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I think you're still drinking the marketing kool-aid. The ballistics are not that much better than conventional modern cartridges (6 ARC etc.), so the high pressures aren't getting you much more for all those trade-offs. The length doesn't matter much when the gun weighs 15-20 lb. Drop the suppressor to make it "as short as an M4" and the recoil is unmanageable (according to testers). The muzzle blast also gets much higher without the can, and you're envisioning shortening it to clear buildings? Guys' heads are going to pop trying to shoot these indoors with no can and no hearing protection.
I mean, if you're not going to be at all serious about the comparison I'm not sure why I should continue. While I agree that yes, the US would get some mileage out of switching to an intermediate cartridge that's actually well-designed (and 5.56 is really not), we're also not discussing intermediate cartridges.
The high pressures serve one purpose: to get better performance from a shorter barrel.
.308 simply cannot sling 140 grains as fast as 6.8x51 can when both are being fired from 13" barrels. .308 can do that if it has a much longer barrel, sure, but we don't want a long barrel, we want a short barrel (so that we retain the same overall length of the system if we stick a suppressor onto it). In theory, this is an excellent idea; in practice, the rifle is a boat anchor that says SIG on the side.
As far as noise goes... yeah, cutting a .308 gun down to 13" is going to be blasty as fuck too. For recoil, full-power rifle gonna full-power rifle; not sure what they're expecting there (especially if you're running the hottest ammunition where the recoil actually does exceeds what .308 does- I wouldn't want something in .270 Win or .300 Win Mag as my service rifle either, lol).
Enlighten me on the massive performance boost we're getting with this hybrid-case blasty cartridge. You seem to be saying it's basically .308 from a shorter barrel.
Which, fine, but the line doesn't carry .308s. And they're not going to carry something twice as heavy as a 5.56 gun just so they can have .308 performance in a short gun, because soldiers don't need .308 performance in a short gun, we have it in big fuck-off machine guns, DMRs and sniper rifles. You don't WANT .308 performance clearing houses. You don't WANT power and range and penetration when your own guys are clearing the next apartment separated by third-world drywall. You also don't want something the length of an M-16, which turns itself into a flashbang grenade every time you shoot it in the short configuration.
Getting big-boy long range ballistics from a short barrel is not that hard. Thompson/Center was doing it in the seventies. The question is what trade-offs you're getting for that performance, and whether line troops can even use big-boy long range ballistics. All the tech and cartridges and range-finding scopes aren't going to fix bad marksmanship, you still have to be an excellent shot, and the average soldier is never going to be that.
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