Pentagon Confirms Move to 6.8mm

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Simply put, those in charge at the time decided the advantages of the .276 were outweighed by the disadvantage of the cost to produce and convert to it.
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Incorrect.

As Hatcher documents in his Book of the Garand, the final chambering decision wasn't a collective one. Every General and other rank seated on the Ordinance Board had long endorsed and recommended the .276 Garand rifle in its 10-rd, clip-fed form for the reasons given in my post you quoted.

Only MacArthur's last-minute veto nixed the adoption of the chambering, and JCG was directed to 're-do' the M1 as a clip-fed 30-06 rifle.

The 'cost' argument aside, the 'mixed calibers' and supply-lines argument is largely self-rebutting when you consider that during Vietnam the U.S. did exactly that, fielding numerous cartridges for various U.S. weapons, pistols, rifles and machine guns, ranging from the .30 carbine, 5.56, 30-06, 7.62mm, .45acp, .38Special Ed (in S&W revolvers for pilots), and likely several other cartridges I'm forgetting.

MacArthur's veto was more about personal ego and less about the economics of the supplying the military services.
 
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It’s not as simple as a better cartridge. There’s lots of cartridges that will disrupt more body tissues than the 5.56. Just need a bigger heavier gun with a bigger cartridge in that takes up more space with no more recoil.

The persistence of the 5.56 is because it does its job in a lightweight controllable compact weapon.
The parameters of the new weapon requires it to be “significantly” more powerful in roughly the same weight and package size of the M4... which has proven to be a difficult task. This is evident because it requires a revolutionary weapon that hasn’t been fully proven yet.

If they merely wanted a cartridge that was more effective at a longer range, we have plenty of those, no need to reinvent anything.
Where energy is involved, there’s no free lunch; you can’t get something for nothing. But I guess math is hard for some people.
I don’t buy the train of thought that implies that there is some nefarious government plot to keep a substandard weapon in the military inventories.

There’s not a weapon that has made the grade yet, nothing says that the submissions will even pass the testing.

I assure you that I’m all in favor of this, but the doubt the timeline will be met.
 
The service has been employing its standard-issue M4 carbine since the 1960s while steadily making improvements to the system over time. But now, the rifle’s 5.56 mm round may not be able to penetrate enemies’ newly developed body armor, officials said.

During a Senate Armed Services airland subcommittee hearing last year, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., noted that “everyone from Russia and China, to Hezbollah” and the Islamic State is employing advanced armor that “risks making the 5.56 round essentially obsolete.”
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https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2018/2/1/pentagon-takes-new-look-at-rifles-ammo


Anybody have any 5.56mm Wonder Bullets?? ;)
 
It’s not the bullet, it’s the weapon system. If it was bullet alone, we could just give everyone a rifle that shoots a .50bmg and call it good.

You cannot get much of an improvement over the 5.56 and keep the same logistical burden, similar shoot-ability, same ammo load, same weight and in a compact package.

There’s lots of cartridges that offer a bit of improvement in terminal performance over 5.56 and still retain the same real estate of an M4, but they’re not earth shattering enough to refit the entire military.

This new weapon system aims to do this, what’s in doubt is the timeline. And again, we can’t get a new gun to the troops if it’s never tried. The government tries lots of things that never manifests into reality.
Even if something does get through testing, a simple election can end it.
2020-2021 revolutionary new weapon system fielded, when there’s not even a final product as we sit in the last part of 2019? ... not keeping my fingers crossed.
 
Simply put, those in charge at the time decided the advantages of the .276 were outweighed by the disadvantage of the cost to produce and convert to it.
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Only MacArthur's last-minute veto nixed the adoption of the chambering, and JCG was directed to 're-do' the M1 as a clip-fed 30-06 rifle.
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And was not MacArthur the person in charge??? Regardless of what his personal feelings were, the stated "official" reason was cost.

The 'cost' argument aside, the 'mixed calibers' and supply-lines argument is largely self-rebutting when you consider that during Vietnam the U.S. did exactly that, fielding numerous cartridges for various U.S. weapons, pistols, rifles and machine guns, ranging from the .30 carbine, 5.56, 30-06, 7.62mm, .45acp, .38Special Ed (in S&W revolvers for pilots), and likely several other cartridges I'm forgetting.
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I don't consider what the military did during VietNam as any kind of rebuttal of the arguments used by an earlier generation of people some 30+ years earlier, and done before we were in armed combat. Those same people changed their views about a number of things during WWII and afterwards.


The service has been employing its standard-issue M4 carbine since the 1960s while steadily making improvements to the system over time.
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Not sure who provided the information for this statement but their history is off by a couple decades. According to the "infallible" Wikipedia the M4 entered service in 1994, which by my poor math is some 30 years after the M16 was adopted.
 
Cartridge discussion - been a while

It's been a while since I've responded to a military cartridge discussion, so I'll play.

I spent 7 years active duty and have been in the Reserves a little over 3 years. I deployed twice (one was as a QRF and saw no action, however), so I do have some first hand experience.

I've always felt the 5.56 was a little under powered to be considered the Army's all-purpose, do everything round. I was in Afghanistan and generally was out in open spaces, so that may explain my bias.

I'd like to see:
1. All M4s changed to a 6mm bullet, about 80-85 gr with about a .350 BC fired at about 2900fps. This adds about 200fps and 200 foot lbs of energy at distance. Not a huge increase, but enough to make a difference and also to be better at wind deflection (a real weakness of the 5.56 in my opinion) without adding noticeable recoil or lowering the magazine capacity to much. I think a 6 SPCII would be the ideal cartridge. I'm not a wildcatter, but I think it should be capable of those velocities at that bullet weight.

2. At this point, it would be minimally difficult to change an M4 to 6.8SPC if the mission dictated a more powerful cartridge. Logistics would already be supporting the magazines and bolts. Of course the barrel is different, but still not too hard.

3. Change the 7.62 to a 7mm bullet. I think the 7mm08 would be the perfect cartridge. A little more speed, a little less wind deflection and since the 7.62 round seems to be used mostly when the target is out around 300+ m (but certainly not always, that's just a generalized statement), the higher BC bullet allows the 7mm bullet to keep energy longer, assuming same weight bullet of course.
 
6.8spc is a little better performer. The receiver of the M4 hinders using much of anything else without loosing magazine capacity. There’s stuff out there that has advantages and disadvantages, but most wouldn’t be worth the effort and expense just to end up with basically the same rifle.
The new proposed weapons aim to overcome all the shortfalls of the 5.56 (by a rather large margin) without introducing the disadvantages of going back to a larger cartridge.
 
3. Change the 7.62 to a 7mm bullet. I think the 7mm08 would be the perfect cartridge. A little more speed, a little less wind deflection and since the 7.62 round seems to be used mostly when the target is out around 300+ m (but certainly not always, that's just a generalized statement), the higher BC bullet allows the 7mm bullet to keep energy longer, assuming same weight bullet of course.
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Not to mention significantly less recoil than a .308 or 30-06 ... I've actually seen an M1 that had been re-barreled to 7mm-08.

Forgot who the barrel-maker was, but this was sometime in the '90s when certain makers were offering M1 barrels chambered for cartridge-derivatives of either the .308 or the 30.06 - e.g., the .270 Winchester, in the case of the latter.

In fact, I always thought a Garand in 25-06 might be something interesting to play with, especially if you scoped it - either in M1D 'sniper' form or by running an Ultimak forward rail in place of the rear handguard and mounting a Scout' scope. You could easily tune an M1's gas system to any 25-06 ammo simply by installing Schuster Mfg.'s adjustable gas plug and working things out at the range ...

Back to the 7mm-08, ... If I recall correctly, the terminal ballistics and recoil-level of the '08 cartridge is actually pretty close to that of the 276 Pedersen, not to mention also being extremely accurate and flat-shooting.

