H&K Wins CSASS！

[Digital_Damage]

Who should have won, in your opinion? LMT?

It is not as simple as "the better rifle wins".

They all (well almost all) met the requirements.

Do I think the G28 they put forward sucks? No it is a fine weapon, however they are all fine weapons.

It almost always comes down to who puts the better deal forward.

It even gets into who the support personnel assigned to the contract will be, what is their background..ect. We have to often submit resumes along with each bid depending on the project.

[call_me_ski]

Remington was not down selected. How did it come out strong?

It seems that, as is always the case in any of these contracts, there is a conspiracy against everyone's favorite if they did not win.

The letters H and K in particular seem to invoke some extreme emotions when placed together in the gun community. I don't get it. There are lots of greats guns out there. This is not the first time the hk417 has displaced a sr25 KAC gun and it may not be the last, and I am sure that LMT and KAC will win contracts against the HK again in the future as well.

Hk has been making guns for war fighters for decades. Many of them carried by tier 1 groups across the west, including the US. Why is it had to believe that they are able to make a quality rifle that would benefit the warfighter?

LRRPF52, I do get what you mean by there being a disconnect between what is bought and what is needed at times. There is a balance between waiting for something ground breaking and filling a need when you can. An 80% solution is better than no solution so to speak. I will say that it is very refreshing when you get a bit of kit and it actually seems like they asked a grunt what he thought before ordering it. That refreshing feeling was not as common as it should be.

[Failure2Stop]

What I'm hearing about this contract is that there is some new stipulation from DoD that previous contract awardees can't be awarded the next contract, but I am still waiting on confirmation of that from others with a SOTIC background.

I do not believe this to be correct, and there certainly isn't an official rule about it.

[call_me_ski]

That policy would call into question the entire system.

[Digital_Damage]

Remington was not down selected. How did it come out strong?

It seems that, as is always the case in any of these contracts, there is a conspiracy against everyone's favorite if they did not win.

The letters H and K in particular seem to invoke some extreme emotions when placed together in the gun community. I don't get it. There are lots of greats guns out there. This is not the first time the hk417 has displaced a sr25 KAC gun and it may not be the last, and I am sure that LMT and KAC will win contracts against the HK again in the future as well.

Hk has been making guns for war fighters for decades. Many of them carried by tier 1 groups across the west, including the US. Why is it had to believe that they are able to make a quality rifle that would benefit the warfighter?

LRRPF52, I do get what you mean by there being a disconnect between what is bought and what is needed at times. There is a balance between waiting for something ground breaking and filling a need when you can. An 80% solution is better than no solution so to speak. I will say that it is very refreshing when you get a bit of kit and it actually seems like they asked a grunt what he thought before ordering it. That refreshing feeling was not as common as it should be.

Remington did come out strong. Like I said some things about the whole process raises a lot of questions. I'll leave it at that.

People keep bring up the 417... it was not submitted. Don't know why people keep bringing it up, or why it even became a focal point in this discussion. The guns HK submitted were far better than the 417. No one is saying the HK was not make a good rifle, it simply was not the best performing one out of the group.

[Digital_Damage]

I do not believe this to be correct, and there certainly isn't an official rule about it.

There is no rule, we would be out of business then.

[call_me_ski]

Remington did come out strong. Like I said some things about the whole process raises a lot of questions. I'll leave it at that.

People keep bring up the 417... it was not submitted. Don't know why people keep bringing it up, or why it even became a focal point in this discussion. The guns HK submitted were far better than the 417. No one is saying the HK was not make a good rifle, it simply was not the best performing one out of the group.

I think people understand that the rifle submitted was different from a hk417. At least I do, I just use it as a frame of reference for the family of firearms as there is still a fair deal of speculation by most people as to what exactly the final rifle will look like. From what I have been able to learn about the program is that it is an evolution of the g28 which is itself an evolution of the hk417.

The same way that the m110 is an evolution of the sr25.

