NATO Cold War Battle Rifles and much more: https://www.headstamppublishing.com
Cappy Army video on the SIG M7A1:
CBJ Armor Piecing ammunition:
The plan to replace the 5.56mm M4 Carbine with the 6.8mm M7 as the US Army’s standard infantry rifle is a bad idea, and today I will try to explain why. In short, both of the justifications used for the switch (long range engagements and armor penetration) are better solved by other options. Modern FPV drones and squad designated marksmen are both better ways to handle Afghanistan-type long range engagements, and a proper armor-piercing round for the 5.56mm NATO, for example something like CBJ Tech makes, is a better solution for armor.
Historically, we have ample evidence from World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam that an infantryman cannot typically see a target beyond 300m because of terrain and obstacles, and generally is unable to hit targets beyond 200m in actual combat. To sacrifice rifle weight, ammo weight, and ammo capacity for the sake of giving the infantry a rifle theoretically capable of 600-800m engagements is a fool’s errand and a bad idea.
I couldn’t agree more with this video. As soon as I learned about the ngsw m7, I was blown away. Heavier, plus high pressure rounds, and less ammo seems like an awful idea when it comes to infantry. To me, the FN l.i.c.c seems like a much better middle ground if they wanted to go the route of having an infantry rifle for longer engagements. I also really agree with your point about the barrel/parts wear due to the higher pressure .277 fury. I expect the argument to be that they can swap barrels or whatever but we’ve seen long engagements in ukraine where barrels have melted. The USA has been in situations where we have worn out barrels due to long, heavy engagements. My fear would be that the m7 would be adopted across the board and then we would end up with some of our troops loosing the effectiveness or use of their weapons due to the barrel wear, parts wear, etc, mid engagement.
All of that said, I would love to hear your thoughts about the FN licc, or whatever it’s called now.
Paging kirk…
Also, here’s a thought: let’s say in a few years the army decides that issuing what is effectively a very high chamber pressure DMR to every E1 Joe was a bad idea. What would it take to convert one of these rifles to a more manageable, less barrel trashing cartridge? Could they, for instance, come up with a kit to rechamber the M7 to .243, or even a somewhat underloaded commercial .270? Also, would this actually solve anything?
.270 (an ’06-based, half-inch-longer cartridge) wouldn’t be practical, but .308 or .243 would just require gassing adjustments in addition to the barrel swap.
“(…)would this actually solve anything?”
Unless using cartridge already in supply (like 7,62×51 NATO) this would increase logistic burden. Keep in mind, whilst reworking weapon itself for milder cartridge is most often not much hassle, it would result in need to lug around just ballast, as most often lighter weapon can be crafted for said cartridge.
At what point does it become tradition to forget lessons learned the hard way?
It’s not just tradition, in the armies of the world: It’s standard operating procedure.
Almost to the point of sick parody.
The super 6.8 out does the 7.62 but does the regular commercial? Why not develop a better, heavier larger 6×45 round and upgrade the M4s, issuing a few 7.62 to the squad? M203s and MGs fill the gap to AT4 and javelins! You need more range, air strike, artillery or drones would suffice. Is this the drug deal to get the SIG pistol and a whole package rifle, MG from SIG? Are we buying an expensive pig in a poke? And what does the USMC say? Will they keep their M27s or buy the new M7A1? Notice no X or E in the M7. It will be in service. How much development have we seen on the MG version? At least they both can convert to 7.62, the parent case!
“(…)MG version(…)can convert to 7.62(…)”
Indeed, this is possible as proved be https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2025/israel-acquires-us-xm250-light-machine-gun-chambered-in-7-62x51mm however by doing such conversion you end with untypically short barrel of 444 mm. Which is not what 7,62×51 is optimized for. Lack of barrel where powder can burn means lower muzzle velocity and thus reach.
I’ll lay you long odds that the Israelis are doing that buy because they can apply Foreign Military Sales monies to it, instead of having to purchase the guns on their own dime.
Which is probably why they are emphasizing the M4 carbine over the local products, as well. “Free” from the American taxpayer is an awfully attractive thing…
FMS is not subsidized by the USG. There are financing and grants available for certain countries in certain situations for the purchase of military equipment, but that is not part of FMS per se.
Jesus H. Christ, are you a quibbling twat, or what?
The US pays Israel’s tab when Israel buys US products. The generalized term for this has become “FMS”, because everyone in the business understands that what’s happening is that the US is subsidizing the purchase of US-made weapons. It’s not actually the FMS program itself that’s being tapped; it’s just the vehicle for it.
EVERYONE in the US military and defense ecosystem understands this fact, and uses “FMS” as a term of art for these situations. Apparently, you do not.
“(…)they had in that video was talking about potentially upping chamber pressures to 125,000 PSI(…)”
Wait. They entertain idea of doing just this alone? That would mean having 2 cartridge of identical shape and different powder charge, of which cranked up should definitely never be used in weapons made for milder cartridge.
It’s the Spanish Army and Japan Ground Self-Defence Force “answer” to the 7.62 x 51mm NATO problem all over again, just worse.
I don’t know whether to tell them “stop re-inventing the wheel” or “when you’re in a hole this deep, stop digging”.
clear ether
eon
@eon,
I guarantee you that none of the involved/responsible parties for this BS are even aware of the entire sordid history of the 7.62 NATO, or that the Spanish and Japanese were already down this highly disreputable alley decades ago.
The US Army is effectively ahistorical. As an institution, it is incapable of even remembering that it already researched something decades ago. I had the interesting experience of informing a contractor (big defense type…) that the Army had already paid them to evaluate thermal imaging devices for locating mines back around the end of the Vietnam War. Right after Desert Storm, the Army contracted the same people who’d done the research back when, and asked them to look into it.
Neither the Army program manager nor the company had any idea that anyone had ever done anything similar. They all thought they were doing ground-breaking research.
