..unless the weapon has unsuspected design flaws that'd make it next to useless, and not minor reliability issues, it's definitely a step in the right direction.
Given that any weapon going into service now should be expected to have to be used to kill armored robots, and physics imposes certain constraints there, anything with substantial armor-piercing ability is good.
I'm going to attempt to temper your enthusiasm a bit. While I agree that the rifle is not the wunderwaffe the Army wants it to be and their procurement practices are, in typical bureaucratic fashion, utter garbage, I think this article is overreaching for a clear cut conclusion. It would be nice and easy if the rifle was just terrible and we could dismiss it as another M-14, but I think the reality is not so simple.
Going point by point: the mud test he cites is, as stressed by it's creator, extremely intensive, and should not be taken as a standard measure of reliability. Notably, the HK-416 performs the same as the XM-5 did, but this has not stopped the 416 from being adopted by many of the world's largest armies, including the US Marines (though I admit the USMC plan make the M-17 standard issue is half baked at best). The author also mentions the issue of carcinogenic gas but dismisses it without properly addressing it; alarmingly, this could be interpreted as stating that giving soldiers cancer is worth a marginal increase in reliability. I don't think that was his intention, but the result of cherry picking evidence to over emphasize the rifle's worst qualities.
On the armor piercing capabilities, he acknowledges that defeating level IV plates "unassisted" (which I take to mean with lead core ball ammunition) is not in the spec, so from my perspective we should assume it doesn't exist. Criticizing the Army for saying otherwise is completely fair. A notable issue with citing civilian testing is that civilians do not have access to the high pressure ammunition, which is specified. Every commentator I've seen has raised their eyebrows at the promised 50k PSI (iirc) of this cartridge, so the feasibility is fair game for discussion and criticism. But if that was the author's intent then he should have addressed it directly, instead of deflecting to an Alabamian shooting the civilian loading.
I won't try to rebut issues with the supply chain, I am also concerned about how intertwined the military industrial complex is with the global supply chain (I have a personal conspiracy theory that government support for environmentalism is at least partially driven by a desire to preserve the natural resources of the USA for a potential war... but I digress). Again, the author glosses over a fix in the form of steel penetrators by simply stating that they are also hard to make, but wouldn't they be easier than tungsten? I assume the reason for tungsten he alludes to is because it has better penetration, but is it necessary for the 6.8 cartridge to achieve penetration or is steel sufficient? These are things I think would be worth investigating, but they are glossed over in service of snappy quotes for detractors to cite.
I'm not sure what point he is trying to make about the ballistics. I thought he was trying to say the high pressure as specified isn't possible, but then weakly praises the increased case pressure technology. If his criticism is that this is just higher pressure 7.62, then it's still an improvement. Competition shooters and hunters already benefit from cartridges like 6.5mm Creedmoor, another 7.62 case necked down to a 6mm-class bullet, achieving flatter trajectories with little loss of terminal performance. The even higher pressure of the military spec cartridge should push these benefits further.
The supply chain criticisms for the XM-157 sight are again valid, though I wonder if they also apply to existing sights like Aimpoints. I have never seen any claim that the XM-157 was supposed to be "auto aiming." Those "usable seconds" that the shooter needs to range the target would otherwise be spent wasting one or more shots missing as they walk in their fire, and if those seconds are critical then the shooter can still fire without ranging. The bigger benefit of the sight which is glossed over, in my opinion, is how it integrates the IR laser that every infantryman straps to his rifle anyway, saving space and weight. The rangefinder also has uses in target identification, for reporting positions and calling in fire support. I fail to see many downsides here.
This is a typical watered down hit piece, the same kind of thing that was leveled at the M-16 or the Maxim gun by curmudgeons who fail to see the benefits of technological progress. There are legitimate criticisms of the NGSW program: increased weight while shrinking ammunition capacity, introducing a new cartridge to the supply chain, and yes, terminal effectiveness of the cartridge. Only the latter is addressed here, and poorly. Notably he does not even mention the XM-250 machine gun, which by all accounts is f**king fantastic.
All of that said, I agree the XM-5 will not be the next standard service weapon. I think it has potential though, in a DMR or specialist role. The XM-157 should be mass issued now, and I hope the XM-250 also sees wide adoption, perhaps chambered for 7.62 or 5.56.
Notably, the HK-416 performs the same as the XM-5 did, but this has not stopped the 416 from being adopted by many of the world's largest armies
The 416 is basically an RPK equivalent. It's being adopted by nations that either want to cozy up to Germany and have no state arsenal (France) or want an excuse to replace clapped-out M16s with the same manual of arms (USMC), but most other nations are adopting slightly-overbuilt-for-5.56 can-become-a-light-automatic-rifle-if needed indigenous designs if they have them or modernized ARs if they don't.
Interestingly, it's also kind of junk; the way they did the piston conversion requires they mitigate the fact that the Stoner system is not designed to have force applied in that way; every time it fires, it applies a force to the receiver that isn't supposed to ever be there. SIG's design, as well as some of the East Asian conversions (Chinese and South Korean), mitigate this in a more intelligent way: in fact, the HK 417 (the AR-10 version) needs a steel upper receiver to not be worn out prematurely.
The 416 is actually under-built for 5.56 NATO. Granted, this is a problem the AR has in general- the bolt is undersized for how hot we load 5.56 NATO today (and the 416 is compatible with standard bolts).
This is part of the reason guns like the Bren 2 have significantly thicker bolt lugs- so that you can run the hottest possible ammunition through it (and if you're running a short barrel, loading it that hot is what you have to do to get the fragmentation you're looking for) and it'll never break. Battlefield Vegas' forum posts on Arfcom have nothing but praise for the SCAR-L's durability (another gun with a much beefier bolt), and if you're a small military force that wants your rifles to last a long time because your government really doesn't like the fact the military exists at all having what are essentially forever-rifles that can still do some light but sustained automatic fire it's a wise idea to sell them on the slightly-overbuilt models to avoid having to ask said government for money for new parts later.
What kind of stress does the receiver undergo here?
The Stoner design originally expects that driving force to come from the center of the BCG, so when that force is applied the carrier does not tilt into contact with the receiver (while there probably is some effect based on the gas key it's also going to be minimal relative to everything else).
