The Quarter Inch Rifle shall be the standard personal weapon of the Light Infantry Division,the rest of the British Army,the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines.
The Three Eighths Inch Carbine and Pistol shall be issued in lieu of the Quarter Inch Rifle only where there is a specific need for a weapon which is shorter or lighter or which fires special ammunition types.
The Quarter Inch Rifle shall be:a semi automatic,gas driven weapon;three feet long,of "bullpup" configuration;with a heavy,twenty four inch long,free floating,fluted barrel,with one in seven rifling;ambidextrous controls and ejection;lightweight receiver,reciprocating parts and furniture and an integrated moderator.
The complete Quarter Inch Rifle system shall weigh twenty five pounds and shall include:a Quarter Inch Rifle;sling;cover;moderator;one to eight magnification day scope;clip on thermal imager;non magnetic multitool (bayonet,knife,mine probe,wire cutter etc.) and scabbard;pouches for six magazines;operator's kit (lubricant,cleaning rod,brushes,batteries,dope cards,ballistics tables etc.);seven thirty round polymer magazines and two hundred and ten rounds of quarter inch by two inch ammunition.
Photo: Original photo by Pvt. Bob Bailey United States Marine Corps modifications by Grand Logistics
The day scope shall have a red dot reticle in the second focal plane which shall subtend an angle of two minutes of arc (or alternatively one half a milliradian) which is roughly equivalent to the height of a man's head at a quarter mile range or the width of a man's torso at a half mile range and can therefore be used as a crude range finder.
The day scope shall have variable,between one and eight times,magnification and a grid type reticle in the first focal plane,which is inherently more flexible than a bullet drop compensation reticle.
The day scope shall be used with the Quarter Inch Rifle,the Three Eighths Inch Carbine,the Three Inch Mortar and the Six Inch Rocket.
The Quarter Inch Rifle shall be chambered in the quarter inch by two inch cartridge,five of which shall weigh as much as four 7.62x51mm cartridges or eight 5.56x45mm cartridges.
The Quarter Inch Rifle shall fire a one hundred and fifteen grain* copper and steel bullet with a G7 ballistic coefficient of 0.3 at three thousand feet per second from a twenty four inch barrel with a one in seven twist rate.
Within a range of a quarter mile,the bullet shall not be more than eight inches above or below the line of sight allowing rapid,point and shoot,engagements at the most common combat ranges.
At a range of half a mile hold over shall be no more than twice a man's height,which is small enough to allow rapid,intuitive adjustment.
The Quarter Inch Rifle shall exceed the armour penetrating abilities of both 5.56x45mm and 7.62x51mm weapons due to it's higher impact energy,a consequence of superior external ballistic qualities.
The Quarter Inch Rifle shall be able to fire at least one thirty round magazine per minute for at least seven minutes without overheating,at an ambient temperature of at least sixty degrees Celsius.
The Quarter Inch Rifle shall replace the L85A2/3 Individual Weapons.
The Quarter Inch Rifle shall replace the L86A2/3 Light Support Weapons.
The Quarter Inch Rifle shall replace the L108A1 and L110A2/A3 Light Machine Guns.
The Quarter Inch Rifle shall replace the L96A1 and L118A1 sniper rifles.
The Quarter Inch Rifle shall replace the L119A1/A2 carbines.
The Quarter Inch Rifle shall replace the L129A1 Sharpshooter rifles.
*This cartridge was originally intended to fire one hundred and twenty grain all copper Ball and copper,titanium and tungsten Armoured Piercing Incediary (A.P.I.) bullets but the one hundred and fifteen grain bullet weight is more suited to cheaper but lower density steel and copper bullets.
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46 comments:
Why are you proposing using a new calibre rather than something like 6.5 Creedmore, which is in service in SF community in US?
Also the bullpup configuration, why not use a standard lay out with extending or swing butt?
Hello Jim Davies,
those are very good questions.
The Quarter Inch cartridge mentioned here was conceived many years before Creedmoor was adopted for military use,in fact before it was even released,but there were similar cartridges available back then such as the 6.5-08 (later 6.5-08 A-Square and .260 Remington) and which were amongst hundreds considered.
They are very well suited to upgrading existing 7.62x51mm weapons which need a barrel change but have plenty of life left in them (sadly the British armed forces seem to have little interest in that idea) but still have significant disadvantages when compared to an all new cartridge in an all new weapon.
The biggest problem with 6.5mm cartridges is that they need a higher bullet weight to obtain the same Ballistic Coefficient (B.C.) as a lighter Quarter Inch bullet (and if it is to be a lead free bullet that weight would also consume significant powder volume).
This means it is necessary to impart more energy to the bullet to obtain a given muzzle velocity (which is the dominant external ballistic factor at short ranges),which in turn requires some combination of a larger cartridge (and magazines),longer barrel or higher operating pressures.
The entire weapon system ends up being bigger,heavier and harder recoiling in order to obtain the same external ballistics,and hence hit probability,which is a problem for an already overloaded infantryman.
It would be possible to fire lighter bullets to get a higher muzzle velocity and a flatter short range trajectory but they would have a lower ballistic coefficient and therefore perform poorly at longer ranges.
The Three Eighths Inch carbine cartridge proposed on this site actually fires relatively light for calibre bullets with a lower ballistic coefficient,because it is designed for use at the shorter ranges found in confined spaces,a high ballistic coefficient is of little importance at short ranges but lower sectional density offers internal ballistic advantages which permit the use of shorter barrels,for the same muzzle velocity,which are desirable in a weapon designed for use in a confined space.
The alternative to lighter bullets or heavier weapons systems is to settle for lower muzzle velocity which produces poorer external ballistics at close ranges with more drop,windage and target movement,but even then,the 6.5mm Creedmoor could never match the combination of high muzzle velocity and high ballistic coefficient (and hence excellent long and short range external ballistics) of the Quarter Inch cartridge proposed here,despite being both bigger and heavier.
The bullpup configuration is dictated by internal ballistics,a smaller calibre gives a higher ballistic coefficient for any given bullet weight but it also offers a smaller area for the propellant gasses to work on and therefore needs a longer barrel to get any given muzzle velocity.
An extending or swing out butt with a shorter barrel than a bullpup would cause a loss of muzzle velocity,but if the barrel was the same length as the bullpup,then the rifle would be longer when the butt was extended and the soldier would have the inconvenience of having to extend and retract the butt at times when he should be concentrating on what is going on around him.
There is also the issue of the deadweight of a butt,which a bullpup rifle does not have to carry around.
Bullpups are often criticised for issues relating to their triggers,ejection mechanisms and ergonomics but to a large extent these criticisms relate to the design of specific weapons rather than the genre as a whole.
Grand Logistics
The Creedmore gives you nearly everything you asked for, 120 grain, 3020 ft/sec out of a test 28 inch barrel, ballistic co-efficiency is close to what your proposed bullet would give, it's armour penetration is better than 5.56 or 7.62, it's accuracy at long range is proven. Plus it gives you more, a common supply partner on missions abroad.
The rifle doesn't seem like a good idea, as an infantry man I'm being asked to lose a minimi or LSW from my fire team for a semi automatic with 210 rounds. I usually carry 10 magazines, 30/29 rounds per mag, now I'm down to 7, how do I win the firefight, when one eye is one the ammo and I don't have a good base of fire? I can better hit targets at range, which is great, but on the off chance that they don't stand up 900 metres away and wait for me to shoot them, I can't close with the enemy and neutralise them. If I'm reading it right I need to switch across to a 3/8th Inch carbine for operations in built up areas, so I have to carry two guns, where as I can carry L85 and do both jobs.
Hello Jim Davies,
the British armed forces often used different cartridges to the Americans and have benefitted greatly from that,British Centurion tanks had the excellent 105mm L7 which the Americans adopted in preference to their inferior 90mm,the Cheiftain had a 120mm gun almost twenty years before the American Abrams,more recently British snipers have had the .338 Lapua Magnum while their American counterparts were stuck with the shorter ranged .300 Winchester Magnum.
The Americans are currently planning to introduce a new 6.8mm cartridge,it is not clear if this will be any more successful than the many failures which have preceded it,the United States' Army has a very poor record when it comes to choosing new rifle cartridges,and the British armed forces have a rather tragic history of following them.
See here: https://asc.army.mil/web/portfolio-item/fws-cs-2/
The Creedmoor may fire a 120 grain 6.5mm bullet at that speed from a twenty-eight inch barrel but a twenty-eight inch barrel is four inches longer (and hence heavier) than the barrel the Quarter Inch Rifle is intended to use,it's performance with a shorter barrel is going to be less than that and the 6.5mm 120mm grain bullets are also going to have a lower ballistic coefficient than the Quarter Inch bullet.
Flatline Bullets (who produce some of the lowest drag bullets available) do manufacture 6.5mm bullets with ballistic coefficients similar to that of the proposed Quarter Inch but that is because their bullets are all copper,the higher density of which gives higher sectional density and hence a higher ballistic coefficient,which is an expression of the relationship between sectional density and form factor (shape),rather than a lower density combination of steel and copper (Ball) or tungsten/titanium/tracer and copper (Armoured Piercing Incendiary Tracer) which would be needed for a modern combat round.
A 7.62x51mm N.A.T.O. round typically weighs about 25 grammes (it varies depending on cartridge type and manufacturer),roughly double the weight of 5.56mm,Creedmoor is based on the same cartridge and is likely to be of similar cartridge weight for the same bullet weight though a 120 grain bullet would weigh about a gramme less than a typical 140 grain 7.62mm Ball round but a Quarter Inch Cartridge would be about four fifths of that weight,which means that four Creedmoor rounds would weigh about as much as five Quarter Inch rounds.
