There's been quite a bit a news in the weapons category here recently.
I know, d'uh, there's a big war going on . . .
No, I don't mean that. I actually mean in two NATO countries, the United States and Canada.
More specifically, the United States Army, in a process stretching back to the 1980s, has finally settled on a rifle to replace the AR15 platform which, further, acknowledges the insufficiency of the 5.56 round, taking a giant step up with a new 6.8 round.
In military rifle news, this is really big news.
And secondly, Canada, which has been using the Browning Hi Power pattern sidearm since World War Two, and which chose a replacement, has put the brakes on that for the time being.
A New Rifle for the U.S. Army. . . sort of and maybe.
Let's discuss the Army's new rifle first. Here's what the Army Press release informs us of:
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Army announced the award of a 10-year firm-fixed-price follow-on production contract to Sig Sauer, Inc for the manufacture and delivery of two Next Generation Squad Weapon variations (the XM5 Rifle and the XM250 Automatic Rifle) and the 6.8 Common Cartridge Family of Ammunition.This award was made following a rigorous 27-month prototyping and evaluation effort that included numerous technical tests and Soldier touch points of three competing prototype systems.The value of the initial delivery order on the contract is $20.4 million for weapons and ammunition that will undergo testing. The contract includes accessories, spares and contractor support. It also provides the other Department of Defense services and, potentially, Foreign Military Sales countries the opportunity to purchase the NGSW weapons.The XM5 Rifle will replace the M4/M4A1 carbine within the close combat force, and the XM250 Automatic Rifle is the planned replacement for the M249 Squad Automatic WeaponBoth weapons provide significant capability improvements in accuracy, range and overall lethality. They are lightweight, fire more lethal ammunition, mitigate recoil, provide improved barrel performance, and include integrated muzzle sound and flash reduction.Both weapons fire common 6.8 millimeter ammunition utilizing government provided projectiles and vendor-designed cartridges. The new ammunition includes multiple types of tactical and training rounds that increase accuracy and are more lethal against emerging threats than both the 5.56mm and 7.62mm ammunition.The XM5 and XM250 will be paired with the XM157 Fire Control, a ruggedized advanced fire control system that increases accuracy and lethality for the close combat force. The XM157 integrates a number of advanced technologies, including a variable magnification optic (1X8), backup etched reticle, laser rangefinder, ballistic calculator, atmospheric sensor suite, compass, Intra-Soldier Wireless, visible and infrared aiming lasers, and a digital display overlay. It is produced by Sheltered Wings Inc. d/b/a Vortex Optics, Barneveld, Wisconsin.
Pretty signficant news. This means, at least in some applications, the historically long reign of the AR15 is over in the Army.
And like most things here, we'll take a trip through history to get there, as it's always our position that understanding the past lets us know where we are, and how we got here.
- A little history.
To really grasp this topic, you need to go back before the current set of rifles and carbines. And indeed, you need to go way back. Back to the adoption of the Krag Jorgensen rifle, which was adopted in 1892.
Okay, we're not going to deal with that in depth, but its important to this story, as the M1892 Springfield Rifle, the Krag, was the first US cartridge arm to use a modern, bottlenecked, cartridge. Before that prior US cartridge arms, which had been blackpowder arms, fired large caliber straight cased ammunition, like the long serving .45-70. Smokless powder, which generated high case pressures, allowed for the development of high speed, much smaller, projectiles such as the .30-40 used by the Krag.
How small the bullet could be was a matter of debate. At the same time that the Army went with .30, the Navy went with 6mm, not only adopting a different cartridge than the Army, and a different rifle to fire it, but a much smaller one measured, oddly, in the metric system. 6mm is .244 in terms of caliber.
The U.S. Navy wasn't the only armed service taking this route. All over the globe different militaries were trying to figure this out, with some going all the way down to 6mm, like the U.S. Navy, and others going up to 8mm (.324). Generally, most service rounds around the globe fell into the 6.5 to 7.7 (more or less .30) range, although there were exceptions on either end. A couple of major wars, moreover, failed to sort this out, although the U.S. dropped the 6mm Navy during the Spanish American War, settling first on .30-40 and then designing a new cartridge that developed into the .30-06.