Better piston conversions, like the SIG MCX (and derivatives; all AR-18s and most AKs do this too), have a steel guide rod in the upper that the bolt assembly rides on, so while there's still going to be a torque generated it's kept in line by a material that's far more resistant to wear.
The 416 (along with most of the early piston conversions) just blank off the gas key with no other modifications, so when the piston contacts the carrier to force it backwards, it also imparts a counterclockwise moment (view the gun from the side with the muzzle pointing to the right) about that blanked-off gas key (the fit isn't perfect; there's a bit of space between the receiver body and the carrier). The net effect of this is that normal use drives the bottom-rear of the carrier into contact with the receiver and wears on it over time if steps aren't taken to mitigate this (to their credit HK's BCG is tapered there, but they wouldn't have to taper it if they did more than just the bare minimum).
H&K making big bank on a gun that's not really that stellar and maybe even flawed
It's probably worth noting the context: the memes about AR-15s when the 416 was created were that standard "direct impingement" (even though it really isn't) were unreliable guns because "shits where it eats" with a side of "muh Vietnam". The AR was never not an excellent rifle, and I think the 416's success is mainly due to that and succeeded despite "fixing" a problem that didn't actually need fixing.
Ah, didn't know about all that, thank you. I think it's only relatively-recently that people have realized that the AR-15 might be the closest thing to a Platonic Ideal of firearms, though there are probably good reasons why First-World nations are adopting all new rifles that use more proprietary short-stroke systems (when they're not buying 416s), as you note.
there are probably good reasons why First-World nations are adopting all new rifles that use more proprietary short-stroke systems
It all ultimately comes down to unit cost.
Contrary to what US market prices might have you believe (and the worst import laws in the world help keep foreign gun prices high), AR-15s are one of the most expensive modern rifles to make- they require more machine time and labor than any other modern rifle. Sure, forging helps get the rough shape right and saves a good chunk of process time, but you still spend a lot of time drilling and tapping holes and milling into that final shape and that gets expensive fast.
Every modern rifle is made this way. They're not nearly as outwardly blatant about it as the Bushmaster M17s is, but aluminum and plastic extrusions require vanishingly little post-processing time: the tubes need to be cut to length and have a few holes cut into them, and the plastic lower assembly needs nothing else (if it needs to be made in 2 halves, like the KE15 does, it can be automatically welded closed). Install the other parts (doesn't require trained labor, even for the barrels most of the time) and the gun's out the door. The upper half doesn't even need to be aluminum if you're smart about it (Beretta was, HK was not) which means even less cost and weight (for the cost of significantly less sustained fire capability and slightly less durability, like the AR).
So why's the AR not made that way too? Because you can't make an AR any other way without losing its unique advantages. The BCG and buffer has to sit where it does mainly for balance reasons- all piston guns except for the AR are front-heavy, and because they usually pack on a pound and a half for reasons related to that aluminum extrusion the balance is worse than a similarly-equipped AR. The Perun X16 is a really good try, but I think most reviewers are confusing more weight with better overall handling. This isn't even something the KE15/WWSD solves, being that it requires more reinforcement material because the stock and lower are one unit and, if you're not using the thinnest barrel and lightest forend you can manage, compromises the balance just the same.
Every commentator I've seen has raised their eyebrows at the promised 50k PSI (iirc) of this cartridge
It's 80,000 PSI. The upshot of this is that this pressure is above the failure point of brass casings; that's why the head has to be stainless steel. This also isn't new technology; Shellshock has been selling this exact thing for the last 5 years in their pistol cartridges at a price point that indicates it's actually quite a bit cheaper than brass is to make. You can even reload it, too, you just need to modify the sizing die so you don't rip the base off when trying to extract the case.
Most of the "but muh feasibility" people are the reason gun owners have the reputation for intellectual curiosity that they do. Even rifles produced 80 years ago and designed only to take 60,000 PSI are still capable of not turning into bombs at twice that pressure; making modern metallurgy take 10% more pressure on the regular is not a difficult challenge.
Barrel life is also not likely to be the issue people think it is, partly because they're using better steel and coatings, but also because of projectile choice. The tradeoff you make with the extremely long projectiles that 6.5CM in particular is famous for (and how it gets most of its performance at extreme distances) is that the projectile's bearing surface gets quite large- contributing to accelerated wear.
On the armor piercing capabilities, he acknowledges that defeating level IV plates "unassisted" (which I take to mean with lead core ball ammunition) is not in the spec, so from my perspective we should assume it doesn't exist.
But if it can't defeat Level IV with assistance (as in, the AP cartridge that nobody outside of the military has been able to take a look at yet), then what the fuck was the point of switching cartridges? The thing to remember is that .308 and 5.56 AP also fails to penetrate (if the armor can't stop that it's not Level IV), but outside of that its wounding potential is higher, the rifles that fire it last longer (and already exist), and it has more room inside the cartridge for incendiary material.
(The article is simply wrong on this point- .308 AP and 5.56 AP, despite their name, do not penetrate Level IV, and Level IV is what the US/Aus military is worried about a mass of Chinese troops showing up wearing. They were certain the Russians would have had it too but, well...)
I refuse to believe the US Army (and the Australian Army, for that matter- they're also considering adopting a rifle in this caliber) is that stupid. Sure, there's always a chance that they want to go back to muh One Shot One Kill and fighting the last war (where they wanted a rifle that could perform from 0.8m to 800m, hence their use of the SCAR and re-issuance of the M14, and a usecase where the LVPO XM157 has a tremendous advantage- this isn't the XM25 where you had to lase the target for it to work, it's a scope first, manual rangefinder second).
I have a personal conspiracy theory that government support for environmentalism is at least partially driven by a desire to preserve the natural resources of the USA for a potential war... but I digress
They should have waited for Textron's all-plastic casings. I remember it being mentioned that they might run out of brass, which is already an expensive material to make functionally one-time-use casings out of. Being able to extrude the casing is the future of ammunition (just as it was back in the 1950s with the Dardick Tround- the ammunition was solid, the gun was crap), we just haven't managed to develop a good rifle for it.
They should have waited for Textron's all-plastic casings.
That was my thought as well. Prior to the XM-5 announcement I expected the competition to come down to either the Textron or General dynamics options. My assesment was that while Textron's design was clearly the most innovative, GD's plastic cased ammo basically delivering 7.62 NATO performance at a fraction of the weight while being backwards compatible with existing platforms (after a barrel swap) might get chosen as the "safe bet".
