the drive to create the “One Cartridge to Rule Them All”.
Does. NOT. Work.
I honestly doubt that the problem has anything to do with the procurement guys, either: It’s the proponent and unit commanders that drive the train, and they aren’t saying “Hey… Our MG support systems are what the problem mostly is, fix those…”
I’ve talked to those guys. The vast majority just look at you like so many cattle when you start talking training with the guns, getting the crews the tools they need, and when you try explaining the benefits of something like the Lafette tripods? Oh, man… They just can’t get it. They also don’t grasp that the qual standards shouldn’t be driven by fixed defense missions, either. Try setting up a range to go out into the hills and fire at dynamic targets; they lose their fucking minds over the safety issues: “YOU CAN’T DO THAT! THAT’S UNSAFE!!!!”
The machinegun is probably the most neglected and misunderstood weapon in the US military inventory. You can do so much with them, but you have to have trained on them properly to see the potential, and how to use them.
The bulk of our army ‘qualifies’ on individual weapons twice a year, and if it is more than dumping a few dozen rounds on a zero range, it’s an exception. Training is not involved, but all the correct boxes are checked on the training schedule.
Heavy, clunky.
Watch the spec forces prefer the existing light compact 5.56s for as long as they are permitted to.
“You want to know why we were losing those engagements in Afghanistan?“
With some very rare exceptions we simply didn’t lose any engagements in Afghanistan. I know, I was there. It was political, not effective range of the weapons that hamstrung us.
As far as one round to rule them all. I don’t believe the 6.8x51mm/.277 Fury is going to be the new “medium” machine gun cartridge, it looks like the .338 Norma has won that. However they may rebarrel the 240G to accept the new rifle cartridge. SOCOM and MARSOC have already gone to .338 Norma.
Martin Morehouse said:
“The bulk of our army ‘qualifies’ on individual weapons twice a year, and if it is more than dumping a few dozen rounds on a zero range, it’s an exception. Training is not involved, but all the correct boxes are checked on the training schedule.”
Precisely this. They are trying to solve what is actually a training/doctrine issue with new toys, and it won’t work because they’re not actually addressing the problem.
See, here’s the thing: Individual riflemen don’t really make all that much difference, in combat. Go look at the actions in Iraq where you had the Army and the Marines taking on equivalent forces. Did the exquisitely-trained Marine riflemen really make a difference in those engagements? Not that I could see.
As far as my informants could tell me, it was much the same in Afghanistan. The real problem here is that we don’t effectively train our junior leaders how to fight their units, using organic small arms. If you’re a sergeant or a lieutenant, and you think that you should be engaging the enemy out past 400m with your riflemen addressing each target as though they’re so many pop-ups on the range…? You’ve been improperly trained. That’s just not effective combat operations; it’s like cockroaches in your kitchen. You see one? You know damn good and well there are another fifty you didn’t see, no? So, if you’re dealing with cockroaches in the kitchen, does it make sense to snipe the one or two you may actually see when they come out into the open, or do you go looking for the actual effective cockroach-killers like the spray can of Raid?
You shoot at individual targets exposing themselves past 400m, you’re that guy trying to handle his cockroach problem by stomping them one by one; what you want to be doing is using your small arms effectively to deal with the enemy in volume, and you do that not by having your riflemen shoot at the one or two guys they manage to spot (which ain’t easy, either…), you do that by having your MG teams light up those areas in the vicinity of those guys who exposed themselves. One way, you’re killing onesies and twosies; the other? You’re killing fire team- and squad-sized elements all at once. Which is more effective and which makes more sense?
The guys that focus on the riflemen are seriously deranged; that’s just not how combat really works. The MG and the mortar are what do the killing; the rifles are just there for security, and the entire package of the NGSW program assumes that the individual rifle is the key component of the tactical system, which just ain’t the case.
The US keeps defaulting to this erroneous idea that the MG is there to support the riflemen; that is just not the case. The MG is your most efficient killing system in the small arms realm; you have to use it as such. You don’t have your assault frontally; you work your guns in from the flank, then work the enemy over with the MG fires you can generate from there. Yet, we keep training and behaving as though “Every man a Hathcock…”, and wonder why the casualty rates are so goddamn high.
All these deficiencies have been masked for decades because of the plethora and plenty of our supporting arms. We went into Afghanistan, and the terrain combined with our idiotic ROE stripped those supporting weapons away, so that the small arms suddenly played a major role. And, we didn’t know how to really use them… The lack of tripods, rangefinders, and binos for adjusting MG fires are the telling things, here. Among other issues.
Shit didn’t work, yo…
Teal said:
“Heavy, clunky.
