When Sweden decided to replace the AK-4 (a license-built H&K G3) with a 5.56mm rifle in the 1970s, they tested nearly every potential rifle on the market. Only two survived the stringent Swedish arctic trials; the FN FNC and the Israeli Galil. The Galil was being offered by a Swedish company called Försvarets Fabriksverk in cooperation with IMI, and was designated the FFV-890.
The FNC and FFV-890 advanced to a series of extensive trials that took several years, and the 890 was changed in a number of ways to address Swedish concerns. This led to the improved FFV-890C model, which we are looking at today. This models added a rubber gasket to seal the rear dust cover opening, a polymer handguard, green paint finish, Swedish selector markings, case deflector, shortened barrel, and changes to the trigger guard and magazine release.
Eventually, the FNC was chosen despite some claims that the FFV-890C actually performed better in testing. The choice was definitely politically influenced, and the Swedish government at the time was potentially leery of licensing an Israeli weapon and also in choosing a Soviet-lineage rifle.
In the late 1980s Canada began trials to replace the Rifle FN C1 and SMG C1. I knew someone supporting the trials. The FNC was more fragile than expected compare to the Galil. The M16 had other complaints, but was chosen. Because during the Cold War Canada cannot choose a rifle designed originally by the ‘other guys’. BTW, I’ve carried three versions of C7 in three deployments. The A2 is the most handy, but the A1 was quite satisfactory.
“Cold War Canada cannot choose a rifle designed originally by the ‘other guys’”
Which also may contribute to the lack of respect in the West for 7.62×39 ammunition. I know, the debate between .556 vs. 7.62×39 will continue past Judgement Day. But politics always messes up sound technical analysis.
7.62 x 39mm M1943 was designed to do to the Wehrmacht what the Wehrmacht had been doing to the Russian Army for two and a half years.
5.56 x 45mm was designed to generate a hurricane of fire out to 250 meters to obviate the need to actually teach soldiers marksmanship.
The jury is still out on which approach is more likely to win the war.
clear ether
eon
I would have to differ with you, on this. My take is that 5.56X45 was conceived and engendered more by the need that the powers-that-were of the time had to avoid admitting they’d done f*cked up, and should have gone back to the .280 British. That would have been the sane course of action, but since they couldn’t admit they’d been entirely delusional with the 7.62X51/M-14 debacle, here we are.
It’s only by the grace of God that it all worked out as well as it did. The M16 is now the longest-serving “interim” rifle in US military history. And, it’s still being adopted by other nations…
Which is bizarre as hell. It’s like people in 1936 going out and buying the Lebel and its cartridge as their “new” standard… If you’d have told someone that was going to happen in 1960, they’d have had you committed to the nearest mental health institution, and you’d likely still be drugged out of your mind to this day.
Well, I see your point, but that “hurricane of fire” was the whole point of the Project SALVO study out of the Infantry School in 1949.
After they got done crunching the numbers from Pearl Harbor to VJ Day and concluded that “aimed deliberate fire” was no more effective in creating enemy casualties than random burst fire.
SALVO was considering calibers as small as 4.5mm (0.177in, yes, BB gun bore) and wanted MVs above 1500 m/s (4,900 f/s) to avoid changes in sighting for trajectory reasons out to 300 meters.
(BTW, as near as I have been able to determine, the SALVO study was the first one in U.S. Army history done entirely in MKS measurements.)
All of the above severely pissed of the Ordnance Board, which in Ezell’s words in Small Arms of the World (14th ed.) “ordered Ordnance establishments to have nothing to do with the Infantry School’s heretical program”. (Italics mine.)
Exactly how 5.56 x 45mm emanated from all of this remains a subject for debate to this day. The Armalite rifle, AR-10, was of course originally a 7.62 x 51mm, meaning “son of.300 Savage”, but SALVO’s proposals included cartridges based on .22-250 Remington and .222 Remington.
https://forum.cartridgecollectors.org/t/project-salvo-cartridges/15609
Their only major contribution to the 7.62 x 51 “One Cartridge To Rule Them All” obsession was the M198 Duplex Ball. A reversion to the Shaler Sectional Bullet concept of 1864 and about as impractical.