To that must be added the weight of the larger weapon,magazines and pouches,the proposed Quarter Inch Cartridge is narrower than the Creedmoor which means the magazines and pouches shall be smaller and lighter,efficient packaging is of little importance to civilian cartridges but is very important to military cartridges.
But weight per round carried should not be considered in isolation,if it was you would be running around with magazines full of .22 Long Rifle,what matters is weight per kill,superior external ballistics increase the hit probability for any soldier at any range and superior terminal ballistics increase the probability of incapacitation from every hit so the infantryman needs to carry fewer rounds to get the same kill probability.
Compared to the proposed Quarter Inch Rifle system,Creedmoor would give less terminal energy and a lower hit probability with a heavier weapon,ammunition and accessories,a lighter 5.56x45mm weapon system would give a similar hit probability,but less terminal energy,at short ranges because of it's high muzzle velocity,but with lower hit probability and lower impact energy at longer ranges because of it's low ballistic coefficient.
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For the last twenty years Terry Taliban has been relying on the off chance that British infantrymen would "stand up 900 metres away and wait for me to shoot them",and their inability to return fire effectively is what the British infantry have been complaining about.
Consider a foot patrol in an eerily quiet Helmand village starts taking fire from PKMs,SVDs and RPGs on a ridgeline half a mile away,an athlete on a running track could cover that distance in a couple of minutes but they have been on patrol for hours,they are tired,it is hot,they are carrying a hundred pounds of kit and there are ploughed fields,drainage ditches,mud walls and a steep hill between them and the enemy and they have to move tactically because someone is trying to kill them.
You are an infantryman,you know how long it would take to close with and clear that position better than I do,half an hour,an hour or longer?
Your Minimi weighs about twice as much as a rifle,to deal with heat and recoil,and every pound of that extra weight is roughly equivalent to a full thirty round 5.56mm magazine,divide the number of belted 5.56mm rounds you have by the number of minutes it is going to take to clear the enemy position and you will probably find that the result is less than the sustained rate of fire of a lighter rifle which would have allowed you to carry more ammunition in the first place,unless engagements are very short the light role (foot mobile) machine gun cannot sustain a higher rate of fire than a rifle because of ammunition constraints caused by it's heavier weight (machine guns in fixed positions or on vehicles do not have this problem).
Also,at longer ranges the poor external ballistics of the 5.56mm make it ineffective at suppression:
"Field testing has revealed that 5.56 bullets have only half the suppressive radius of 7.62 fire, exacerbated by the fact that the little bullets are more affected by wind drift and therefore less likely to get close to the target. This is supported by battlefield reports that the Taliban basically ignore 5.56 suppressive fire."
See here: http://www.sadefensejournal.com/wp/the-next-nato-rifle-and-machine-gun-cartridge/
The superior external ballistics of the proposed Quarter Inch Cartrige shall produce greater suppressive effect per round fired than either 5.56x45mm or 7.62x51mm N.A.T.O.,requiring fewer rounds to be carried.
You will not need to carry two guns with the Quarter Inch Rifle,it shall be thirty-six inches long,including the moderator,that is three and a half inches shorter than an M16 without a moderator or about the same length as an M4 with a moderator and stock extended,or an L86 without a moderator,it is short enough for most infantry work.
The Three Eighths Inch Carbine is intended to be issued only where there is a specific need for either a very short weapon (it shall be about twenty one inches long) or the use of specialised ammunition such as heavy subsonics,it would be standard issue for naval boarding parties and used as required by land forces,an infantry battalion might issue lots of them if it was operating in thick jungle or doing a lot of house clearing but otherwise it would be a rather rare beast.
Grand Logistics.
Depending on the manufacture of the round I have seen G7 coefficients of around the figure you are looking for, for example Sellier & Bellot offer a 140 grain bullet G7 of 0.247, which is 2648fps out of a 21 inch barrel, so 0.3 with a Creedmore design at 120ish grains 3000 fps seems entirely possible.
The weight of a Creedmore is 20g, dependent on the make up. Personally I would rather go down the path of plastic cases to reduce weight. To be honest it feels like we are talking about pretty minor differences between 6.5mm and 6.35mm.
The discussion about suppressive effects drives me up the wall. Yes louder, more visual bullets should suppress more, but all of the science fails to take into account the people aspect. When an ANA solder you're mentoring decides to stand up in the middle of a firefight to go for a wander and sit next to his mate, you realise what rubbish it is. The suppression calculations don't take into account whether the person being shot at is intoxicated or their belief system. If you believe that a bullet will only hit you if the almighty wills it, then you ignore bullets landing close to you. In general in Afghan we didn't suppress effectively because they were in good cover and we weren't even close to get rounds on them. Firing down at you from range is a tactic that has been used in that part of the world since muzzle loaders, but what matters is was it effective? Taking British Army deaths caused as a proxy, less that 20% were due to rifle fire at longer than CQB range. Explosions took the vast bulk of the soldiers lost. When looking at reports analysing engagements it's important to differentiate between effective engagements and harassing. There was shooting at long range, most didn't do anything and were just spraying and praying to intimidate the foreign forces. Replacing with a quarter inch round wouldn't improve the situation because the insurgents would just change tactics and shoot at us from where civilians were, knowing we couldn't shoot back (which they did a fair bit anyway).
Replacing 7.62 with Creedmore/Quarter inch I could see the benefit, but would guess that it would be a very small selection of weapons which would change, mainly in the infantry. For armoured vehicles/aircraft/mini guns on ships etc the benefit seems too small.
The lack of an automatic weapon in the proposal is a straight no. Off the top of my head there are 3 SOPs which require automatic. The L85 replaced the Sterling as well as the SLR and from day one the SLR was introduced alongside an automated weapon in the platoon as a base of fire, be it Bren or GPMG. What your proposing is taking us back to 1914.
There's a reason that no professional military in the world has a platoon with semi auto only, it would leave them dangerously short of firepower to dominate the enemy.
As the article you quoted says the driver for a different cartridge is that COIN operations in Afghan would continue. Since that's been written the world has moved on. Creating a rifle to suit one environment risks making it unusable in others, I was happy with the DMR and GPMG taking on the distance work and the L85 the rest, I certainly wouldn't want the entire platoon to be equipped as marksmen, that's not how we fight.
Hello Jim Davies,
some rudimentary calculations suggest a 6.5mm copper and steel bullet,with a density of eight and a half grammes per cubic centimetre,would have to weigh about one hundred and twenty-two grains to have a nought point three G7 Ballistic Coefficient,would be slightly longer than a Quarter Inch bullet and,with a couple of grains more powder,it would require a twenty-six inch barrel to reach three thousand feet per second if fired from the Creedmoor cartridge.
The Creedmoor cartridge appears lightweight but there are significant differences in cartridge weight depending on how thick the case walls are,some 0.308 cartridges are more than two grammes lighter than some 7.62x51mm cartridges because the latter are more conservatively constructed,the Creedoor case would be significantly heavier than the Quarter Inch if they were similarly constructed because it is a larger case,Creedmoor would also require bigger and heavier magazines and pouches as it is less space efficient,and while the differences may seem small they soon add up when a platoon is carrying thousands of rounds.
Plastic cases are interesting but back in the nineteen-eighties the very height of small arms fashion was the cased telescopic ammunition of the G11 rifle,they had plastic cased ammunition back then too and of course,the perennial favourite,laser weapons,none of those things have yet entered infantry service four decades on,however,lighter,higher performance ammunition is available today,at very low cost,without the need to develop any new technology.
Your comments about suppression brought to mind complaints,about a century ago,from British an American officers that the Muslims whom they were shooting didn't seem to understand that they were supposed to be dead,this led to a slew of new large calibre pistols.
The Quarter Inch Rifle is one of a small range of weapons which are intended to work together to deal with a range of battlefield problems,when dealing with infantry in defilade it's job is to inhibit target movement for the Three Inch Mortar,which should be able to put an air bursting bomb on target in under a minute with a lethal radius larger than that of an 81mm mortar due to the tungsten balls in the bomb casing.
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There are some creatures whose survival strategy depends upon tasting so bad that no predator would want to eat them,the Afghans have a very similar strategy,which they have used for a very long time,and firing down from hills is a big part of that:
"A GREAT and glorious thing it is
To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe -
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: "All flesh is grass."
Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in "villainous saltpetre".
And after?- Ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our 'ologies.
A scrimmage in a Border Station-
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!
No proposition Euclid wrote
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar's downward blow.
Strike hard who cares - shoot straight who can
The odds are on the cheaper man.
One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.
With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem.
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The "captives of our bow and spear"
Are cheap, alas! as we are dear."
When the enemy's object is to impose sufficient attrition that that we retire from the field,as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan,then losing twenty percent of our casualties to long range small arms fire must have been very helpful,to them,it would be very interesting to know what casualties the Taliban took at long range from our section weapons.
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As an aside,many years ago there was a document published about the causes of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan and it was note worthy that few of them seemed to be down to heavy machine gun fire,entirely in line with Che Guevara's opinion of the heavy machine gun's use in guerilla warfare which inspired the Three Eighths Inch Machine Gun concept at a time when the half inch Browning was expected to be replaced with something heavier.
Hiding amongst civilians is a tactic which would work against just about any weapon,you can't blame that on a Quarter Inch Rifle!
Given the vast sums the army has spent on light weight equipment,it is rather surprising that they did not invest in lighter ammunition,Creedmoor would have been well suited to both the Sharpshooter Rifle and the General Purpose Machine Gun in the infantry platoon,giving both less weight and better ballistics,there are also two other ways to cut the weight of 7.62x51mm belts by about a pound per hundred rounds,if anyone at the Ministry of Defence would like to know about that it would only cost them a substantial consultancy fee.
