The ideal rifle for the military to replace the M4

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johnwilliamson062

Moderator
that last 100 yards belongs to the guys moving on boot leather and wearing crossed rifles.
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Your not considering a UAV or UGV that can navigate in a building, fire just as precisely under human cotrol(or more so as the controller is not in danger), sustain multiple hits without losing any combat effectiveness, and operate 24 hours a day as fresh controllers are rotated off in shifts at a secure location where they just slept in a real bed, ate a warm breakfast, and took a hot shower before reporting to their cubicle.
You aren't going to have anywhere near the collateral damage when a unmanned vehicle is breaching. The controller is much calmer than a person breaching.

Will there be live infantry on the ground? Probably. There will still be tribal elders and such that will be better handled with personal communication. A video monitor on a robot doesn't even work well in the movies. An equal or greater number of UAVs operated from a remote location? Probably. Will the UAVs be screening for the infantry, taking damage, drawing fire, etc? Probably.
Imagine a small Afghan village the US needs to secure. Too small to leave forces at, but landing a UAV with a semi-auto 223 rifle on a hill overlooking it at a cost less than a small fraction of a more vulnerable platoon. Really a 22lr "Zip" with a ballistic computer can probably do the job and carry an unbelievable amount of ammunition. It just sits in the sun 1000+ yards away until needed. If some kids see it and decide they want to poke it with sticks or throw rocks at it, it just takes off and repositions on the other side of the valley. Bad guys roll up, it takes off, floats above and takes a precision shot or two. Bad guys run off. A few hours later boots show up and exploit the results to further the relationship. The rifles they carry won't be that important as there will probably be a half dozen or more better armed, better armored, UAVs overhead ready to interdict any threats.
Once a week or so a refueling craft can top it off.

ARSS is 10 years old. UAV technology has made leaps and bounds in the last decade. As long as the US has the ability to provide a super secure staging area and apply a million dollars per casualty inflicted(which is probably a lot less than current costs), the potential is incredible.

I'd still think any sort of improved rifle would be an easy sell. I haven't heard anyone complaining about any of the other weapons systems, armored vehicles, etc etc the infantry is being given. Think of the huge uproar when Rumsfeld didn't take the armor issues seriously(or was at least perceived not to do so). I think military spending is unbelievably inefficient, that we could cut the size of our military in half with ease, that spending money to be three fighter generations ahead of our enemies while they steal our research results and leap frog our billions in mothballed follies, is more a threat to our security than the possibility of China fielding a blue water navy. I still wouldn't put up a fight on anything that MIGHT increase the survivability of infantry, even if I don't want infantry deployed in the first place. We now fight wars with no "last hundred yards."
 
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BlueTrain

New member
I think Mr. SPEMack618 touches on the very point over which most of the controversy and discussion is about in this and other threads. That's the "last 100 yards." It requires some elaboration, however.

First, I'd up that to maybe 300 yards. The main thing that keep getting mentioned is the ineffectiveness of the M4 and maybe the M16 beyond 300 yards or meters, if you're younger than me. But some sources give the effective range of 7.62 weapons as being little different than 5.56 weapons, depending on the weapon but mainly depending on the source. In any case, other weapons, as Mr. SPEMack618 mentions, are for longer range targets.

It is worth mentioning on that point that not only different armies and different branches but even different units have different approaches to that problem. Of course, they may not all have the same resources to call upon either, which may be the heart of the problem. At least one suggested that, in so many words, even the designated marksman might not be around when you need him. So you give every infantryman more capability to engage targets at a longer range. Whether the man is up to doing that is another story. And whether present weapons are incapable of that is also questionable. But if you come up with a better infantry rifle, it doesn't follow that it needs to replace each and every M4 or M16 on hand, so I think that part is not a major issue. I also don't think that expecting an infantryman to learn yet another weapons system (they are expected to know all the weapons in the platoon) is not unreasonable unless they're as dumb as we used to think Russians were.

But of course military spending is inefficient because wars are wasteful and inefficient. But I don't think the Pentagon is so bad. I will confess, however, that my late father-in-law, formerly of the Army Air Corps, an engineer, had something to do with weapon procurement for the army, working mainly with rotary wing aircraft. I don't see, however, how we could cut the military in half or spend half, either, unless you want units to be deployed twice as often. But you say you wouldn't put up a fight over something that might work. The thing is, you never know and long retired experts like us will be discussing what a dumb thing or brilliant thing it was fifty years later.

It is said that a few troops went ashore in Normandy arguing about Gettysburg. Probably wasn't true. Makes a good story, though.
 
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stagpanther

New member
Several quality manufacturers of combat rifles are coming out with "quick" field caliber conversion ability and apparently are being marketed to police and military forces. I wonder if this is not "the wave of the future."
 
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johnwilliamson062

Moderator
how we could cut the military in half or spend half, either, unless you want units to be deployed twice as often.
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Or half as much. Stop all the entirely pointless and very expensive "hearts and minds," nation building, policing the world, etc. etc. If you want to wreck the Taliban do it. Let it be known that if the government that fills the vacuum causes any problems for the US/allies we will return and topple it. In out, roll the dice. Repeat until you get a favorable result. Much cheaper. I might support "nation building" if our previous success rate wasn't so close to zero(West Germany and Japan which were both strong nations before we assisted in rebuilding them). We are outright bad at it, even if no one else is better. We can't afford it anyways. If the money spent militarily in the Middle East over the last 30 years had been invested in alternative energy sources, to include oil from other locations, it could have been done really inefficiently and still offered a much better return IMO.