So, if some talented-mind found a way to modified a Garand's action to accept a slightly longer-than-standard M1 clip holding TWO extra rounds of 7mm-08, you'd essentially be back to 'Square One' of the 10-rd, clip-fed semi-auto JCG built for the U.S. military in the mid-1930s.

The old is new again. ;)
 
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The M1 Garand's enbloc clip was obsolete by the mid 1940s. Late in WWII Springfield, Winchester, and Remington were all working on box magazine Garands. The first wave into Kyushu would have had a lot of 20-shooters if they could have gotten one into mass production.

Anthony G. Williams has done a good deal of writing on the subject.
History of the "assault rifle" at
http://quarryhs.co.uk/Assault.htm

Development of the "600 meter round."
http://quarryhs.co.uk/Emeric2019.pdf

More indexed at
http://quarryhs.co.uk/miltech.htm
 
The M1 Garand's enbloc clip was obsolete by the mid 1940s. Late in WWII Springfield, Winchester, and Remington were all working on box magazine Garands. The first wave into Kyushu would have had a lot of 20-shooters if they could have gotten one into mass production.

Anthony G. Williams has done a good deal of writing on the subject.
History of the "assault rifle" at
http://quarryhs.co.uk/Assault.htm

Development of the "600 meter round."
http://quarryhs.co.uk/Emeric2019.pdf

More indexed at
http://quarryhs.co.uk/miltech.htm
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"The irony was that the stated aim of the US Army was to adopt a lightweight selective-fire rifle in .30 cal which could replace the M1 Garand rifle, the M2 .30 Carbine, the .30 cal Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) and the .45 Auto M3 SMG. In the event, the 7.62mm M14 rifle could only replace the Garand; it was too light to replace the BAR and too heavy, with too much recoil, to replace the Carbine and SMG. Both the 7mm EM-2 and the 7.92mm CETME Model 53 came much closer to meeting the Army's requirements."
 
The Army is still looking for the "free lunch" cartridge and rifle. They want something that gives them the things they want to eat, and as much as they want to eat without having to pay for it in things they don't want, such as size and weight. They haven't found it yet, and they've been looking a long time.

I doubt they ever will find it, if it even exists, but the only sure thing is that without looking, its unlikely it will just drop in their laps. (and if it did, they'd probably ignore it :rolleyes:)
 
The Army is still looking for the "free lunch" cartridge and rifle. They want something that gives them the things they want to eat, and as much as they want to eat without having to pay for it in things they don't want, such as size and weight. They haven't found it yet, and they've been looking a long time.

I doubt they ever will find it, if it even exists, but the only sure thing is that without looking, its unlikely it will just drop in their laps. (and if it did, they'd probably ignore it )
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This sums up the entire thread.
 
The M1 Garand's enbloc clip was obsolete by the mid 1940s. Late in WWII Springfield, Winchester, and Remington were all working on box magazine Garands. * * *
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And yet the clip-fed Garand soldiered on successfully through the Korean 'police action' and into the early days of Vietnam even as others had moved to mag-fed weapons. Some Kennedy-era 'advisors' were armed with M1s, not M14s or M16s.
 
And a lot of the Other Guys were soldiering on with bolt actions.
Enfields on our side, Nagants on the other.
I think a problem when you are fighting a "police action" and not going to war.
 
The Army is still looking for the "free lunch" cartridge and rifle. They want something that gives them the things they want to eat, and as much as they want to eat without having to pay for it in things they don't want, such as size and weight. They haven't found it yet, and they've been looking a long time.

I doubt they ever will find it, if it even exists, but the only sure thing is that without looking, its unlikely it will just drop in their laps. (and if it did, they'd probably ignore it )
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Yeah,

If the Army only had access to engineers, scientist, experienced soldiers, and all the resources Bubba has at his disposal the they could have found a 5.56mn Wonder Bullet solving all their problems!!

Nobody can beat Bubba...
 
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