You might be surprised how important weight reduction is to armoured vehicles,they have the same problems as infantrymen,there is always something heavy which needs to be added to them and they can only carry so much weight without breaking,the ammunition load for the Light Protected Truck,proposed herein,is sixteen hundred rounds of a large Three Eighths Inch Cartridge which is likely to weigh about two hundred and eighty pounds,for eight tins of two hundred rounds each,it would have been double that weight if it was 12.7mm Browning Machine Gun,leaving hundreds of pounds less for payload or armour on a vehicle which has hard weight constraints as it is intended to be helicopter portable.
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A semi automatic rifle can fire at least five,thirty round,magazines in under a minute (is that what you mean by "taking us back to 1914"),a machine gun fired at a higher rate than that would require multiple belt changes and a barrel change in just a few minutes,at which point it is likely to have consumed all of it's linked ammunition,but if the light role machine gun fires at a lower rate it is doing nothing the rifle cannot do and still runs out of ammunition before the rifle (because a General Purpose Machine Gun with a spare barrel weighs about twenty pounds more than a Quarter Inch Rifle,the section can carry twenty pounds less ammunition for it).
With the Quarter Inch Rifle every man in the section has a weapon with a sustained rate of fire not far short of a Bren Gun and a lot more ammunition than Bren Gunners had at their disposal,the base of fire can be provided by any member of the section,not just the lone machine gunner,nobody does it that way but then nobody had belt fed machine guns in the infantry section,until they did.
The World may have moved on but it keeps moving back to where it was,we have just had our fourth Afghan war,have invaded Iraq for the third time and are currently stomping around Africa yet again,where next,another fight in the jungles of Asia,the Radfan,or the fields of France?
The Quarter Inch Rifle was not conceived for Afghanistan,it long predates that conflict although the concept has been tinkered with over the years,it was designed to be an all rounder,compact enough for close quarters work but with enough range for the longer stuff,precise enough for a marksman but able to put down enough fire to do the work of a light machine gun,allowing every rifle in the section to contribute to whatever needs to be done.
How you fight is a product of how you have been trained and equipped,if there are only two longer range weapons in the section,then they do the long range fighting while everyone else takes cover,but that is not efficient,against an opponent with a larger number of longer ranged weapons you lose the long fight and then cannot close to use the short range weapons.
With the Quarter Inch Rifle,every man in the section can fight from bayonet range out to half a mile and beyond,ensuring that the right weapon is always in the right place at the right time,and more of them may be brought to bear whatever the situation.
Grand Logistics.
To clarify my comment on taking us back to 1914, I was meaning that the British Army entered the Great war with large platoons armed uniformly with 'full bore' rifles and no automatic weapons.
I think we are talking at cross purposes, sustained rate of fire from a semi auto is one thing, 'instantaneous' automatic fire is another, for example counter ambush drills are full auto, everything in your magazine goes in the direction of the enemy on one trigger pull, it's not an aimed rapid repeated fire. It's rarely used in the real world, because we rarely get into the situation, but it's an essential when we do.
Your comment "nobody does it that way but then nobody had belt fed machine guns in the infantry section,until they did" illustrates my point, since the section level (portable) automatic weapon was invented no military has gone back to an all semi auto only platoon, despite there been many excellent rifles capable of doing what you want and the additional hassle of lugging around the extra weight of a machine gun. A rifle man with 210 rounds is not a replacement for a Minimi with 500/600 of link and a quick change barrel as a base of fire. The experience of over a century of warfare has provide evidence to back up the theory that a 'machine-gun' base of fire works.
There is a weight problem in the infantry, replacing 5.56mm with fewer bigger rounds isn't the solution, the trials of M16 versus M14 50 odd years ago confirmed that.
Hello Jim Davies,
the British Army appears to now have one General Purpose Machine Gun in each section with no Light Machine Guns leaving just one weapon to generate a base of fire,when it is available.
One might reasonably expect that weapon to have a fifty round starter belt or nut sack which in an ambush would be exhausted in about five seconds if firing at cyclic rates,at which point the gunner has to spend about half a minute laying his weapon down and putting on a new belt while the enemy shoots at him,he might have an assistant to speed that process up but that would mean the section had one less weapon returning fire (this is why some clever chaps invented the Bren Gun).
The rifleman can only fire about thirty rounds in five seconds but it only takes a few seconds for him to change his magazine so he can have several magazines emptied before the machine gunner has his second belt ready.
If the machine gun fires it's second belt at cyclic rates,and the belt has one hundred rounds,it is going to need another belt change ten seconds later,taking the weapon out of the fight for another half a minute and by the time the third belt is on the semi automatic rifle will still have fired more rounds than the machine gun.
After firing the third belt the machine gun's barrel is probably going to be so hot that it would need to be changed before the next belt was put on,though it has been reported that the British Army is not issuing infantry sections with spare barrels for their machine guns.
If true,this suggests that the machine gun is expected to fire bursts at sustained rates,which is very sensible (in terms of control,heat build up and ammunition consumption),but which also means it is firing slower than the maximum rate of fire of a semi automatic rifle,but above the rifle's sustained rate of fire,and therefore has a rate of fire advantage only over longer time periods,which it can only exploit if it has more ammunition,which it doesn't because it weighs so much more than the rifle.
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In summary,the machine gun can put more rounds down range than the semi automatic rifle in the first five seconds if running at cyclic rates but then falls behind the rifle in the first minutes because it takes so much longer to change a belt than a magazine,but over a longer time period the rifle would start to overheat and the machine gun regains the advantage,if it has spare barrels and if it has enough ammunition,but as the machine gun and spare barrels weigh twenty pounds more than a rifle and the 7.62x51mm link weighs more than Quarter Inch Cartridges in magazines the rifle has more ammunition for the same weight.
The British Army has gotten rid of it's Light Machine Guns and the United States' Marine Corps has gotten rid of it's M249s,the latter now has a fire team of four M27 Infantry Automatic Rifles instead of three carbines and a Minimi (the sustained rate of their new fire team is almost identical to that of the old).
Firing at rapid rate a Minimi would overheat a barrel and consume a two hundred round ammunition box every minute,six hundred rounds and three barrels in three minutes,at a sustained rate of fire it is firing no faster than a rifle can but has less ammunition available because it weighs so much more.
We can both agree about the weight problem but the British Army's return to 7.62x51mm section weapons and the American's plans to change to a 6.8mm cartridge both suggest that the move to 5.56x45mm is not considered successful,despite the benefits which it does have in certain circumstances such as generating large volumes of short range fire.
The Quarter Inch Rifle,with moderator,shall weigh about as much as a bare L85 Individual Weapon,not because it is light weight but because the L85 is heavy,the 5.56x45mm ammunition weighs less than Quarter Inch but you need to carry more of it because of it's inferior external and terminal ballistics.
The Sharpshooter Rifle and General Purpose Machine Gun are both heavier than the Quarter Inch Rifle and so is their ammunition,in addition to having inferior external ballistics.
Overall,Quarter Inch Rifles shall weigh less than the current section's weapons and how much the ammunition weighs depends on how much of each type is being carried.
The United States' Army has come to the conclusion that the 5.56x45mm cartridge was a bad idea,for once they may be right.
Grand Logistics.
The LMGs are not on standard issue, which is sensible if you already have a belt fed machine gun in the section, but are still available from storage for the 'regular' army if required for a particular operation, SFs have always done something different, the range of weapons they work with is huge. The USMC explicitly allow the M249 to be issued at the unit commander's discretion, so no, the Minimi hasn't been got rid of, it's kept for when it is needed. GPMGs are really a two man weapon, even if in the light role it's just carried by one, the assistant is there with ammunition next to the gunner, so it's not a 30 second job to get link into the gun, I've seen it done before the first belt has finished, usually the gunner, if he's switched on, will pause just before the end of the belt to allow the assistant to connect his supply to the rest of the belt, to maintain a close to uninterrupted flow. I've no idea where the comment about not issuing spare barrels comes from, if you ask for a spare barrel, they give you one, a unit commander might decide they don't want to take one, but if you need one, they're there.
Much as I like your high regard about the capability of British infantry to rapidly fire a rifle, a rate of 6 per second isn't achievable, I've never been timed doing it, because it's not something I have to do if I've got a full auto option on my rifle, but I would guess about 2-3 rounds per second would be realistic. Could soldiers achieve higher rates with lots of practice? Maybe, but given the cost and time involved it raises the question about why bother doing it when you can fit a button to achieve a better result.
The use of automatic fire isn't for a sustained period of time, in the ambush scenario it's dump a mag into the enemy's location and get the f out of there. A L85 can fire 30 rounds in approximately 3 seconds as opposed to 10 seconds semi auto, which when you're getting shot at is the difference between life and death.
Most criticism of 5.56 seems to be centred on faulting it for things it wasn't designed to do. It's a good round for out to 300 metres, which is where most combat takes place. It has probably reached the limits of what it can do against modern body armour, which is why the US wants to look at other options, but if and when they get to comparing the 6.8 against the existing suite of weapons, they're going to find 5.56 is not an easy bullet to replace, the fact that proposals are using various combinations of plastic cases proves that the weight issue is a rough nut to crack. As an aside I recall when I was first trained on 5.56 the sergeant said that the aim wasn't to kill the enemy but cause severe wounds, so that that three enemy would be taken out of the fight, the injured, plus two to drag him off the battlefield, I've no idea if that was true but the suggestion definitely went around and in a high intensity (cold war turned hot) type conflict it makes sense.
Replacing 7.62 with something lighter, less felt recoil and better residual energy at distance makes a whole lot more sense, but I don't think there's the cash to replace the range of weapons which use that calibre.
Hello Jim Davies,
we shall have to wait for the next war to find out if Light Machine Guns have a resurgence in popularity,but for now they are sitting on the bench.