Agree on all accounts. There is so much we still don't know, especially about the cartridges. The Army could be hiding this information because it's embarrassing... or that could be SOP. I don't have the experience to say, and I doubt many of the detractors do.
I wonder, if one looked at everything the Army ever adopted and counted up the number of items with performance claims that turned out to be false, how many times it actually happened. People point to failed programs saying "look at all the stupid stuff they tried to make!" but the vast majority failed before adoption... which is how the system is supposed to work! And don't even mention The Pentagon Wars, that book is full of stupidity and lies.
I remember reading discussions on the plastic ammunition before the NGSW was awarded. Some (most?) of the commentators had the Sig entry in distant third because it was barely any different than existing platforms and we're talking up the supply chain benefits of the GD and Textron entries. Honestly, the seethe when Sig won was pretty funny. I take it to mean that the other systems just didn't work very well. At least True Velocity is continuing to develop their ammunition, so maybe even.277 Fury will come in plastic someday.
Nice reference on the Trounds too, the Dardick makes a lot more sense when you look at it as a platform for the Trounds instead of a serious pistol design. I think they also had an auto cannon design that used the Trounds to achieve some ungodly fire rate.
I remember reading about it, and the dual cartridge system was the selling point.
You can use normal ammo shooting fleshy enemies, but if you meet something harder to, but the gun can also use the very hot rounds that probably would also cause durability issues.
Guns with very high muzzle velocities or just very big guns often last only cca several hundred rounds before a barrel swap is required.
1930s Polish anti-tank rifle (guys should have just used .50 BMG) with a muzzle velocity of 1275 m/s had a barrel life of just ~300 rounds or so.
Remember that the original .50 Browning cartridge was an armor peircing incendiary round intended for anti-vehicular work, it was only after the US being the US started slapping M2s on everything that someone suggested that making a simple FMJ "ball" variant of the cartridge might be a wise economical choice.
The Army could be hiding this information because it's embarrassing... or that could be SOP
Well, there's no actual upside to publicizing what they actually have. Either it does, and now the enemy knows it does and will beef up their armor that last little bit in response so now their competitive advantage is gone... or it won't, and the enemy knows it doesn't (and that would indeed be embarrassing).
However, I will point out that if a military organization has any brains, they've already tested this. A standard .270WSM rifle with a proper AP projectile will (even at performance levels currently public) outperform 6.8x51 with that same projectile, so if that can't penetrate Level IV armor 6.8x51 almost certainly can't either.
I take it to mean that the other systems just didn't work very well.
There are also a couple of other considerations. The Army tends to be quite conservative in procurement, and the SIG rifle is the closest thing to the M16 (everything else was completely alien in terms of manual of arms, and on top of that the Textron one had a completely different operating mechanism since ejection on that has to be push-through). So, a platform based on the M4 has a massive leg up- they really don't want to retrain everyone, and "the new rifle is an M16, but bigger and with some additional niceties" accomplishes that goal.
On the other side of the coin, the GD rifle would require substantial retraining. It was probably much cheaper to make (given it's 100% extruded aluminum and plastic with very little secondary machining required) in bulk but would have taken a lot of work and bullpups slightly compromise the range of things you can do with the rifle (it's better on a static range when you're not taking weird positions on the ground, but there are some things you really can't do as well, like changing magazines while prone).
Also, the TrueVelocity/GD/Beretta system didn't really measure up in terms of performance- the ammunition wasn't loaded nearly as hot (despite its advanced construction, they could have changed the case material to normal brass with no loss in ballistic performance) and as such needed a longer barrel to compete with SIG's rifle. It was also slightly more complex mechanically and I suspect had a fundamentally-unsolvable heat issue after multiple magazines of fully-automatic fire, much like the Bushmaster M17s (with its all-aluminum construction) does. Yes, the polymer case solves heat at the chamber, but doesn't reduce it at the gas block, and because the gas block is under the handguard it's going to heat that area- this is why the British L85's handguard is made of plastic.
(Aside: I'm aware that there's very little actually documented about how their rifle actually works- I choose to interpret what's written as it being a standard AR-18-derived design, but the entire bolt/barrel assembly is housed within a carriage that moves back and forth so the recoil impulse is less. At least one of SIG's prototypes had a similar system, if I recall correctly.)
I think they also had an auto cannon design that used the Trounds to achieve some ungodly fire rate.
Yeah, the rotating drum "revolver" cannon was honestly pretty cool. I would never have though Plexiglas could be a suitable material for that job, but then again I also didn't think that of MDPE/HDPE (the material the early Trounds were made of- Celanese Fortiflex- isn't special or exotic in any way).
I still believe there is a valid place for Trounds, though. If armor's so good now that it requires multiple hits in the same place in rapid succession to defeat (and ceramic armor is still defeated by normal 6.8x51 in this way)... well, a high speed small caliber burst could conceivably be the solution, and the Wankel Dardick action is known for extremely high RPM with very little complication (unlike the G11 where the solution to malfunctions is "throw the internal mechanism away and get a new one").
As such, I think the answer is a rifle with the rotary action that Trounds enable as well as a helical magazine, with the action and magazine riding on G11-style rails such that any recoil impulse isn't transmitted until the end of the burst. It'll have a lot in common aesthetically with the M1216 shotgun, with a magazine capacity close to 90 rounds, firing a burst of slightly beefed-up 5.56 equivalent at a rate sufficient to put every round into the same ceramic square of the enemy's armor. In this way, you still have 30 trigger pulls before reloading (though this would make magazines quite a bit longer) without fundamentally disrupting the hangup the US in particular has embedded in its culture of "one shot one kill single well-placed shot" marksmanship. Recoil's going to be heavy, but 6.8x51 already has that problem anyway.
I still believe there is a valid place for Trounds, though. If armor's so good now that it requires multiple hits in the same place in rapid succession to defeat
All this talk is as funny as guys talking about ultra-modern tank cannons with even higher muzzle velocities that could penetrate 1.2m of RHA, but what's the point of that when a drone or prone, camouflaged infantry man or just a housecat with the right cybernetic implant relaying fire control information over a laser link can cause a howitzer 12 km away to drop a round into a circle of +-3m around the tank's center.
Good luck defending against that - APS may help somewhat, but the cost is probably the same as a howitzer shell, and tanks usually have like 8 at most, which means after that you're shit out of luck and the tank is scrap metal.