And of course the U.S. never adopted the AR-10 after various failures in testing.
The Light Rifle Competition with prototypes from Winchester, H&R, and Armalite, that the Armalite won in spite of deliberate sabotage by Ordnance (see Gordon Rottman’s Osprey book on the M16 for the details) was basically Ordnance throwing in the towel and admitting that the Small Caliber High Velocity (SCHV) concept was “the wave of the future”, with its attendant emphasis on “sustained firescreens” over “marksmanship tradition”.
Or IOW, killing the enemy at wholesale rather than boutique retail.
The fact that even then the emphasis was on the individual rifleman, rather than the support machine gun, to generate the “base of fire” shows that Ordnance still hadn’t entirely given up on “tradition”. If they had, we might have ended up with a much better GPMG that that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned M60.
An M214 “Microgun” on an M274 Mechanical Mule in every infantry platoon might have changed our entire perception of CQB firepower.
That’s my amateur opinion, take it for what it’s worth.
cheers
eon
Let’s look at the Ukraine-Russian war. Almost all rifle ammo is 5.56×45 and Russia’s answer to it, the 5.45×39. Russians don’t have a choice, the Ukrainians do. They use the 5.56 overwhelmingly. After the fall of Afghanistan, the Taliban dumped their AKs for M-16s. Is there still an argument here?
5.56X45 was a solution arrived at in a perfect storm of denial and misconception. It had no business working as well as it did, but here we are: The accidental solution just works.
Is it the optimal solution in the individual weapons space? I would submit that while it does work, it has flaws. The real issue at this point is, are those flaws sufficient so as to justify replacing it?
My take is this: Probably not. I cannot quantify the deficiencies sufficiently well so as to condemn the cartridge to the dustbin. All I can articulate are “feels”, and those are precisely what got us to the point where the 5.56X45 originated.
I am morally certain that the entirety of the NGSW program is ill-conceived and unnecessary. I am not so sure of myself when it comes to 5.56X45; I think it’s at the very least, adequate to purpose. Maybe not ideal, but at least… Adequate.
The whole of this problem boils down to one thing: The people in charge of all of this have no earthly idea what they are doing. None.
The reality is that the individual weapon role and “solution” is something that’s been surrounded by fantasy and misconception, outright delusion. The purpose of an individual weapon is local security, close-in combat, and that’s it. If you’re trying to use a weapon truly fit for that role as a means of addressing threats out past 300-400m? You’ve fundamentally misunderstood how to wage effective war in this day and age. As such, the individual weapon cartridge has a totally different set of ideal design criteria than does the support weapon or designated marksman rifle. The idea that you’re going to have a singular cartridge suitable for all roles? Utterly insane. You can’t do it; the physics mandate that. Not to mention materials technology and chemistry…
I don’t know that the 5.56X45 is the ideal solution in this space. Can’t prove it; I also cannot prove that there’s anything particularly wrong with it, either. That being the case, I’d prefer not to try and replace it with a totally different paradigm like the NGSW idiocy. If it works, leave it the hell alone until it doesn’t work, and then have something else ready to go, being researched and developed in the liminal space where 5.56X45 still works well enough, and when it ceases to do so.
NGSW is ill-conceived, and doomed to abject failure. The thrashing around between the M7 and the M8, along with the ammo production issues? The problems getting the uber-sight system actually produced? Highly indicative of where it all ends, in my opinion.
If memory serves me, Ian Hogg wrote an article postulating that 5.45 was adopted because the USSR was trying to conserve lead, had in fact bought large stocks on the world market just before the AK74 showed up. This makes sense if you remember that Russia had always been ballistically parsimonious, 7.62 being the chosen caliber for pistol, rifle, SMG and MG so that the barrel-making and rifling machinery could be shared by all platforms.