[Digital_Damage]

I think people understand that the rifle submitted was different from a hk417. At least I do, I just use it as a frame of reference for the family of firearms as there is still a fair deal of speculation by most people as to what exactly the final rifle will look like. From what I have been able to learn about the program is that it is an evolution of the g28 which is itself an evolution of the hk417.

The same way that the m110 is an evolution of the sr25.

The rifle submitted only has about 60% of interchangeable parts between it and the current 417.

The differences are substantial in the upper, lower and fire control group. The only similarities I could tell were small parts.

The SR25 (ECR) and M110 are very similar at their core and you would have no problem "cloning" an ECR into an M110.

[Digital_Damage]

another example of manufactures going to court over contracts

https://www.m4carbine.net/showthread.php?182592

This is not just happening in the small arms world, it is happening allover the government procurement realm.

[coldblue]

I remember watching the Army's SWS contract unfold back in the late 1980s. The sniping community in SF did everything in their power to make the XM25 (an even more tweaked M21) a viable contender, but the Army decided a bolt gun was the way to go. The problems with trying to get an M14 to shoot accurately repeatedly through a long course of fire, like we would see in any formal sniping school, was the main obstacle.

Keep in mind that at the time, Stoner was working with Knight's Armament on the SR25, but it was really under the radar. If they had just waited another year or two, we could have skipped the abortion known as the M24 entirely, and gone straight into a modern SASS at the time that actually shoots. Instead, we ended up with a 14lb boat anchor with a long action, shooting a short action cartridge, with an internal 5rd magazine that would choke when you tried to rapid bolt manipulate it after carrying the gun, because the cartridge stack would allow lower rounds to move forward in the long action magazine.

Also, the adjustable stock was the worst of any of the precision rifles out there, since the 82nd stipulated that the rifle needed to have an extreme amount of LOP adjustment to be able to fit in the M-1950 Weapons Case-something the M24 didn't do anyway because we would tape MRE cardboard around the adjustment mechanism just to get it to stay in place.

At the time, we were doing really retarded things, like sending 2 guys out by themselves, one with an M24 and an M9, the other with an M16/M203, both humping 80-120lb rucks. Fortunately, most people understood that was a bad idea in the real world, so sniper teams were almost always attached to a line company or platoon to provide enahnced situational awareness and precision fires with high hit probability. When detached on stay-behind missions, a small section of shooters would be used, to include taking SAWs and as much ammo as possible in case things went south.

Keep in mind, as soon as KAC came out with the SR25, units that had the purchasing capability immediately acquired them, and have used them or some variant to this day. The Unit did, Squeals did, SF did, and Ranger Regiment did, all in the 1990s. As time went on, you saw the bolt guns slowly being displaced by the SR25, even to the point that when the Marines eventually got them, a lot of guys in STA Platoons wouldn't even take the M40A5 outside of the wire in most cases, and would just take the KAC guns.

What I see from a historical perspective is this: Here we are, on the cusp of being able to field a smaller frame receiver set that makes the gun actually controllable from positions, handles more like an M4, with several established companies making different types of them, and what does the Army do? Same thing is always does. Screw up a potentially pivotal moment for the sniping community by putting out a retarded solicitation for some pig of a rifle, when M110 is barely even fully fielded.

There is way too much thinking inside of the box on all of this, while they think they are actually pushing the envelope. Instead of thinking about what threats they need to be defeating, engagement distances, and comparisons between the effective ranges of the threat systems we are seeing, they are thinking back to what they have always done, not being very aggressive at all with the solicitation, and not recognizing how to even draft requirements.

They need to be looking at what are the common threat systems out there that can be countered with precision fires from a trained shooter. We're talking about the PKM, SVD, RPG, and other systems that give dismounted enemy combatants a lot of stand-off when engaging friendly forces, like in the 800-1300m envelope.

Since you rarely get the prone, one of your key assumptions for this contract is null and void. With the emerging systems that are out there, this is a time to challenge the various manufacturers to make a true lightweight CSASS, with ELR capability, not a small incremental change.

My problems are more with the Army, not necessarily HK.

Well stated!