By the Great War, most armies were fielding cartridges in the noted range, although there remained some experimentation. Prior to the war the British, for example, sought to adopt a 7mm cartridge which was more or less a "magnum" cartridge by modern definitions, seeking to push out their range further based on their experience in the Boer War. The intervention of World War One kept this from occurring.
Nobody went into WWI unhappy with their cartridge and there really weren't any that proved to be bad, but the experience of the war suggested that military rifle cartridges were too big, as in their cases were too big, containing too much powder. Ranges, which in the Boer War had been long, were shorter in the Great War, and various militaries began to conclude that future combat conditions would of course be like that of the war that they just fought. The first military to really reach this conclusion was the U.S. Army, which in the 1920s began to experiment with a .276, or more or less 6.8mm, sized cartridge with a shorter case, hoping to pair it with a semi-automatic rifle. Both worked very well, but the head of the Army, Douglas MacArthur, intervened in order to cause the rifle to be redesigned to fire .30-06, fearing that Congress would reject any moves that made large amounts of ammunition, as well as other Army weapons, accordingly obsolete.
We'll pick up here where we've discussed that on these pages before:
In the early 1920s he (John Pedersen) 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 U.S. fought the Second World War, like most nations, with a full sized cartridge, that being the aforementioned .30-06 and the M1 Garand. Well, that last statement isn't completely true. The U.S. actually retained M1903s Springfield and M1917 Enfields in use for some things and introduced the M1 Carbine, a light semiautomatic carbine firing a small .30 round, for others. Indeed, more M1 Carbines were made in the war than M1 Garands.
During the war the US was exceedingly well armed and small arms were no exception. None other than cavalryman George S. Patton, famous for armored warfare, termed the Garand "the greatest battle implement ever devised". The M1 proved to be nearly a flawless design, with only a couple of minor reas where it could be criticized. Nonetheless, developments during the war pointed towards the next step of firearms evolution, although not clearly.
Indeed, the Germans, while they did attempt field a semiautomatic rifle during the war, essentially leaped over that stage of firearms development and went right to the next ones, introducing both the assault rifle and the battle rifle during the war.
An assault rifle is basically a rifle that can easily fill the role of submachine gun, which normally necessitates it firing a less powerful cartridge than a "full sized" rifle round. The introductory German example was the Stg 44, which fired a 7.92 sized cartridge, like the full sized German weapons such as the K98k did, but with a much shortened case. Hence, its name, the 7.92 Kurz.
A battle rifle is a selective fire (usually) rifle that is capable of fully automatic fire. It too is supposed to fill both roles, but it does so less easily as it fires the full sized cartridge. In some instances, battle rifles were conceived of filling the role of rifle and light machine gun. In others, rifle, submachine gun, and light machine gun. In yet others, it was conceived of filling the same role as the assault rifle, with the emphasis on the rifle role more fully than the assault rifle. The Germans introduced the battle rifle in the form of the FG42, a battle rifle for paratroopers.
Both developments would be influential in post-war designs, but there was no question that the Stg44 was the more influential of the two. European designers started working on weapons influenced by it during the war itself. The Soviets introduced a new cartridge, but going to less of an extreme than the Germans had, in the form of the 7.62x39, first pairing it with a semiautomatic rifle, and then using it for a true assault rifle very much conceptually based on the Stg44, that being the AK47. The Czechs took the same route, introducing a similar cartridge and similar assault rifle independently.
Western European thought was along a similar lines, but with the thought of retaining more of a true rifle ability, with the British adopting, briefly, the radical EM-2 assault rifle that featured the 280 British cartridge. The .280 British was a 7x43 sized cartridge.
Hmmm, keep that in mind. . .
