we wouldn't be in this silly firearms pickle we now find ourselves in.
Now, loyal readers here are going to wonder what on earth this topic, the Army edging upon the adopting of the 6.8x51 cartridge to replace, at least in some capacity, the long running and really crappy 5.56 cartridge has to do with Wyoming, Canada (and the UK), but there's a distinct Wyoming connection, that's why.
So here we have some regional history in addition to national, and even international.
That connection is John Pedersen.
John Pedersen holds more patents than any other Wyoming resident.
Or sort of Wyoming resident.
Pedersen was born in 1881 in Grand Island, Nebraska. The Pedersen's were ranchers, and somewhat unusually they had more than one ranch, which indicates that they must have been doing fairly well. Pedersen's upbringing, including his education, are oddly obscure, but at some point he was living in Jackson Hole, on one of the family's ranches. While Jackson Hole was incredibly difficult to get out of during the winter months, Pedersen retained a family connection with the Teton County ranch much of his life. Maybe all of it.
Or so it seems.
Details on Pedersen, as noted, are actually surprisingly difficult to easily obtain, and because he was overshadowed in life by the Utah firearms genius John M. Browning, nobody seem to have written a biography on him in spite of his being an inventive genius, which Browning himself acknowledged. When he arrived in Wyoming isn't really known. Whether he retained a lifelong connection with Wyoming isn't really known either. His parents seem to have died relatively young, and when that occurred, Pedersen seems to have become a youthful permanent resident of Jackson Hole. One item I read, but can no longer locate, suggested that perhaps a sister of his relocated to the Jackson Hole ranch when Pedersen was still a boy, and took him with her.
If Pedersen went to school in what was then part of Lincoln County isn't known.* If he went on to school beyond that doesn't seem to be known. It'd be very odd if he didn't, as he clearly had very advanced mechanical and engineering knowledge, but then so did John M. Browning and he hadn't.
It is known that he didn't marry until 1921, at which time he married Reata Canady in Provo, Utah. Why he was in Provo and how he met Canady is, of course, not known. Canady had a colorful background. She'd been in China with her father at the time of his death and had become a semi orphan at that time. She was decorated for heroism while serving as a British nurse during World War One. This brought her to the attention of illustrator P. G. Morgan, who did approximately 100 illustrations of her as a British serving nurse, attesting to both her heroism and her beauty. Following the war, she became a writer, often writing on fly fishing for Field & Stream, but she also wrote novels.
The couple had two children and, while they traveled widely. They used Jackson Hole as their base.
At some point, they divorced. She lived until 1969 and died in San Diego, California. John Pedersen remarried and died, while traveling, in Prescott Arizona at age 70. He was living in Massachusetts at the time. His second wife was 33 years his junior.
Of Reata and John's children, his son, Eric Pedersen would receive some fame for the story of Reckless, a horse he purchased during the Korean War which was used an an ammunition hauler by Eric Pedersen's marine Corps unit. Reckless went on to be famous.
So John D. Pedersen, at any rate, had a strong connection with Wyoming and was a Jackson Hole area rancher at a time when Jackson Hole was one of the worst places to live in the state, due to its isolation. That isolation may have worked to Pedersen's advantage, however, as it gave him time to work on his invention.
And inventive he was, although he also would have the unique fate of often being an "also ran".
Pederson designed a pistol for Remington which Remington did market, but which failed to secure the military contract for a semi automatic pistol, that going to John Browning's design which became the M1911. During World War One, he designed the "Pedersen Device", which was adopted by the Army and which allowed the M1903 Springfield bolt action rifle to be converted into a very strange, small cartridge, semi automatic. While adopted, as noted, the design came to late to be of any use in the Great War ant stocks of them were accordingly destroyed after the war, the main accomplishment of it having been to point towards the M1 Carbine, in some ways. He also designed a huge number of designs for Remington Arms, at least one of which is still basically in use today in the form, somewhat ironically, as the Browning BPS shotgun. He occasionally worked with Browning when Browning was working on designs for Remington.
In the early 1920s he designed a self loading rifle for the United States government.
Now, everyone who knows anything about the history of U.S. military rifles of the 20th Century knows that the first semi automatic rifle adopted by the U.S. was the M1 Garand. So this would tell us right away that Pedersen's rifle wasn't adopted. But the cartridge it fired very nearly was. But that doesn't mean it was a bad design so much as it means that John Garand's was excellent.
