Ascendance International has introduced the Dark Horse line of ammunition. This ammunition mainly consists of frangible rounds. However, among a selection of frangible loads, the company also showed a door breaching bullet loaded in the .308 Winchester (7.62x51mm NATO) round.

The door breaching via shooting the locks and hinges is almost exclusively done using shotguns with proper breaching slugs. That makes the units to carry a shotgun (either mounted on the firearm or separately) for the mentioned use. With the Ascendance International new breaching bullet for the .308 Winchester cartridge, you don’t need to carry a shotgun if you have a .308 rifle in your unit. By simply shooting these breaching round through the rifle, you’ll get the job done.

On their SHOT Show booth, Ascendance International showed a piece of broken door lock which was breached using this cartridge. As you can see in the images below, the impact side of the lock is damaged and the lock mechanism is broken, however, the internal side of the door has no signs of damage.

The material that this round is made of transfers the energy to the impact surface and immediately turns into dust. The company even had a small jar of that dust gathered for the demonstration.

The choice of .308 Win is hard to explain. I think it would be a better idea to make it in .300 Blackout or at least in both calibers. The reason may probably be the length of the bullet and the need to accelerate it to a certain muzzle velocity to make it work as an efficient breaching round. It probably will fit into the .300 Blackout case but won’t leave enough space for the powder to reach required muzzle velocities. The MV of the current .308 load is something that the company refuses to reveal.