In the ambush scenario you mentioned,if assistant machine gunner,Private Usain Bolt,decides that instead of returning fire with his personal weapon,he is going to sprint through enemy fire to the machine gunner,Lance Corporal Rambo (who has managed to rapidly swing his two stone weapon in the direction of the enemy and fire it at a high rate and in a controllable manner whilst standing,or quickly getting in to the prone position),and hook on a new belt in the seconds before the starter belt is consumed,and then keep hooking up new belts faster than the seconds it takes to consume each one,then the machine gun need not be out of action for half a minute while the belt is changed,but even then there are problems.
If the light role General Purpose Machine Gun is being operated by two men,in an eight man section,then it has to do the work of two rifles as the section now has only seven weapons firing during an ambush,of course two rifles can fire at two targets at the same time,while the machine gun can only fire at one,and they present the enemy with two targets and,to match the rate of fire of the two rifles,the machine gun has to fire twice as fast as each rifle: several hundred rounds per minute to match the two rifle's combined maximum rate (requiring a lot of ammunition and a stop for a barrel change every couple of minutes) and above sixty rounds per minute to match their sustained rate.
Given that a General Purpose Machine Gun with no ammunition at all and no spare barrel weighs about as much as a Quarter Inch Rifle with three hundred and sixty rounds,and a spare barrel weighs about as much as another one hundred and twenty Quarter Inch rounds in boxes,and that more than one spare barrel may be required to sustain high rates of fire because barrels heat up faster than they cool down,the machine gun has much less ammunition available for the same weight carried,or for the same number of rounds carried it weighs much more,as you said earlier "There is a weight problem in the infantry",and this is it.
Having other members of the section carry ammunition just makes the problem worse as they can then carry much less ammunition for their own rifles,which fire lighter rounds,or other weapons such as mortars,rockets or grenades.
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Battle Order claim that: "No spare barrel is carried when employed at the section level",their resources page does not show where they got that information from,but for most other armies they list official sources.
See here: https://www.battleorder.org/british-rifle-platoon-2019
Thirty round magazines can be emptied in five or six seconds each by a semi automatic rifle.
See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB8hN9X5z5M
That is just an average guy,Jerry Miculek could be described as "above average",when his mother went in to labour they did not call the midwife,they called the armourer,not every man can put eighteen rounds in to nine targets in just over three seconds with a 7.62mm semi automatic Fabrique Nationale Fusil Automatique Léger (F.A.L. also known as the Self Loading Rifle),but every F.A.L. can (he had a lot more trouble when he tried a Minimi).
See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5wqSY9GW24
On the other hand,Hickok45 is an old man and is not doing anything any teenage recruit could not also do.
See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2PFY8MNVuY
With a lighter rifle you get the weapon on target more quickly than a machine gun in an ambush situation and have more mobility,the machine gun may fire a fifty round starter belt in about five seconds on full automatic (and need the world's fastest assistant gunner to hook the next up),it would take longer with burst fire,a semi automatic rifle would empty a thirty round magazine in about five or six seconds and,as you said,a full automatic rifle would do the same in about three seconds,those seconds may be a life or death matter,as may having an empty magazine,an overheated weapon or being outranged by the enemy,but if you optimise a weapon for one of these situations it will be worse in the others.
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You are quite right about the criticism of the 5.56mm,it is being faulted for not being good at "things it wasn't designed to do".
It's architecture tells us what it was designed for,the short nose length is unsuited to very low drag bullets,the case does not have the capacity to push long,heavy,high ballistic coefficient bullets to a high velocity and the small bore area is not conducive to generating high velocities from short barrels,but give it a long barrel and a short,light,low ballistic coefficient bullet and it will give you a flat trajectory and high hit probability at short ranges,before it is drained of energy by drag,because that is what it was designed for and that is what it is good at.
The problem is not the cartridge,the problem is the users,not soldiers but armies,armies who buy a cartridge designed for long barrel weapons and then decide to fire it from short barrel weapons,armies who buy a cartridge designed for short ranges and then decide to fire it at long ranges,armies who buy a cartridge designed for short,light bullets and then decide to fire long heavy bullets from it.
It is true that 5.56x45mm is a decent cartridge for obtaining hits at three hundred metres and that is because it is the product of studies which concluded that most combat takes place within that range,based on statistics from the Second World War,but there are few things abused more frequently than statistics.
The most common way to abuse statistics is to quote them out of context (politicians and journalists do this frequently),in terms of small arms the context is the user,the enemy,the terrain,the weather and the weapon.
If the users are poorly trained conscripts,they are likely to engage at shorter ranges than experienced marksmen.
If the enemy knows he has a range advantage he is likely to initiate engagements at longer ranges.
If combat is in the open desert,engagement ranges are likely to be longer than in thick jungle.
If combat is in thick fog,engagement ranges are likely to be shorter than on a sunny day.
If rifles have open sights,engagement ranges are likely to be shorter than if they have magnified optics.
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If the most common combat ranges during the Second World War were within three hundred yards then it might seem reasonable to develop a rifle optimised for those ranges but such a weapon might have inadequate external and terminal ballistics for the open expanses encountered during the entire North Africa campaign,on the other hand,a rifle designed to be adequate at longer ranges may have excellent ballistics at three hundred yards.
This is the case with the Quarter Inch Rifle,it's ballistics are good at half a mile but outstanding at a quarter mile,it is serendipitous that the ballistic qualities which give superior external ballistics are the very same qualities which give superior armour penetration.
A high ballistic coefficient 6.8mm bullet would be large and heavy,require a large cartridge and produce a large recoil impulse if fired at a high velocity,it is possible that the Americans are sacrificing external ballistics in favour of a lower sectional density to get better acceleration from the shorter barrel of a rifle with a conventional layout,alternatively they might be looking at a very high performance cartridge with sophisticated fire control,but time will tell.
Given the large amount of time and money which has been spent on plastic cases over the years and the small amount of time and money required to develop a better conventional cartridge it is not clear why sixty year old cartridges cannot be replaced by today's technology.
Whatever technology is used,a replacement for 7.62x51mm is likely to be a smaller,lighter cartridge and a replacement for 5.56x45mm is likely to be a larger,heavier cartridge and there is little point in having two similar new cartridges.
It would be possible to replace 7.62x51mm link with an existing cartridge which could be fired from existing weapons but which would weigh up to fifteen pounds less per thousand rounds,and still have better ballistics.
The British Army is always short of money,but there is never any shortage of funds for the very latest military fashions,witness the eight thousand million pounds wasted on the Strike Brigade fiasco,to find the funds for a new rifle cartridge one need only have the right branding to appeal to senior officers,call it an Artificially Intelligent Vanguard Unmanned Littoral Stealth Strike Cartridge and funding shall appear.
Ammunition is constantly being consumed and replaced,there were incinerators to dispose of unused rounds in Afghanistan,and weapons wear out and have to be replaced anyway,it is the cost differential between the legacy weapon system and it's replacement which is financially significant and given the large volumes of weapons and ammunition required that comes down to differences in direct manufacturing costs.
Grand Logistics.
It's hardly the work of Usain Bolt to cover 15 yards in 3 seconds. Moving whilst being fired at is the definition of what infantry do. Right enough when I've seen it done the gunner was carrying more than 50 rounds, he was built like the proverbial so 100 rounds was more likely. Sprinting for 3 seconds then putting a connector round into the link within the 8 to 10 seconds is perfectly doable from a reasonably well trained team, taking 30 seconds to slap some link into the feed tray and pull the charging handle would be grounds for 'encouraging advice' from the sergeant! The following YouTube video shows what a reasonably well trained team can do, https://youtu.be/1Z0kVF_lXYo, albeit in a sustained fire setting, I particularly like that they didn't skip past the picking up brass part of training!
I was watching the YouTube videos you linked to and they seemed to be averaging about 7-8 seconds per presumably 30 round mag, so more than twice the time of using full auto. A L85 is firing rounds at 10/12 a second, semi auto from the video shown is 4 ish per second. My challenge is that the videos shows optimum conditions, in the first video it was trying to sell lubricating fluid so obviously they are going to show it working well and these were prepared, experienced rifle users in good conditions. But in real life you have tired soldiers, possibly cold, being fired at in an unexpected encounter, it's tough enough to train someone this situation to not freeze, without having to train them that they need to keep pumping the trigger. Eventually you get to where someone will point out 'rather than spend hundreds of pounds and hours on the range, why don't we put a button on the side of the rifle, like everyone else does?'. Jerry Miculek is a world record holder in quick fire, I'm not sure many, if anyone, in the British Army could hope to get that fast, given any length of training. Hickok45 is a very experienced marksman, could a 18 year old with no prior experience get up to that rate of fire with the couple of hundred rounds available in rifle training? Not a hope. Even then, he wasn't even close to half the rate of fire of automatic.
The key bit here is that it's a short encounter, in an ambush the considerations about barrel over heating, or total number of rounds carried go out of the window, it's about surviving those first few seconds of contact.
I like the idea of having different options for different situations, the challenge is where do you draw the boundary, for an internationally focused army a rifle has to cover multiple different environments, jungle, arctic, desert, temperate, all mixed in with urban. Optimising a rifle/round combination for one situation risks leaving short comings in other areas. A round optimised for long range work is positively dangerous if you use it in an urban environment with houses constructed from lightweight materials, as is often found in poorer countries.
The problem with saying 5.56 is too small, 7.62 is too big, there must be a size which does both, is that you could end up with a solution which satisfies no one. We have been round this loop since the 1950s, if not before. Yes, there needs to be a substitute for 5.56 which deals with enemy using modern body armour, while not reducing bullet numbers carried, a creedmore/quarter inch in a conventional cartridge would not do that, which leads you to think of alternatives, for example plastic/combustible casings.
The question is why given rifle technology has been stable for 40-50 years, polymer furniture being the last substantial change, no one has managed to hit that sweet spot?