Imma gonna go out on a limb and say that’s about the least likely explanation for the 5.45X39 that I’ve ever heard.
Being as modern Russia is a net exporter of lead, with 7% of the world market? I doubt that they were suffering from any shortage of the stuff, or they’d have cut back on exports. Which, as far as I know, they never did. I have never heard of them “buying large stocks”, ever. Several different inquiries of AI and a search of several search engines shows that the they are all unable to discover anything on the internet in reference to the Soviets every having gone short enough of lead to require buying from outside the Soviet Union, let alone those shortages being great enough to influence cartridge design.
@ Kirk;
As Ezell stated in his book on the AK, official Russian Army documentation stated that the development of a SCHV AK began in 1968-69, after analysis of casualties inflicted on VC/NVA/etc. by M16 fire, notably in Tet.
Ezell’s diagrams of wound channels created by 7.62 x 51mm, 7.62 x 39mm, 5.56 x 45mm, and 5.45 x 39mm show that (once you redraw them to the same scale, which I did-I’m a lab geek) the permanent crush cavities are all about the same size, but 5.56 x 45mm 55-grain tends to fragment and add that damage to the permanent avulsion.
That was what the Russians were after. Something that caused the same damage as 7.62 x 39mm but had the advantages of 5.56 x 45mm, namely lighter ammunition so more rounds could be carried for same mass, plus higher velocity to allow firing at longer distances (250 meters) without sight corrections.
As Raymond Caranta showed in his evaluation of the AKS in Gun Digest (1985 ed.), the 5.45 x 39mm round pretty much does exactly this.
cheers
eon
5.56 (SS109) was extensively tested by Yugoslavia and compared to 5.45 (7N6) and 7.62×39 (M67). Conclusion was that:
– if you have 18+” of barrel 5.56 was “best” (most destoyed tissue, best penetration etc)
– With 16″ barrel 5.45 and 5.56 were more less same, 7.62×39 lagging behind
– With 12″ barrel 5.45 performed best, if only slightly while 5.56 and 7.62 were ~tied
– With 10″ barrel 7.62×39 was “best”, then 5.45, then 5.56
This is reason why Zastava 5.56 AKs (M80/M90) got 18″ barrel.
Which is another demonstration that the M4 Carbine never should have been designed around the 14.5″ barrel the way it was.
Truthfully, the M4 was the misguided result of “off-the-shelf” design-by-inventory. They had the Model 650 barrels on hand, they allowed the fitment of the M203… Good enough, right? Right?
So far as I am aware, they never actually closed the loop with regards to examining the issues of what they’re now terming “lethality”. The M855 SS109-alike had issues with the 14.5″ barrel, but nobody wanted to acknowledge them until well into the GWOT. Sheerest stupidity, and effective outright malicious leadership failure. See, the M4 was never, ever supposed to be the primary combat weapon: It was supposed to be issued to support troops, who apparently didn’t need to be able to reach out and touch anyone, so why bother validating their weapons with the standard ammo?
This bit them in the ass when the infantry decided to glom onto every M4 sent out to the units. Poetic justice, in a way.
Also, another reason why I think a two-tier “combatant who gets decent weapons and kit” vs. a “not intended to be a combatant, who we can shortchange in all sorts of ways” mentality is both pernicious and extremely stupid.
What the M4 should have been was something around 16-18″, mid-length gas system, and with optimized ammo for that barrel length. As it was, they optimized M855 for the M16A2’s 20″ barrel length, and here we are. Took the morons until around 2007 before they really fully acknowledged that M855 out of an M4 was just plain not working consistently…
Something testing would have told them back when, but they never bothered.
Dear Kirk:
Jane’s Infantry Weapons 1980-81, 6th Edition, Foreword by Col. John Weeks dated May 1980. He explicitly states that the USSR bought enough lead “two years ago” to raise prices worldwide. He also speculates on other reasons for adoption of the AK74 (lighter weapon, flatter trajectory, more ammunition per soldier). I mis-ascribed authorship because Ian Hogg wrote the section on ammunition therein. Go scoff at Jane’s.
