#Infantry

One of the early automatic rifles that has caught my interest for several years going now is the Winchester Machine Rifle, also known as the Burton Machine Rifle or the Light Machine Rifle. The Burton – as I’ll call it for the purposes of today’s post – is interesting primarily because it qualifies retroactively as an “assault rifle”, sharing all the normally ennumered characteristics of that class of firearms, 26 years before the MP. 43 would erupt onto the world’s stage.

Let’s take a brief tangent. While my job is to write about firearms for you guys, I have many other interests; one of them is Medieval history. It’s a pretty cool thing to be interested in these days, as YouTube is practically bursting with awesome channels that go into an incredible amount of depth and detail on Medieval-related topics, including everything from swords, to armor, to clothing, and everything else.

In the comments section of  my 6.8mm SPC article last year, I was asked what I thought about future infantry small arms. This is a subject that has dominated my thinking over the past several years, and much of the historical research I have undertaken has been in service to forming a better picture of the current state of small arms and how to improve it.

Previously, we looked at the Breda Model 39, an Italian rifle that competed against what would become the Beretta BM-59 in a bid to be the Italian military rifle of the 1950s and ’60s. TFB friend Trevor Weston sends along more photos of three Italian rifles that are not well known today. The first two are Beretta-made licensed-produced copies of the 7.62mm  SG 510-4 rifle, the more conventional one being the first Chilean contract rifle of 13,000 made by the company for that country. The other is a Beretta-made “improvement” of the 510, called the BL-62, with a combined buttstock and pistol grip.

The German Federal Office of Bundeswehr Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support (BAAINBw) has released a Prior Information Notice (PIN) to the industry, regarding new infantry weapons that could replace the troubled G36 rifle. A PIN is the European equivalent of the American Request For Information (RFI), which usually precedes a tender for a contract. A machine translation of the PIN is reproduced below:

This is the zeroeth part of a series of posts seeking to describe and analyze the 7.62mm Light Rifle concept promoted by the Americans, and subsequently adopted by NATO in various forms. This series will cover development from before World War II to the present day, but will focus primarily on the period from 1944-1970, which constitutes the span of time from the Light Rifle’s conception until its end in the United States with the standardization of the M16.

Now that all the guns of Ian’s educational videos have been auctioned off, it is time for a more traditional Forgotten Weapons post, of the kind he’s been doing for several years now. The subject of his latest is the Mannlicher 1885 self-loading rifle, an extremely special example of a semiautomatic hand weapon designed around blackpowder cartridges. Without some practical experience with blackpowder weapons, the ambition of Mannlicher’s goal cannot be fully understood; blackpowder is a nasty, corrosive substance that fouls even simple single-shot weapons to the point of hopeless inaccuracy and uselessness without regular cleaning and attention. To attempt to design a practical self-loading weapon is approaching an exercise in total futility, but it was a challenge that Ferdinand von Mannlicher felt he was nevertheless up to:

Controversy over small arms is nothing new. Back in the early 1950s, when the 7.62x51mm was called the “.30 Light Rifle” and NATO still believed it could achieve the goal of a universal standard rifle, there was (quite naturally, given the large number of parties involved) what was called more than once “The Great Rifle Controversy”. An apt name, I think.

Is the M16A4 worth the extra weight and length it brings? Howard of LooseRounds has weighed in with an article relating some of his experiences with the rifle. His conclusion is as follows:

In my critique of the M1 Garand rifle on Sunday, I noted that John Cantius Garand was not only a firearms designer, but a machinist as well. It was his intimate understanding of the world of the shop floor that made his rifle economical to produce, which is in my opinion by far the most outstanding attribute of the weapon.

In 2012, AR-15 designer Jim Sullivan applied for a patent for a new rifle design. Apparently based on his Ultimax 100 light machine gun, the rifle features a quick-change barrel, a guide-rail-less receiver with a “backbone” guide rod attached to the lower receiver, a modular trigger pack, and dual firing modes in the open and closed bolt positions.

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.