I’d called them, looking for copies of the 1970s research work, due to my boss wanting to find out what there was after I’d shown him the Rand report where it was described in passing. None of the people I talked to within the Army or at the contractor were even aware that there had been a Rand report on countermine warfare in Vietnam, or that there had been research done on thermal imaging used to find landmines.
Mind-boggling, TBH. They don’t even know what they knew or did, a mere twenty or so years earlier.
Years and years ago when I was an IPMS member, at the Nationals I spent some time talking to a sales rep from Tamiya. Who also happened to be a Lt. Col. in the JGSDF reserves.
Our talk turned to weapons; hey, Tamiya’s main line is 1/35 scale armor and 1/48 scale military aircraft. It turned out he’d been one of the officers involved in the adoption of the Type 64 rifle, and before that the Type 62 GPMG.
He explained the whole “two different loads” thing to me, pointing out that the same thing had been done by the Imperial Japanese Army with the Type 11 6.5mm MG, except that in that case it was the MG that needed the reduced-charge round, not the rifle, because even with a built-in cartridge oiler, with full-pressure rounds case-head separations were the rule rather than the exception.
Then he dropped the clanger. When the JGSDF adopted the Type 64 rifle with its reduced-charge 7.62 x 51mm round, Howa Machine Co., the manufacturer of the Type 62 and Type 64 both, already had the license for the Armalite AR-18 in 5.56 x 45mm.
He and quite a few other officers thought the AR-18 was a Hell of a lot better rifle for infantry than the Type 64.
Why didn’t JGSDF adopt it?
According to him, U.S. Army Ordnance wanted everyone using 7.62 x51mm for everything even as late as the early 1960s. There was apparently some diplomatic “encouragement” to adopt the “home-grown” Howa rifle over the “imported” AR design, solely because it was 7.62mm instead of 5.56mm.
So it took another 25 years for the JGSDF to get a 5.56 x 45mm rifle, the Type 89. Which looks a lot like a SiG 550 aka StG 90 series outside, but inside is pretty much a straight AR-18 type action. (The SiG is closer to an AK.)
I guess all’s well that ends well, at least if U.S. Army Ordnance is involved.
cheers
eon
Yup. It might cause big issues if you run it in your Bear Creek gun, but anything issued by the Army will handle it.
Once more we’re re-inventing the 7 x 57mm Mauser, vintage 1892, in pursuit of the One Cartridge To Rule Them All chimera.
The laws of physics and terrain say it will never work, and no Act of Congress can ever change either one.
The 6.8 x 51mm is not powerful enough to be a practical support machine gun round, and it’s too powerful and has too much recoil for use as an individual weapon rifle round.
The “duplex load” BS is just going to increase barrel wear in the MG; expect bulges at the point where the “second stage” ignites much like you’d get from firing a WW1 type “rodded” rifle grenade.
In the IW, it is going to increase muzzle signature when the “second stage” ignites on contact with the outside air. Which will absolutely erode the Hell out of the muzzle and flash suppressor, meaning your accuracy is going to go to shite in under 5,000 rounds.
As for the sound suppressor; fifty rounds and it’s finished. That “second stage” ignition will occur about halfway down it and blow its baffles out.
6.8 x 51mm is another example of an idea conceived by theorists who know nothing about a battlefield, and apparently aren’t too well versed in ballistics, either.
They should go back to trying to make an infantry laser rifle work. They probably won’t succeed, but it might keep them out of everybody else’s hair for the next couple of decades or so.
clear ether
eon
“(…)absolutely erode the Hell out of the muzzle and flash suppressor(…)”
Army Captain Trent prepared report w.r.t. XM7 using non-secret source, where https://www.twz.com/land/army-captain-slams-new-xm7-rifle-as-unfit-sig-sauer-says-otherwise
…most serious issue observed with the XM7 was barrel and rifle[ing] gouging occurring in all samples that had greater than 2,000 rounds through the system…It has to be said that 2,000 rounds through a rifle is generally, in the industry, considered to be a break-in period. However, approximately four inches from the muzzle … [and] one inch behind the gas block, a scratch, or in some cases, a gouge is starting to form in the rifling of the system itself. This can lead to all kinds of problems with accuracy and safety…
This would indicate that the “second stage” of the duplex load is igniting too soon. So both the IW and the MG version will have bore “ringing” problems much like firing a Hale rifle grenade from an 0.303in SMLE.
https://passioncompassion1418.com/decouvertes/ImagesDecouvertes/Grenades/GrenadeNr3Schema.jpg
Not what I would call “optimal”.
clear ether
eon
Armies are brilliant at preparing to fight the last war again.
Frankly, I think you give them too much credit.
What they’re actually brilliant at is “fighting the last war they imagined that they fought”, because the real deal is that most of the world’s militaries exist in a haze of fantastic imagination about what the last war they were in was like, and how they fought it.
This is mostly down to the fact that we’ve had predominantly conscript armies, with a very shallow layer of “professionalism” floating on the surface like so much pond scum. Most of those “professionals” are not really real soldiers; they’re poseurs, who would really rather be playing dress-up with their fancy uniforms and bling, rather than actually doing effective training and being out in the cold and wet, miserable reality of field training or actual, y’know… War.
Most of the people we have running our militaries are not actually soldiers; they’re bureaucrats wearing uniforms. They base their decisions on things that they imagine, not things that they actually observed or experienced for themselves. Which is how/why things like the NGSW happen. Some company-grade moron writes a paper for his staff college course, and just like a militant Greta Thunberg or that kid who got plastic straws banned, the institution looked at them in all their ignorance and said “Yeah, this ignoramus knows what they’re talking about…”
Reality? That f*cking captain had a single, solitary tour in combat during a very unusual war, and imagined himself into a thesis due to the fact that he had no idea at all how to employ his small arms.
That whole “Infantry Half-Kilometer” thing was the equivalent of that high-school science fair project where they came up with lockdowns as a concept for fighting pandemics. It was never actually properly researched, and in fact was rejected by actual public health experts as worthless.