Hello Jim Davies,
if Private Bolt manages to sprint over to Lance Corporal Rambo in three seconds and then grab a new belt (from an ammunition tin,bandolier,pouch,round his shoulders or wherever he may be carrying it) and hook that up to the fifty round starter belt,that is running through the gun at cyclic rate,in the two remaining seconds before it runs out then that would be quite a feat of assistant machine gunnery,it would also mean that in those five seconds Private Bolt and Lance Corporal Rambo had between them put no more rounds down range than if they were both firing semi automatic rifles.
It seems more likely that Lance Corporal Rambo would slow his rate of fire,to below that of a pair of semi automatic rifles,to give Private Bolt (a great name for a runner) a chance to hook up a new belt,or would finish off the starter belt and lift the cover to put on a new belt which might take ten seconds or so,when the gunner does everything on his own it tends to take a lot longer.
An American Special Forces operator might not be up to the standards of the average British squaddie,and the operator in the following video may not be in too much of a hurry to return fire,seeing as he is in close combat,but his gun is out of action for about fifty-five seconds for the first belt change,the second takes at least forty-five seconds (it is partially edited out) and later it takes him about fifteen seconds just to hook more links up to the running belt.
See here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LENv3L_zbjg
If Lance Corporal Rambo has a one hundred round starter belt then things are a little easier,Private Bolt now has three seconds to sprint over to Rambo and seven seconds more to grab a new belt,from wherever,and hook it up before the running belt is done or Rambo has to slow his rate of fire,which is still rather an impressive performance.
But even then there is a problem,Rambo has to walk around all day carrying a machine gun and a one hundred round starter belt,weighing two and a half stone,and then in a meeting engagement,or worse an ambush,he has to point that machine gun at the enemy and shoot,before the enemy can do the same to him with a loaded AK-47 (which is one third of the weight),and then exit the kill zone with the agility of a gazelle.
There are aspects of riflery which require education,concentration and years of practice but pulling a trigger quickly is not one of them,unless you want to be as fast as Jerry Miculek,mere mortals appear to fire about five rounds per second.
See here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIg6qn79mjg
See here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65AZWtAqf40
See here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0PEqP0Y-jo
See here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjx4KSKHIC4
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Some people can change a magazine in less than two seconds but three seconds is more reasonable for a typical soldier so in practice an automatic assault rile can put the contents of a thirty round magazine down range about once every six seconds versus about once every nine seconds for a semi automatic rifle.
Pointing the weapon at the target and pulling the trigger requires the same amount of training time whether the weapon fires automatically or not,but one of the advantages of operating a fleet of semi automatic weapons is that,because they fire at a slower rate,they consume less ammunition and wear out more slowly so annual operating costs are lower.
There are cartridges available today which weigh less than 7.62x51mm and surpass it in every respect,it is still used for the same reason that people still climb Mount Everest,because it is there.
Stressed soldiers don't have any difficulty with pulling a trigger but they do often have a problem with letting it go,infantry with automatic weapons have an unfortunate habit of becoming target fixated,emptying a full magazine in to a target with a single trigger pull,a Special Air Service trooper did that at the Iranian Embassy seige,despite many hours of expensive training firing short bursts in the killing house,other examples which spring to mind include a United States' Marine in Hue city and a Russian in Stalingrad,this is a big problem if the chap they have just shot has a friend near by (he did not in these incidents but we shall never know how many times he did),or even if they are short of ammunition.
In a short encounter how quicky rounds are put on target matters far more than how many leave the barrel (if you just want to make noise it hardly matters if you fire five rounds per second or ten),full automatic fire from a light weight rifle tends to increase dispersion which may be an advantage if the weapon is not aimed correctly,but not if it is,resulting in more rounds being fired but fewer rounds hitting their mark,this is why British Army Self Loading Rifles were semi automatic only and it is also one of the reasons why the 5.56x45mm cartridge has relatively short range and little terminal effect.
Controllable full automatic fire from a light weight rifle requires a cartridge which has little recoil impulse,and hence little firing impulse,a small charge which generates little heat,so the rifle does not require a heavy barrel,and light weight so lots of rounds can be carried,all resulting in a cartridge ill suited to long range fire and armour penetration but perfectly adequate for hitting short range targets albeit with limited terminal effect,which is what 5.56x45mm was designed for.
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You are quite right to say that "the challenge is where do you draw the boundary",warfare,and consequently weapons design,is an art rather than a science because of the many unquantifiable factors,which is why so many people have different ideas about small arms,for example,Anthony G. Williams also promotes an "intermediate-intermediate" cartridge,one that falls between the full power rifle cartridges and the intermediate cartridges (7.92×33mm Kurz,7.62x39mm,5.56x45mm etceteri,which are intermediate between pistol and full power rifle cartridges) but he favours a less powerful cartridge designed for automatic rifle use which consequently has neither the external and terminal ballistics of the Quarter Inch Cartridge nor the compactness,light weight and controllability of the 5.56x45mm,one can make a case for a variety of solutions depending on what parameters are considered to be important,opinions vary but the science is the same for everyone.
You are also quite right to say that "for an internationally focused army a rifle has to cover multiple different environments",that is the problem with weapons chambered for the 5.56x45mm cartridge,it is designed for short range engagements and is not well suited to environments where engagement ranges are longer or where the enemy is wearing modern armour,it is optimised "for one situation......leaving short comings in other areas".
All modern military rifle rounds,including 5.56x45mm,can penetrate the structure of typical dwellings,some more easily than others (the use of frangible rounds would prevent that but they would be of little military utility),all urban combat is therefore inherently dangerous to any civilians present,however,the danger to a civilian of being hit by a stray bullet which has already penetrated a building is very small,the danger to a soldier who cannot penetrate such structures to successfully engage an enemy who is using them for protection is very great.
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Many years ago Personal Defence Weapons chambered in small calibre cartridges,such as 5.7×28mm and 4.6×30mm,became fashionable (and one should never underestimate the effect of fashion on British military procurement,they bought some),one British Army officer even wrote an essay advocating their issue to front line infantry platoons as a replacement for 5.56x45mm weapons,but decades of combat experience since then have led to such ideas being consigned to the dustbin of history,it is now highly likely that the replacement for 5.56x45mm will be a larger,more powerful cartridge with greater range and terminal effect,on the other hand,the problem with 7.62x51mm is it's weight and since smaller,lighter cartridges can do it's long range work just as well,or even better,it is likely to be replaced by a smaller cartridge.
That then leaves the choice of having two different cartridges which are much closer to each other in terms of size,weight and performance than are 5.56x45mm and 7.62x51mm,or of having a single cartridge to replace both,like the Quarter Inch Cartridge promoted herein.
It is also true that "We have been round this loop since the 1950s, if not before",the British Army adopted the 7 mm MK1Z cartridge seventy years ago,and it is still highly regarded today,unfortunately naive senior decision makers allowed the United States Army Ordnance Corps to meddle in things and the United Kingdom ended up replacing it's new cartridge with the American's more powerful 7.62x51mm for purely political reasons,a decade later the Amercians decided to go to the other extreme and adopted 5.56x45mm leaving the United Kingdom stuck with the 7.62x51mm for another quarter of a century before adopting 5.56x45mm (after a British 4.85×49mm round was passed over),and a decade after the British Army had converted to that,the Americans were already complaining that it was inadequate in Afghanistan.
See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.280_British
The lesson here is to never get involved in American procurement projects,especially those involving small arms,but the Ministry of Defence is currently doing just that with the Joint Lightweight Ammunition Integrated Product Team,which suggests that senior British decision makers do not spend much time studying history.
Any new cartridge with improved armour penetration is likely to be heavier than 5.56x45mm,unless it uses exotic technologies which have been in development for decades but have never yet proven to be viable,it is possible that problems associated with those technologies may be overcome but it is also possible that other insurmountable problems may arise,for example,will the politicians who demanded that soldiers stop using lead bullets be happy about battlefields being littered with plastic cartridge cases?
The development of small arms ammunition and larger calibre ordnance in the Western World has stagnated as a direct result of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation standardisation,a recent example of this being the British Army's decision to adopt the obsolescent 120mm smooth bore tank gun for it's latest ill conceived armoured vehicle project,civilian cartridges are not subject to the same constraints of bureaucracy and politics as military cartridges and consequently there are many fine cartridges available (generally good deer cartridges are also good man cartridges),though few have been designed with military use in mind,the Quarter Inch Cartridge promoted herein might be regarded as a modern,military,equivalent of the old 0.257" Roberts Ackley Improved.
Grand Logistics.
Yes it was a 100 round belt, yes he was the sort who could do pokey drill with the GPMG. The issue about weight is slightly misleading, yes 100 rounds on top of the weight of the gun is substantial, but you're carrying it on a sling rather than trying to constantly cover the angles at a high ready as you are with the rifle. The issue is then the total weight of the ammo plus gun, but not one which gets fixed by carrying less ammo.
As an aside in the belt change video you link to he says 'God bless the fact that I carry this heavy fkin gun' I don't think he's supporting your position for semi auto only rifles! The video illustrates that when the adrenaline starts pumping, even experienced operators fumble, I'm sure in training he would consistently be getting less than 10 seconds, maybe something similar to the 5-6 achieved in the following video https://youtu.be/fy32jGw5of8 that chance of mucking up applies just as much to magazines as belt, but with a 100/200 rounds of link you reduce the number of times you have to do that change.
I'm not sure if you meant to include the video of Jerry with the others of 'mere mortals'? So if we say 4-5 rounds per second in optimum conditions with experienced shooters, then we are looking at 6-7.5 seconds to empty a 30 round magazine as opposed to less than 3 for auto on a L85.
Assuming 100 rounds in 9 second for the GPMG then for a 2 man team that's 100 round down range, for 2 quarter inch rifles at 4 per second that's 30 rounds per man (because they empty the magazine at 7.5 seconds so have to reload) for a combined 60 rounds. At 5 rounds per second that's still 60 rounds (they are still changing magazine). So just over half the fire at best.