That cartridge for the Pedersen rifle was the .276 Pederson, a 6.8 mm cartridge that was 51mms long. That made it .5 in shorter than the .30-06, then the military's cartridge. While there was great skepticism about the cartridge at first, that skepticism was overcome in testing and as the M1 Garand pulled ahead, it too was in .276 Pedersen. It appeared that the Army was set to adopt the rifle in that cartridge, but a late directive by Douglas MacArthur, who was at that time the Chief of Staff of the Army, caused the design to be adopted in .30-06. MacArthur feared, and probably correctly, that Congress would pull funding for the new rifle if it came in a new cartridge, which in turn would have had to have resulted in new automatic weapons of all types to replace those then chambered in .30-06.
The M1 Garand, in .30-06, was undoubtedly the greatest rifle design of World War Two and it soldiered on in U.S. use, in a secondary role, all the way into the 1970s. In other armies it lasted longer than that. But even during the late stages of the Second World War it was obvious, or seemed obvious, that a shorter cartridge would have to be adopted in order to make a rifle into an effective selective fire rifle, the utility of that design having been proven by the revolutionary German assault rifles of the war. That lead to a redesign of the M1 Garand after the war into what became the M14, a rifle firing a cartridge which became the 7.62 NATO, which was a .30 cartridge, like the .30-06, but with a 51mm case. I.e., a case that had the same length as the abandoned .276 Pedersen. That cartridge prevailed over a 7mm British design that had a 43mm long case given that, at the time, the NATO countries all wanted to be armed with the same cartridge, something that indeed is still supposed to be the case today.
And then, in the 1960s, came the M16 and the 5.56 cartridge.
Let's pick that story up elsewhere, where we've covered it before, in a thread called:
Vietnam and the Law of Unintended Consequences: The AR15
As we've already written on that topic at length there, we won't try to repeat the whole thing here, other than to note we've done it. But we will cover the relevant parts, without repeating.
Now, the real irony of this is that the Air Force is the service that's least qualified to decide anything about small arms and in truth perimeter security in Vietnam would have been just as readily served by men carrying M1 Garands. Heck, it would have been better served. The Air Force didn't need M16s and it shouldn't have received them. It was patently absurd. Compounding the problem, however, the Army's Special Forces took some M16s and heaped lavish praise on them, the recipients of the praise forgetting that special troops are notoriously able to make use of weapons that regular soldiers cannot.
This combined result then operated to convince William C. Westmoreland, whom we've recently otherwise read about, to urge the ordering of what had then been adopted as a limited standard as the M16 by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. There was some logic to his decision. For one thing, the ARVN soldiers were tiny. The M1 Garand which they were supplied with by the United States was huge and the alternative M1/M2 Carbine was ineffective. The M16 seemed just the ticket.
The ARVN was not impressed. While Americans have heaped condemnation on the ARVN for decades many ARVN troops saw years and years of combat and they weren't actually asking for new small arms. When they received the M16 they were amongst the first to discovery that it jammed, and jammed badly. They were convinced that the Americans were giving them junk that the Americans themselves weren't using. That was soon to change.
Coincident with the first ordering of the M16 there were teething problems with the production of M14s. In retrospect they weren't all that bad and even recent US military history at the time should have revealed that. There had been teething problems with the M1903 Springfield and the M1 Garand as well. Production capacity limits meant that the M1903 never was fully replaced during World War Two in spite of a massive effort to manufacture M1 Garands. During World War One production limits had lead to the as many M1917s being made as M1903s. So this wasn't really new. More than enough M14s existed to equip the active duty Army and Marine Corps, even if the reserves did not receive them. But they were practically new. Nonetheless McNamara had the production of M14s stopped.
This was a monumentally boneheaded move and this alone deserves to rate Robert Strange McNamara as a Department of Defense disaster. Springfield Armory dated back to the early history of the country, and now it was idled and no M14s were being made. M16s, on the other hand, were coming in from Colt and would soon be licensed by Colt to other companies as production for the Vietnam War heated up. It was soon decided to equip US soldiers in Vietnam with the rifle.
Problems rapidly developed, although they were problems the ARVN was already aware of. The gun jammed and people were getting killed. The immediate solution was to come out with the A1 variant of the rifle, the M16A1, which featured a large plunger that struck the bolt to close it in an emergency. This didn't solve the problem but it did mean that there was at least the hope of not getting killed if the rifle jammed up in combat.^
The M16A1 was not well received. Marine Corps units avoided using it as long as possible by shifting M14s to units in the field and M16s back to the rear. This went on until the M14s had been withdrawn and they just couldn't get away with it any longer. The Army, being larger, never had that opportunity and so it went right into front line units The initial results were disastrous as the new weapon locked up like a drum in combat. People with long memories recalled after the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division ran into trouble with the weapon at Ia Drang in 1966 that the same regiment had experienced fatal weapons jams nearly a century earlier at Little Big Horn due to the copper cartridges used by the Army in the action sticky trapdoor Springfield at that time.