Same level of actual knowledge, same level of actual thought. I mean, the fantasy-imagination audacity of the whole thesis is actually quite incredible, when you recognize that this “genius” company-grade officer described infantry combat almost solely as being between his riflemen and the enemy… At no point does that rocket scientist ever acknowledge that his real problem is that he and his senior leadership have no idea how to properly employ their machineguns and mortars; he’s all about this “Great American Rifleman” hoax that dates back to the Revolutionary War, where again, the idjit class imagined themselves into this whole thesis of precision firepower at the rifleman level being superior to massed firepower. Back then, it was regiments of muskets vs. lone Kentucky riflemen in their imaginary little fantasies, but the reality was that it wasn’t riflemen that won that war, but Continental Army regulars in massed formations.
They all live in imaginary dream worlds, and can’t get out of them.
Hm. I freely admit that I’ve never been shot at across a valley by a guy with a PKM, but lots of guys with CIBs and CABs say that that actually happened and want a rifle that can reach back across that valley. Lots of old newsreels showing guys with M1s shooting at Germans across the Rhine and Marines trying the same thing in Hue City with M16a1s. I’m not man enough to call those guys “poseurs”. Most of them were conscripts, though.
The poseurs I’m speaking of aren’t the guys out on the ground doing the necessary, but the people that sent them there, trained them, and equipped them.
You get PKM fire from across the valley; odds are quite excellent that you cannot discern a valid point target. How do you combat that effectively?
You sure as hell don’t plan on your individual weapons guys somehow either managing to spot the unspottable, or to accidentally hit, with semi-auto fire, the PKM team. Or, even really hit near enough to persuade them to displace.
You can only answer that sort of fire with something that actually threatens the PKM team, which (if you’re limiting yourself to small arms return fire, which is stupid and due to ROE…), then you need to start dropping effective bursts on entire sections of real estate near where you can tell the fire is coming from.
You can do that most effectively with something like an A-10 or an Apache (I prefer a B-52 Arc Light strike, but those are expensive…), but if you’re gonna go with small arms alone, you absolutely need to have something like a tripod-mounted MG team that knows what it’s doing. They can scour that PKM team off the rock face with carefully-directed and managed fires, conducted in concert with good leadership and observation.
Individual weapons firing at point targets? Waste of f*cking time and effort. MG team dropping a burst across a nice, tight beaten zone? You’re gonna be a lot more effective. Not “Napalm in the open” effective, but way more than playing Carlos Hathcock with most of your riflemen, the majority of whom are quite clearly NOT Carlos Hathcock.
Root problem here is that most of the forces involved really and truly do not understand how the hell modern combat worked from about 1920 to 2010. The forced-draft evolution of drone technology may have fundamentally changed things, but they still ain’t wrapped their heads around how all this crap really works. Doubt they ever will, until someone rubs their faces in a Kasserine Pass-level of failure.
I don’t know how it works now, but in the past Russia had a whole bunch of “snipers” in each infantry company. These may have been more along the lines of a designated marksmen. But the point is what Ian is trying to get across — there is no need to give every rifleman a fancy (and expensive) long range capable rifle. Give them what is effective at short range (where most of the combat actually occurs) and give a select number of troops, that are really good shots, the job of taking out the long range targets.
And I like the idea of attack drones to take out the really hard targets.
Honestly, most DMR programs in most armies are a complete waste of time that would be better devoted to doing more training on target identification and integration of that identification with the crew-served weapons.
Yeah, it’s way cool and all, but you don’t win wars doing that retail-sales equivalent to combat. I’m honestly not even all that sure about sniper programs, in terms of cost/effectiveness.
I mean, sure, yeah… If you can do it, after you’ve gotten all your troops proficient on spotting the enemy out there past 300m and communicating what they saw to the gun/mortar teams, by all means… Do some long-range marksmanship training.
You’d still be making way more money by doing the wholesale-level killing with gun teams and mortar teams. Just sayin’…
At least, up until lately. The drone thing has me going “OK, maybe, just maybe, the paradigm is shifting…” Honestly don’t know; I do know that most of the idjit-class types we have running things do not grasp how combat really worked during most of the 20th Century.
Because, if they did? You’d see none of this NGSW BS even being considered.
Somebody on the drone side is apparently thinking. Reports of battlefields in Ukraine with fiber-optic “angel hair” all over the place from drones indicates that they’ve already figured out a way around RF ECM.
If some smartass applies that idea to an off-route “mine”set-and-forget-type ATGW setup, especially a top-attack type, look out.
clear ether
eon
It will all eventually culminate in a mine like the guys at the FCS program postulated, a little goodie that would lay in wait for the tankies to come through, then get up and follow them to wherever they were going to laager up for the night and wait, cunning and quiet, until the logistics bubbas showed up, then going after the fuel, ammo, and food. Envision packs of these things across the battlefield…
Basically, an anti-tank mine that would follow you home to the motor pool and then blow up everything in it.
I really feel a lot like that ancient Spartan king supposedly felt, looking at a bow and arrow: “Alas, the valor of man is extinguished…”
This crap can be seen on the horizon, coming: War isn’t going to be the same, when it’s fought mostly by inanimate drones. You’re already seeing the face of future atrocity, with the way the Russians are reputedly hunting Ukrainian citizens on the streets of their own cities; the sick f*cks doing the hunting remaining untouched, kilometers away, invulnerable and not even culpable.
That, I fear, is war of the future.
That’s the kind of war pseudo-Utopians have wet dreams about. Being able to off anybody who “offends” them with zero risk to themselves.
Orwell and PKD didn’t know the half of it. I suspect RAH did near the end of his life, and he was not happy about it, which might explain Friday and Number of the Beast (both versions).
clear ether
eon
Perhaps the only thing that might give one hope is reflecting on the very human tendency not to carry out war to the extreme; we’ve had nukes for how long, now? How many times have they actually been used?
Japan is something of an indicator; they gave up the gun, unique among nations, when they decided that they’d rather make war gloriously with the sword as their weapon-of-choice. They essentially gamified war, because they found that the gun was too much of a muchness, for their war-making needs.