But that's not an accurate summary because the machine gun is only part of the sections fire power, for a 8 man section with quarter inch rifle you're looking at 240 rounds for the first 9 seconds versus 460 for GPMG plus 6 L85s, assuming the 3 seconds to change mags. After that point you should be exiting/exited the killing zone and have moved on to the next stage of your drill.
Training a soldier to rapidly fire a full bore rifle is a different training programme from a single placed shot, currently we don't train on the ranges to fire L85 on auto, so there will be a increase in range time and cost to train.
In ambush drills we knowingly sacrifice accuracy for weight of fire, because that's what combat experience has taught us succeeds. As always, ground and enemy dictate.
What I was suggesting in clearing a building is I want to have a level of comfort that the rounds won't exit the building and hit friendlies with sufficient energy to injure them. 5.56 is good in that regard. It's certainly not a prime consideration on deciding a rifle/round combination but illustrates the point about the difficulty in designing a round to do all the jobs required of it.
I'm not sure if you're suggesting that we seek a round which has the ability to penetrate the structure of buildings?
NATO standardisation does mean that there's a big inertia to overcome but also there's a big incentive to get an ideal round because the market for achieving this is huge. The challenge is that every time we come to test the proposals aren't sufficiently better than the existing to make the jump. Of course that's looking at the western situation, but we can't ignore the Russians and Chinese, we see a remarkably similar set up, with 5.45 (or 5.8) and 7.62, rifle/heavy barrelled automatic rifle/belt fed machine gun combinations. With Russia there's no shortage of combat to back up their choice. Personally I think the 'one true calibre to rule them all' is a cul-de-sac, sometimes being in the middle means you don't excel in anything. I would rather look at changing the technology rather than tweaking inside of the existing constraints.
Hello Jim Davies,
If the section is carrying around a hundred pounds of machine gun and link,then they are carrying one hundred pounds less of something else and that machine gun is not going to be as easy to bring to bear in a hurry as a rifle,slung or not.
That operator did seem to like his machine gun,and quite rightly so,studies have shown that 7.62x51mm provides more suppression than 5.56x45mm,both round for round and pound for pound,bullet size,speed and miss distance are important factors in suppression,although fast at the muzzle,5.56x45mm has a smaller bullet than either the Quarter Inch Cartridge or 7.62x51mm and at longer ranges it is slower than both,it needs to be closer to the target to have the same suppressive effect as the larger rounds which it is unlikely to be if fired automatically from a rifle due to increased dispersion.
You are quite right to say that things are easier in training than on a two way range,in the following related videos you can see how long it takes to pass belts to the gunner,take them out of the bag and load them in combat,at one point he fires off a hundred round belt at cyclic rate in the general direction of the enemy gaining ten seconds of suppression,if he is lucky,in a twenty minute plus fire fight (contrast that with the fire of the R.P.K.),and then says he has only three hundred rounds left,that is the only time he did anything which could not be done more easily with a Bren Gun,note also the stoppage he has at three minutes and forty seconds in the first video,why make life harder for infantry men in close combat by giving them belt fed weapons?
See here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ2SWWDt8Wg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_GZzjFyeaM
That squad appeared to be pinned down and not sure where the enemy was (this is exactly the sort of target the proposed Three Inch Mortar is intended to quickly neutralise after Quarter Inch Rifle fire has driven it to ground),note the men with the carbines around the six minute mark,the eighty times spotting periscope,which is part of both the proposed Three Eighths Inch Machine Gun and Four Inch Mortar weapon systems and also intended to equip platoon stalkers,would have been very useful in that situation.
The video of Jerry Miculek was included just to show how much faster he is than mere mortals,Jerry could get five head shots on five different targets in a second,ordinary guys might fire five rounds at one target in the same time,as the chap with the Sig 522 demonstrated when he put twenty two rounds on target in about four seconds,the next video is of a youngster firing thirty rounds semi automatically in less than five seconds and another thirty on full automatic in less than three seconds,if he can do that any British squaddie can.
See here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhSIJuCQ64I
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Comparisons of rate of fire are sensitive to the chosen time period,for example,in six seconds both a semi automatic rifle and a fully automatic rifle could fire thirty rounds but the fully automatic rifle would also have completed a magazine change,in nine seconds the semi automatic rifle would have changed magazines but the fully automatic rifle would by then have emptied it's second magazine,the machine gun looks a lot better if you don't count the time it takes to reload it and a lot worse if you do!
That said,an eight man section with Quarter Inch Rifles could put two hundred and forty rounds down range in five or six seconds and then take about three seconds to change magazines,in the same time the machine gun team could fire off a hundred round belt and the six automatic rifles could fire two thirty round magazines each for a section total of four hundred and sixty rounds so,we agree on that number,but there is a lot more to it than just rate of fire (if it was we could just give every man in the section a Fabrique Nationale P90),it is what those bullets do that counts.
Larry Vickers is a former member of some cowboy outfit called Delta Force,he fires a lot more slowly than the chap with the Sig 522 but still manages to get six hits on three targets,with six rounds (one hit for every round fired),in around six seconds when firing semi automatically,when firing bursts he gets four hits with six rounds (two hits for every three rounds fired) and on full automatic he manages just six hits with thirty rounds (one hit for every five rounds fired) in around three seconds,at that rate he could get thirty hits with thirty rounds,in thirty seconds on semi automatic but in the same time,firing fully automatic,he could fire about five magazines totalling one hundred and fifty rounds but still only get thirty hits,and a hot barrel and five empty magazines,which is probably why he says automatic fire: "looks good in the movies but remember,in the real world,useless.".
See Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cosc-RO_oMg
That was at a range of just fifteen yards,dispersion is angular,at sixty yards the group size would be four times as large and the hit probability would be much lower for fully automatic fire,even if the object is not to hit the enemy but to suppress them that is a problem as studies show that the small 5.56x45mm rounds need to land much closer to have the same suppressive effect as larger rounds,but if they are being fired automatically then they will be much further away,even at very short ranges (with the Quarter Inch Rifle firing semi automatically you get bigger bullets landing closer),the next video shows the same problem with a 5.56x45mm weapon,even when fitted with a moderator which ought to dampen the recoil.
See Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2WEvvisFfg
Infantry currently train on the ranges to fire the L85 on semi automatic,training for the Quarter Inch Rifle should take less time and fewer rounds to train any soldier to hit any target at any range as the trajectory is flatter and windage less,close quarters training should be similar to the L85 except for training to pull the trigger more often instead of selecting full automatic or semi.
What was the ambush drill when British infantry were equipped with the semi automatic only L1A1 Self Loading Rifle and didn't that work?
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You are quite right to say "ground and enemy dictate",there are certain situations when full automatic fire may be beneficial,mostly when volume of fire may be used to compensate for fire control errors (which is why machine guns have greater effective ranges than sniper rifles firing the same cartridge),for example,sweeping a narrow sector of thick foliage with automatic fire would give a high probability of a hit on an unseen target at very short ranges,but the problem is that there are many more occasions when the compromises required to provide automatic capability in light weight weapons out weigh the benefits in terms of weight,hit probability,range or terminal effect.
The 5.56x45mm cartridge was designed to have similar penetration to the 7.62x51mm as that was part of the requirement,in practice,which has most penetration depends on what you are firing at and at what range (there is an interesting paper somewhere which demonstrated that bullet penetration was worse at short ranges due to bullet yaw),they can both go through walls and any new cartridge which has better range or better armour penetration is also going to be better at penetrating walls,bullets fired from the proposed Three Eighths Inch Carbine,which is intended for close quarters work,would be much better in that regard as they would have to push through more than twice as much brick.
For cartridge manufacturers,the problem with North Atlantic Treaty Organisation standardisation is that to get a cartridge accepted they have to wait for a competition to be initiated,go through expensive tests,get dozens of countries to agree to it and then every other ammunition manufacturer is allowed to make cartridges to the same specification,in the past new military cartridges were being introduced all the time,just like civilian cartridges are today,because armies wanted better weapons and manufacturers could make money from developing them,the incremental adoption of 0.338" Lapua Magnum avoided the problems of standardisation and now special forces are starting to move back to how things were done in the past by experimenting with non standard calibres.
The British armed forces have twice now adopted new American cartidges,7.62x51and 5.56x45,which were inferior to their own for purely political reasons but they don't want superior cartridges which "aren't sufficiently better",or which have not been adopted by the Americans?
The British Army has long neglected small arms development,unlike the armies of even the smallest industrialised nations,and has an unfortunate habit of following every fleeting trend in military equipment which is why it has heavy General Purpose Machine Guns in it's infantry sections while the Russians have much lighter,purpose designed,light role machine guns like the P.K.M. and P.K.P.,significantly reducing the weight problem (long before that the Soviet Union's extensive combat experience led to them fielding entire companies equipped with the PPSh-41) and the Chinese have developed their own 5.8×42mm cartridge which is significantly more powerful than 5.56x45mm,what a pity the British Army no longer has Generals who are able to think for themselves like their Russian and Chinese counterparts.
This blog proposes a total of three small arms cartridges,a large Three Eights Inch Machine Gun Cartridge for machine guns and sniper rifles which is intended to replace the 0.5" Browning Machine Gun,0.338" Lapua Magnum and in some roles the 7.62x51mm,the Quarter Inch Cartridge which is intended to replace 5.56x45mm and the remaining 7.62x51mm and the Three Eights Inch Carbine Cartridge which is intended for a variety of niche roles such as short barrelled and silenced weapons.