Personal body armor is now so incredibly good that the traditional final boss of anti-personnel armor piercing rounds, .30-06 M2AP, cannot penetrate it with a single hit. I'm relatively certain even .338LM's AP loadings can't get through either, and they can even stop non-AP .50 BMG rounds at sufficient distances (the actual AP stuff will still beat it). When the individual soldier's armor is shrugging off rounds designed to defeat light vehicles, and that armor is available to any industrialized nation at 200USD a plate I would very much agree that any military ignoring this is criminally negligent. Western militaries have all had the first-hand experience of their expensively-trained soldiers not dying is a big deal.
This armor is generally made of ceramic or plastic cells, where even if one cell is damaged it won't stop the other cells from stopping more incoming fire. So at that point, you either beef up your fighting rifle and cartridge to the point you can reliably get through that armor, or you fire more than one round in a burst that's fast enough to score a hit on the same cell of armor, defeating it.
The first approach is not a good one. More powerful rounds are heavier and larger, meaning the individual soldier can't carry as many- a problem once you've spent your entire load of 80 rounds and now you have no ammunition with which to close with and destroy the enemy- and they recoil a lot more so the weight of the gun has to be higher and affordances have to be made not to beat the soldier up too badly. Oh, and at that point your enemy then figures out that they might as well not wear armor if it's not going to protect them anyway (the norm for most conflict involving firearms) so you have these overpowered rifles that can barely keep a sustained rate of fire above that of a WW1-era bolt action rifle.
So we come to the second approach, which has comparatively few downsides. If the enemy decides not to issue armor after all (like Russian forces in Ukraine), you're not caught with some overpowered undersupplied monster rifle, it's still useful when it comes to suppressing fire (even if they know those rounds won't penetrate their armor they're still not sticking their heads into the incoming fire to find out!) because you didn't cut your individual soldier's ammunition supply by 3/4ths, and so on. It still depends on armor being defeatable in this way, and the individual soldier needs to be on target before they fire since it won't fix that, but we know that 6.8x51 at its public power level will still get through today's super-tough armor if you hit the same cell enough times- and there's only one known action that lets you feed/fire more than one round that physically big that fast.
Good points, in context of small arms, burst fire does make a good amount of sense.
Also, I'm suspecting there's a lot of things that haven't been tried. HEAT is probably not the best idea on account of the target being some sort of ceramic, but APDS would probably fit the bill nicely, as I imagine the plates themselves, when penetrated, do cause spalling, right ? APDS in tanks greatly increases penetration.
When the individual soldier's armor is shrugging off rounds designed to defeat light vehicles, and that armor is available to any industrialized nation at 200USD a plate
A plate. Which means, unless the guy is hit once or twice straight into a plate, he's just somewhat less likely to die. Which is very nice for the soldiers, but not really a gamechanger, as artillery is the bigger killer, and if they're shot at comprehensively, just as dead as an unarmored one.
Yet making a practical suit of armor that'd actually render the soldiers largely bulletproof to small arms, etc would still be prohibitively heavy, so you'd need either powered exoskeletons or bodybuilders and some cooling system.
APDS in small arms has been tried before. The major problem with it is that a long, skinny dart doesn't have very good killing power- it isn't carrying very much kinetic energy and due to its nature of being a long, skinny dart has a very hard time actually dumping that energy into the target. Other problems include requiring much more precision in manufacture to fly straight and the sabots have a tendency upon separation to bounce off the ground at Mach 4 and injure squadmates (a problem noted in the SPIW trials).
If I recall correctly, exploding ammunition for small arms has some laws of war constraining its use. It's quite trivial to make an explosive 30-caliber projectile (InRange has a few videos about this, with both German and Russian examples used in WW2), but your accuracy suffers a bit unless you make the projectile correctly and the cost per round from both a pure BOM and manufacturing cost perspective increases significantly.
Which means, unless the guy is hit once or twice straight into a plate, he's just somewhat less likely to die.
He's significantly less likely to die. He's also much more likely to remain combat effective after taking a hit, which means that even if you end up causing eventual fatal injury to someone wearing this he's still probably going to be able to shoot back.
And while I agree that artillery is going to shred you no matter what armor you're wearing, that's not as effective when your enemy is either dug in (which a peer army could and would do) or irregular (in the case of civil war).
that's not as effective when your enemy is either dug in (
... I don't mean artillery of the kind the Taliban are using - a few rusty 120 mm mortars with a few shells, but the kind actual armies use.
You've heard the stories out of the Ukraine, or seen the pictures, right ? With accurate artillery fire, unless you have a deep shelter several meters under the ground, you're pretty much dead.
Perhaps the next step would be some sort of dead-zone generation tech that nullifies remote weaponry. Hard to say what that could be, though: StingRays on steroids, Gap generators, Minovsky particles?
Even in a helical mag 90 rounds is going to be... Well maybe you could come up with a clever way to multi stack Trounds and make them telescoped, but that is still going to be a chunky mag. Sounds badass though.
People point to failed programs saying "look at all the stupid stuff they tried to make!" but the vast majority failed before adoption... which is how the system is supposed to work!
I don't have the link on hand, but imagine I linked to that post about the US military testing to failure here.
I do have to wonder, does the US military produce more procurement boondoggles than other nations on average/per capita? Are we just so materially-rich that we can afford to try stupid shit, whereas any other nation would really have to save up to even think of replacing anything?
Right now I'm watching my town's snowplows spread salt before it RAINS. And the core reason they're doing it is because we got no snow this year, so they need to use up some of their salt supply to keep the supplier contract in place. Maybe somebody's brother in law, maybe rational inventory management within bureaucratic restraints.
The military works the same way, plus a bit of extra corruption. They need to produce stuff all the time to keep the industry humming for when they need something.
I would appreciate if you could find that post, I don't think I've read it.
I do have to wonder, does the US military produce more procurement boondoggles than other nations on average/per capita?
My gut feeling is that it is partially true. There are almost certainly more boondoggles in other countries that we don't hear about because they aren't as open as the USA and they don't get the same media attention.
However, the US military is terrified not of their adversaries technologically surpassing them, but of them merely closing the gap. All of US strategy relies on overmatch, the theory that you don't just outperform your enemies, you can totally crush them if desired. In the situation where your advancement is plateauing, the bad guys are rapidly catching up, and you're at a severe disadvantage in manpower but you're flush with money and brain power, why not throw everything at the wall and see what sticks?