Until Commodore Perry showed up, at least.
In any event, you have to remember that war is primarily a social phenomenon; if it gets to a point where it doesn’t fulfill a social need, then whatever factor that went into that failure to fulfill gets left by the wayside.
Which could answer a lot of questions, really… The idjits I’ve been railing about “not getting it” with regards to NGSW are living their dream, where the individual rifleman infantry fill the “knights of the sky” fantasy, so they flatly refuse to accept that the MG is a far more effective tool…
I suppose you could look at it like that, and simply go along with the idea that modern American leadership is doing the same thing that the Japanese shogunate did when it abandoned the gun, but… Yeah. I dunno. I need to think about that, some more.
I hate to think that the whole thing is basically play-acting, posturing, but… There are some signs that that is precisely what it is.
@ Kirk
At the time of the battle of Sekigahara, Japan was the most fire-armed country in the world, and with guns of very good quality.
BUT, who won the war, were the Samurai class.
And they knew very well that firearms put an ordinary Ashigaru (the ordinary infantryman of peasant origin) at the level of a Samurai.
So, withthe luxury of having finally a unified government, the Tokugawa clan progressively restricted the locations where firearms could be manfactured. Until it remained only one, under the control of the Shogun.
It had not been a moral choice. It had been self-preservation of the ruling class, since there were no more credible enemies, besides the peasants that could have taken up those weapons against them.
@Dogwalker,
You miss the point. I never said it was “moral”, or any other such twaddle.
What I said was that Japan’s experience shows how much “war” is a social construct, and that when the underlying society says “Yeah, this is too destructive…”, then that society tends to stop making war that way.
The Samurai class and the warlords they supported basically looked at the firearm and said “Yeah, this is gonna kill us and render the whole game we’re playing pointless… So, let’s trash them all, and keep on playing with swords…”
It wasn’t morality, but flat-out pragmatic self-interest. They saw what was coming, and delayed it by centuries.
Much as the world has done since Hiroshima. Nukes are too destructive to be useful as war-making toys, so they haven’t been used. Just like large-scale biowar agents. The game is played, and the players recognize the table-turning potential, so they refuse to let those pieces be played.
Sad truth to recognize, but I think it’s there to be observed. Japan did not “give up the gun” out of a sense of fair play; if anything, they did that to keep the Samurai scam running on the rest of Japan’s population. Pure pragmatism and recognition that the “democratization” of violence was going to lead nowhere they wanted to go.
Even to this day, the Japanese do not like the idea of anyone wielding real power outside the system, which is the fundamental basis of American exceptionalism with regards to self-defense and firearms. The Japanese prefer their holy “system” to individual rights and liberties, so they set things up so as to put all real power into the hands of the hierarchy and its servants… Precisely as Tokugawa Ieyasu intended.
Ian kinda-sorta gets it, but… He’s still way off on the real issues here.
Point the first: The real issue is that entire concept of engaging individual point targets past about 300m is a huge fallacy. It should not even be a goal of the individual weapon, and the whole reason boils down to “Ya see one, there are almost certainly ten more you didn’t see…”
You do not win wars with retail murder. You win wars with wholesale slaughter.
If you are a leader, and you think it’s an appropriate thing to have your rifleman going after individual targets past 300m, you’re the reason why your armies are losing wars.
You see a guy at 300m, you absolutely should be dumping a couple of MG bursts on his ass, purely on speculation. If you have the time and the ammo, you should be doing search-and-traverse across as much of that area as makes sense, because the odds are excellent that he’s just the only idjit that raised his head and got noticed. That’s how you win wars; killing the enemy in job lots.
This isn’t so much a “Yeah, there’s a caliber problem…” as it is a conceptual one of “We have no idea how to fight wars and actually win…”
Individual weapons are strictly for close-in fighting, under about 300m. They have totally different characteristics and requirements than these idiotic M7 monstrosities. The necessity for them is to be easily carried, brought into action quickly, and be effective enough at killing to stop an enemy. You do not use them to engage anything past about that 300m mark, and if you do…? You’re a dumbass. I suppose that if you could work up a fire-team or squad-size volley affair, that might be effective, but the root problem is that the projectiles you’re firing aren’t all that good at penetrating barriers or cover/concealment. You see someone out there in that range band, if you’re wanting to win? Fire your MG systems at them, and just hose down the entire area around the one idiot that exposed himself. He has (hopefully, “had”…) friends that you want to kill, as well.
Not far off. If you have the luxury of MGs with endless belts and artillery, it’s better to use those first. But what is the rest of the squad doing while a couple of guys engage the threat? Carrying ammo? Unpacking mortar rounds? For that, everybody could get issued a Grease Gun and call it a day. I don’t have a problem with sticking with giving most guys some kind of improved M4. The M7 should be viewed as DMR-style way to augment a squad’s firepower. Put one or two in a squad at most, things will be fine. The guy with the drones can carry a Grease Gun.
Look… I get the attraction of “one rifleman against the world”, but that just ain’t how it works. Not on scale to win wars.
The point of war is to eliminate the combatants. You sink ships, shoot down aircraft, and kill infantry.
Out past about 300m, you are not doing that at all efficiently by doing it retail-scale: Consider the facts of the usual “Ohmygawdwe’reovermatched” fantasy that the idjit class has been selling.
Situation: You’re taking fires from long range. Whether or not those fires are actually, y’know, effective in terms of stopping your mission is basically up to you. You can answer those fires, call in support, or ignore them. If you chose to answer them, which is more effective when the fire you’re answering is coming not from an identifiable point source, but a terrain feature?
You are getting nowhere by telling your individual riflemen “Hey, someone’s shooting at us; shoot back…” and they can’t actually make out where that fire is coming from. A point-fire weapon has to have a point to aim at, amIright? No point target, no point to the fire.