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Within the section there are two options,you can have a variety of specialised weapons and cartridges which may excel in one particular role,such as putting down a large volume of short range fire,but which is likely to result in the wrong weapon being in the wrong place at the wrong time and only a fraction of the section being suitably equipped for whatever task is at hand or,alternatively you can equip the whole section with general purpose weapons which may not be quite as good at one particular role but which are more likely to result in the right weapon being in the right place at the right time and the whole section being brought to bear on whatever task is at hand,resulting in a more fluid infantry.
The cartridge designer has a different choice,he can accept the limitations of designing a cartridge for automatic fire from a rifle which means he can either have poor external and terminal ballistics in order to have low weight,barrel heating and recoil on full automatic or accept greater ammunition weight and increased recoil induced dispersion and barrel heating on automatic in order to have mediocre external and terminal ballistics,the only alternative to this choice is to forego fully automatic fire in order to have better external and terminal ballistic which is what the Quarter Inch Cartridge is designed for,polymer cartridges may help with the weight problem,if they ever work,but they are never going to solve the recoil and barrel heating problems.
Grand Logistics.
The issue with referring to youtube videos is that they present best case scenario, where as I train on the basis that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Making a weapon automatic removes that the soldier will fire one round then freeze. I'll take wasting a mag over losing a life anytime.
Larry is right, running through mags expecting it to get hits is a waste of ammo, auto should be the exception for very specific circumstances. Ambush drills is one of those. We're talking about different things, sustained fire is one thing, contact drills another.
To the specific question of the SLR, yes it was a problem that it was Semi auto only. But you need to see the context, we had Sterlings, Brens and GPMGs in the fire teams to counter that shortage of firepower, with the quarter inch rifle those are missing, M16s were also used when working in jungle and NI. SLR was replaced with an auto capable rifle, that explains there was a problem. In the 30+ years since L85 was introduced I've never heard one soldier say the auto selector should be removed.
The quarter inch won't reduce training time because the L85 is as low as it's possible to go in training the principles of marksmanship and weapon handling. 5.56mm's light recoil and flat ballistics could be matched but aren't going to be bettered in the length of ranges we have available. Training someone to rapidly fire the rifle is a new ask and will increase range time and cost.
My problem with trying to design a bullet to go through walls is what are you aiming at? A person can compact themselves into a pretty small space, if I can't see them, where am I shooting? In general I want a round which doesn't penetrate walls to avoid friendly casualties, if I want to take down a wall at distance, then there's rockets or 0.5 or armour for that.
I'm not sure on your sources, the Chinese 5.8 is looking at 1,926 joules, the M855A1 is 1,859 joules, so very similar.
My point on China and Russia is that they aren't subject to NATO standardisation yet they have automated weapons, with <6mm squad weapons and 7.62mm weapons. If there's a benefit to a single cartridge size with no automatic option, then no military in the world has discovered it yet, NATO standardisation or no.
I'm not sure on the argument of the costs to develop new rounds for the military are a deterrent, I'm no expert on development of military hardware, but most departments of defence will pick up development costs when it sees a justification. For a cartridge manufacturer their machines are adaptable and can produce varying cartridges between 5.56 and 7.62 it's just programming of the machines, not a huge cost.
My personal experience, so not evidence, is that magazine weapons failed more often than belt fed, allowing for the fact that magazines changes happened more often, but I had many years with L85A1 under my belt. Magazine fed weapons might appear inherently more reliable than belt, with the obvious opportunity for link to foul, but it really depends on the implementation. It's easy to critique from the comfort of the armchair, but the standard of weapons handling displayed in the two combat footage linked to was very poor, sticking the barrel into the ground would be a blockage waiting the happen, given the handling I'm amazed that the machine gun did as well as it did. Fire control seemed non existent. But these aren't examples of a response to ambush, they're attempts at suppressive fire from a position of hard cover. Removing the auto selector switch wouldn't have helped, better training would.
I would dispute the army has sat on it's hands with regards to infantry carried weapons. Since I've been in we introduced GMG, LMG, under barrel grenade launcher, Sharpshooter, new pistol, various sniper weapons, A2 of the L85 which is really a new rifle, combat shotgun, 60mm mortar, AT rockets by the bucket load. Not sure many armies could compare to be honest.
Hello Jim Davies,
you are right,some YouTube videos do present best case scenarios where there are no rounds coming in the other direction,such as Larry Vickers video where he was only able to score one hit for every five rounds fired on full automatic,it would probably have been much worse in a real combat situation,but other videos are taken in combat and show that there is a lot more to go wrong with belt fed,rather than magazine fed,weapons and the limited benefits they gain in exchange at the section level.
For sustained fire the belt fed wins hands down,but at the section level it is not practical to carry the weight of ammunition and spare barrels to exploit that when conducting foot mobile operations,which is why the Three Eighths Inch Machine Gun concept is intended to replace both heavy and medium machine guns rather than trying to replace medium and light machine guns,as the general purpose machine gun concept did.
If an infantryman pulls the trigger once then freezes,with a semi automatic weapon he has fired one round at the enemy,with a fully automatic weapon he has emptied a full magazine when he might not need to,or want to,which is worse would be very situation dependent but,as you say,whatever can go wrong will go wrong,if you do not trust a soldier to pull the trigger more than once,how can you trust that same soldier to have the selector switch in the right position for the situation at hand or to release the trigger when needed?
The increased dispersion of fully automatic fire can get a soldier killed just as surely as not sending rounds down range fast enough,depending on the situation at hand,the very specific circumstances in which automatic fire from a rifle is not just a waste of ammunition occur at very short ranges,ambush or not,how short depends on the weapon and ammunition,for example,an L85 rifle should have an advantage over an L119 carbine in full automatic due to it's longer barrel and greater weight.
The British Army didn't seem to think that semi automatic Self Loading Rifles were a problem,it was the select fire versions which it refused to issue,which is hardly surprising given the dispersion when firing on full automatic and the small number of rounds carried back then,no doubt many squaddies would have liked to have had the option of full automatic fire but one cannot help but wonder how many battles in the Falklands War would have been lost if they had been given it.
Back then an eight man section typically had one General Purpose Machine Gun with a fifty round belt,a Sterling sub machine gun with a thirty-two round magazine and six Self Loading Rifles with twenty round magazines,for a total of two hundred and two rounds ready to fire,which could be sent down range in about four seconds at a rate of about fifty rounds per second,compared to eight Quarter Inch Rifles with thirty round magazines,for a total of two hundred and forty rounds ready to fire,which could be sent down range in about six seconds at a rate of about forty rounds per second,the Three Eighths Inch Carbine would be available for jungle fighting and house clearing if needed.
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While there have been earlier attempts to equip the British Army with automatic rifles,such as the Rifle,No.9,Mk.1,the fully automatic L85 is in service with the British Army because they followed the lead of the United States' Army which had adopted the fully automatic 5.56x45mm M16 (and later replaced it's automatic capability with a three round burst on the A2 and A4 variants),and the United States' Army adopted the fully automatic M16 because the Operations Research Office had studied use of the semi automatic M1 Garand by poorly trained conscripts,using open sights in the cities of Europe and jungles of Asia,and concluded that it was effective within a hundred yards,but that a "pattern-dispersion principle" would increase hit probability up to three hundred yards and,after many years of failed experiments with flechettes and duplex rounds,it became clear that the only practical way to achieve "pattern-dispersion" was with a fully automatic rifle which,rather ironically,could only generate a usefully small dispersion pattern at short ranges due to the recoil on full automatic,even when firing a low power round,and thus was never able to do what it was intended to do.
The Quarter Inch Rifle shall have a flatter trajectory than the L85 at the quarter mile,or four hundred metre,range which British infantrymen qualify at,as it is within it's point blank range,it is simply a question of putting the red dot on the centre of mass and pulling the trigger but even the L85 has a reasonably flat trajectory to that distance,there shall be no need to train at firing on full automatic and as British soldiers already train to fire rapidly on semi automatic,how can that increase range time and cost?
See Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipil6x22nBc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs5L4bIkd0A
Poking holes in walls is what the very earliest fire arms were designed for,most modern combat bullets are intended to go through walls (of course it depends on the type of wall),some are just better at it than others,the Americans halted the use of their new 5.56x45mm M855A1 in Live Fire Shooting Houses as it was considered able to penetrate "SHOCK ABSORBENT CONCRETE,WALLS FILLED WITH PEA GRAVEL OR SAND,AND 3/8 INCH AND 1/2 INCH AR 500 STEEL",the Afghanistan videos above show an American squad hiding behind a wall and the Taliban clearly knows they are there,the gangsta style overhead fire was a combat indicator,if you know where the enemy is,being being able to shoot them is very convenient,whether they are behind a wall,a tree,a sandbag or a car,increased penetration was one of the benefits claimed for both the M855A1 and the British Army's recent L31A1.
See Here:
https://usarmorment.com/pdf/M855A1.pdf
https://www.baesystems.com/en-media/uploadFile/20210407025307/1434594460607.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwZPJgkF6G8
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About twenty years ago a magazine published an account by a chap called Will Scully of a battle at the Mammy Yoko Hotel in Sierra Leone during which he was firing through walls with a General Purpose Machine Gun to engage the rebels hiding behind them,while the rebels were firing through the wall he was hiding behind with Rocket Propelled Grenades,unfortunately the account does not appear to be online but it may be in his book "Once A Pilgrim".
Interestingly,depending on which source you believe,the hero of the hour was either Will Scully formerly of the Special Air Service and subsequently Queen's Gallantry Medal,Captain Lincoln Jopp of the Scots Guards and subsequently Military Cross,Peter Penfold the High Commissioner of the United Kingdom to Sierra Leone,the United States' Marine Corps' 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit from USS Kearsage,or the Nigerian Army,take your pick.
