#6.5Mm

Despite the suggestion being raised more than once in Congress, the United States Army will not be buying M27 Infantry Automatic Rifles from Heckler & Koch, but instead is devoting its small arms resources towards the Next Generation Squad Automatic Rifle program, which is now being referred to under the broader name “Next Generation Squad Weapon”. The NGSW program is focused on delivering a new “10x” improvement over current small arms, with the focus primarily on defeating heavy ceramic body armor at combat ranges. According to testimony from Deputy Chief of Staff, G-8 Lt. General John M. Murray during a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, the NGSW program will use an intermediate caliber between 5.56mm and 7.62mm, and leverage lightweight ammunition in the form of cased telescoped (CT) technology. From his testimony:

At an AUSA breakfast conference yesterday, US Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley gave us a hint at exactly what the US Army’s next rifle could look like, and the focus was on extended range capability. The rifle, Milley said, will give a 10x improvement in capability through the type of ammunition, optics, and degree of chamber pressure specific to it, with the aim of providing the soldier a weapon with much more accuracy and range than the current M4 Carbine. Milley also clarified that the term “10x” was not intended to be a precise measurement of the capability growth, but rather a term indicating significant improvement. The new rifle will come as part of an effort that also includes new artillery, tanks, aircraft, and virtual reality training facilities, Milley said.

The Army Marksmanship Unit’s .264 USA – a medium-sized 6.5mm round in-between the 6.5mm Grendel and 6.5mm Creedmoor in size – is not yet dead, it seems. The round, about which little had been heard in official channels for a couple of years, is the subject-in-part of a new solicitation released by the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office’s Technical Support Working Group (CTTSO TSWG). The Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) describes a need for a Lightweight Intermediate Caliber Cartridge (LICC) and an “Individual Weapon System (IWS), designed to “overmatch” targets out to 800 meters. The specifications for the new weapon are quire ambitious, with a threshold velocity requirement of 2,650 ft/s with a 108gr bullet, and an objective requirement of 2,750 ft/s with the same, both from an 11.5″ barrel!

In March of 1963, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald purchased an M38 Carcano rifle and some quantity of ammunition from Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago. Oswald would later use this rifle and ammunition (or so the official narrative goes) to assassinate the then- President of the United States John F. Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.

It’s almost 3 in the morning, and I’m lying awake in bed thinking about small arms. I’m trying to put everything out of my mind so I can go to sleep and wake up in the morning, go to the range, and bring you some raw ballistic data. So of course what pops into my head is an almost complete article about just why the Army’s latest whizzbang rifle program is doomed to collapse in a heap. All I have to do is write it.

Is the US Army pushing for a new high-powered 6.Xmm caliber with their new NGSAR program? Recently, the listing for the NGSAR industry day in December was updated with a document describing in part the agenda of the second conference. Scheduled for 9:45 in the morning in the document is a 15 minute long presentation on “Ammunition Data – Surrogate Projectile and Specs”, presented by Todd Townsend, David Charowsky, and Mark Minisi. Minisi’s name may not be well-known, but it will be familiar to astute students of recent wound ballistics literature: It was Minisi who developed the finite element analysis-based tissue damage model, which has been refined over the past decade at ARDEC through PM Maneuver Ammunition Systems (PM-MAS). Mr. Townsend is also likely representing PM-MAS, now under the leadership of Colonel Hector Gonzalez. 

Vertebrae is a small European company based in Bergen, Norway. They are specialized in designing long-range shooting products. They design products both for their own brand and for other companies in the industry. We have earlier wrote about the bipod this company makes. In this article, we’ll take a look at a Vertebrae branded muzzle brake.

With the development of wildcat calibers that eventually become more common and less wildcat over time it is difficult for reloading companies to keep up with published, verified data. Nobody knew 10 years ago that the 6.5 Creedmoor, 6mm Creedmoor or 6.5 Grendel would be as popular as they are today, but here we are.

The US Army will be holding a second Industry Day for its Next Generation Squad Automatic Rifle program, which seeks to replace the M249 light machine gun with a new longer-ranged, lower signature automatic rifle. The Industry Day will be held at Picatinny Arsenal on December 12th and 13th. The Army is also accepting white papers concerning NGSAR by January 16th, 2018. The updated NGSAR listing is available here.

A warning against romanticism in military planning.

With Level IV armor rising in availability, calls for “overmatch”, and the increased presence of urban warfare, will designers be able to meet the requirements for future small arms? Forumgoer Poliorcetes raised this question in a discussion at the Military Guns & Ammunition forum:

The shooting world has become completely infatuated with 6.5mm calibers over the last couple of years. Hornady may have ignited an avalanche of support when they introduced the 6.5 Creedmoor and now they have another trick up their engineering sleeves. Originally developed for match shooting, the brand new 6.5 PRC (Precision Rifle Cartridge) looks to be a scorching caliber within the 6.5mm brethren.

We have already seen the 6.5mm CT Carbine prototype brought out by Textron for the 2017 Association of the United States Army annual meeting, but TFB also got an up close and personal look at Textron’s cased telescoped machine guns. Textron has two different cased telescoped belt fed weapons in testing right now: A 5.56mm CT light machine gun, and a 7.62mm CT medium or general purpose machine gun.

In examining the future of infantry capability, we must not only be aware of potential technological solutions, but of the need to re-think and re-work what it means to train and prepare troops for future battlefields. At the core of this is the simple matter of man and rifle, of marksmanship.

Sierra Bullets is a long time manufacturer of projectiles for the firearms industry. Some of its designs are legendary, and many shooters prefer its designs to any of the other options on the market.