In defense of the 5.56mm NATO round
I recently blogged about Tony Williams’ presentation at the NDIA Conference in which he argued that that NATO needs a new rifle and machine gun round. Directly after his presentation Per G. Arvidsson, Chairman of the NATO Weapons & Sensors Working Group, gave a presentation in defense of the 5.56mm NATO round [PDF Link].
I don’t agree with Mr Arvidsson’s conclusions but I do think his presentation slides are worth looking at. They contain some very interesting graphs.
[ Many thanks to Owen for posting a link to the presentation in the comments. ]
I have embedded the presentation below …
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No-one has ever argued that the 5.56mm can't inflict severe wounds - just that it can't be relied upon to do so. Sometimes it's very effective, sometimes it isn't. That applies to all cartridges, of course (there's no such thing as a guaranteed one-shot instant stopper in small arms), but the 5.56mm fails far too often.
And of course, that's an entirely different issue to the main one which is causing a shift back to 7.62mm in Afghanistan - the 5.56mm's lack of effective range.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ONE MAGIC BULLET FOR ALL SITUATIONS. The 5.56 NATO round is absolutely the correct round for what it was designed to do. Keep your shots inside the rounds effective engagement range it will indeed put savages on the ground for good. When you need to engage savages outside the performance envelope of the 5.56 NATO, use a 7.62 NATO caliber weapon. . When the 7.62 won't reach far enough, its time for stuff that either comes from the sky or shot from something that on wheels to pick up the slack. This stuff doesn't require an Ivy league degree to figure out