Several quality manufacturers of combat rifles are coming out with "quick" field caliber conversion ability
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If you looked at some of my posts from a few years ago you would see I was all over the multi-barrel systems in all their iterations. Members here told me the problems of the systems, but like many things I learned the hard way(expensive).
In most cases, the quick change itself doesn't hold zero perfectly. You need an optic for each caliber/barrel. If you go with a scout mount you have to protect the whole extra barrel pretty well in the field. If you go with two QC receiver mounted optics you are going to get 1 MOA variance with remount at best. You get a total accuracy loss that is significant at the ranges the extra barrel is meant for(4-600 meters). The shooter needs to learn both cartridge/gun combinations ballistics extremely well. Most of the systems involve small parts that aren't difficult to lose in the field. In the end none of the systems really outshine simply carrying a second upper. Additional compromises must be made on the lower regarding things like type of stock and trigger either way. Still need to carry double ammunition.
I still have an Encore, but it is much more expensive than separate firearms and carries very limited advantages. If I didn't already own it I would likely go with separate firearms. I won't buy any other barrels for it, and I wouldn't be surprised if I don't own it in 2 years. It may go away before this Fall. In my limited experience, the much simpler single shot hunting oriented Encore works better to fill its role than any of the more complicated switch barrel systems.

I previously said I don't think the problems of a bullpup are unsolvable at a reasonable cost(trigger, ambidexterity,catastrophic malfunctions in close proximity of the shooters head) . I have the opposite opinion of the multi-barrel systems.

I might be able to put together a very light CQB carbine/pistol and a very light bolt action long range rifle that weighed less total than the dual caliber system with a faster transition between the two. Probably cheaper also.
 
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Palmetto-Pride

New member
Or half as much. Stop all the entirely pointless and very expensive "hearts and minds," nation building, policing the world, etc. etc. If you want to wreck the Taliban do it. Let it be known that if the government that fills the vacuum causes any problems for the US/allies we will return and topple it. In out, roll the dice. Repeat until you get a favorable result. Much cheaper. I might support "nation building" if our previous success rate wasn't so close to zero(West Germany and Japan which were both strong nations before we assisted in rebuilding them). We are outright bad at it, even if no one else is better. We can't afford it anyways. If the money spent militarily in the Middle East over the last 30 years had been invested in alternative energy sources, to include oil from other locations, it could have been done really inefficiently and still offered a much better return IMO.
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Agreed 100% and to stay on topic..........I know currently the technology isn't there, but if there was a way to safely push a .30cal bullet out of a AR15 size weapon as fast as say a AR10 size weapon can push a 30cal bullet.....think about it this way a 300BLK pushing a 150gr bullet as fast as a 7.62 NATO can push it. Something like that maybe worth replacing the current rifle/caliber if the technology was there.
 
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BlueTrain

New member
I think that sometimes progress happens with technology when we aren't watching or expecting it. It sometimes comes from a different direction. Fresh thinking. Fresh thinking is as hard to come by as new technology. In other words, new things are resisted.

Technology also has to advance, sometimes, on a broad front. You may recall that both smokeless power and small bore (from .28 to .32 caliber, that is) arrived on the scene a long time ago, whenever it was the 8mm Lebel was introduced. I think it finally reached the troops around 1890. Other well-known, or rather, better known cartridges arrived soon thereafter. Overnight, you were hopelessly old-fashioned if you still used a .45 or 11mm rifle. But almost as soon, a really small bore, the 6mm Lee-Navy (this is all from memory, by the way, and I'm sure to get something slightly wrong). It was used, in fact, by the US Marines, but one might say it was before its time. There were problems with the combination of the bore, the bullet and the powder. It was nothing like these latter-day small bores, though.

There were other attempts to introduce something smaller than, in our case, the .30-06, but the timing was bad and it didn't happen. As far as I know, that was a dead-end, too. Without researching anything, the 7.62 NATO was not a quantum leap forward but everybody liked it at the time, even civilians.

Then came Eugene Stoner and Armalite. That was something new. But even before then was Kalashnikov and his designs, which were inspired by, though not based on an even earlier design and you all know that story.

Were any of them technological breakthroughs? The AR-10 and AR-15 were in some ways, more so than the AK series, I think. An AK might remind you more of an old-fashioned sporting weapon in some ways, and in fact, the safety of an old Remington auto-loading rifle works exactly the same way, externally, anyway. The advancement with the AK was more tactical than technical. The idea of using a so-called intermediate round was also not something all that new but the idea of an army using a less than full powered rifle round was. Here I'm thinking of the old Winchester self-loading cartridges. They had a certain amount of popularity in law enforcement circles, though not as much as Thompson sub-machine guns. Thompsons and other submachine guns met with resistance by the military, too, until they were on the receiving end.

It begins to sound like there hasn't been much progress since the 1880s. There have, of course. In fact, there had been a great deal of progress in the previous 40 or so years than in the previous 140 years. Since then there have been advances in manufacturing techniques to make weapons less expensive (and to allow faster production). I'm not sure if stamped metal technology is fully developed or not but plastics are certainly widely used. Does anyone make a new infantry rifle that has any wood on it?

Personally, I think the single thing that has happened to infantry weapons in the last 25 years that has increased the effectiveness of the infantry rifle and the soldier has been the widespread use of optical sights. Ground breaking? Hardly. But like the use of a less than full-powered cartridge, it's one of those "why didn't we think of that before? ideas.
 
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