So, what you should be doing is raking that hillside with steady bursts of MG and mortar fire, seeking out the enemy where they’re hiding. Doing that is effective, because what you’re doing with the MG is delivering area effect; if you do that right, you’re either going to manage the killing of the people shooting at you, or you’re going to convince them that they really ought to find better ways of occupying their time. At 800m, you can deliver a beaten zone measured in hundreds of square meters; that’s an effective tool to clear terrain. You are not going to do that with individual weapons fired at point targets.
I do not understand why the hell this is so difficult to get across to people, but it is. A point-fire weapon like the NGSW individual weapon is envisioned as is both useless and irrelevant to anything out there that they imagined as a problem, like that PKM team. You can’t make out the point? No point to the point-target weapon. You need area-effect, and you’re not getting that absent either the MG or massed volley fires that we do not train any more, and which would likely be ineffective anyway because “lack of tripod mounting” that would provide the necessary control and lack of dispersion.
You cannot do the mission of an MG team with a bunch of guys firing individual weapons off their shoulders who’re also spread out like a mo’fo. It just doesn’t work; how the hell do you think you’re going to coordinate it all?
The whole of the NGSW idiocy came in because the morons we have running things in the Army do not understand how combat works, nor do they know how to effectively employ machineguns.
A DMR is so low down on the list of actual “needs” that it isn’t even funny. You’d be way better off spending that money on getting every soldier observation tools like those mini-binoculars and effective squad-level comms, so that PFC Snuffy can tell the boss he sees where the dust from the enemy’s shooting is coming from…
Yesterday I read in another shooting forum how the M7 will let ‘the rifleman go toe to toe with enemy machineguns out to 600 yards.’ True, the guy writing it was just Joe Schmoe (one hopes.)Still it indicates how deeply fantasy gets etc he’d into the popular imagination.
Damned auto-correct. ‘Etched.’
It looks like somebody gave an answer to a question that nobody asked. Or the military have a load of cash to burn up, surely the present situation where the STD 5.56 / .223 as the STD infantry issue and as a longer range DMR role 7.62 / .338 is working so well at the moment a simplistic view perhaps but if it ain`t broke ……
The reason the Army in the 40’s and 50’s want the 7.62 Nato was that in WW2 and Korea there were endless complaints about the ability of M2 ball to penetrate cover. A lot of units wouldn’t accept M2 ball and would onlt take AP. Ordnance was unhappy about this as the AP was hotter, ate up barrels and bent op rods in M1’s. Ordnance finally gave in and started issuing AP in 8 rd clips. So afterwards they were to dermined accept as Nato standard that had less cover penetration than M2 ball. I’ve always been of the opinion that the 276 Pedersen cartrige was the best compromise for a general purpose rifle and MG ctg. But no one weapon or ctg is perfect in all cases. Before MG’s and mortars became ubiquitous, infantry were trained in indirect fire by volley out to 2000 or so yards. The M1905 sight on the 03 was designed for this. That’s way it goes out past 2000 yards. No one expected some to hit an individual at that range but a platoon or company could lay down a barrage on an area target at that range. All that went away with MG and Mortars.
I think one of the things that has to be understood is that the whole question of “M2 ball won’t penetrate cover” is another one of these highly subjective questions that everyone just took at face value. Just like the “M1 carbine doesn’t work” coming out of the same era…
Quick question: What the hell changed between WWII and Korea? Inside the Army, that is: One key thing is that the Army left behind the idea of unit cohesion, and started doing individual rotations. Which, in turn, meant that the actual fighting was done by brand-new inexperienced soldiers, who were not trained to the highest level of proficiency.
Gee, I wonder why they reported their weapons didn’t work? When the long-service guys from WWII, who’d fought in North Africa and Italy went to fight in Europe, they mostly knew a hell of a lot better what to expect in combat. Unlike, say, the average Korean War-era guy who got shipped off to Korea as a single individual and then fed into combat to die in job lots when the laws of averages caught up with them…
I think we have to examine all these apocryphal tales from the frontline with huge ‘effing bags of salt. I read over the after-action reports coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq, and you could make out the same thing you could make out from Somalia: The usual run of front-line combatant really does not know much past “I was shot at; I shot back; they kept shooting at me…”, and you do not know from that experience anything at all that will tell you how effective your weapons are. You can tell a lot about how those combatants perceived their weapons working, but the actual real downrange effects?
An anecdote from the Korean War comes to mind: Guy was a rifleman, during the late phase of the war. He’s out on a position, sees a Chinese soldier pop up and he shoots. Chinese guy pops down, pops back up… He shoots. This goes on for about ten iterations, and my informant is morally certain that it’s the same Chinese soldier screwing with him; the uniform, the face, the whole nine yards screams “Same guy” to him. He’s certain he didn’t hit anything, and he’s also sure he needs a new rifle.
Next day or so, his unit sends out night patrols, one of which stumbles across the position he observed the Chinese soldier in.
They count ten bodies, all shot in the head/upper torso. He hadn’t missed once.
He’d already turned his rifle in, when he found that out, and as he related to me after the fact, he never found another M1 rifle that shot like that for him. He rued the day that he turned it in for a new one…
You think you see/experience something in combat? Odds are pretty damn good that you’re delusional about it, and since nobody ever goes out to verify anything, you’ll never know whether or not that guy you had to shoot forty times was Superman, or forty different dudes that happened to look just alike, to your eye…
I never said that M2 ball wouldn’t penetrate cover. I said that there were a lot of complaints about that, weather justifed or not. There were a lot of complaints about the “stopping power” of the 30 carbine as well, justified or not.There are a lot of complaints about MRE’s whether justified or not. In the 60’s the military issued white t-shirts with V- necks that everybody hated. And so on.
There’s a guy on YT who goes by “Yee Yee Life”, who does nothing but test various calibers against target media. As in, firing everything from .22 LR to .50 BMG at trees, utility pole sections, slabs of granite, steel barbell weights, even above-ground pools.
It’s very interesting, because pretty much nothing short of 12.7 x 99mm will “go through” any reasonable thickness of anything. A tree trunk a foot in diameter stopped 5.56 x 45mm M855 and 7.62 x 51mm M80 ball.