Watch the spec forces prefer the existing light compact 5.56s for as long as they are permitted to.”
Won’t just be SF; I guarantee you that the line units are going to take these things in, try them out, recognize that they’re another M16A2 disaster, and then the Urgent Needs Statements will flow like water, demanding that the M4 comes back, aside from DMR-roled rifles.
The whole thing is nuts, TBH. You can observe the reality of what the troops need and want by the debacle that was the M16A2. Ain’t nobody came out of Vietnam saying that the M16A1 was great, it just needed to be bigger, heavier, have more complicated sights, and all the rest of the questionable Camp Perry-esque “improvements” they put on that poor thing. As soon as the Infantry saw the first M4 carbines, which were never really validated or meant to serve as the primary Infantry small arm, they glommed onto those like there was no tomorrow. Why? Smaller, lighter, more “wieldly”, and far more in line with what they actually needed than the much-disparaged “musket”, the M16A2.
What they should have done, in order to recapitalize the individual weapon fleet? More like a 16″ barrel carbine with a mid-length gas system, (which would have enabled decent functioning of the original M855 cartridge), a collapsible stock, luminous night sights, and the rest of the stuff that guys actually said they needed. That didn’t happen; we “accidented” ourselves into the M4, which is an arguably flawed weapon firing ammo that wasn’t meant for it and which didn’t work until late in the GWOT.
Hell, despite all the problems with the M4 and M855, which reduced the lethality envelope to around 200m? We still made it work; what does that tell you about the idiocy of NGSW?
PUE 206 said:
“With some very rare exceptions we simply didn’t lose any engagements in Afghanistan. I know, I was there. It was political, not effective range of the weapons that hamstrung us.”
With all due respect, I debriefed a bunch of those guys coming back from Afghanistan. You say “…we simply didn’t lose any engagements…”, and the first thing I want to know is how you’re defining “lose”, because the guys I talked to who were there sure as hell “lost” a bunch, because they encountered fire, and then stopped what they were doing and withdrew most of the time. They didn’t have a means of answering the PK fires, so they’d be out doing their thing, take some fire, and then leave off whatever mission they were on. That’s a loss, no matter that the enemy might not have actually inflicted casualties. When they’re making you do what they want you to? That’s a lost engagement. Period.
And, when you’re fighting an insurgency? Each and every time you fail to kill the stupid sumbitches shooting at you? That’s a loss; every convoy fired up, with the convoy bulling through, not developing the engagement to kill the enemy who dared shoot at us? That’s a loss, and we just provided a training/morale opportunity to the enemy.
Did the same stupid shit in Iraq. The brass has no idea how to fight these wars, and demonstrated that fact time and time again.
You do not allow an opportunity to kill the enemy to slide past you; you have a convoy shot up? You stop, you fix the enemy in place, you kill the enemy. That simple: The rule is, they shoot at you, they die. Anything else and you’re playing whack-a-more very ineffectively.
Used to fucking kill me, sitting there in the Headquarters in Iraq: All day, the line combat units would be out doing search-and-destroy, finding dry hole after dry hole… No contacts made, no enemy found.
At night? Every goddamn log convoy moving would be taking hits, and the loggies would just blow on through as though the overall mission was playing trucker, instead of killing the enemy and pacifying Iraq. Did any of the brass ever think that this set of facts was representative of insanity? Oh, hell no… You’d try and get it across to them that the contacts the loggies were getting were the only thing on offer, and if you want to kill the enemy, you do it then, when they pop up. Infantry and Armor thought it beneath themselves to do escort, and the loggies couldn’t even be bothered to report contacts or IED strikes because it wasn’t their job… Suggested that we start running troops with the log convoys, and the loggies one and all protested that it wasn’t their job to fight, and if the convoys fought the enemy, then the enemy would target them more…
None of those fucking idiots ever studied the Bush Wars in South Africa, or understood the nature of what was going on around them. You’d try and point these things out, and they would stare at you as if you were mad, and then go right back to doing more planning, planning, planning to generate more dry holes during the day, and more IED/small arms strikes on our movements at night.
Frankly, it’s my opinion that we’d have been better off handing the entire war in Iraq off to a small committee of corporals and sergeants and then telling them that they were getting a bounty for every insurgent killed. The officers certainly weren’t earning their paychecks, so far as I could tell.
I do believe the 6.8x51mm is a solution in search of a problem, but like all engineering there is no perfect answer. At least as far as killing 180 lb hominids 5.56×45 is arguably too little and 7.62×51 or any full powered battle rifle cartridge (including 6.8×51) is arguably too much. Of course with a switch is the juice worth the squeeze?
