#Iar

In recent testimony to Congress, USMC leadership Lieutenant General Robert Walsh and Brigadier General Joseph Shrader officially acknowledged that the USMC’s M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle, made by Heckler & Koch, encounters durability issues when used with the US Army’s new M855A1 Enhanced Performance Round. The testimony is transcribed below:

After over 30 years of using the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, it seems the US Army may be moving away from the concept of squad-level belt-fed automatic firepower in favor of a lower-capacity but more precise (and probably magazine-fed) weapon. In a recent Special Notice posted to FBO.gov, the US Army formally announced its intention to replace the M249 with a magazine-fed weapon, dubbed the Next Generation Squad Automatic Rifle (NGSAR). The Special Notice also announced a classified set of Industry Days for demonstration of potential NGSAR weapons, to be held July 25-27 of this year. The new Special Notice seems more similar to a Request for Information (RFI) than a Request for Proposal (RFP), and explicitly states that no contracts will be awarded or offers accepted:

In the wake of Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley’s testimony to Congress on the present and future state of the US Army, there has been a significant amount of speculation and in some cases misleading reporting regarding his statements on small arms and ammunition. Authors such as Todd South with Army Times and Eric Graves of Soldier Systems have presented their take on General Milley’s comments, but in doing so have presented an interpretation of his testimony that I do not think reflects what he said or meant. Therefore, briefly, I’d like to go over some of these interpretations and explain why I think they are not accurate and what General Milley meant, instead. After each bullet I will list the interpretation that I think is incorrect, followed by General Milley’s statement regarding it, and then my own explanation.

In a surprising turn of events given the recent public motions towards an all-M27 fleet, the United States Marine Corps has just released a new request for information (RFI), soliciting proposals from the industry for a whole new suite of infantry equipment, including rifles, upper receivers for existing weapons, optics, suppressors, and targets. The new RFI is very explicit as to what the industry can and/or should bring to the table as far as proposals. Below is replicated the “Infantry Rifle” segment of the RFI document, which is just one part out of five:

Since its introduction in 2009, the Marine Corps’ M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle has proven itself as an effective support weapon that offers more firepower and range than the Corps’ other squad level weapons, the M4 Carbine and M16A4 Rifle. This good reception has led many within the Corps to reach an obvious conclusion: The USMC should simply replace their M4s and M16A4s in the Infantry Battalions with M27 IARs. This idea gained so much traction that the USMC has experimented with arming an entire battalion with IARs, and even released an RFI to the industry for 11,000 more IARs.

Today, a variant of the Heckler & Koch HK416 rifle is the standard squad infantry automatic rifle (IAR) of the United States Marine Corps, as the M27. At one time in the mid-2000s, though, companies from Colt to LWRC competed against each other in a competition to see which weapon would be the the Corps’ choice to fill the role, supplanting the belt-fed M249 as the squad’s automatic fire support capability. These weapons took a variety of approaches to meeting the USMC’s needs, from the constant recoil Ultimax MG, to the heat-sink equipped Colt IAR, to the open bolt full auto, closed bolt semiauto LWRC IAR. Ultimately, simplicity won out, and Heckler & Koch’s quite unambitious HK416-derived entry was selected to be the M27.

Earlier today, the United States Marine Corps Systems Command released a request for information (RFI) to manufacturers regarding the industry’s capability to fill an order for 11,000 new IAR-type rifles. You can read the RFI over at this link at FedBizOpps.

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.

More and more, it seems like we are on the cusp of a break in the small arms “plateau”, and that major changes may be coming both in the technology and use of infantry small arms and ammunition. The biggest harbinger of this coming paradigm shift has been Picatinny’s Lightweight Small Arms Technologies (LSAT) program, now superseded by the Cased Telescoped Small Arms Systems (CTSAS) program. As CTSAS and similar programs make headway, it seems increasingly likely that some sort of next generation lightweight ammunition paradigm will force a shift in infantry small arms, and that the current fleet of metallic-cased ammunition and the weapons designed to fire it will have to be replaced by new designs.

Will Heckler & Koch’s HK416 rifle become the most successful assault rifle model of the early 21st Century? It’s starting to look that way. After the French adoption of the HK416F as their standard issue weapon to replace the FAMAS, and a likely Bundeswehr contract for the rifle on the horizon, now the United States Marine Corps is exploring the possibility of fielding its own HK416 variant – the M27 IAR – to all infantry battalions in place of the M4 Carbine. Military.com reports:

An image of a mysterious new Russian machine gun was leaked to the public recently, during a visit to the Kalashnikov factory by Deputy Defense Minister Yuri Borisov. The weapon is an intriguing dual-feed magazine/belt loading gun that features distinctly un-AK-like underbarrel gas tube, as well as integral top and bottom Picatinny-type rails. Little is known about the weapon besides its name which is reportedly “RPK-400” (Ручной пулемёт Калашникова -400, or “Handheld Kalashnikov Machine Gun 400”) EDIT: That is apparently the name of the modernized RPK-74 that is on the far left in the image

As part of the recent Russian re-armament program including the T-14 Armata man battle tank, the T-50 air superiority fighter, and the AK-12 and A545 rifles, the Federation has initiated a program for a new 5.45mm caliber squad support weapon, called “Tokar-2”. The weapon being developed uses a combined belt and magazine feed system, similar to the system utilized by the Belgian-American M249 5.56mm automatic rifle.

The SlideFire stock is an idea that pushes the boundaries of what the ATF considers acceptable for a Title I firearm. Without diving into the world of the National Firearms Act, a Slide-Fire stock is the closest you can get to a fully automatic weapon of your very own. For the most part, these stocks are just a range toy: With no spring to automatically return the gun to the firing position, constant forward pressure is required to continuously activate the trigger. This makes them impractical as a serious weapon, but quite a lot of fun to shoot.

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.

The last time we discussed the Singapore Technologies Kinetics (STK) Ultimax 100 machine gun was back in 2008 when General Dynamics unveiled the Ultimax 100 Mk5 as their entry into the Marine IAR competition, a competition eventually won by the H&K M27 IAR. At the Singapore Airshow last week, STK unveiled the Ultimax 100 MK 8.