My Friendly Local Gun Shop still has its M17 propaganda posters up. Funny how those never materialized for the NGSW family. Who'd have thought a 9mm would have a wider audience than a multi-thousand-dollar battle rifle?
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Notes -
..unless the weapon has unsuspected design flaws that'd make it next to useless, and not minor reliability issues, it's definitely a step in the right direction.
Given that any weapon going into service now should be expected to have to be used to kill armored robots, and physics imposes certain constraints there, anything with substantial armor-piercing ability is good.
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I'm going to attempt to temper your enthusiasm a bit. While I agree that the rifle is not the wunderwaffe the Army wants it to be and their procurement practices are, in typical bureaucratic fashion, utter garbage, I think this article is overreaching for a clear cut conclusion. It would be nice and easy if the rifle was just terrible and we could dismiss it as another M-14, but I think the reality is not so simple.
Going point by point: the mud test he cites is, as stressed by it's creator, extremely intensive, and should not be taken as a standard measure of reliability. Notably, the HK-416 performs the same as the XM-5 did, but this has not stopped the 416 from being adopted by many of the world's largest armies, including the US Marines (though I admit the USMC plan make the M-17 standard issue is half baked at best). The author also mentions the issue of carcinogenic gas but dismisses it without properly addressing it; alarmingly, this could be interpreted as stating that giving soldiers cancer is worth a marginal increase in reliability. I don't think that was his intention, but the result of cherry picking evidence to over emphasize the rifle's worst qualities.
On the armor piercing capabilities, he acknowledges that defeating level IV plates "unassisted" (which I take to mean with lead core ball ammunition) is not in the spec, so from my perspective we should assume it doesn't exist. Criticizing the Army for saying otherwise is completely fair. A notable issue with citing civilian testing is that civilians do not have access to the high pressure ammunition, which is specified. Every commentator I've seen has raised their eyebrows at the promised 50k PSI (iirc) of this cartridge, so the feasibility is fair game for discussion and criticism. But if that was the author's intent then he should have addressed it directly, instead of deflecting to an Alabamian shooting the civilian loading.
I won't try to rebut issues with the supply chain, I am also concerned about how intertwined the military industrial complex is with the global supply chain (I have a personal conspiracy theory that government support for environmentalism is at least partially driven by a desire to preserve the natural resources of the USA for a potential war... but I digress). Again, the author glosses over a fix in the form of steel penetrators by simply stating that they are also hard to make, but wouldn't they be easier than tungsten? I assume the reason for tungsten he alludes to is because it has better penetration, but is it necessary for the 6.8 cartridge to achieve penetration or is steel sufficient? These are things I think would be worth investigating, but they are glossed over in service of snappy quotes for detractors to cite.
I'm not sure what point he is trying to make about the ballistics. I thought he was trying to say the high pressure as specified isn't possible, but then weakly praises the increased case pressure technology. If his criticism is that this is just higher pressure 7.62, then it's still an improvement. Competition shooters and hunters already benefit from cartridges like 6.5mm Creedmoor, another 7.62 case necked down to a 6mm-class bullet, achieving flatter trajectories with little loss of terminal performance. The even higher pressure of the military spec cartridge should push these benefits further.
The supply chain criticisms for the XM-157 sight are again valid, though I wonder if they also apply to existing sights like Aimpoints. I have never seen any claim that the XM-157 was supposed to be "auto aiming." Those "usable seconds" that the shooter needs to range the target would otherwise be spent wasting one or more shots missing as they walk in their fire, and if those seconds are critical then the shooter can still fire without ranging. The bigger benefit of the sight which is glossed over, in my opinion, is how it integrates the IR laser that every infantryman straps to his rifle anyway, saving space and weight. The rangefinder also has uses in target identification, for reporting positions and calling in fire support. I fail to see many downsides here.
This is a typical watered down hit piece, the same kind of thing that was leveled at the M-16 or the Maxim gun by curmudgeons who fail to see the benefits of technological progress. There are legitimate criticisms of the NGSW program: increased weight while shrinking ammunition capacity, introducing a new cartridge to the supply chain, and yes, terminal effectiveness of the cartridge. Only the latter is addressed here, and poorly. Notably he does not even mention the XM-250 machine gun, which by all accounts is f**king fantastic.
All of that said, I agree the XM-5 will not be the next standard service weapon. I think it has potential though, in a DMR or specialist role. The XM-157 should be mass issued now, and I hope the XM-250 also sees wide adoption, perhaps chambered for 7.62 or 5.56.
Edit: I do like the memes though https://ifunny.co/picture/bApDQZJa9
The 416 is basically an RPK equivalent. It's being adopted by nations that either want to cozy up to Germany and have no state arsenal (France) or want an excuse to replace clapped-out M16s with the same manual of arms (USMC), but most other nations are adopting slightly-overbuilt-for-5.56 can-become-a-light-automatic-rifle-if needed indigenous designs if they have them or modernized ARs if they don't.
Interestingly, it's also kind of junk; the way they did the piston conversion requires they mitigate the fact that the Stoner system is not designed to have force applied in that way; every time it fires, it applies a force to the receiver that isn't supposed to ever be there. SIG's design, as well as some of the East Asian conversions (Chinese and South Korean), mitigate this in a more intelligent way: in fact, the HK 417 (the AR-10 version) needs a steel upper receiver to not be worn out prematurely.
So the 416 is overbuilt for 5.56 NATO, but underbuilt for an AR? What kind of stress does the receiver undergo here? Is the 416 overgassed?
Though, yes, "H&K making big bank on a gun that's not really that stellar and maybe even flawed" is nothing new.
The 416 is actually under-built for 5.56 NATO. Granted, this is a problem the AR has in general- the bolt is undersized for how hot we load 5.56 NATO today (and the 416 is compatible with standard bolts).
This is part of the reason guns like the Bren 2 have significantly thicker bolt lugs- so that you can run the hottest possible ammunition through it (and if you're running a short barrel, loading it that hot is what you have to do to get the fragmentation you're looking for) and it'll never break. Battlefield Vegas' forum posts on Arfcom have nothing but praise for the SCAR-L's durability (another gun with a much beefier bolt), and if you're a small military force that wants your rifles to last a long time because your government really doesn't like the fact the military exists at all having what are essentially forever-rifles that can still do some light but sustained automatic fire it's a wise idea to sell them on the slightly-overbuilt models to avoid having to ask said government for money for new parts later.
