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.
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.
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.
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?
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Notes -
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
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.
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 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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