Anyhow, while longer than the new Soviet cartridge, it was much shorter than the .303 British and the radical rifle design had other advantageous features for a weapon designed to fill an automatic and semiautomatic role. The Belgian arms manufacturer of Fabrique Nationale designed its own assault rifle to use it, anticipating its adoption.
The .280 British, except briefly, was not to be.
The goal was to adopt a cartridge for use by all of the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization members so, in the event of a war, they'd have ammunition compatibility. Indeed, the original goal was to adopt one cartridge and one longarm, but the closest the organization ever came to that was very early, when the M1 Garand nearly achieved that role. Anyhow, the US had the most say in the choice of the cartridge, and it was pretty happy with the .30-06 and saw little reason to depart from it much.
The US did see a need to replace the M1, but only barely. The defects in the design, to the extent that they were defects, were the peculiar top loading clip it used and the gas tube running in contact with the barrel. The US also agreed that the war had shown the need for a selective fire rifle, but it felt the M1 design could be adapted to that. With this in mind, it introduced a shortened .30 cartridge for competition, which kept the same performance of the common World War Two .30-06. That cartridge became the 7.62 NATO, or the 7.62x51. The new rifle was the Springfield Armory designed M14.
Various European nations in and out of NATO developed their own 7.62 NATO battle rifles, as that's what 7.62 NATO rifles are, in the 1950s. FN adapted its .280 British design to 7.62 NATO, creating the FN FAL, which was widely used all over the globe and still is to some extent. German designers, working first in Spain, and then in Germany, designed the rifles that became the CETME and the G3.
And then came the Vietnam War.
The M14 was a great battle rifle. It was accurate, for one thing, and it perfectly fit the role the US had anticipated it filling. For that matter, the FAL became a legendary battle rifle, and the G3 actually managed to fit the role of battle rifle and assault rifle amazingly well, because of its peculiar action design. But Vietnam was a dense triple canopy jungle, which made any full sized rifle bulky by default. That wasn't the rifle's fault, as the Johnson Administration ultimately failed to appreciate, so much as a lesson in terrain. In close infantry fighting, it ideally suited the AK47 and its updated variant, the AKM.
Indeed, jungle warfare had taught this lesson before. During World War Two it had caused the British to develop a "jungle carbine" variant of the Lee rifle, which didn't point towards any defects in the Lee so much as it did to the conditions. The British also had heavily favored the M1 Carbine in the jungle. The US, in contrast, which had done less jungle fighting that the Commonwealth forces hadn't really picked up the lesson.
Another lesson that they were picking up, however, is that the Vietnamese people are tiny, and the full sized weapons they were being issued were not physically suited for them. All this caused things to begin rolling in an unfortunate direction, and that direction lead to the M16.
During the 1950s the U.S. Army, which is always experimenting with something, started experimenting first with the .222 Remington, a small Remington cartridge popular with coyote and varmit hunters at the time. For nearly unintelligible reasons, this lead to the .223 Remington, a sort of product improved, but barely, .222. A number of small rifles were developed by various manufacturers as part of the test, including a Garand action rifle by Springfield Armory and a M1 Carbine actioned rifle by Winchester.
If those sound familiar in someways, think Mini14.
A third participant in the program was Colt, the famous pistol manufacturer, which entered the field with the AR 15.
The AR15 was a Colt rifle that they had on the books due to having purchased the manufacturing rights of the AR design from Armalite, an arms manufacturing branch of Fairchild, the aircraft manufacturer. After World War Two Fairchild briefly thought about trying to get into arms, and their weapons designer was Eugene Stoner. He designed the AR action and the company subsequently produced the AR10.
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 the US commander inVietnam, William C. Westmoreland, 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, given the tiny size of the Vietnamese solder and the fact that they were armed with legacy arms of the French in Indochina. Indeed, at that point they were fighting the war with M1 Garands and M1/M2 Carbines, the former of which was a giant weapon for them and the latter of which was lousy. The M16 seemed just the ticket.