@LDC,
Jane’s is sadly not the authoritative source many think that it is. All too much rumor and supposition got into those references, especially about Soviet weapons. I don’t doubt that the Soviets bought a lot of lead on the international market, but ascribing a national lead shortage requiring them to totally revamp their ammunition from that…? Yeah; I rather doubt that was what was going on.
They always ascribe ammunition changes to resource restrictions, but in peacetime? That may be a consideration, but the reality is that they’re only dealing with temporary issues, especially for non-strategic resources.
“(…)Yugoslavia(…)”
Regarding non-NATO AND non-WarPact users of 5,56 mm cartridge Switzerland might be informative case https://modernfirearms.net/en/assault-rifles/switzerland-assault-rifles/sig-550-551-552-556-556xi-eng/ when they found that SIG510 replacement is due they entertained using own cartridges, namely 5.6 x48 Eiger and 6.5 x 48 GP80 ammunition but finally decided to use slightly improved version of the 5.56 x 45 NATO cartridge and designated it as the 5.6 mm GP90. They used 528 mm barrel which fits into 1st of your point, as it is more than 18 inches.
A C7 is probably superior in every way to a Galil variant, from accuracy to reliability long-term to weight. Canada chose wisely.
The Galil is a variant of the Valmet. Why didn’t Sweden test the Valmet? Literally could have walked over to the neighbors and said, “Hey Jari, mind if I barrow your rifle for a bit?” Hey Ian, the Galil already had the up pointing charging handles for lefties like you bud. Not a Swedish innovation.
Harold, you ask some excellent questions. I don’t know why Valmet was apparently not even considered, because I’ve never heard of them even providing samples to the Swedes.
It is an oddity; you would think that the Valmet being designed by the Finns specifically for an environment much like Sweden’s would be a selling point, and since Valmet did have 5.56X45 versions available at the time…? Borderline inexplicable, and worthy of researching.
Thinking about it, maybe there was something going on with the “understandings” that Finland had with the Soviets? I dunno; Finland certainly did not get a Kalishnikov Design Bureau TDP for the Valmet, there was never any licensing agreement that I ever heard of, and maybe the Soviets were OK with just the few boutique sales Valmet made, along with assisting the Israelis with some receivers, but were unwilling to let the Finns make a major sale to the Swedes? Maybe IMI was suitably distant…?
I would love to know what the various patenting deals were that went on during that whole situation; was Valmet in possession of its own TDP, unencumbered, and able to sell, or were they constrained? Did they get royalties from IMI for the Valmet-specific design features?
I have been told that the sovs regularly applied significant political pressure on the basis of the Continuation War-ending treaties to scupper various finnish attempts to export arms, to the point where they essentially gave up after a while. I strongly suspect that the Galil deal was part of this
Hahahah, the bias of zionist-occupied Americans will never not be funny.
Algerians freedom fighters are ‘terrorists’, but foreign home invaders with no business being anywhere in the region further infesting the Golan Heights are just ‘making more israel’.
Like the man said, ‘The American mind is Israeli-occupied territory.’
No, we just have a thing about a primitivist, tribalist culture jammed in neutral in the 8th Century AD that wants us kuffar as slaves or compost.
clear ether
eon
regarding the Yugoslavian ballistics test: do you happen to know that range the test was performed at? it certainly makes for an interesting comparison.
secondly, in those day and age, what really is the optimum barrel length for an infantry rifle (assuming that you can design any cartridge you want, optimized to that barrel length)? The NGSW people seemed the be convinced it was quite short, but part of that was driven by wanting to issue suppressors with every rifle.
The NGSW barrel length/suppressor decisions were based more on delusional thinking, than anything else.
They didn’t want a bullpup, so the barrel had to be short, which meant that to get the velocity they wanted (delusionally…) they had to over-charge the cartridge, which led to a death-spiral of stupid.
