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7.62x39 is a WW2 round. Every single non-vestigial military has moved on to rounds similar to .223 (which, by the way, didn't pioneer those ballistics). The British were pushing for a .280 cartridge in late '40s but Americans insisted on .308.
It's remarkable how bad Federal Americans are when it comes to guns. After WW2, it should've been obvious intermediate is the way to go, but not only did Feds refuse to that, or failed to copy the MG42 despite trying to, they proceeded to compromise their entire's bloc small arms procurement for the next 30 years.
There are late 19th century American military studies recommending intermediate cartridges. They even plainly spell out that higher velocity 6.x mm rounds would be deadlier at all ranges than much heavier slower rounds.
And yet it took almost a century for it to be realized.
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The US was trivially correct to reject this cartridge and the British were out of their fucking minds here. In fairness, the fact they had lost WW2 [and their Empire with it] hadn't really dawned on their people yet and wouldn't come to a head until the Suez crisis.
The thing about .280 is that it's not a good GPMG round (and it's also slightly too heavy to be that intermediate- its initial loadings were more powerful than 7.62x39 is too). 6.5 Japanese had similar ballistics to what .280 would eventually have and would be ultimately replaced on the grounds of insufficient GPMG performance- and for a US-led alliance that needed to have a logistics train that much poorer countries could support (read: one caliber for everything) the infantry rifles would need to remain in the same caliber as the machine guns.
Hence a full-power cartridge, that could be retrofit to replace both .303 and 8 Mauser (7.5 French was too fat, wouldn't have worked), was required. Yes, it'd compromise the infantry rifles somewhat, but infantry rifles weren't expected to win a war with Russia whereas American logistics was.
Note also that the Russians didn't really figure the AK out until the early 1960s, and the SKS is not better from a tactical standpoint than a Garand (or M14, or FAL) is anyway. The Russians didn't need to hurry, since they already had plenty of quasi-intermediate SMGs in inventory (the PPS-43); neither did the Americans, who used the M1 Carbine for that.
30 years is an acceptable timeframe over which to replace equipment. And it really didn't hold the [mostly useless] allies back: remember, the bloc consisted of Britain (who never fought a war -> didn't matter), other militarily insignificant European nations (a good chunk of whom stuck with Garands), Britain's soon-to-be-dispossessed colonies (never fought a war beyond the ones the US also fought with 7.62x51 -> didn't matter), West Germany (conquered), and France (who stuck with 7.5 French).
Most militaries are now using two rounds, an intermediate one and a full rifle one. Why would switching to a .280 or something a little smaller wouldn't have made sense then? Manufacturing 5 million rifles is really not that big of a deal, especially if you did sensible things like looked at the Stg.44 and derived the appropriate lessons.
How many rifles or machineguns were re-barelled to use .308 post war? Some Garands. PPS-43 isn't really 'quasi intermediate', the effective range tops out at about 150m, maybe. It's also a relatively small and light bullet. Even the strongest loadings top out at under 1000J from an SMG barrel.
...what? 90,000 British fought in Korea. They also put down the communist insurgency in Malaysia and then in Brunei. I guess that doesn't count, right?
Because it's not sufficiently intermediate and it's not just the rifles (which only form a minor part of the equation). It's worth noting that both France and Switzerland both flirted with intermediate caliber rifles (in .30 Carbine), but ultimately rejected them; if you want to go "7.62 bad because fat burger country", fine, but then why did every other Western nation that was looking to change calibers and was capable of indigenous weapons development also reject the idea? They all should have been aware of the StG-44.
We have the benefit of hindsight, and the Americans had the 'benefit' that the first war in which intermediate caliber weapons were being used against them in large numbers was one of the two terrain types in which submachine gun-type weapons utterly dominate (the other being urban warfare).
Note also that the first commercially-viable .22-caliber cartridge that wasn't an overpowered meme (sorry, .220 Swift) was a 1950s invention. It's far more difficult to make a viable bullet that small; your manufacturing tolerances have to be much better than they do with the .30s or with the .264s (which appear to be the lower limit of this, considering that other than the US adopting a bleeding-edge 6mm rifle that one time in 1895, no other military would adopt a smaller cartridge until 5.56 NATO). That's feasible with 1960s manufacturing technology, but not necessarily with 1920s or 1940s (and the Russians would take into the 1970s to figure it out).