In one test that looked silly until I thought about it, he stacked 500 Lego block baseplates and shot at them. Again, only 12.7 x 99mm got all the way through.
The “penetration deficiency” of 5.56 x 45mm, or .45 ACP for that matter, is largely a myth. Basically, no non-armor-piercing military ball, pistol or rifle, is going to “shoot through a tree and hit the guy hiding behind it”. None. Period.
There are a lot of reasons that you might want a more powerful round for the MG vs the IW, but “penetration” isn’t one of them.
clear ether
eon
@eon,
I think that focusing on “penetration” is an error, as well.
However, the fact remains that there’s something there that goes along with it, and that’s “inertia”. Itty-bitty high energy projectiles can be easily thrown off course by some very insubstantial things, like tree branches and heavy leaves. Bigger projectiles that people ideate as “penetrating better” have more inertia and tend to keep on going in the direction the shooter intended, doing more directed damage.
So, while “penetration” all on its own doesn’t really amount to much of an attribute, the accompanying one of “inertia retention” points to something we need to take into consideration.
Also, you slam a 5.56mm round into a plate, then its 7.62mm equivalent, which is going to do more “shock damage” that will put the guy behind the plate down for longer than if it was just 5.56mm hitting them?
One of the points about “body armor” as a concern is that I seriously doubt anyone who has ever been wearing said armor and taken a hit in combat was behind that “we gotta have overmatch”. Plain fact is, from my personal observation? Even if the targeted body-armor wearer survives, they’re not much good for anything else for a considerable length of time. Acquaintance of mine survived two hits on his chest plate from what was presumed to be 7.62X54R, and while he lived to fight another day, that “other day” was about four months after he took the hits. The hematomas and bruising he received took him right out of the fight and forced a MEDEVAC flight, just as though he’d been wounded/killed.
If you get the hits, even if the target lives, they’re still going to be sufficiently traumatized so as to have tactical effect. Just as if you’d killed them, only without the life-insurance payout to their families…
The concept of “shock trauma” never seems to “penetrate” the minds of theorists.
Put simply, you don’t necessarily need to put a hole in somebody to render them hors de combat, at least for a time longer than the fight’s going to last.
John Plaster related that he once was hit on his vest by a 7.62 x 39mm and the impact pretty much put him out.
Elmer Keith related that in a gunfight along the Rio Grande, a Border Patrolman he knew was hit on his big belt buckle by one .38-40 180 grain flatnose from a Winchester, and the impact literally made him so sick he fell flat. No penetration, but he had a huge bruise shaped like that belt buckle. Which was still better than getting that slug in his guts.
If non-penetrating trauma wasn’t dangerous, how to explain people badly injured or dead from getting hit with everything from crude caveman clubs to baseball bats?
Best to assume that anything that hits you with that much KE is going to hurt, and concentrate on trying very hard to avoid getting hit.
Hitting the other guy first being the most cost-effective measure.
cheers
eon
not accept. I hate typing on a cell phone.
We should have had a 6MM round years ago. You are NOT always going to have surplus drones, and yes, body armor is a factor. A different weapon could be used, but one of the original decisions was to go with the 5.56 because you could carry more ammo, less weight, and the M-16 system was easier to shoot, had alleged superior lethality, etc. 30 years in the Military and Law Enforcement and the 5.56 is great in an urban, closer range environment. But having to depend on drones or a GMG to reach out and touch someone? That is a problem. Don’t like the H&K? Get a different 6MM rifle.
We should have had a 6MM round years ago. You are NOT always going to have surplus drones, and yes, body armor is a factor. A different weapon could be used, but one of the original decisions was to go with the 5.56 because you could carry more ammo, less weight, and the M-16 system was easier to shoot, had alleged superior lethality, etc. 30 years in the Military and Law Enforcement and the 5.56 is great in an urban, closer range environment. But having to depend on drones or a GMG to reach out and touch someone? That is a problem. Don’t like the H&K? Get a different 6MM rifle.
At this point, and reading all the commentary on Ian’s video post over at YouTube, about all I have to say is that there are a lot of people out there who simply have no idea at all how the hell modern warfare actually works.
Especially out past about 200-300m.
Here is the reality, folks: In war, the majority of your issue isn’t your weapon or even necessarily your skill with it. The reality is that the way you win an engagement is by observing the enemy first, delivering effective fire on that enemy, and then continue delivering that fire until they are dead, dead, dead.
In the vast majority of cases, you’re not even going to see the enemy until he’s up close and personal, trying to kill you. This ain’t antelope hunting out on the high plains; the target here is “people”, and people are smart enough not to show themselves to you in most cases. Because of that, the focus on “Let’s help the average soldier play Carlos Hathcock” is a systematic failure. Why? Because spending all that money and time training those guys to be able to shoot targets they’ll never actually, y’know… See… Is a complete and utter waste of time.
If you do see someone out there in the longer-range small-arms band, then the odds are excellent that “someone” is there with a bunch of his friends. So, if you shoot him with your uber-rifle, playing Alvin York, guess what? You just lost the opportunity to get a bunch of kills that you would have gotten had you possessed the wit and wisdom to instead dump a nice hot burst from a machinegun onto that idiot exposing himself, plus everything around him for a couple of hundred square meters.
All y’all are apparently thinking “I’ll just shoot him…” and are completely missing the entire point of warfare, which is to basically kill the enemy as effectively and efficiently as possible. You do NOT do that by shooting him in onesies and twosies when someone is stupid enough to expose themselves to your eye at 300m.
In fact, it would be my opinion that by shooting that one guy, you’re actually doing the enemy a favor: On the one hand, you’re eliminating their likely least effective combatant, a total idiot, and you’re also providing all the rest a swift object lesson in “Why you don’t show yourself to the enemy…”
In short, you’re making the other side better.
If you see a singular enemy soldier out past your immediate area, you should be firing crew-served, support, and everything else besides your individual weapons at him. If you’re trying to play Carlos Hathcock en masse across your operational area, that is why you’re losing your war. That is not a realistic or effective way to run a war.
The real problem with all this crap is that it’s predicated on something that just doesn’t exist in the real world outside a rifle range: Clearly identifiable targets and equally clear lines of fire that are all going to get themselves situated for you to take your perfect shot.
Reality? You’re going to spot that one enemy guy while you’re sitting there with your rifle in your lap, you’re gonna have him expose himself for literal seconds, and odds are absolutely amazing that if you even notice him, he’s going to be gone before you can react. Instead of popping a few rounds in that general area, what you need to do is saturate the terrain around where you saw him on the off chance that there are more people there to kill that you just can’t see.
All y’all need to quit thinking of this in a context of police work or deer hunting; you’re absolutely NOT doing that. This is war; it’s wholesale slaughter, and the victor is the one that does it best at the least cost to their own side. So, if you’re thinking of all this as “Yeah, we gotta get the guys to the point where they can hit at 800m…”, you have no real grasp on how to win. You absolutely need to be using your MG teams on everything you and your guys spot, and those teams need to be saturating entire terrain features with fire.
Do you know why we were firing 50,000 rounds in Vietnam for every VC or NVA casualty? BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT IT TAKES.
And, no, we did not “lose” Vietnam militarily speaking; it was a political defeat handed to us by our own Congress.
1. You are absolutely right. Shooting individuals is how poor people fight. Because they have to, not because they want to.
2. “Our (broke ass, weak) enemy will not close with (rich, powerful) us and fight like men! is the cry of generals and politicians who lack sonder.
And who are too lazy, stupid, or entitled to confront and tell the truth about the price of victory.
3. For eight years the generals, who had all fought an all out war themselves in 1942-45, lied to everyone that Vietnam could be “won” using historically failed techniques. For their own reasons, they believed they could defy the history they knew and their own lived experience. Congress continued to accept the generals’ judgements and demands until absolutely everyone could see it was a failure as fought.
The generals lost Vietnam.
On the contrary.
After Tet, the VC were a spent force. The envisioned grand national uprising never happened; the normal citizens of South Vietnam did not rise.
It got so bad that in 1973, the North attempted a conventional invasion, which they lost everything doing. The South Vietnamese, with copious American support, drove them back north across the DMZ. ARVN actually did a decent job at it all.
Then, the betrayal happened in Congress. Support was cut, funds were cut, the Air Force support was pulled. When the North had rebuilt in 1975, they invaded again. This time, the South had nothing to fight with, and the South lost. Even so, they inflicted considerable casualties on the North.
In the final analysis, the US military did not “lose” in Vietnam. Not in any military sense; the war was lost in Congress, and due to the frankly treasonous activities of men like Joe Biden and Teddy Kennedy. All of whom had voted for approval on the treaties obligating the US to support South Vietnam.
The whole thing was a put-up job. Teddy Kennedy’s older brothers and the other Democratic Party arseholes got us into that war, against the advice of the Joint Chiefs back in the beginning, and even so… The US military handed the politicians a victory. Which they promptly pissed away, with malice aforethought.
There are innumerable parallels to Vietnam that you can look at with regards to how we “lost” Afghanistan, another conflict where we were defeated in the halls of Congress rather than on the battlefield. Same exact sorts of things were done, right down to cutting the aviation support that was critical to the fight.
You might want to get your facts from somewhere other than the pages of your local Democratic Party propaganda operation. They’ve been lying to you for decades, and you’ve somehow managed to miss that fact.
Walter Cronkite is the only reason that the North Vietnamese didn’t make peace after Tet. There’s testimony out there that they knew they’d lost when the popular uprising didn’t happen, that they’d pissed the VC away for nothing, and that it was the US news media that convinced them they had a chance. Which they did, because that media and the Democrats were determined to give it to them.
The whole “Tet Offensive as US defeat” is one of the biggest lies ever sold in history. In actuality, the Tet Offensive represented the VC and NVA that were then in the South coming out for battle with conventional US forces, and then having their asses handed to them. It destroyed the VC, and significantly damaged the NVA in the South. Had we not allowed the media to tell the lies that it did, odds are excellent that we’d have gotten them to the negotiating table in 1968, and actually gotten somewhere. Instead, we had to delay until after Nixon presented them with another defeat before they got serious.
You don’t know nearly as much as you think you do, because what you “know” consists of Democratic Party talking points and outright lies.
No mention of ol’ Dickey’s secret negotiations with Hanoi? No mention of Peace with Honor? But does it really matter? We were in Vietnam killing hundreds of thousands to what end? So we could end up with Vietnam as a major trading partner and potential military ally to counter the Chinese? All the bull spewed by the right about bloodbaths and oppressive commie rule if we pulled out? Yeah that didn’t happen. The whole shebang could have been avoided if we had let them just have their independence in the first place. And yes. We lost the Vietnam war.
You are a poltroon and a moral coward.
You seem to think that the US went into Vietnam and started it all, when the reality is that it was the French and the North Vietnamese Communists doing everything from the beginning.
And, while noting US hypocrisy, you seem to whiff right on by the point that the vaunted North Vietnamese Communists you so love and honor abandoned their fine Communist principles and beliefs the moment that they realized they don’t work, and went full-bore capitalist after carefully turning over all that stolen loot to their own party members.
So, pray tell, what was the point of all that slaughter inflicted on their own people? Just so that the children of the party elites could do what every Communist regime has done, and turned profiteer off the loot? Nothing about that, eh? I think we can safely tell who are your heroes.
F*ck all Communist looters and their enablers, who you’ve just self-identified as. All that murder, all that destruction, just so children of the party elite could “build communism” by taking the stolen properties and setting up their own little “capitalist enterprises” that they’d fought so hard against.
Creepy bastards, all of you.
Pol Pot has entered the chat….
@Reltney McFee:
Show me a single “revolution” that hasn’t ended with the sainted revolutionaries replacing the people they revolted against, and doubling down on the evils they found so hard to live with.
