#.264

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:

In yesterday’s article, we took a look at examples of two different methods of design, which I called “preference-driven” and “process-driven”. For these examples, I supposed two engineers from two different cultures – called “Romulan” and “Vulcan” after the aliens from the Star Trek universe.* In the “Romulan” example, we explored preference-driven design, where a final product is outlined by amalgamating preferred characteristics from previous works to create a desired whole. For the “Vulcan” example, we examined the more elaborate method of developing processes that can be fed data to procedurally generate characteristics as an example of process-driven design.

If you were designing the next small arms round, how would you do it? What methods would you use to determine its physical characteristics and performance attributes? How would you know what was too large or too small, too powerful or too weak? Perhaps more critically, how do different methods for answering these questions compare to one another? Could some methods be better or worse than others?

In the rush to augment the infantry’s firepower with new advanced small arms technologies, we may be on the precipice of crippling their ability to fight wars. The push to equip the infantryman with more powerful rifles and machine guns risks reducing his mobility to critical levels, and “locking out” his capacity to carry powerful supporting arms. Although more potent basic infantry weapons are undeniably desirable, current attitudes towards their purpose – exemplified by the concept of “overmatch” – may compound problems that already have reached crisis levels.

Vladimir Fedorov (sometimes written as Fyodorov) was a famous Russian/Soviet firearms designer mostly known for his automatic rifle ( Fedorov Avtomat) which is arguably the world’s first issued assault rifle. Besides designing firearms, he was also one of the most advanced Russian researchers of small arms ammunition of his time. The Fedorov Avtomat is chambered in 6.5x50mm Arisaka. However, the rifle was initially designed to be chambered in a completely new 6.5mm cartridge, which was Fedorov’s own design. So the subject of this article is the history of development of that cartridge.

According to a recent article on Soldier Systems, the US Army is considering an “interim” switch back to the 7.62mm caliber in standard infantry rifles. Eric Graves of the site lays out a reasonable overview of the situation on the ground, and what sort of weapons might be considered as the 7.62mm “interim” weapon. Follow the link to read his article over at soldiersystems.net.

In the first two parts of this article on a new long range infantry rifle paradigm, we painted a picture of what sort of weapons would be needed to maximize the infantry’s long-range capability, in theory allowing them to achieve “overmatch” versus enemy infantry armed with existing .22 and .30 caliber weapons. We created estimates for both the cost and weight of the infantry rifle, and we also examined the problem of training soldiers to maximize their capabilities with the new longer-ranged weapons.

Les Baer Custom has cloned the 6.5mm Grendel and named their creation the .264 LBC-AR. So why would Les Baer, who were well known for producing quality licensed 6.5mm Grendel AR-15 rifles, start competing with Alexander Arms? Let me tell you why.