The Stoner design originally expects that driving force to come from the center of the BCG, so when that force is applied the carrier does not tilt into contact with the receiver (while there probably is some effect based on the gas key it's also going to be minimal relative to everything else).
Better piston conversions, like the SIG MCX (and derivatives; all AR-18s and most AKs do this too), have a steel guide rod in the upper that the bolt assembly rides on, so while there's still going to be a torque generated it's kept in line by a material that's far more resistant to wear.
The 416 (along with most of the early piston conversions) just blank off the gas key with no other modifications, so when the piston contacts the carrier to force it backwards, it also imparts a counterclockwise moment (view the gun from the side with the muzzle pointing to the right) about that blanked-off gas key (the fit isn't perfect; there's a bit of space between the receiver body and the carrier). The net effect of this is that normal use drives the bottom-rear of the carrier into contact with the receiver and wears on it over time if steps aren't taken to mitigate this (to their credit HK's BCG is tapered there, but they wouldn't have to taper it if they did more than just the bare minimum).
It's probably worth noting the context: the memes about AR-15s when the 416 was created were that standard "direct impingement" (even though it really isn't) were unreliable guns because "shits where it eats" with a side of "muh Vietnam". The AR was never not an excellent rifle, and I think the 416's success is mainly due to that and succeeded despite "fixing" a problem that didn't actually need fixing.
Ah, didn't know about all that, thank you. I think it's only relatively-recently that people have realized that the AR-15 might be the closest thing to a Platonic Ideal of firearms, though there are probably good reasons why First-World nations are adopting all new rifles that use more proprietary short-stroke systems (when they're not buying 416s), as you note.
It all ultimately comes down to unit cost.
Contrary to what US market prices might have you believe (and the worst import laws in the world help keep foreign gun prices high), AR-15s are one of the most expensive modern rifles to make- they require more machine time and labor than any other modern rifle. Sure, forging helps get the rough shape right and saves a good chunk of process time, but you still spend a lot of time drilling and tapping holes and milling into that final shape and that gets expensive fast.
You know what's dirt cheap by contrast? Aluminum and plastic extrusions.
Every modern rifle is made this way. They're not nearly as outwardly blatant about it as the Bushmaster M17s is, but aluminum and plastic extrusions require vanishingly little post-processing time: the tubes need to be cut to length and have a few holes cut into them, and the plastic lower assembly needs nothing else (if it needs to be made in 2 halves, like the KE15 does, it can be automatically welded closed). Install the other parts (doesn't require trained labor, even for the barrels most of the time) and the gun's out the door. The upper half doesn't even need to be aluminum if you're smart about it (Beretta was, HK was not) which means even less cost and weight (for the cost of significantly less sustained fire capability and slightly less durability, like the AR).
So why's the AR not made that way too? Because you can't make an AR any other way without losing its unique advantages. The BCG and buffer has to sit where it does mainly for balance reasons- all piston guns except for the AR are front-heavy, and because they usually pack on a pound and a half for reasons related to that aluminum extrusion the balance is worse than a similarly-equipped AR. The Perun X16 is a really good try, but I think most reviewers are confusing more weight with better overall handling. This isn't even something the KE15/WWSD solves, being that it requires more reinforcement material because the stock and lower are one unit and, if you're not using the thinnest barrel and lightest forend you can manage, compromises the balance just the same.
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It's 80,000 PSI. The upshot of this is that this pressure is above the failure point of brass casings; that's why the head has to be stainless steel. This also isn't new technology; Shellshock has been selling this exact thing for the last 5 years in their pistol cartridges at a price point that indicates it's actually quite a bit cheaper than brass is to make. You can even reload it, too, you just need to modify the sizing die so you don't rip the base off when trying to extract the case.
Most of the "but muh feasibility" people are the reason gun owners have the reputation for intellectual curiosity that they do. Even rifles produced 80 years ago and designed only to take 60,000 PSI are still capable of not turning into bombs at twice that pressure; making modern metallurgy take 10% more pressure on the regular is not a difficult challenge.
Barrel life is also not likely to be the issue people think it is, partly because they're using better steel and coatings, but also because of projectile choice. The tradeoff you make with the extremely long projectiles that 6.5CM in particular is famous for (and how it gets most of its performance at extreme distances) is that the projectile's bearing surface gets quite large- contributing to accelerated wear.
But if it can't defeat Level IV with assistance (as in, the AP cartridge that nobody outside of the military has been able to take a look at yet), then what the fuck was the point of switching cartridges? The thing to remember is that .308 and 5.56 AP also fails to penetrate (if the armor can't stop that it's not Level IV), but outside of that its wounding potential is higher, the rifles that fire it last longer (and already exist), and it has more room inside the cartridge for incendiary material.
(The article is simply wrong on this point- .308 AP and 5.56 AP, despite their name, do not penetrate Level IV, and Level IV is what the US/Aus military is worried about a mass of Chinese troops showing up wearing. They were certain the Russians would have had it too but, well...)
I refuse to believe the US Army (and the Australian Army, for that matter- they're also considering adopting a rifle in this caliber) is that stupid. Sure, there's always a chance that they want to go back to muh One Shot One Kill and fighting the last war (where they wanted a rifle that could perform from 0.8m to 800m, hence their use of the SCAR and re-issuance of the M14, and a usecase where the LVPO XM157 has a tremendous advantage- this isn't the XM25 where you had to lase the target for it to work, it's a scope first, manual rangefinder second).
They should have waited for Textron's all-plastic casings. I remember it being mentioned that they might run out of brass, which is already an expensive material to make functionally one-time-use casings out of. Being able to extrude the casing is the future of ammunition (just as it was back in the 1950s with the Dardick Tround- the ammunition was solid, the gun was crap), we just haven't managed to develop a good rifle for it.
That was my thought as well. Prior to the XM-5 announcement I expected the competition to come down to either the Textron or General dynamics options. My assesment was that while Textron's design was clearly the most innovative, GD's plastic cased ammo basically delivering 7.62 NATO performance at a fraction of the weight while being backwards compatible with existing platforms (after a barrel swap) might get chosen as the "safe bet".
