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Recently I had a disagreement with someone in here on the NGSW program and the SIG rifle it's based on. For the uninitiated, this is the Army's newest multibillion dollar boondoggle, rich with corruption and marketing lies. I've been bagging on this system since it was announced years ago, and it has progressed through military testing despite really withering criticism. Many people better qualified than I have articulated the problems with the system both conceptually and in practice. I want to focus on one simple thing that might be easier for non-military/gun people to understand. Weight.
Weight is incredibly important, which is why when I saw that the bare, unloaded weight of the gun was 9.8 lb, I knew it wasn't going to be a general issue weapon. We now know that the whole system in standard configuration weighs about 13.5lb unloaded and somewhere between fifteen and sixteen loaded, depending on ammo. This is with the fancy scope and suppressor, but crucially, not with a flashlight or IR laser device, both of which are standard for line infantry. With all that, we're pushing twenty pounds.
Forget all that extra weight, and just focus on the advertised 9.8 lb a moment. For comparison, the M4 variants most commonly issued now are about 6.5 lb. With sights, lights and lasers, about ten pounds. The old full-length M-16s that they dropped for those M4s weigh 7.5 lb. The gigantic, heavy M1 Garand from ww2 was 9.5, and didn't need any more weight to make it work. The 1903 Springfield, named for the year of its adoption, was 8.6. The last generally issued service weapon to weigh more than the bare NGSW was the french muskets they sent us in the Revolutionary war, and that's only because they were heavier than the British models. The Brown Bess musket from the eighteenth century weighed less than the bare SIG.
Roughly eight to ten pounds is what almost all standard-issue firearms weigh in practice. Any lighter and you add capability, any heavier and the average troop can't lug it.
If we count the actual loaded, serviceable weight of the gun, the last generally issued service weapon to be even close to that heavy was the Macedonian Sarissa pike, at 12-14lb.
If adopted generally, the NGSW would be by a substantial margin the heaviest weapon ever carried by the line in human history. The last infantry to have more weight in their hands were the Roman legions, if we're counting that big-ass shield. On weight alone, this gun is DOA for general issue.
At 80,000 psi for the hottest cartridge, I wonder how much of that weight is intended to paper over the round's recoil.
Even at 13 lbs, I'm calculating free recoil numbers in the vicinity of 13 ft/bs, with a pretty snappy impulse to boot. If the rifle weighed as much as an m4, it'd kick like a .300 win mag.
6.8x51 is functionally identical to 7x57 Mauser, it just only needs 13" of barrel instead of 26" to match it. (Out of longer barrels, it performs like a magnum version of 7x57; Europeans have 7x64, Americans have .270 Winchester[1]).
Really, though, why the fuck is it so heavy? I get that SIG is fucking incompetent because lol P320 (also bendy handguard), but even the early AR-10s don't weigh that much and 80,000 PSI doesn't require that much more barrel. Maybe they're doing the M16A4 thing where they think they need bull barrels because "muh sustained fire and Camp Perry scores" even though that has shit fuck all to do with actual combat? Even the Soviets' Dragunov was lighter than this thing.
I think the obsession with "being an AR-15" holds the MCX (and by extension the Spear) back. AR-15s (and AR-10s) are excellent rifles, and I get that they're kind of outdated now from a manufacturing standpoint because you can't just take your upper receiver straight from the aluminum extruder (SCAR, Bren, QBZ-191?) or plastic mould (ARX-160, G36, Tavor), but if that was the goal then why the fuck are they doing a shitty retrofit? Though, of course, that's SIG's MO (as 'shitty retrofit' is what the P320 is)- don't need to pay for tooling and testing when you can just reuse what you have. Kind of speaks to the politics of the entire Western world in general that they'd select a solution like that.
And I'm not going to pretend that rifle ammunition hasn't been in need of a revolution, and has been overdue for one ever since Dardick invented the Tround. Packing more power into a smaller package is a legitimately useful thing and it's nice that we're doing it now, but I don't think the full-power rifle is where that innovation actually belongs. A hybrid-case 5.7x30mm cartridge that performs like 5.56 with magazines half the size would be transformative: a P90 that performs like an M4, with 60 rounds in the gun? Who wouldn't want that?
[1] Yes, I know that 7x64 isn't just a magnum version of 7x57 and .270, while it ultimately descends from 8 Mauser like 7 Mauser does, uses a slightly different projectile diameter. The comparison still holds.
A lot of it is, frankly, this.
Marksmanship scores are easy to measure, which makes them an attractive KPI.
I'm sympathetic to an American army that spent 20 years fighting in the high desert without an appropriate long-range rifle, and want something to fight at very close range in mud huts before coming out of that village and getting lit up by PKMs from the hillside.
Maybe fighting in a milieu where precision marksmanship could (and usually did, if someone had an ACOG) make a difference allowed that stupid "one shot one kill" meme to re-establish its historic hold over American military doctrine? In all honestly putting an LVPO on the M4s would probably make more difference, which is probably why second-rate Western militaries are doing exactly that. They don't have (or given that this is Western militaries we're talking about, are unwilling to grant) money to spend on a new platform that would be optimal, and that this is the next best thing is, I feel, telling.
Russians have a 12 lb light machinegun.... Supposedly developed after battlefield input as a desirable weapon.
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