Reality is, there’s really no damn point to the NGSW “overmatch” BS. You get enough actual realistic combat effect out of the current cartridges, because you aren’t doing much fighting after you take a couple rounds from any of the standard cartridge/rifle combinations in the chest plate. You may well survive, but you ain’t fighting effectively.
NGSW is a package of delusion, wrapped in idiocy, with a stupid-flavored nougat center enrobed in really nasty Hershey-flavored fake chocolate moronicism. Horrid set of ideas led to a horrid execution, which will inevitably lead to massive failure the first time someone takes that package into a real war against peer competitors. Peacekeeping against idjitry? It’ll likely work well enough to fool everyone.
If they could prove that 5.56X45 was really inadequate, which I rather doubt they could? Mostly due to the fact that nobody has ever bothered to actually go after the data or honestly evaluate it… Well, if that was indeed the case, and I don’t see anyone really proving it one way or another, then what they should have done was build themselves a cartridge in something like 6.5X55 Swedish in a modernized case. Back off from the power level of that historic cartridge until it’s controllable on full-auto in an individual weapon, then make the case fit that powder load.
That’d be an excellent starting point for an individual weapon cartridge, just ensure it’s lethal out to somewhat over the usual real combat range of 300m, and then build a better support weapon around a bigger cartridge. You cannot do both jobs with the same cartridge, and trying to square that particular circle is just plain stupid.
I’m still not convinced there’s a need to abandon 5.56X45. Emotionally? I don’t like the cartridge. Too small, too light, not enough “put the arsehole down” power. However, intellectually? I know damn good and well that nobody can prove that thesis one way or another, so until we’ve got better evidence that the current set of cartridges aren’t working? Keep the existing ones.
NGSW is trying to answer a question that was actually posed against existing machinegun doctrine and training, not the individual weapon. Misguided morons who think that you win wars by plinking singular targets out past 300m are the problem; the answers to those questions should have been better tripods, better doctrine, better training, and better accessory equipment for the MG gun teams. That would have actually addressed the issues, but the morons who wanted NGSW, which they saw as a generational opportunity to make money off a new weapons fleet and cartridge set? Yeah; they screwed that pooch straight into the ground.
You don’t fight and win wars by plinking individual targets with your riflemen. You win wars by killing job lots of your enemies with actual area-effect weapons, which for small arms…? That means machineguns. Period.
The US had the perfect all around cartridge over 90 years ago, The .276 Pedersen.
Like .280 Ross and 6mm Lee Navy, it ate rifling like salt-water taffy.
Back the MV down to where the rifling isn’t gone after 5,000 rounds, and- surprise!- you have once more re-created the 7 x 57mm Mauser 1892.
Which every single 7mm class (6.7 to 7.25mm)”Super cartridge” since then has done.
7mm Liviano came closest to getting it right. SiG Spear aka .277 Fury isn’t going to get it right. They’re already seeing “ring erosion” of rifle barrels 10cm from the muzzle as their magickal “duplex load” for the GPMG ignites its second stage too early.
The laws of physics don not care how effing brilliant you think you are. And they always win.
clear ether
eon
If the mark of a genius is in how much they agree with you…? eon, you are a genius.
I think the 7mm Liviano was probably right there in the sweet spot for “ideal individual weapon caliber”, and is exactly what we should have adopted after the whole 7.62X51 NATO debacle immanentized itself. Not as a “one caliber to do it all” solution, just for the individual weapon.
Single-caliber “do all” solutions are delusional. The hard and fast rules of physics/chemistry/materials dictate what the potentials are, not the whims of men who want the easy way out.
As such? Yeah, the .276 Pedersen was too “hot”, and badly needed downloading and a smaller case.
That’s just reality; you have to work within the constraints.