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Agree on all accounts. There is so much we still don't know, especially about the cartridges. The Army could be hiding this information because it's embarrassing... or that could be SOP. I don't have the experience to say, and I doubt many of the detractors do.
I wonder, if one looked at everything the Army ever adopted and counted up the number of items with performance claims that turned out to be false, how many times it actually happened. People point to failed programs saying "look at all the stupid stuff they tried to make!" but the vast majority failed before adoption... which is how the system is supposed to work! And don't even mention The Pentagon Wars, that book is full of stupidity and lies.
I remember reading discussions on the plastic ammunition before the NGSW was awarded. Some (most?) of the commentators had the Sig entry in distant third because it was barely any different than existing platforms and we're talking up the supply chain benefits of the GD and Textron entries. Honestly, the seethe when Sig won was pretty funny. I take it to mean that the other systems just didn't work very well. At least True Velocity is continuing to develop their ammunition, so maybe even.277 Fury will come in plastic someday.
Nice reference on the Trounds too, the Dardick makes a lot more sense when you look at it as a platform for the Trounds instead of a serious pistol design. I think they also had an auto cannon design that used the Trounds to achieve some ungodly fire rate.
...don't know.
I remember reading about it, and the dual cartridge system was the selling point.
You can use normal ammo shooting fleshy enemies, but if you meet something harder to, but the gun can also use the very hot rounds that probably would also cause durability issues.
Guns with very high muzzle velocities or just very big guns often last only cca several hundred rounds before a barrel swap is required.
1930s Polish anti-tank rifle (guys should have just used .50 BMG) with a muzzle velocity of 1275 m/s had a barrel life of just ~300 rounds or so.
Remember that the original .50 Browning cartridge was an armor peircing incendiary round intended for anti-vehicular work, it was only after the US being the US started slapping M2s on everything that someone suggested that making a simple FMJ "ball" variant of the cartridge might be a wise economical choice.
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Well, there's no actual upside to publicizing what they actually have. Either it does, and now the enemy knows it does and will beef up their armor that last little bit in response so now their competitive advantage is gone... or it won't, and the enemy knows it doesn't (and that would indeed be embarrassing).
However, I will point out that if a military organization has any brains, they've already tested this. A standard .270WSM rifle with a proper AP projectile will (even at performance levels currently public) outperform 6.8x51 with that same projectile, so if that can't penetrate Level IV armor 6.8x51 almost certainly can't either.
There are also a couple of other considerations. The Army tends to be quite conservative in procurement, and the SIG rifle is the closest thing to the M16 (everything else was completely alien in terms of manual of arms, and on top of that the Textron one had a completely different operating mechanism since ejection on that has to be push-through). So, a platform based on the M4 has a massive leg up- they really don't want to retrain everyone, and "the new rifle is an M16, but bigger and with some additional niceties" accomplishes that goal.
On the other side of the coin, the GD rifle would require substantial retraining. It was probably much cheaper to make (given it's 100% extruded aluminum and plastic with very little secondary machining required) in bulk but would have taken a lot of work and bullpups slightly compromise the range of things you can do with the rifle (it's better on a static range when you're not taking weird positions on the ground, but there are some things you really can't do as well, like changing magazines while prone).
Also, the TrueVelocity/GD/Beretta system didn't really measure up in terms of performance- the ammunition wasn't loaded nearly as hot (despite its advanced construction, they could have changed the case material to normal brass with no loss in ballistic performance) and as such needed a longer barrel to compete with SIG's rifle. It was also slightly more complex mechanically and I suspect had a fundamentally-unsolvable heat issue after multiple magazines of fully-automatic fire, much like the Bushmaster M17s (with its all-aluminum construction) does. Yes, the polymer case solves heat at the chamber, but doesn't reduce it at the gas block, and because the gas block is under the handguard it's going to heat that area- this is why the British L85's handguard is made of plastic.
(Aside: I'm aware that there's very little actually documented about how their rifle actually works- I choose to interpret what's written as it being a standard AR-18-derived design, but the entire bolt/barrel assembly is housed within a carriage that moves back and forth so the recoil impulse is less. At least one of SIG's prototypes had a similar system, if I recall correctly.)
Yeah, the rotating drum "revolver" cannon was honestly pretty cool. I would never have though Plexiglas could be a suitable material for that job, but then again I also didn't think that of MDPE/HDPE (the material the early Trounds were made of- Celanese Fortiflex- isn't special or exotic in any way).
I still believe there is a valid place for Trounds, though. If armor's so good now that it requires multiple hits in the same place in rapid succession to defeat (and ceramic armor is still defeated by normal 6.8x51 in this way)... well, a high speed small caliber burst could conceivably be the solution, and the
WankelDardick action is known for extremely high RPM with very little complication (unlike the G11 where the solution to malfunctions is "throw the internal mechanism away and get a new one").As such, I think the answer is a rifle with the rotary action that Trounds enable as well as a helical magazine, with the action and magazine riding on G11-style rails such that any recoil impulse isn't transmitted until the end of the burst. It'll have a lot in common aesthetically with the M1216 shotgun, with a magazine capacity close to 90 rounds, firing a burst of slightly beefed-up 5.56 equivalent at a rate sufficient to put every round into the same ceramic square of the enemy's armor. In this way, you still have 30 trigger pulls before reloading (though this would make magazines quite a bit longer) without fundamentally disrupting the hangup the US in particular has embedded in its culture of "
one shot one killsingle well-placed shot" marksmanship. Recoil's going to be heavy, but 6.8x51 already has that problem anyway.All this talk is as funny as guys talking about ultra-modern tank cannons with even higher muzzle velocities that could penetrate 1.2m of RHA, but what's the point of that when a drone or prone, camouflaged infantry man or just a housecat with the right cybernetic implant relaying fire control information over a laser link can cause a howitzer 12 km away to drop a round into a circle of +-3m around the tank's center.
Good luck defending against that - APS may help somewhat, but the cost is probably the same as a howitzer shell, and tanks usually have like 8 at most, which means after that you're shit out of luck and the tank is scrap metal.
This is in the context of small arms, though.
