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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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They were largely not sovereign nations

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.

and forced to do so by Americans due to NATO

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.


Japanese adopted 6.5mm

Which is why I said

or with the .264s

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.

"stupid burger country intentionally screws up procurement" story.

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.