#Solicitation

Last Thursday, we discussed the US Army’s solicitation for combustible cartridge cases. Today, we’ll take a look at another interesting solicitation published in the same US government program called SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research). This time the Army is looking for powder metal small arms barrels.

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!

The United States Marine Corps has issued a new acquisition notice for up to 50,814 M27 Infantry Automatic Rifles (IAR), to be sole sourced from Heckler & Koch. The notice is technically not a solicitation in and of itself, but a pre-solicitation notice, intended to give other companies the chance to submit their own proposals or bids if they think they can meet the same need at a lower cost. From the solication:

It feels like déjà vu: India has once again issued a Request For Information (RFI) for a new rifle, this time in 7.62x51mm NATO caliber. The RFI was reportedly issued on the 27th of September, making it two and a half months between the nation’s government announcing they were preparing the document, and actually issuing it. DefenseWorld reports on the RFI’s contents: