Free Republic

The .308 is really good at a lot of things, but other rounds are better in specific roles. Where the .308 is a jack of all trades, other rounds designed for one purpose have done a better job in the roles they were designed for. But none can fill all roles like the .308 can. In the combat/close quarters battle role, the .223 is king. There is no denying it. When the M16 replaced the M14 as our nation’s primary service weapon in the 1960s, it permanently made the .308 a less acceptable combat round. The .223 round is lighter,...

Will the military grade ballistic plate stop these rounds? Watch as Jerry Miculek pits an AR-10 .30 cal against body armor with some high-volume rapid fire. Jerry is trying to duplicate what Richard Ryan of Full Mag did, and that is he fired a .30 cal machine gun at a piece of armor. Jerry will be using the same cal with an AR-10 with the standard NATO 7.62 ball 147 grain rounds. There it is, the plates were able to absorb the hits against it, round after round. There is a reason modern light infantry and combat soldiers wear integrated...

Critics said the M-14 was what happened when the U.S. government took many years and spent millions of dollars designing a rifle that was really just a glorified M-1 Garand from World War II. The M-14 was the U.S. military’s last battle rifle. It appeared in 1959—the contemporary of the Pentagon’s first jet fighters and ICBMs. With its heavy steel parts and walnut stock, the M-14 looked positively archaic. It was hardly a Space Age weapon. And it only endured as America’s battle rifle until 1970, when the M-16 completely superseded it—the shortest service record of any U.S. military rifle...