Personal body armor is now so incredibly good that the traditional final boss of anti-personnel armor piercing rounds, .30-06 M2AP, cannot penetrate it with a single hit. I'm relatively certain even .338LM's AP loadings can't get through either, and they can even stop non-AP .50 BMG rounds at sufficient distances (the actual AP stuff will still beat it). When the individual soldier's armor is shrugging off rounds designed to defeat light vehicles, and that armor is available to any industrialized nation at 200USD a plate I would very much agree that any military ignoring this is criminally negligent. Western militaries have all had the first-hand experience of their expensively-trained soldiers not dying is a big deal.
This armor is generally made of ceramic or plastic cells, where even if one cell is damaged it won't stop the other cells from stopping more incoming fire. So at that point, you either beef up your fighting rifle and cartridge to the point you can reliably get through that armor, or you fire more than one round in a burst that's fast enough to score a hit on the same cell of armor, defeating it.
The first approach is not a good one. More powerful rounds are heavier and larger, meaning the individual soldier can't carry as many- a problem once you've spent your entire load of 80 rounds and now you have no ammunition with which to close with and destroy the enemy- and they recoil a lot more so the weight of the gun has to be higher and affordances have to be made not to beat the soldier up too badly. Oh, and at that point your enemy then figures out that they might as well not wear armor if it's not going to protect them anyway (the norm for most conflict involving firearms) so you have these overpowered rifles that can barely keep a sustained rate of fire above that of a WW1-era bolt action rifle.
So we come to the second approach, which has comparatively few downsides. If the enemy decides not to issue armor after all (like Russian forces in Ukraine), you're not caught with some overpowered undersupplied monster rifle, it's still useful when it comes to suppressing fire (even if they know those rounds won't penetrate their armor they're still not sticking their heads into the incoming fire to find out!) because you didn't cut your individual soldier's ammunition supply by 3/4ths, and so on. It still depends on armor being defeatable in this way, and the individual soldier needs to be on target before they fire since it won't fix that, but we know that 6.8x51 at its public power level will still get through today's super-tough armor if you hit the same cell enough times- and there's only one known action that lets you feed/fire more than one round that physically big that fast.
Good points, in context of small arms, burst fire does make a good amount of sense.
Also, I'm suspecting there's a lot of things that haven't been tried. HEAT is probably not the best idea on account of the target being some sort of ceramic, but APDS would probably fit the bill nicely, as I imagine the plates themselves, when penetrated, do cause spalling, right ? APDS in tanks greatly increases penetration.
A plate. Which means, unless the guy is hit once or twice straight into a plate, he's just somewhat less likely to die. Which is very nice for the soldiers, but not really a gamechanger, as artillery is the bigger killer, and if they're shot at comprehensively, just as dead as an unarmored one.
Yet making a practical suit of armor that'd actually render the soldiers largely bulletproof to small arms, etc would still be prohibitively heavy, so you'd need either powered exoskeletons or bodybuilders and some cooling system.
APDS in small arms has been tried before. The major problem with it is that a long, skinny dart doesn't have very good killing power- it isn't carrying very much kinetic energy and due to its nature of being a long, skinny dart has a very hard time actually dumping that energy into the target. Other problems include requiring much more precision in manufacture to fly straight and the sabots have a tendency upon separation to bounce off the ground at Mach 4 and injure squadmates (a problem noted in the SPIW trials).
If I recall correctly, exploding ammunition for small arms has some laws of war constraining its use. It's quite trivial to make an explosive 30-caliber projectile (InRange has a few videos about this, with both German and Russian examples used in WW2), but your accuracy suffers a bit unless you make the projectile correctly and the cost per round from both a pure BOM and manufacturing cost perspective increases significantly.
He's significantly less likely to die. He's also much more likely to remain combat effective after taking a hit, which means that even if you end up causing eventual fatal injury to someone wearing this he's still probably going to be able to shoot back.
And while I agree that artillery is going to shred you no matter what armor you're wearing, that's not as effective when your enemy is either dug in (which a peer army could and would do) or irregular (in the case of civil war).
... I don't mean artillery of the kind the Taliban are using - a few rusty 120 mm mortars with a few shells, but the kind actual armies use.
You've heard the stories out of the Ukraine, or seen the pictures, right ? With accurate artillery fire, unless you have a deep shelter several meters under the ground, you're pretty much dead.
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Perhaps the next step would be some sort of dead-zone generation tech that nullifies remote weaponry. Hard to say what that could be, though: StingRays on steroids, Gap generators, Minovsky particles?
... if you propose inventing magic, you're welcome to try, I guess.
Let me know when you manage to gain access to this simulation's console, okay ?
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Even in a helical mag 90 rounds is going to be... Well maybe you could come up with a clever way to multi stack Trounds and make them telescoped, but that is still going to be a chunky mag. Sounds badass though.
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I don't have the link on hand, but imagine I linked to that post about the US military testing to failure here.
I do have to wonder, does the US military produce more procurement boondoggles than other nations on average/per capita? Are we just so materially-rich that we can afford to try stupid shit, whereas any other nation would really have to save up to even think of replacing anything?
Right now I'm watching my town's snowplows spread salt before it RAINS. And the core reason they're doing it is because we got no snow this year, so they need to use up some of their salt supply to keep the supplier contract in place. Maybe somebody's brother in law, maybe rational inventory management within bureaucratic restraints.
The military works the same way, plus a bit of extra corruption. They need to produce stuff all the time to keep the industry humming for when they need something.
.. is that even working, given that Ukraine hasn't had artillery fire parity with Russians since some of the ill-planned early attempts at Kiev ?
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This causes everyone's cars to rust.
It'd be legitimately better to just dump the salt in a hole, should they really need to waste it.
Almost anything would be better, as usual in economics transfer payments to salt companies would be the superior choice.
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I would appreciate if you could find that post, I don't think I've read it.
My gut feeling is that it is partially true. There are almost certainly more boondoggles in other countries that we don't hear about because they aren't as open as the USA and they don't get the same media attention.
However, the US military is terrified not of their adversaries technologically surpassing them, but of them merely closing the gap. All of US strategy relies on overmatch, the theory that you don't just outperform your enemies, you can totally crush them if desired. In the situation where your advancement is plateauing, the bad guys are rapidly catching up, and you're at a severe disadvantage in manpower but you're flush with money and brain power, why not throw everything at the wall and see what sticks?
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My Friendly Local Gun Shop still has its M17 propaganda posters up. Funny how those never materialized for the NGSW family. Who'd have thought a 9mm would have a wider audience than a multi-thousand-dollar battle rifle?
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