Any of the English rebellions? Oliver Cromwell, who did unto Ireland as the Catholics wanted to do unto England? The American Revolution, which was relatively humane on a comparative scale, with what happened to the Loyalists and the people who just didn’t give a damn? French Revolution, and the Vendee? Any of that crap?
Revolution always turns into a scam; it’s happened everywhere. Every single time. The CCP? LOL… They’ve turned themselves into sick parodies of what they used to accuse the “landlord class” of. Same with the Bolsheviks and all the rest.
Show me a “revolutionary”, and I’ll show you a monster who wants nothing more than to put themselves in charge and do the same things they rail against. You can always tell them, because whatever they claim is being done to them, they are doing themselves. See “Castro’s Cuba” for examples, where Che Guevara spent weeks at a time amusing himself by killing “class enemies” in the prisons they set up.
It never fails; revolutions are nasty things, like cancers. Anyone espousing for them, any of them, will almost always turn out to be an utter shiitebox of a human being.
I include the wonderful assholes that were some of my ancestors during the American Revolution in that number. I know what they did, why they did it, and who they did it to. None of that was at all moral, proper, uplifting, or something to be proud of. They were criminal scum, a lot of them. Saving grace was that some of the Founders managed to overcome that BS, and actually created something worthwhile.
I would argue that America did not start treating the Vietnam War seriously until the start of the Operation Linebacker in 1972. That finally resulted in a peace treaty in 1973, and the betrayal of South Vietnam subsequently, ensuring that every life lost and every dollar spent had been wasted. The Democrats found that to be such a good idea that they repeated it in Afghanistan. Does anyone really vote for them? I have my doubts.
Isn’t this cartridge made up of a multipart case? I wonder if the military considered the added complexity, time, and cost of manufacturing a multipart case during wartime?
Bleak, really bleak. Old geezers arguing about what befell a half century ago while the U.S. turns Third World right outside their door this very day.
Piper was a student of history, and understood that civilization was secure only so long as it was propped up by the mutual self-interest of the rulers and the ruled.
Put simply, the commonfolk would obey the laws and keep the economy running as long as the rulers (1) didn’t try to grab too much and (2) didn’t have their armed retainers grabbing comely wenches off the street for the rulers’ orgies, and/or rounding up people with different opinions, or no opinions at all, and massacring them just for s#!ts and giggles.
The surest way to wreck it all? Hand power over to people with the mentality of an infant, i.e. a limitless appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Diapering a government never works. Nor does importing a few million “infants” to ensure enough votes to keep that sort of government in power.
Civilizations rarely fall due to external attack. By the time the attackers can wreck them, it’s due to decades or even centuries of rot from within.
It all comes down to who’s running things, and what motivates them. As Heinlein said, once a politician convinces himself that everything he does is “for the greater good”, you have someone who can cheat at solitaire with a clear conscience, because he is certain that it would be a disaster for everybody if he were ever to lose at anything.
Those are the sorts of people running the West today, and what “party” they claim to represent is irrelevant. They’re all cut from the same cloth.
As George Carlin said, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it”.
clear ether
eon
The question I have is what is enabling all these politicians like Omar to stand up there and say that they’re “more for Somalia” than America, and still win elections… Is the electorate really that stupid?
The minute a politician starts telling you that they’re acting on behalf of illegal aliens is the minute you ought to be removing them from office and shipping them off to that very same turd-world shithole whose citizens they’re acting in the interests of.
I really can’t understand why all of these assholes aren’t being dealt with as actual criminals; you’re elected to represent voters and citizens, and instead you’re doing everything for the illegals? WTF? And, everyone stands by as this goes on, right out in the open, doing nothing?
This is how you get vigilante violence, when the citizenry wakes up and realizes what is going on. The results are going to come, and it will be something straight out of a horror show. As in, French Revolution horror show, with the “elite progressive” types cast in the roles of the aristos, being hauled off to the guillotines they’re so fond of paying to have erected at “protests”.
But they, being good little pseudo-Utopians like the Jacobins, are certain that they will be the ones who decide who gets a date with the National Razor.
They affect to be terrified of the “reactionary nativists” they despise in their enlightened globalist way, while having a bromance with the people who regard shortening “unbelievers” as a religious, moral, and cultural imperative. (It says so, right in their holy book, so it must be so.)
The enlightened ones will be the last ones laid with their precious necks across the block, while crying out “But can’t we talk about this?” as the executioner raised his blade.
Of course, that will be just a bit too late to do the rest of us any good.
clear ether
eon
In Europe, its interesting, these illegal immigrants that roam unchecked freely through many of its borders are never called as such by media, they are just “migrants”, thus mudding the water that crossing the border forcefully is really a no big deal.
There were even cases when police tried to stop them physically in their attempt to cross the border, of media launching the campaign of accusing the police of brutality. Who profits from all this multinational madness?
Politicians seeking huge voting blocs who will re-elect them ad infinitum.
That was the whole reason when Tony Blair first started mass migration into the UK when he was PM. The traditional Labour voting blocs, like the old TUC, were no longer blindly supporting “New Labour”.
So Blair and his cohorts decided they needed new, more “reliable” voters. God forbid they should ever ask themselves what it was about them and their policies that their bedrock supporters no longer wanted.
Blair & Co. loosened requirements for immigration, with emphasis on migrants from “underdeveloped countries”, specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Mid-East. Places where one-party rule over generations was the rule rather than the exception.
They expected it would keep them on top forever. While they sneered at Britons and said, “You stopped doing as we told you, so we’re going to replace you with more obedient voters”.
Everybody else in Europe (and progressives here in the U.S.) thought this was a marvelous idea, and copied it.
None of them understood that when you import huge masses of people from primitive foreign cultures, you are importing those cultures as well.
And if the culture in question is Islam, they will pick up where they left off trying to conquer the rest of the world about a century and a half ago. (Look up “Chinese Gordon” and “Khartoum”.)
clear ether
eon