Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire 101st Airborne soldiers are first to receive new Next Gen Squad Weapon

The mountain of dead the 5.56 has piled up obviously has no effect on your opinion. Second anytime I can have 280 to 320 rounds over 140 I will take the formwer.

How many for a .277 at 80K psi. And just how good are the suppressors? How many rounds will they last? How loud will the rifles be without a suppressor? Seems a miserable choice, going deaf, running out of ammo.

What is the militaries fascination with .277 when there is .264 and .284? Stick a large rifle primers in a 6x47 lapua and make a 130g boat tail with a g1 bc of better than .550. The lapua round is proven accurate and a few extra bc points wouldn't hurt. Too many of our old military guys listen to too many of their uncles 270 win deer hunting stories. The swedes had the bore right over 100 years ago. I like the 6mm gt too. A 110g 6mm bullet can have a bc over .6 and weighs less.

Bb

500 yards is pretty ambitious anyway for most.

20 just like the M14.

Seems reasonable to use the new rifle with designated riflemen.

can a 5.56 penetrate Level 4 body armor at 50 meters? 100 meters? 150 meters? 200 meters? i don't know, but i betcha the Army does know.

the 5.56 was a good round to kill unarmored opponents. today in this day and age, China supplies level 4 body armor to their troops. it's kinda hard to kill the Chinese troops having level 4 body armor using the 5.56.


338 Lapua with polymer cases is less weight than a 7.62. i don't know if the Lapua is coming out or shelved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVgyOHB5D5M&t=132s&ab_channel=Task%26Purpose

just for your own info

https://www.armytimes.com/news/your...new-rifle-machine-gun-and-optic-in-2024/

Army to field new rifle, machine gun and optic in 2024
By Todd South
Dec 20, 2023


The Army’s newest rifle and automatic rifle are already in the hands of soldiers for testing and will officially field to its first unit in 2024.

The service delivered the Next Generation Squad Weapon rifle and automatic rifle, known as the XM7 and XM250, respectively, along with its advanced optic, the XM157 fire control, to a platoon in the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky in late September.

That platoon, along with a squad from the 75th Ranger Regiment, conducted user tests over the subsequent months as the Army ramped up for full fielding to a not yet identified unit in the 101st by the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, officials told Army Times.

The XM7 will replace the M4 for close combat units such as infantry, scouts, combat engineers and special operations forces. The XM250 will replace the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon for the same units.

The weapons and optics will drop the “X” in their names once fielded.

Non-close combat forces will continue to carry the M4 and M249 for the foreseeable future.

The legacy M4 and M249 fire the 5.56mm round while the XM7 and XM250 fire the recently developed 6.8mm cartridge.

The Army began development of the “intermediate caliber” to better defeat enemy body armor and increase both accuracy and lethality at longer ranges. That effort began in earnest following the 2017 Small Arms Ammunition Configuration Study, which identified firepower and range gaps in small arms across the Army.

The Marine Corps has actively participated in multiple testing and evaluation sessions with the Army, provided feedback and is “monitoring” the Army’s development and fielding of the weapons systems.

The heavier round provides better penetration and outperforms the 7.62mm round used in the M240 machine gun system, typically found at the platoon level.

The increased energy of the round also allows shooters to penetrate barriers that deflected 5.56mm rounds, as demonstrated in a live fire during which an Army Times reporter participated in September at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

Multiple XM250 6.8mm rounds drilled holes through cinder blocks and struck a human silhouette target while only a single 5.56mm round managed to damage, but not fully pass through the cinder blocks.

“That’s turning cover into concealment,” Lt. Col. Micah Rue, product manager for soldier weapons at Program Executive Office-Soldier, said at the time.

The current 10-year contract for the Sig Sauer weapons, builder of both systems, has a ceiling value of $4.5 billion, and the Vortex Optics/Sheltered Wings XM157 fire control cost ceiling is set at $2.7 billion.

The fire control allows for computer-aided ballistics, matching the round and weapon with the optic for better accuracy. The shooter can aim at the target, push a button on the weapon or optic and it will automatically adjust for distance and bullet drop, allowing the user to adjust fire rapidly.

The fire control has preprogrammed ballistics information and can be fit to nearly any small arms weapon system in the Army’s inventory.

Sure. Until the suppressor lost. Or not installed properly or damaged jumping out of a vehicle or slammed against a doorframe just enough to cause a baffle strike.

20.

The 6.8X51mm is the same case size as the 7.62X51mm (.308). It's a .270/08 running at very high pressure.


Yeah the 7.62X39mm is a contender but has not been the frontline issue round for the Commies for decades. The Orcs went to a 22 cal version and the ChiComs use the 5.8X42mm. The trend to the smaller caliber rounds is pretty much universal for those with large armies.

The M7 is going to be a failure for general infantry issue and the current guns are not accurate enough for DMR duty.

Well then, perhaps you should tote you some .22 LR or .17 HMR so you could quadruple that to 1,200 rounds or so. 🤷‍♂️

This is what a West Point education gets you nowadays I guess…

They shoulda just kept the M1 Garand. John C. Garand even wanted to make it a .277 caliber but General MacArthur vetoed that because of the gazillions of rounds of 30-06 they had left over from WWI.

After the last four years, I don’t a give a schidt if they use any caliber from 17 on up.

It will slow the AAP s down when the already can't keep up with the rate that congress is giving our armaments away to foreigners.

My "nowadays" was mid 80's.

So, now we mock West Point graduates here?

Wow.

Well their pledge has changed with the times, you know. Army values? Mourn maybe more than mock.

Have I said this before ? Too complicated, too expensive (good for "losing" a few 100 large). And not made in the US of A, and that is a disgrace.