We ran to the sound of gunfire, we didn’t flee. We didn’t walk away, run away or drive away from getting shot at. We didn’t shoot at anyone more than 300m off and usually under 150. We closed with them to root them out and make those distances shorter. A PKM is largely worthless out past 600, but once again range was never the issue.
We do lots of long range hunting of tahr and chamois. Believe me, it isn’t the cartridge….it’s the fore end rest and the Leica range finder that determines success.
There is nothing a .308 can’t do vs a 6.8…the differences appeal to theoreticians and gun magazines.
We’ll have to wait and see if the 6.8’s 90,000lb + psi chamber pressures cause undue throat wear in the new rifle. We could’ve gotten the muzzle velocities to attain the desired armor piercing effects by going with a 5.56 out a 20” barrel
Did we fight those wars stupidly and did the brass’s risk aversion play a factor, yes, but it had very little to do with our engagement TTPs. A low intensity insurgency is a tough row to hoe no matter how you slice it. In a country that has been at some form of war for 45 years and with an average age of death of 35, dying just isn’t that scary. Fatalism doesn’t do the attitude justice, nihilism is closer to the reality. Short of doing what we are unwilling to do and killing nearly every male in that country there is no taming it.
PUE 306 said:
“We ran to the sound of gunfire, we didn’t flee. We didn’t walk away, run away or drive away from getting shot at. We didn’t shoot at anyone more than 300m off and usually under 150. We closed with them to root them out and make those distances shorter. A PKM is largely worthless out past 600, but once again range was never the issue.”
It’s unfortunate that you and your commanders were in the minority. And, a part of the problem is that there were, just like Vietnam, a bunch of different sub-theaters within Afghanistan, and the fact that just about every tour was different for different guys. I honestly don’t know what the hell the people behind NGSW used as their baseline for data, but they sure as hell weren’t talking to the people I did coming out of theater. What I’ve been saying is based on the guys I debriefed and talked to informally, some of whom I trained on the MG at points earlier in their careers. I made a point of looking for those guys, when I could.
It’s a deeply-rooted problem, going back to doctrine and training. Were you ever, at any point, taken out into the field with live ammo, given targets out past 600m, and then required to engage them while taking corrective guidance from gun crew leaders and the chain of command? Did anyone ever teach you how to correct fire while using a tripod outside of the context of a fixed defensive position?
Hell, did anyone ever even tell you it was possible, to do such a thing? Did you ever train on it? Were your leaders properly equipped with rangefinders and binoculars with the proper mil reticles, down to the gun crew leader?
I ran into one lieutenant who took his issued M22 binos to the field with him regularly. He used them solely for artillery fire and observation. Had not a f*cking clue about using them with the MG teams until he overheard me talking to one of his MG gunners, and going “Hey, waitaminute… What? How do you do that?”, inserting himself into our conversation.
Machinegunnery is a lost art in the US Army. It’s a vanishing art in the Marine Corps. How do I know? Go look at the Marine MG manual; it’s got the same illustrations from the 1940s-era MG manuals with totally different reticles from binoculars that went off-issue back before the Korean War, showing how to do this task… I called up their proponency agency when I noticed that, a few years ago. They were entirely uninterested in the error, and seemed to think it was no big deal that a long-obsolete illustration was in the current manual, which would confuse the living snot out of anyone using it to actually try learning how to do this task.
Which, ironically, I was taught by former Marine veterans of Vietnam. No idea how they picked it up, because they weren’t exactly people who were prone to late-night reading of any manuals besides Playboy and Penthouse… True artists with the machinegun, though.
I will note that the Socom community is pursuing a 6.5 derivative based on .264 USA.
https://soldiersystems.net/2023/01/16/the-fn-america-fna-previews-the-lightweight-intermediate-caliber-cartridge-licc-individual-weapon-system-iws-developed-for-the-irregular-warfare-technology-support-directorate-iwtsd/
additionally, regarding machine guns and half ass rounds. Contracts are already signed for .338 Norma Machine guns
My honest opinion, not backed in anything at all factual, is that the 5.56mm isn’t heavy enough for the individual weapon role, and the 7.62mm isn’t heavy enough for the man-portable support weapon role. That’s merest opinion; I have no objective facts to support those opinions.
That said, I’d say that the old 6mm SAW or the .270/.280 British are good starting points for the individual weapon cartridge, and that the support MG round ought to be something like the old 8X63 Swedish MG cartridge.
The .338 just strikes me as too damn heavy for the man-portable role; vehicular? Why not go up to the .408 Cheytac?
Note that none of this is backed by hard numbers, because ain’t nobody got the numbers, nor are they trying to get them. It’s a vacuum, filled with pure projection and supposition.
