![]() Considered revolutionary in its day, the WWII-era German assault rifle was credited with saving the outnumbered Kampfgruppe Scherer from certain annihilation by numerically superior Russian troops in November 1942. Wehrmacht troops in overwhites with Sturmgewehr 44’s. 30 caliber 7.62x54mm rimmed Russian cartridge? Few foes on the planet could hope to dominate America in an air, tank or naval battle yet every bad actor with an AK or PKM takes on American ground forces in a small arms fight because we are no longer appropriately armed and thus not respected in that battle space. and NATO 5.56mm weapons by the enemy’s use and outright exploitation of SVD rifles and PKM and now PKP light machine guns firing the nearly 100 year old. One must ask, and many are, have our troops lost their ability to win and survive in a small arms encounter against a determined enemy armed with basically WWII-era technology? Are we being overmatched at ranges outside those of U.S. Threat “Overmatch” – the Product of Falling Behind Special Operations Command after having failed repeatedly on the modern battlefield. However decades later the original M193 Ball round and its 1980s replacement the green-tipped M855 “Penetrator” round, developed primarily for steel helmet penetration and intended for use in light machine guns, would be fully replaced in the U.S. For that intended role it was a perfect choice. 223 Remington round, selected primarily for its light recoil, to be used in the lightweight AR-15 and later M16 rifle platform. The AR-15’s designer, the world renowned Eugene Stoner, created what would become the 5.56x45mm or. 222 Remington Magnum cartridge designed for use on small varmints out to 250 yards. Air Force security policeman, the 5.56mm round was a modification of the commercial. and NATO programs have been conducted to improve or replace the 5.56x45mm NATO cartridge first developed and fielded in the early 1960s for the AR-15, America’s first true assault rifle. operations in Somalia during the “Battle of the Black Sea” operation in Mogadishu in 1993, also known in the media as “Black Hawk Down,” dozens of U.S. What does the future hold for the Stoner rifle platform and current NATO cartridges against ever improving threat capabilities? (U.S. No one needs a calculator to see how badly this ends for the good guys.Īmerican troops engaging insurgents in Afghanistan in 2011 with 5.56mm and 7.62mm NATO rifles. It was well known in 1990 that the AK-47’s sustained fire rate was 120 rounds per minute, 150 for the newer AKM model seen at Wanat. Special Operations Command report on the M4. This shortcoming was documented again in 2001 in a U.S. Army Material Command tests as early as 1990 revealed that the M4’s maximum safe sustained fire rate was 90 rounds per minute, and that under excessive sustained fire rates as described above, the barrel would overheat causing the weapon to fail. Numerous M4 Carbines, M249 Squad Automatic Weapons and MK19 AGL’s stopped firing as they overheated in the 173rd’s valiant attempt to repel the superior numbers of determined insurgent fighters armed with AK-47s and RPGs. small arms to keep up with Russian weapons designed decades earlier. troops were killed with another twenty seven injured in what arguably was a failure of U.S. ![]() In this horrific infantry battle nine U.S. Army’s C Company, 2-503rd Infantry, 173rd Brigade Combat Team. Close combat would never be the same again.įast forward to Jduring the Battle of Wanat in Afghanistan, Combat Outpost Kahler, manned by the troops of U.S. The encircled German troops break out of the tightening Russian noose to fight another day in great part to the tremendous and sudden increase in “firepower” provided by the revolutionary new German “assault rifle” and its intermediate rifle cartridge in its first appearance on the battlefield. The German Luftwaffe drops the new and super-secret MKb42 “machine carbines” and equally new 7.92x33mm Kurz ammunition to the vastly outnumbered German unit. The beleaguered German Army “Kampfgruppe Scherer” unit is surrounded and outnumbered by Red Army forces on the Russian front. Here's a similar article, featuring a round you may have never heard of that is also mentioned in the Small Arms Survey paper: It even has a few updates on the LSAT program (including the name of a paper I'd love to read: Intermediate-calibre Cased Telescoped Small Arms Systems: Benefits and Trade-offs): Small Arms Survey just put out an interesting paper going over how militaries might want to go to 6.5mm rounds and new tech that can help them do it cheaper and better (like cased telescoped ammo). ![]()
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