#AdvancedCombatRifle

Recently on The Firearm Blog we talked about one of the great might-have-beens, the German caseless G11 rifle developed by Heckler & Koch during the 1970s and 1980s. Today we have a video from 1990 filmed at Aberdeen Proving Grounds of a demonstration of the G11K2 on the firing range.

In the comments section of my recent Brief Thoughts article regarding caseless ammunition, there was a discussion about whether the cookoff issues of caseless would also be problem for LSAT-style polymer cased telescoped ammunition. Based on conversations I have had with subject matter experts regarding polymer cased ammunition in general, I noted that a lower cookoff threshold is one of the challenges I would expect CT ammunition developers to face. However, after some back-and-forth in the comments, I decided to contact LSAT/CTSAS program officer Kori Phillips regarding this issue (as it was not something I covered in my three-part interview with her), and she kindly agreed to allow her comments on the matter to be published here on TFB. They are below:

In the world of “might-have-been” small arms, a world of .276 Garands and NATO-standard EM-2s, none flew so high nor fell so far as the Heckler & Koch G11 caseless hyperburst assault rifle. Designed to out-match any contemporary small arm in a Cold War shootout across Central Europe, the G11 combined the aesthetics of a scifi plasma rifle with complexity of a Swiss watch. The result was a bullpup caseless wunderwaffe with a 2,000 round per minute hyperburst setting, and a price tag that, as the joke goes, compared unfavorably with reconstructing East Germany.

Caseless: The ammunition designer’s holy grail, and the engineer’s worst nightmare. It would obsolete the cartridge case overnight, resulting in cheaper, lighter, and more compact ammunition. Weapons would be able to carry 50, 60, or more rounds in slim, inexpensive magazines, and expel them at a rate of fire much higher than current weapons are capable of – not only because the ammunition is lighter and therefore more could be carried to feed such thirsty guns, but because the extraction and ejection cycles of the weapons themselves could be eliminated.

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.

At the 2017 Association of the US Army (AUSA) Annual Meeting, Textron System displayed for the very first time their firing 6.5mm CT Carbine prototype. Previously, only non-firing mockups had been shown to the public, but after successful tests this summer the real thing was brought out to show at the conference, where TFB got its first look at the weapon.

Not long after SHOT Show, I got the chance to interview Mrs. Kori Phillips, former program officer for the Army’s Lightweight Small Arms Technologies (LSAT) program, and current program officer for the Cased Telescoped Small Arms Systems (CTSAS) program. We talked at length about both programs, the technology they developed, and the state of lightweight ammunition today. The interview, which spans fifty-five questions, will be broken up into three sections, each covering questions about different aspects of the program, to be published monthly once each in March, April, and May-wait, hold on,

Not long after SHOT Show, I got the chance to interview Mrs. Kori Phillips, former program officer for the Army’s Lightweight Small Arms Technologies (LSAT) program, and current program officer for the Cased Telescoped Small Arms Systems (CTSAS) program. We talked at length about both programs, the technology they developed, and the state of lightweight ammunition today. The interview, which spans fifty-five questions, will be broken up into three sections, each covering questions about different aspects of the program, to be published monthly once each in March, April, and May-wait, hold on,

Not long after SHOT Show, I got the chance to interview Mrs. Kori Phillips, former program officer for the Army’s Lightweight Small Arms Technologies (LSAT) program, and current program officer for the Cased Telescoped Small Arms Systems (CTSAS) program. We talked at length about both programs, the technology they developed, and the state of lightweight ammunition today. The interview, which spans fifty-five questions, will be broken up into three sections, each covering questions about different aspects of the program, to be published monthly once each in March, April, and May. This first installment deals primarily with the history of the LSAT and subsequent CTSAS programs, with a little bit of the ammunition technology thrown in.

In May of this year, I got the rare opportunity to travel to Heckler & Koch’s headquarters in Ashburn, VA, to take a look at some of the experimental and prototype firearms they have located there in their famous “Grey Room”. It wouldn’t be worth as much for me to just tell you about it and to snap a few foggy cell phone pictures, though, so I brought along Othais of C&Rsenal to help me take high resolution light box photos of these unique and rare firearms.

It’s often said that small arms technology has plateaued; that development of better kinds of weapons is essentially unfeasible for the moment, and that non-optic related small arms technology had pretty much reached its peak by 1965. It would be very difficult to cover the state of the art and how to improve it in-depth, so I won’t. Instead I want to take only a moment of our readers time to explore an often-missed element of firearms technology that is the key piece in understanding the technology “plateau” and how to end it.

We’ve posted about the ACR Program here on TFB before, but there’s a lot of information available on the subject through DTIC. The Advanced Combat Rifle program was begun in the late 1980s as a research and development effort which would eventually lead to the next U.S. service rifle, replacing the M16. The intention was to field the new weapon, whatever it would be, before the end of the 1990s. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the ACR program withered, and the successor to the M16 in U.S. Army service became the M4 Carbine, another derivative of the Colt AR-15.