The ARVN, however, 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. There had been teething problems with the M1903 Springfield and the M1 Garand as well when they were new, so that was to be expected. Additionally, it was just coming into production which always means that production was limited. 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 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, Secretary of Defensen Robert S. 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 was fielded as the XM16E1,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.
In Vietnam, it became obvious at an early stage that the basic weapon, the M16 rifle, was a piece of junk. The infantry knew it, the field commanders knew it, and the Pentagon knew it. But only after the deaths of American troops was anything done.The M16 replaced the M14, the most reliable and forgiving weapon yet designed. Heavy and slow in full automatic, it nevertheless kept firing when wet, muddy, or unlubricated. By contrast, the M16 was lightly built and fired a smaller round. But it jammed with the slightest amount of mud and required much more maintenance. As heat built up with repeated firings, the bolt stopped halfway through its return. The average American infantryman despised the M16. Most of it was plastic, just like a toy.
Early in my tour in Vietnam, I was part of a raid into Cambodia on a huge enemy arsenal (called Rock Island East after the Illinois arsenal). Truckloads of weapons, medical supplies, and bicycles came back through Tay Ninh where I was with the South Vietnamese Army, the ARVN. There were thousands of Russian Kalishnikovs, which were quickly bought or stolen from the US trucks by ARVN troops. They left their issued M16s home for their wives to use. I was advised to get one myself, and so I did. It must have been 10 years old or more, but it was of a heavy, simple construction, brutish but reliable. Many American troops got themselves Kalishnikovs, and imagine our surprise to find out that, through American ordnance channels, the proper ammunition was readily available. At least somebody was looking out for us.
Not a cheritable view.
But we need to ask why did they keep it once we were out of Vietnam?
- "Fixing" the M16
The Marine Corps, which had never liked it, was responsible for improving it such that the M16A4 and M16A5 eventually came about, which a heavier barrel and much improved sights. But not after an initial attempt to dump the rifle.
The Army, at first, seemed more or less complacent on the M16, except for those elements which we'll address below that mounted rear guard actions against it. The Marine Corps, which sometimes was able to use its small size and vaunted reputation to go outside the normal supply chain, took a different approach, both of which accepted that the 5.56 round wasn't going away.
At first, the Marines approach Sturm Ruger to see if it could equip itself with the AC556, the selective fire variant of the Mini14. The AR15 now has such cult status in the US that its fans detest the Mini14 and recoil against such suggestions, but it did occur.
Ruger had picked up on the popularity of the civilian AR15, which started to build its cult status during the Vietnam War itself. Colt, as noted earlier, hadn't' really known what to do with the AR15, but it hit the jackpot with the Army's adoption. After that it stumbled around on how to sell the civilian semiautomatic variant, at first marketing it somewhat successfully to police departments, but then marketing it to civilian shooters. The weapon more or less sold itself to some degree, because any arm used by the military tended to have some popularity with civilian shooters. Ruger, however, also noted that the AR15s image didn't appeal to a more traditional group of shooters, and they speculated that the 5.56 round may prove popular in and of itself, but offered in a rifle that looked like a throwback to the beloved M14. Hence, the Mini 14.
The Mini14 actually is sort of a mechanical mating of the Garand action, used in the M1 and the M14, and the gas system of the M1 carbine. Like the AR15 and M15 Carbine, the Mini14 lacks a gas piston, setting it much apart from the Garand family of rifles. It instead used the M1 Carbine style of action in which gas is directly vented on a block, operating the operating arm. Like the AR15, its sort of a direct impingement system, but it's one that doesn't vent into the action and is accordingly fairly clean. The bolt and action, however, were very much from the Garands. Ruger first offered it for sale in 1973.
The Mini14 proved to pretty quickly be a popular arm with some police forces, including some international ones. This included some paramilitary policing units, and the weapon saw some odd use, such as squaring off on the British side, in a police application, against the AR180 on the IRA side, in Northern Ireland. Less appreciated is that it received some paramilitary use as well, to a small degree, such as in the Philippines. And it equipped the Bermuda Regiment of the British Army.