Did the .277 Fury developers ever present a rationale for their optimism about the duplex load not doing what it is doing? I am in the slow class when it comes to engineering and my first thought when reading about the concept was ‘Won’t that eff-up the barrels?’ The philosophy behind it reminded me of that oldie from the 80’s ‘There is nothing could go wrong, there is nothing should go wrong, repeat repeat, repeat repeat.’
The idea was that the “second stage” would ignite only after 18-20″ of barrel travel. With a 16″ rifle barrel this would be in the open air beyond the muzzle. In a 22″ GPMG barrel this would be just short of the muzzle, giving the bullet a final boost to higher MV than the rifle. In the rifle, I would expect that if it worked as advertised, muzzle signature would be at the 120mm M256 level.
Duplex loads were a handloader’s trick to achieve high velocities in Unlimited Class benchrest competition a generation ago. Most competitions banned them because of their tendency to detonate in the bore, with results generally closely resembling a bore premature in a field artillery piece. Which many Unlimited Class benchrest rifles resemble to begin with.
https://accurateshooter.net/Blog/visalrail02x600.jpg
Something that could and often did blow up the individual shooter equivalent of one of the Guns of Navarone is something you probably don’t want to put into a service rifle, let alone a GPMG.
clear ether
eon
I’ve never seen anything that said that the 276 Pedersen and 280 ate the rifling in the barrels, where did that reference come from. I can believe that the 6mm Lee was hard on barrels given the high pressure, the double base propellants of the time and the steel jackets. The 276 was, according what info I’ve seen was mostly loaded with IMR25 and 25 1/2, which were second generation IMR type powders. Second generation IMR’s were not noted as barrel burners and for the time the 276 was loaded to rather sedate pressures with gilding metal jacket lead cored ammo. They were developing AP and tracer rounds which possibly would be harder on barrels, but the ball ammo would not have been any harder on barrels that the 30-06 M1 Ball ammo of the time which used second generation IMR powders like 1147 and 1185.
I can’t recall the citations for it, but I know I’ve read somewhere that the .280 Ross and the .276 Pedersen were both prone to barrel damage due to pressure and heat. If I remember it rightly, there was an article somewhere that discussed both cartridges having problems with this in their original loading formats, and that article then went on to discuss how to overcome the problems by handloading with modern propellants.
I wish I could produce the cite on demand, but I can’t. Could be a figment of my imagination, a mis-remembering, or simply having seen someone else’s hallucinations and then taking them for legitimate information…
Eon, there were also triplex loads, not just duplex loads.
I grew up in the SF East Bay (Piedmont) and met several people who were using front ignition (Using a tube threaded into the flash hole) duplex and triplex loads to get the most velocity from Wildcat hunting cartridges (OKH? OK something IIRC).
I’m sure about a .338 and pretty sure about .35 and a .300 caliber cartridges modified this way.
This was @ 55-60 years ago
Charles O’Neil, Elmer Keith and Don Hopkins came up with several cartridges with duplex or triplex loads, the .333 OKH being just one example. .333 OKH was superseded by .338 Winchester in the 1950s, and .300 Winchester was introduced in 1963 as a necked-down-to-.30-caliber version of .338, matching .300 OKH which was a similarly reduced-caliber .333.
What the Winchester cartridges did was use more advanced propellants to match or exceed the OKH wildcats’ performance without resorting to multiple-propellant loads.
As a former .300 WM operator myself, I will state that with full-velocity loads, .300 WM tends to smoothbore the leade’ and first foot or so of bore within 5,000 rounds. One of the reasons it was replaced by .338 Lapua as a standard DMR caliber by most NATO countries is the the Lapua round has lower propellant burning temperatures, and as such the barrels last longer.
cheers
eon
Sorry for late reply, tests were done at ranges of 100, 200, 300 to 400 meters.
Detailed results were done for every range, and % of tissue destruction compared to a 7.62x39mm M67 round.
Penetration of material was measured both in mm/cm of penetration of material, and bullet had to keep ability to penetrate at least… IDR how much mm into gelatin block after penetration.
Unfortunately I have only partial results of tests.