Yes I agree, unfortunately for us they are on the right track

I vote for giving everyone the Ruger SFAR (6.5 pounds) with PA 3x microprisim, and 25 round PMAGs for DMR and keep the M4 as needed for COB and support personnel.

I’ve done no research on their small arms, but it seems interesting.

If you grant the assumption that AI assisted auto aiming is right around the corner, that reverses most of why battle rifles were phased out.

That's where I am at. Standing on its own, I think it's probably a great rifle. But the battle rifle is stupid as shit. Blah blah blah Optic this optic that. The optic isn't going to overcome all of the many reasons battle rifles suck on the modern battlefield.

I think a 5.56 XM5 would be cool . But what's the point? The M4 is the slimmest, most handy and most controllable weapons out there.

I expect the bore life on barrels would be much shorter with this super hot/smaller diameter round.  

Probably not much of an issue for machine guns.

Might be a good if they procured a good number of battle rifles to use in places like Afghanistan.

Do you know why there's no Level 5 armor?  Because that's where the chart stops.

To further emphasize this point look at the change in 30-06 from M1 to M2? 175gr boat tail to 150gr flat bottom because way back before WWII we didn't have ranges that could handle the higher BC bullets down range safety.

"By 1936, it was discovered that the maximum range of the .30 M1 ball ammunition with its boat-tailed spitzer bullets was beyond the safety limitations of many military firing ranges. An emergency order was made to manufacture quantities of ammunition that matched the external ballistics of the earlier M1906 cartridge as soon as possible."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.30-06_Springfield

The Infantry rifle or carbine is one of those items that is a pretty sexy subject matter for the masses when talking about war. I bet you could find plenty of message boards with current discussions on how or why Germany would have won WW2 if every troop had a STG-44.

Except for weight and reduced ammo capacity. Which were the big reasons battle rifles were phased out.

Of note, the military doesn't seem to care for NIJ ratings much. See XSAPI for example

It's almost as if warfare is a combination of resources in depth requiring multiple capabilities for a lot of different reasons.  These discussions always look at problems in black and white, and assign ridiculous requirements to everything for justification.

"Will having a pistol win the war?"; "In an age of nukes why are we worried about a new truck?"; "Why do we need Gen V fighters when our opponents don't have them?"; "Why do we need new ammo when our opponents don't have equivalent armor?"

Then the discussion spins on out-of-context assumptions and outdated knowns.


In the military every service develops it's own plan based on strategic threat guidance plotted 8-10 years out.  Each subset of the branches take their pieces and build requirements based on capability gaps they see within their fields preventing them from addressing those threats assigned to them.  Because in the modern world our procurement moves a lot slower than the threats do, they have to take known emerging threats (which you the general public have never heard of), and apply resources towards how they expect that threat to evolve in several years. Then they start planning the long development process towards that threat knowing we will not have anything in hand until several years in the future, and the end product will be based on their best guess at the time of first seen threat years prior.

I'm not championing the XM5 or SIG 6.9 by any means, just pointing out that the methodology for framing most of the arguments I have seen here are completely flawed and/or irrelevant.






They don't care for a reason, which by default means they do care.

XM118 will not be issued in large numbers because it's not practical to do so. They'd have already issued M993 en masse if it was.

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2017/10/29/level-iv-unbeatable-armor-caliber-problem-tungsten/

.30-06 M2AP is a greater threat to armor than the newer steel core EPR designs because the latter compromise penetrator size to enable fragmentation. In any case, many plates can stop tungsten core threats and they're proliferating rapidly. Aiming around the armor will be the solution, even if you have tungsten core .277 Fury. The penetration range against standard Level IV won't be very long.

Soviet satellites bought linked steel core 7.62AP in quantity so it’s a real threat in much of the world. Plates have reached the point where they can stop just about anything a man can fire from the shoulder or carry in quantity so IMO trying to defeat them directly is a waste.

Sabot time? Flechette time?

How many MG spotting rounds would it take to punch through body armor?

Like on the Eastern front.

Yup, something tells me those are the Easy Button when it comes to defeating body armor.