If you’re going New then go New , don’t just add features to the Old M16 ,D’oh
The democrats would claim a “heavier” weapon would be an unfair option to the women they feel should be in combat roles and are as capable as the men.........Oops...
How light do you think they could make a Garand?
Shoulda stuck with the .45-70.
The civilian world is flooded with 7.62NATO caliber Stoner-pattern rifles. Perhaps that’s where they should start looking ...
A simple solution would be just use a piston driven upper chambered for a 223 necked up to 6.5. Then you can use the same lowers and magazines. The US military absolutely needs to adopt an AR-10 platform to replace the m-14 for snipers and designated marksmen
I knew nothing about guns and weaponry as a 17 year old city kid and really, didn't learn much more in the immediate years following discharge, but as I've aged and experienced, I prefer the 7.62 caliber and though I haven't fired one since my mid sixties Army days ... I did like the feel of my M14.
My two cents' worth.
FN SCAR H all day, every day.
Swap in an 18 inch barrel and you are good out to the range of the 7.62 NATO cartridge with accuracy slightly less than a dedicated sniper rifle.
Luv my Springfield M1A
I have an AR in 6.5 Grendel. You can change the barrel, bolt carrier and magazines on an existing AR and you have a rifle that has an effective range of 800 plus yards. It pretty much equals the overall ballistics of the 7.62 NATO at that distance. You sacrifice little in magazine capacity and the recoil is much lighter than the 7.62. Accuracy is excellent. It is an good round for hunting deer size game so it will drop a enemy soldier in his tracks.
The M-14 fits the bill.
I,personally,did much better with the M-14...scoring only two points below "Expert".But I'll say that the M-16 was more fun...particularly on the one occasion that they let us fire it on full automatic (that was before the three round limiter).
I don't know which weapon "experts" considered more accurate but for *me* it was the M-14.
I know the military environment will want to be universal with one or the other, but the personal preference of the shooter should be taken into consideration. A bigger guy might not mind the extra weight and a smaller guy might choose the lighter. I'm not suggesting that we have 15 calibers for every possible scenario, but just 2, .308 and .223. If you think about it, they already feed .50 cal, 9mm, .45, .308, along with .223. There is probably some .40 and others I don't know about as I'm don't follow it that closely anymore. I believe they use a .416 and .338 for snipers along with .308 and .50. I don't think it would be devastating to the supply Sgt to do this. They also feed sniper rifles in other calibers already.
Do you ever notice that the military is always trying to reinvent the wheel?
The got rid of the large caliber weapons because they weighed to much.Now they are changing course.
Depends on whether they want off the shelf, or want to break new ground. There might be some interesting options with composite overwrapped barrels - thin steel wrapped in carbon fiber composite, like is done for making lightweight pressure vessels. You need steel to prevent erosion on the inside, but carbon fiber can take many times more pressure per unit weight than steel. And because prestressed CF is much stiffer than steel, you get better accuracy too.
There’s been some research on the concept before. For example, this paper on 120mm overwrap gun tubes:
http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=ADA481065
But I’ve also run into some variants researched for small arms as well. It’d put the US into a whole new class of weaponry.
If Army want a heavier round, give them a AKM in 7.62x39mm with a side rail. With today’s scopes, good shooters can still hit at 500m with the bigger bullet. The AK Operators Union demonstrated it last year.
We need to stop complicating things.
Stoner pattern (AR-10) rifles are everywhere. The AR-10 uses the same buffer system as the AR-15 and felt recoil is very slight compared to the M-14/M1A-style actions. Very accurate with massive terminal energy out beyond 500+ yards. They are available in both direct gas impingement and piston drive. The only drawback is the significantly heavier 7.62 NATO cartridge weight vs the cartridge weight of the 5.56 NATO. More weight in the infantryman’s pack is not necessarily a good thing. Just my $.02.
The answer already exists. It’s the 6.5 Grendel from Alexander Arms, The round is so ballistically efficient, it has more legality at 600 meters than even the 7.62x51 / 7.62 NATO / .308 NATO) !
With the addition of the 6.5 Grendel to the product line-up at Alexander Arms® in 2004, the history of no compromise design, engineering, and innovation continues. The 6.5 Grendel provides an extreme range capability for tactical applications. These ranges are far beyond those previously achievable with the AR-15 style weapon. The 6.5 Grendel has the flexibility to move from lightweight varmint bullets in the 90-grain class, which offer superb accuracy for competition and small game shooting, to mid-weight, 108- to 120-grain competition bullets, and then on to 130- and 140-grain bullets, ideal for longer range, tactical shooting.
The origin of the 6.5 Grendel may be traced back to the Soviet 7.62x39. This was modified for European competition, being necked down to form the 220 Russian. From here, Dr. Lou Palmisano and Ferris Pindel took the case and blew out the shoulder to create the 22 PPC and the 6mm PPC, which currently dominate bench rest competitions. In designing the 6.5 Grendel, the starting position was the PPC design, but it quickly became apparent that the caliber of the PPC was not as flexible as was needed. Early research with a wildcat 6.5 PPC also showed that the case lacked powder capacity, which, in turn, created pressure problems. The final 6.5 Grendel design draws on the PPC, but it is very much its own cartridge. The internal capacity was expanded by shifting the shoulder forward and the wall thicknesses in the neck and shoulder were increased to provide a more robust case capable of being fed within a semi-automatic rifle. Finally, the external taper of the case was adjusted for reliable feed in the magazine.
The 6.5 Grendel is challenging the status quo in military and law enforcement units around the world. First unveiled in May 2003 at the Blackwater Training facility in North Carolina, the 6.5 Grendel out-shot the 7.62 NATO at range with half the recoil. Still supersonic at 1,200 yards, the 6.5 Grendel delivered superior external ballistics to the 7.62 NATO. Utter reliability, superior external and terminal ballistics than the current state of the art, outstanding accuracy in a lightweight M16/AR-15 platform it is what appears to be the pinnacle for what may be achieved in the M16/AR-15 chassis. The 6.5 Grendel is not a series of compromises, but rather the perfect marriage of mechanical function, internal, external and terminal ballistics all working in harmony.
Shooting a 123-grain Lapua Scenar with a ballistic coefficient of .547 and a muzzle velocity of 2,600 FPS delivers outstanding accuracy out to 1,200 yards. At 600 yards, tennis ball size targets are no match for this flat-shooting round. For extreme accuracy, formidable terminal ballistics and long range applications, the 6.5 Grendel from Alexander Arms is unbeatable.
Compared to the 5.56 NATO, the 6.5 Grendel, with roughly twice the lead mass, gives you the potential for twice the mass of fragments. If maximum fragmentation is coincident with maximum temporary cavity, the terminal ballistics are quite convincing, all in a package that shoots flatter with 50% less felt recoil than 7.62 NATO M80 ball.
I was a decent shot, but didn't even rank compared to the Southern boys...those redneck, tobaccy chewing SOBs could put a round up a gnats ass at 500 yards against a 45 mile an hour cross wind {OK, maybe a slight, little white lie}.
Is a white lie raciss???
The M-1 was a heavy rifle, but one of most reliable, semi-automatic weapons ever developed.
Carrying that rifle on a 5/10/15/20 mile trek along with a 50+ pound back pack would bring strong, young men to test their inner strength (we had no women back then and if we did, only one out of 200 could have kept up the pace).
I will say that if we had a woman in our group, we would have carried her and her stuff on those walks into the wild.
You don’t want to make a .308 or .3006 rifle lighter. Recoil becomes unmanageable and punishing. Unless maybe you magnaport it or do something to compensate. If you ever tried to fire an M14 on full auto you would know what I mean.