NATO adopted what it did at the right times and nobody really got screwed over. European nations used their 1950s equipment until it wore out, then unloaded it on the Africans as military aid then developed indigenous 5.56 rifles around 1980. Not really a setback.
It's not just the rebarreling, it's also to facilitate easy manufacture of already-existing designs. Britain did this with the Enfield and the Bren, Germany did it with the MG3 (and some MG42s), Spain did it with the FR7/FR8, the Italians famously did it with the BM59, and the US did it with the M1919 (as well as the M14).
Converting an existing design, especially one that had seen significant and continuous improvement due to actually being used in warfare, is generally going to produce a better product than a clean-sheet design. This is one of the reasons the FAL lost in the US' rifle trials, by the way (the other is that it's just a bad gun lol).
A war they fought with Brens and No. 4s in .303. And honestly, no, the other ones don't really matter.
They were largely not sovereign nations and forced to do so by Americans due to NATO. I'm sure that e.g. had the Germans been left to their own devices they'd have kept making Stg.44s post war as the rifle's superiority was recognized during the war.
Sure, buddy. Sure. A communist Malaysia is okay, sitting straight on an important trade route and providing oil.
Japanese adopted 6.5mm in 1897.
The Swiss and Spanish were (almost like that's why I mentioned them). The French remain relevant simply because they never adopted 7.62 NATO in any meaningful way until after the FAMAS.
The Czechs are also an interesting case, having fielded a service rifle in 7.62x45 in 1952 (more powerful than the existing 7.62x39 cartridge). So clearly the 'intermediates are the future' case isn't as clear-cut even when you have weapons available to you that are already in intermediate cartridges, but intermediate cartridges are limited in their usefulness if the gun you're using isn't a carbon copy of the StG-44 (the Czechs even had some of these actively lying around that the Soviets used to deniably arm some of its allies in North Africa).
And the StG-44 is a legitimately expensive gun to make especially if you're not well-versed in German space magic- you need magazines (and they need to be completely interchangeable; it's easier to do that with 9mm), the gun itself is more complicated (it needs to fire from a closed bolt to be viable at range), you need to supply it with enough ammunition to work (and you go through more rounds with these than you would with a full-power rifle round), and it's just as heavy as a full-power rifle is. The Czechs would eventually do the vz. 58, which is still a milled gun 15 years after it theoretically could have been made with stampings; Germany was legitimately that far ahead with the technology.
Another interesting example is Yugoslavia; they bought up most of the German surplus and were still actively using StG-44s (and AKs in 8mm Mauser, of all things) into the 1980s to supplement copies of Soviet equipment. Of course, they were and remain a relatively poor part of the world, so that wasn't as much by choice.
There was nothing stopping other countries from fielding two weapons or even to adopt it in the first place if they had sufficient logistics to do something different (or had already adopted something in large numbers re: France- who I will remind you was in possession of the future-HK engineers in charge of the StG-45); the US was doing that themselves (.30 Carbine) in the first place anyway.
So no, I'm not interested in the "stupid burger country intentionally screws up procurement" story. I will happily say that about the XM7 but in that gun's defense the US doesn't have any usable 7.62 NATO small arms in inventory aside from stuff at the end of its service life, so if they're going to switch to a more efficient (and more powerful) cartridge for a rifle and machine gun now is indeed the time.
Which is why I said
for plenty of nations fielded rifles and machine guns in 6.5mm and 7mm (the 6.5mm cartridges all use .264 projectiles, except for the Italians who used .268). The two largest ones that actually used them in combat all dumped them for something in .30 during WW2 for reasons I already stated.
What else was M14 but a bad idea? Why didn't use adopt MG42 in 30-06, which, I recall, was attempted but somehow failed. Intentionality or not, screw-ups in weapons procurement abounded and proliferated ever more so. Today it's more of an exception than the norm for procurement to be basically fine.
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