Don't we have warehouses full of M-3 "Grease Gun" submachine guns? I remember seeing some in APCs back in my day.
Posted on 06/13/2018 8:15:31 PM PDT by Simon Green
The U.S. Army recently put word out that it wanted submachine guns for conventional forces, and gun-makers were quick to respond.
Ten companies are currently vying to supply troops outside the special operations forces realm with subguns for the modern battlefield. Officials said they wanted a weapon with full/semi-automatic selectable variant and a Picatinny rail, among other features, and organizations from Sig Sauer, Inc. to Colt answered the call.
“For the first time in a long time, the Army is looking at a subgun for conventional forces,” Todd South of Military Times reported Wednesday. “Special operations forces have carried these guns for a very long time, but your conventional soldiers and Marines don’t really have them in their arsenal until now.”
The Army received the following submissions:
Z-5RS, Z-5P and Z-5K Sub Compact Weapons; Zenith Firearms
B&T MP9 Machine Guns; Trident Rifles, LLC
MPX Sub Compact Weapon; Sig Sauer, Inc.
5.5 CLT and 5.5 QV5 Sub Compact Weapon; Quarter Circle 10 LLC
PTR 9CS Sub Compact Weapon; PTR Industries, Inc.
MARS-L9 Compact Suppressed Weapon; Lewis Machine & Tool Company
CZ Scorpion EVO 3 A1 Submachine gun; CZ-USA
CMMG Ultra PDW; CMMG, Inc.
Beretta PMX Sub Compact Weapon; USA Corporation
CM9MM-9H-M5A; Colt’s Manufacturing Company, LLC
“Another subgun option the Army could consider is [Heckler & Koch’s] MP5,” Mr. South reported. “The [MP5 MLI] is an improved version on what they’ve had for decades. It’s pretty familiar to a lot of people. A lot of folks growing up like I did in the 1980s and 1990s might have seen it. The Navy SEALs carried it.”
(Excerpt) Read more at m.washingtontimes.com ...
What? Nothing from Kriss?
Are these to be issued to those members of the armed forces who are otherwise too diminutive to effectively handle weapons currently in use?
Nothing a subgun can do that anAR carbine cannot do exponentially better. No subgun can penetrate tactical soft armor let alone any hard armor. And don’t mention that 5.7 round either.
Remember, by definition a subgun fires pistol cartridges.
Don't we have warehouses full of M-3 "Grease Gun" submachine guns? I remember seeing some in APCs back in my day.
Or Jennings or Hi-Point?
They are still in use around the world in militarys and para-militarys.
and saved their asses in ww1 ww2.
Yeah, what about the Kriss Vector? A very suitable weapon system with all the options already available.
Yup!!
I handled one in the early ‘90s while in ROTC. It had been well cared for. The other cadets had never heard of them.
I would hope there’s a bunch of them in warehouses somewhere... if “Captain Crunch” at Anniston Army Depot hasn’t gotten ahold of them.
JMO, but what is so bad about the M3 series submachine gun? Seemed to work well enough over 60 years for us. Perhaps because it’s too cheap to manufacture?
The one that spreads the most pork across the most districts will be the one chosen regardless of functionality.
Subguns can still offer a quieter and much more compact package than a shorty M16 mounted with a suppressor. Any 5.56mm barrel length of less than 10.5 inches is a liability when a suppressor is added.
I’d still have thought the age of the subgun was long ago in the past but for some reason the US Army is ordering more. I hope they do the right thing and just go with the Hk MP5-SLI. Hk has long ago refused to bring back the SD model, sadly.
Every other subgun on that list is unsuitable including the Sig-SAUER and CZ Scorpion. The Hk knockoffs from PTR and Zenith are lousy low-rent substitutes for the original. The B&T MP9 is the rebranded Steyr machine pistol which is high quality and ingenious but the extra trash you need to add to it to make it an effective subgun turns it into a clumsy afterthought. Finally, pistol caliber M16 subguns are just horrid for several important reasons.
Nothing will best the MP5 on this list but I’m counting on the Army procurement process to make the dead wrong choice or abandon the project altogether.
The GM Guide Lamp division has been out of commission for almost two generations for one thing. The other issue with the M3 and M3A1 was its low cyclic rate and long travel open bolt action. Nobody is looking at a parkerized tube gun SMG as a solution and the M3 design couldn’t hold a candle to the best tube SMGs like the Swedish K.
I am still very fond of the UZI (especially the Mini converted to fire from a closed bolt) but IMI/IWI has said they have absolutely no tooling to produce the long-retired UZI anymore.
Man, everything about this whole topic is revisiting ideas that pretty much ended with the appearance of the Hk MP5. I don’t know why the Army is goofing around like this but they know what the answer is.
Have you ever actually fired a grease gun? They are fairly heavy, that’s minor. The cyclic rate is REALLY SLOW, you can get a faster fire rate (at least for one magazine full) from a 1911.
Second major problem is trying to get any accuracy out of it. remember it’s a blowback only action, nothing but the weight of the bolt (IIRC about 1 1/2 lb)
When you pull the trigger (remember, it fires from an open bolt) you release the latch holding the bolt to the rear and that heavy bolt slams forward, picking up a round, chambering it and firing it. The bolt then slams to the rear. This weight slamming back and forth presents a serious challenge to holding any kind of sight picture.
The "firearm" will be electromagnetic, powered by batteries in a backpack. This is not a weapon we will need for fighting human enemies - conventional firearms are best for that. Big slugs of high velocity copper will be needed to disable combat robots in CQB. At longer ranges ordinary .50 cal will be effective when you have the luxury of follow-up shots, but in close we'll need something better tailored to disable a dangerous robot quickly. A cloud of copper particles created by a high-velocity impact will be deadly to electronic circuitry and wiring.
Also, we'll need flamethrowers. It's tough to design a combat robot which can "see" its surroundings and operate effectively while engulfed in flames.
We're gonna need massive high-velocity copper projectiles and flame throwers, and if we're lucky we'll only need that stuff for robots. I'll leave it at that.
The Jennings hi-point has been delayed. Named the hot-point it has not yet passed the scrub cycle.
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