Originally Posted by
LRRPF52
I've seen and held some of the submission competitors' cartridges.
They range from hybrid polymer/alloy .270 WSM to .270-08 (SiG), to an old school brass cased wildcat.
They have as much in common with 6.8 SPC as .300 RUM has with .30-30 Winchester.
The initial desired performance was a .277" 125gr EPR going 3400-3500fps from a 16" barrel.
Then they changed the requirement to 3200fps from a 14.5" barrel but with a 135gr EPR.
Then they shifted to 3100fps from a 13" barrel pushing the 135gr EPR.
I see this fiasco in the same vein as the 1960s SPIW, 1970s 6mm SAW (actually a good cartridge), 1980s Advanced Combat Rifle (ACR), 1990s OICW, 2000s XM8, the recent 7.62 NATO ISCR abortion, 2000s LSAT (actually a great platform and cartridge system, albeit with some challenges) and now this.
I do suspect that the NGSW SAW variant might get some traction, but if they chamber it in a cartridge as large as or larger than 7.62 NATO, they haven't learned a thing.
The entire premise of the program is based on the idea that dismounted US Infantry soldiers will be engaged in intermediate and long range combat with body armor-clad Russians and Chinese.
Dismounted Infantry in the US are not used in that capacity and have not been involved in anything close to it since 1953, well before we had air superiority, and now air dominance.
Dismounted Infantry have been extensively and almost exclusively engaged in Counter Insurgency (COIN) and Low Intensity Conflict since 1965, including the Vietnam War, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
We deal with organized threat motorized infantry units using our air power, armor, artillery, organic CAS, and USAF/USN CAS. If you want an example of how to deal with a conventional motorized/armored battle group, look at February 2018 in Syria.
What this proposed 80,000-100,000psi NGSW cartridge will do for dismounted Infantry is add insane soldier's load bulk in excess of the basic load for the M14 rifle back in the late 1950s/early 1960s, before that folly was recognized and replaced with the M16 and the 5.56x45mm cartridge.
It's almost as if someone high up at Department of the Army got a crazy idea in their heads that we need to defeat Russian body armor at 600m in some type of fantastical battle, where commanders have failed every step of the MDMP, and committed dismounted infantry against each other in a Napoleonic stand-off in open terrain somewhere on a terrain model that represents nowhere.
In this pipe dream, all organic and slice direct and indirect fire assets including:
* 81s
* 105s with Excalibur PGMs
* M-1A2 MBTs
* Bradleys
* MQ-9s armed with AGM-114s and SDBs
* AH-64Es armed with AGM-114s, TALON LGRs, & 30mm chain gun
* F-15Es/A-10Cs/F-16Cs with LITENING Targeting pods and Link-16
* F-35s
...are not available for some reason. Nope, Joe is on his own, facing down hordes of Russians wearing armor (who will be motorized with lots of weapons that make big boom booms, including thermobaric RPGs, main guns, ATGMs, RPGs, heavy machine-guns, mortars, etc.).
It really makes me question the decision-making process behind all of this. I can see pushing the industry to get away from the limitations of World War II-era metallurgy and late-1800s metallic cartridge technology, but the premise for the NGSW carbine seems to defy everything we've learned about dismounted infantry service rifle realities in the last century.
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