In some military and paramilitary use it was the selective fire version of the Mini14, the AC556, that was sued. This is the case of the Bermuda Regiment as well as in French paramilitary use, where they are locally made. This was the version the Marines inquired about. They took a different direction, however, when Sturm Ruger couldn't guarantee adequate production. Chances are high that, had it been able to do so, the Mini14 would have entered US service and be the rifle that we'd be discussing being replaced today.
The Marine Corps then turned to improving the M16 itself, which lead to the M16A2. The A2 featured a heavier barrel and new, much more precise, sights, making the rifle much more accurate than it had been previously, and it had never been inaccurate. The A2 also eliminated full automatic, which was a mistake, in favor of three shot bursts.
The Army also adopted the A2, and then the Army, abandoning the nonsense introduced into it by SLAM Marshall's work of fiction, Men Under Fire, started to reemphasize marksmanship and fire control. Optical sights came in, which lead to the A4 variant, which took a Picatinny rail, which allowed for optical sights to be incorporated. Those have become standards such that iron sights on the M16 are the exception, and not the rule.
Additionally, as any student of this topic knows, the M16 itself yielded in combat units, and unfortunately, to the M4 Carbine, a development of the carbine version first fielded as an experiment during the Vietnam War. The M4 carbine supplanting the M16 has been, quite frankly, stupid and unjustified, as the M16 is itself really only a carbine, but it came roaring in during the recent wars in the Middle East and basically its sex appeal, which was partially responsible for the original adoption of the M16, brought it in, in force.
- "Fixing" the 5.56
As all of this was occurring, the 5.56 became the NATO round, again due to US pressure, as had been the case with the 7.62 NATO. But there was European resistance to it. European nations would not accept the tiny 55gr bullet, and eventually a 62gr bullet was incorporated into the cartridge in a feature designed by the Belgians, but also influenced by the West Germans and the Swedes, the latter of whom are not in NATO (yet). The heavier bullet was an undoubted improvement. Since the second war with Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, even heavier bullets have been fielded by Special Forces units on a limited basis.
- Looking for a replacement, at first.
Even as all of this occurred, there were those in the Army who never gave up the hope of returning the US to a rifle firing a larger cartridge, or indeed, retuning even to the M14. They were sidelined at first, but by the early 1980s, they were resurfacing.
Starting in 1981, the U.S. Army engaged in a series of war games in Egypt. By the mid 1980s, these resulted in a series of recommendations regarding material that anticipated a large-scale US deployment in action in the Middle East. One of the recommendations was for a different rifle, one firing a cartridge that could reach out further and which didn't jam in the dust. Careful reading made it plain that the Army wanted the M14 back, at least on a theater basis. And in fact, steps were taken to make that happen.
Thousands of M14s remained in the service inventory. Indeed, at no point had the Army ever actually completely ceased using it. Special Forces units kept on using fairly extensively. And after 1981, the Army pulled enough M14s aside and reworked them such that they could be issued to what was designated the Rapid Deployment Force.
The problem proved to be, however, that when the day came to deploy to the Middle East, it was a much larger deployment than had been foreseen. Issuing a division worth's of M14s to troops who had been issued M16A2s or M16A4s would have been problematic enough, but several divisions worth was too much. When the first Gulf War came, it was too much. The M16 kept on being the longarm for most soldiers.
It was the second Gulf War, however, that really changed things. The defects of the M16A4 and M16A5 and the M4 became too much to ignore. So were the defects in the 5.56.
- Trying to fix what was wrong with the M16, the other approaches.
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The XM5 and XM250 will be paired with the XM157 Fire Control, a ruggedized advanced fire control system that increases accuracy and lethality for the close combat force. The XM157 integrates a number of advanced technologies, including a variable magnification optic (1X8), backup etched reticle, laser rangefinder, ballistic calculator, atmospheric sensor suite, compass, Intra-Soldier Wireless, visible and infrared aiming lasers, and a digital display overlay. It is produced by Sheltered Wings Inc. d/b/a Vortex Optics, Barneveld, Wisconsin.
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