Which is what really irks me, TBH. You could at least make the attempt to rationalize this stuff, put it on some semblance of a scientific basis, but… No, we’re not gonna do that.
I defy anyone out there to explain to me the theoretical framework all this crap is hung off of; what the weapons are supposed to be able to do within the tactical framework, and how they work together. You start asking those questions and what you wind up hearing as answers is a whole lot of very fuzzy thinking that’s very poorly expressed, and then mostly as vague platitudes about “overmatch”.
As an example of what I’m talking about: There are finite physical and biological limits on the general capacity for a human being to fire a weapon accurately. That’s what is going on with the whole “800m maximum effective range from the bipod” and “1800m maximum effective range from the tripod”. You don’t have anyone looking at the hard numbers for why these factors exist, or how they interrelate for tactical purposes.
You ask the average lieutenant what his riflemen are supposed to be doing? He’s going to tell you all sorts of nutty things about how “The primary mission of the Infantry battalion is to close with the enemy by means of fire and maneuver. Its purpose is to destroy or capture him, to repel his assaults by fire, close combat, and counterattack, or all of these…”
Note the essence, there: Close with and destroy by means of fire and maneuver. Shoot and move; shoot first, move later.
This is the antithesis of WWII German tactical technique, which was typified by the phrase “Flaechen und Luekentaktik“, the tactics of surfaces and gaps, wherein you maneuver first to obtain advantage, and then fire.
There’s a whole theoretical framework missing, here. One that nobody bothers to think about, because the sad fact about it all is, they tend to teach everyone to handle each and every tactical situation and problem as though it were an ambush they encountered, and assault through the damn thing frontally. Which is, frankly, insane.
You try to get these guys to think about things in terms of “Let’s unhinge what the enemy is doing…”, and they’ll very often stare at you as though you were quite mad. They don’t think that way; they don’t perceive ideas like “Hey, what if we prevented something like the IED campaigns of 2003-2008 by being, y’know… Prepared for them?” as being rational responses.
This also explains why they approach these things like new rifle and cartridge designs as though they were unitary, one-time purchases that we’ll never, ever make again. Gotta blue-sky everything, demanding insanity like “100% improvement in lethality (whateverthefuck that is…)”.
Back in February Army Times reported that “On all key technical measures, the Next Generation Squad Weapons program is imploding before Army’s very eyes.”
https://www.armytimes.com/opinion/commentary/2023/02/28/the-not-really-next-generation-weapons-program/
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Kirk said: “Were you ever, at any point, taken out into the field with live ammo, given targets out past 600m, and then required to engage them while taking corrective guidance from gun crew leaders and the chain of command? Did anyone ever teach you how to correct fire while using a tripod outside of the context of a fixed defensive position?”
Simply put, yes. I was trained on light, medium and heavy machine guns to engage unknown distance Ivan targets out to 850m and beyond, in bipod, both tripod and vehicle mount with a T&E. Vehicle and area target engagement out to longer distances. I have walked through Afghanistan with with a 240 tripod slung on my back. I have instructed at Basic Officers Course, Warrant Officers Basic Course Infantry Officers Course and Gunners at Infantry Weapons Officers Course on how to shift machine gun fires using mil reticle binoculars.
I never took “Shoot, move, communicate” or “Close with and destroy the enemy through fire and maneuver” as a fixed order of operations, but more as things you were supposed to do concurrently. As in shoot when you can or should, move when you can or should and always be talking, but maybe that’s because I’m just a big dumb grunt that doesn’t get language.
By the by, .338 Norma is 8.6x63mm, very close to the 8x63mm Swedish machine gun caliber that is an 8.2 diameter bullet. 14.87mm vs. a 12.43mm base, 300 gr vs. 219 gr bullet weight. Nearly fits in the same footprint.
VERY INTERESTING…
Automatkas says:
May 23, 2023 at 2:18 PM
I will note that the Socom community is pursuing a 6.5 derivative based on .264 USA.
https://soldiersystems.net/2023/01/16/the-fn-america-fna-previews-the-lightweight-intermediate-caliber-cartridge-licc-individual-weapon-system-iws-developed-for-the-irregular-warfare-technology-support-directorate-iwtsd/
additionally, regarding machine guns and half ass rounds. Contracts are already signed for .338 Norma Machine guns
regarding the machine gun. iirc, 408 cheytec is a marksmen/bench shooters cartridge it is know for burning out barrels, think sub 1000 rounds closer to 500. weight wise: the machine gun is about 20 lbs so if you can man handle a 240 you can take the mg338. in the need to fight weight if 338 does the job no need to add more system weight and spin up a new production line.