A couple people had expressed interest in this topic, and I have a bit of extra time for a couple days, so here goes:
Bona fides: I am a former infantry NCO and sniper, hunter, competitive shooter, reloader, hobby gunsmith, sometimes firearms trainer and currently work in a gun shop, mostly on the paperwork/compliance side. Back in the day, was a qualified expert with every standard small arm in the US inventory circa 2003 (M2, 4, 9, 16, 19, 249, 240B, 21, 24, 82 etc.), and today hang around the 75th percentile of USPSA classifications. I've shot Cap-and-Ball, Trap and Sporting Clays badly; Bullseye and PRS somewhat better and IDPA/USPSA/UML/Two-gun with some local success. Been active in the 2A community since the mid-90s, got my first instructor cert in high school, and have held a CPL for almost twenty years now.
I certainly don't claim to be an expert in every aspect of firearms, there's huge areas that escape my knowledge base, but if you've got questions I'll do my best to answer.
Technical questions
Gun control proposals for feasibility
Industry
Training
Wacky opinions
General geekery
Some competition links (not my own) just for the interested.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=U5IhsWamaLY&t=173
https://youtube.com/watch?v=93nEEINflXE
https://youtube.com/watch?v=utcky0zq10E
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Notes -
Given your military experience and qualifications, what's your take on the NGSW? I'd be interested in knowing your thoughts on the LMG and service rifle aspects of it, as well as your thoughts on the entire program.
Not OP, however I'll offer both steelman and criticism of the M5. I suspect justifications for certain decisions come from a mix of both, but I can't really prove any of this- just what I've picked up.
First, the steelman.
Body armor is something the US Army (and NATO in general) spent the last 20 years learning the value of- soldiers (especially volunteers) are very expensive, and being able to survive anything short of a heavy machine gun cartridge (or explosive) at least once really does change the game.
Due to advances in materials science, that armor has become cheap enough to make that the US fears its enemies being able to do the same thing. And China, on paper at least, has the ability to manufacture that kind of armor in very large quantities, so if the US wants to use military force on a Chinese ally/customer (or more cynically, its own citizens), they want to make sure that what they shoot at stays dead.
The US has no weapon in inventory (short of .50 BMG) that can get through that armor, whose effectiveness is defined by, well, the fact that it stops them all. So if they want to make sure that they can get through that armor into the man wearing it, they need a more powerful cartridge (and suitable projectile), and there's no reason to think the proper loading of .277 Fury can't do that. If it couldn't, I don't believe it would ever have been accepted as a standard cartridge- .308 is already good enough.
Also, yes, weight matters, but it matters a bit less the more mechanized your force is. This may come back to bite them once you run into the situation the Russians found themselves in early last year, but the Americans are arguably unique among military powers in their ability to avoid that.
Is it going to be totally useless if the US lands on Taiwan and it's all urban warfare? Of course it is, but much like the F-35, you have to keep funding new development so that when war does break out you still have enough engineers that remember how to solve the problems the next war brings. All rifles are inherently designed with the last war in mind- and you can't really escape that- but at least committing to buying some interesting ideas in peacetime means you have businesses that can bring new knowledge to bear faster than the enemy, and that's a big deal to the extent that equipment helps win wars.
Next, the criticism.
The US Army always looks to get back to its cultural ideal of high single-shot accuracy even though modern warfare really isn't like that. High desert warfare, where one needs both a rifle for kicking in doors and dealing with PKMs at 800 meters within the span of about 20 seconds, is one of those things that intermediate cartridges inherently don't work as well for (they were optimized for fighting within 100 meters, and capable out to 300) and thus gives certain members of the bureaucracy ammunition to declare the system a failure, and invalidate the reasons for being adopted in the first place.
(Note that the other army currently looking into .277 Fury/6.8x51 is Australia's, whose geography is arguably tailor-made for a round and rifle like this- the fact the PLA is not very far away doesn't hurt. The US army, on the other hand, needs something that isn't just good at defending a whole lot of nothing.)
The M5 has a real problem with this- much of the point of making a round low-recoil is to enable rapid follow-up shots, and you can't really do that with the .277 Fury, especially when you're running the hottest armor-piercing ammunition (this is also arguably a problem with all the .308 stopgap rifles that were adopted mid-2000s to deal with the above problem). Which I suspect is half the reason why they don't even issue that ammunition in general (the other being the expense of the armor-piercing projectiles themselves)- they have the ability to do it, but it's also a bit too much for the rifle to handle so the ammunition they're given is down-loaded somewhat.. Plus, you can't carry as much ammunition for the same weight, so if your supply lines mess up (or your vehicle goes down) you're in more trouble than you otherwise would be.
And it's not like "we haven't fought a real war in 60+ years, and everyone who actually had relevant combat experience in those fights are well into retirement if not dead" isn't something that prevents a good solution from being proactively adopted- we saw this in the lead up to WW1 with rifles designed to kill Afghans and Africans at extreme distances and, in matches against a peer adversary, the rifles had to be longer than the enemy's so that your bayonet would stab them before they stabbed you. And then WW1 was 4 years of proving all of that was completely irrelevant, even though it took them that long to figure out how to make a sub-machine gun.
It's not going to be the next service rifle even though they say it is; but it's also not actually a bad rifle and its developments will likely be important further down the line.
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Wacky opinion time!
I'm quite skeptical of new service guns, just because there's been a new one every year for three decades and a grand total of not one of the goddamned things has replaced our inventory of M4s, 249s and 240s. Some see limited use by high-speed units, some get orders from specops etc.
The most interesting thing about the NGSW system is the optic. The rest is yet more MIC bullshitting and wasting money. All these "new infantry arms" are a boondoggle for arms manufacturers. Billions of dollars to not replace the M16, or to marginally improve some esoteric aspect of the platform. The M5 is not going to be the standard infantry arm of the US military. It's too heavy, the performance isn't a big enough improvement, and there is no way in hell they're going to ditch the 5.56 and 7.62. It might see limited use as a DMR. That's my best guess anyway.
The 249 is the weak link in the three, and replacing that would probably be the easiest, but once again, it needs to match the ammo for the service rifle, which is not going to be 6.8.
The 240 is damn near perfect. The only way you could possibly improve it is to reduce weight.
Understand that the media push around "new service weapons" is a marketing strategy for the civilian market, not the military. SIG is trying to sell a pile of eight-thousand-dollar AR-15s with experimental ammunition that you can't even buy yet, and an optic system that won't be available to civilians for some time and will be probably another eight grand when it is.
What was your opinion on the Textron submission?
I don't really have one. I ignore most of these trials and the media hype that goes with them. It's all marketing.
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