New orders requiring "Tiger" to prodigiously clean the weapon constantly, prodigious lubrication and a switch in powder for ammunition partially alleviated the problem but it's never gone away. Oddly, the current M4 Carbine is reported to jam more than the M16A5, showing that they both jam, but the carbine inexplicably jams more. But the M16 has kept on keeping on.
That was in part because in 1968 the Secretary of Defense had Springfield Armory closed for good.
Springfield Armory had been mounting a rear guard action against the M16 ever since it had been introduced. The M16A1 was standardized in 1967 and the M16 had been ordered to replace the M14 by McNamara at least two years earlier. So the United States lost a manufacturing capacity for small arms, by the military itself, that it had since 1777.
This, in turn, gets to something else I wrote on that item, taking it out of order as it appears higher up in the original text.
And now, it appears, we actually might.
Throughout the 5.56's long service there's been a strong section of riflemen, both in and out of the service, who have detested it. Others have been critical of it, if not detesting it. None the less, we managed to foist it on the NATO countries. Then came Afghanistan and Iraq.
That the 5.56 round and the AR15 design were inadequate were known long before the First Gulf War. Indeed, a large military exercise in the 1980s in Egypt had lead the Army to pull aside a lot of remaining M14s in anticipation of issuing them to the Army's Rapid Deployment Force if a war in the region came about. At the same time, the Army issued a requirement for a rifle firing a larger cartridge which could hit at range.
This was in the 1980s.
When the war the Army feared came about, it was too big and came too quickly for mass issuance of the M14 to occur. The M16 went to war in the desert and, quite frankly, it sucked. When a second war came about in Iraq, again, and Afghanistan the Army began to supplement line infantry with M14s so that somebody could hit something. The M16 was accurate, to be sure, but it was just too short range. The M4 was even worse, and oddly enough, even less reliable than the upgraded version of the M16 then in service.
The Army began to search for a new round in earnest at this point, and semi adopted one for special troops, the 6.8 SPC. The 6.8 SPC was short enough to fit into AR actions and harder hitting than the diminutive 5.56. Somebody in the Army didn't like it, however, orders went out recovering the HK416s in 6.8 SPC that had been issued, but not because they weren't liked. Then the 6.5 Grendal and the .300 Blackout came in, all of which would also fit into AR actions, and which saw limited, special, use. The 7.62 NATO, in the meantime, also saw more and more use in rifles (it had never disappeared in general purpose machine guns) finding expanded deployment in upgraded M14s and employment in new designated riflemen variants of the AR10. An entirely new rifle, the FN SCAR-H came into service along side a 5.56 SCAR for special forces, once again.
Some time ago the Army then issued a requirement for a 6.8 cartridge, and a rifle and machinegun to fire it, chambered in a 6.8 round with 3,000 fps muzzle velocity. I.e, something in a rifle that produced a muzzle velocity equivalent to the .270 WSM, a sporting magnum.
Three different cartridges, one of which is highly radical in design, have now been proposed. The most conventional of them is the 6.8x51 round offered by the Swiss firm SIG. It's a highly conventional case with a steel, rather than brass base.
6.8x51?
Isn't that the same length as the .276 Pedersen?
It is.
Now, the .276 Pederson didn't have a chamber pressure of 80,000 psi, which the 6.8x51 does. It probably had one around 60,000 psi. But, while the velocity of the 6.8x51 is truly impressive, the practical field difference between the two? Well, that's debatable.
With a scoped rifle, as the SIG will be, and with a piston, not direct impingement, type rotating bolt head action rifle, a good marksman ought to really be able to hit at distance with a 6.8x51. It'll be an excellent round, if adopted.
And it probably will be.
But ironically, the advantage acquired by it, while real, will only be marginal over the .276 Pedersen.
Which leaves us to this.
Real firearms fans have been saying this since. . . .well some point in the 1930s, more loudly since the early 1950s, and louder still since the mid 1960s.
And also, the alternative course of history is rather obvious.
Had the .276 Pedersen round been adopted in the M1 Garand, and there were reasons that it was not, in the early 1950s the M14 would have been a smaller elective fire rifle that would have really worked as a selective fire rifle. We'd still be using it today.
And for that matter, had the .276 been dusted back off in the early 50s, or if the British .280 round adopted, we could have still reached that point.
And that would have made a massive difference in US military history and in the history of firearms development. Assuming that Robert Strange McNamara didn't make the same stupid mistakes he made in the mid 1960s, which is admittedly assuming a lot, we would hve fought the Vietnam War out with some version of the .276 in a really selective fire M14.
And we'd still be using it today.
*Teton County came into existence on February 15, 1921.
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