If you have a specific need to avoid penetrating walls,for example if operating in a civilian occupied area,then there are special bullets designed to minimise penetration and there are also weapons like the proposed Three Eighths Inch Carbine which is intended specifically for close quarters combat and has wider bullets which are less likely to penetrate,on the other hand,if you do want to penetrate walls,trees,rifle plates or anything else,then the Quarter Inch Cartridge shall be better than either the 7.62x51mm or the 5.56x45mm,the Three Eights Inch Machine Gun shall be better still but much heavier whilst still being easier to carry than a Browning Machine Gun,or an armoured vehicle for that matter,rockets are also a viable option but if they have been designed to penetrate modern heavy armour like the proposed Six Inch Rocket then they are going to be heavy and consequently not carried in quantity.
The M855A1 is a very controversial cartridge with a,disputed,reputation for breaking weapons,it has been claimed that it is operating at pressures above the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (N.A.T.O.) standard which means that it would not actually be a "5.56 N.A.T.O." cartridge,Powley seems to support that but there are different ways of measuring pressure which give different results,if they did have to exceed the specification to get adequate performance that would explain why they are looking for a new cartridge.
The current Chinese 5.8×42mm DBP10 cartridge has more muzzle energy than SS109 and a heavier bullet with a longer nose which gives it a higher ballistic coefficient and significantly more retained energy at the target,it also operates at low pressures which reduce weapon wear at the expense of performance,it would really be quite something if it ran at higher pressures,but the most interesting thing about it is that it is a true universal cartridge which replaced all other calibres in the infantry section,like the proposed Quarter Inch Cartridge.
You are quite right that the Russians and Chinese have automatic weapons in their sections,though the Chinese have long ago moved to a universal cartridge,but they are constrained by the same laws of physics,the lower density of the modern battle space demands longer ranged weapons,modern body armour demands both greater terminal effect and lighter weight as does the proliferation of electronic equipment,the only way to get more range,more terminal effect and lighter weight is to forego automatic fire,soldiers can only carry so much.
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Ammunition manufacturers come up with new cartridges all the time,it may need some new tooling as they are pressings but it is not expensive,there are companies which will make small batches of custom cartridges to whatever specification the customer chooses,the ammunition industry is not the problem,armed forces are,for years western artillery has been crippled by standardisation,the Royal Navy has just adopted the long obsolete American five inch gun and readopted the Bofors 40mm which was considered inadequate during the Second World War,the British Army is now fitting an obsolescent tank gun to it's obsolescent tank chassis because everyone else is using it,it has twice adopted inadequate rifle cartridges simply because the Americans used them and the Royal Air Force has recently ordered some new Chinook helicopters a mere sixty years after they first took to the sky,the United Kingdom has a generation of very senior officers who will spend vast sums of money on any old rubbish as long as the Americans are using it,unfortunately the United States' Army is to selecting small arms cartridges as the England football team is to World Cup penalty shootouts.
From those Afghanistan videos it is clear that the belt fed weapons are often out of action for long periods during belt and barrel changes,some of those belt changes took longer than a dozen magazine changes,fifteen years ago CNA published a survey called Soldier Perspectives on Small Arms in Combat in which the belt fed M249 compared rather poorly to the magazine fed M4 and M16,though they don't count stoppages per round fired on which metric the United States' Army claims the machine gun is more reliable,here are a few highlights from the survey:
"For the M4, M16, and M249, firing in semi-automatic mode decreased the reported occurrence of stoppages and repairs, as well as increasing soldier levels of confidence in weapon reliability and durability.";
"As a matter of fact, improving ammunition is the number one recommendation suggested by soldiers across all four weapons.";
"Soldiers firing weapons on the semi-automatic setting decreased the probability of experiencing a stoppage by half.";
"As with reports of weapon stoppages, soldiers firing weapons on the semiautomatic setting were twice as likely to be confident in weapon reliability.";
"Additionally, soldiers firing weapons on the semi-automatic setting were two times less likely to experience a repair.";
"Similar to all previous models described to this point, those firing weapons on the semi-automatic setting are twice as likely to be confident in the durability of their weapon.";
"M16 users firing on the semi setting doubled the odds of being confident in durability.";
"Across weapons, soldiers have requested weapons and ammunition with more stopping power/lethality.";
"When speaking to experts and soldiers on site,many commented on the limited ability to effectively stop targets,saying that those personnel targets who were shot multiple times were still able to continue pursuit.";
"M9 and M4 users requested armor-piercing and hollow-point ammunition.";
"For the M4, M16, and M249, firing in semi-automatic mode resulted in positive effects, such as decreasing repairs and stoppages, as well as increasing soldier levels of confidence in weapon reliability and durability.";
"For all four weapon types, soldiers requested weapons and ammunition with more stopping power/lethality.".
See here:
https://www.cna.org/CNA_files/PDF/D0015259.A2.pdf
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Videos don't tell the whole story of course,but there was a very striking difference between the calm,deliberate fire of the Afghan with the R.P.K. and the Americans with the carbines who looked rather panicked,but it was difficult to tell what was coming in their direction.
Due to dispersion,automatic fire from an assault rifle is only going to put rounds on,or near,the target more quicky than semi automatic fire if the range is very short,even when firing a low power intermediate cartridge,but if soldiers want greater range or terminal effect then they need a more powerful cartridge,whether it is M855A1,the new American 6.8mm or the Quarter Inch Cartridge,the firing impulse is going to be larger and hence recoil impulse and dispersion are going to increase,thus reducing even further the effective range of full automatic fire.
The question then is whether the ability to use full automatic fire at very short ranges,and ambushes are not always at short ranges,is worth the increased ammunition consumption,increased weapon heating and reduced reliability?
Of the weapons you have listed,only the Long Range Rifle,parts of the Main Battle Tank and Light Anti-tank Weapon and possibly the L85A2 (as Heckler und Koch were owned by BAE Sytems at the time) were developed in the United Kingdom for the British Army,the rest have all been off the shelf purchases of foreign designed and built weapons and some of those were only purchased because other countries used them and have since been discarded,long before the end of their service lives.
There is no other industrialised nation which is so dependent on foreign made and designed weapons,even Serbia develops it's own small arms,the British Army has neglected weapon development for over a century and it's infantry has suffered accordingly,fighting the whole of the Second World War with an obsolete bolt action rifle,past examples of foreign designs include the Vickers gun,the Lewis gun,the Thompson gun,the Lee-Enfield,the Oerlikon,the Bofors,the Bren,the General Purpose Machine Gun,the Browning M2,the Self Loading Rifle and the Browning High Power,there are many more.
The British Army is now dependent on such reliable purveyors of weapons as: the United States' of America,which was on the wrong side of a colonial rebellion a while back and stabbed the United Kingdom in the back during the Suez Crisis;Canada,which did the same;Israel,who's politicians threatened to impose an arms embargo on the United Kingdom when the Foreign Secretary said something they didn't like;Belgium,which refused to supply the British Army with ammunition during the liberation of Kuwait and which was occuppied by the enemy the last two times we needed a lot of it;politically neutral Sweden and Switzerland which were both surrounded by the enemy the last time we needed a lot of ammunition;and not forgetting Italy and Germany,who were the enemy.
Surprisingly,the British Army has not yet ordered weapons from the Irish Republican Army,the Taliban,the Islamic State,Iran,China,Russia,Argentina or Iceland,perhaps they will do that next week,are there no generals left who understand the meaning of the phrase "security of supply"?
Grand Logistics.
Why would a general be worrying about industrial policy? A civil servant maybe, but it's out of scope for a general.
To answer the question "if you do not trust a soldier to pull the trigger more than once", I do trust the soldier, but I also know the physiological effects of extreme fear, I repeatedly train the soldier to have the rifle on auto in situations of high likelihood of ambush and then check that they do before we enter the situation, so they don't have to think about multiple things, just react by doing one.
The semi auto only SLR was a mistake, to be fair it seems to have been a political decision, Churchill apparently loved the FAL and had some very Victorian views on wasting ammunition, which was probably still sort of true when you where using the 7.62 and had a limited amount on you.
I haven't found a passage from a memoirs but I recall from conversations with Falklands vets that they picked up the Argentinian rifles and used them, because they went with full auto. That's generally a sign that your rifles aren't very good.
I only just found out the EM2 was officially adopted, which meant we had a automatic rifle firing intermediate cartridges in 1951, so in-between 1950 and 1985 we went from bolt action, to fully automatic, to semi auto only, to fully auto!
To answer the question "The question then is whether the ability to use full automatic fire at very short ranges,and ambushes are not always at short ranges,is worth the increased ammunition consumption,increased weapon heating and reduced reliability?” the answer is unequivocally yes, because experience tells us that’s what works.
You seems to imply the youtube videos you link to support that the army already does rapid fire, but they don’t, rapid fire is approx 20 rounds per minute not the 4 per second you say would be achievable. So this is a new requirement hence will increase training time and cost.
The British Army doesn’t produce its own designs and that's worked out very well. In every war we have had some of the best weapons on the battlefield, with the exception of the L85A1 which was a MOD project to create a rifle in the UK, as you suggest we should do again. This works because there's no conflict of interest, you select the best then improve on it, you aren't captured by the considerations on manufacturing into making sub optimal choices.The only bad weapon you mention in your list of foreign designed weapons was the SMLE in WW2, in WW1 it was the best in class, by 1939 it was overtaken by semi auto rifles although most of the counties we fought against entered the war with bolt action rifles as well. The army at the time knew it wasn't right but ran out of time to replace it before war broke out. But to make up for it the Bren was the best light machine gun to enter the war, a good base of fire at a stage when the universal belt fed machine gun was still being perfected. In short every one of those weapons you mention were the best available at the time they were in service, there are many complaints to be made about British weapons, for example for almost the entirety of WW2 the tanks were rotten, but infantry weapons were rarely the problem, as witnessed by the fact that many of those designs were purchased by multiple counties and had long service lives, the GPMG and Browning 0.5 are still in service!
The army didn't switch to automatic because of the Americans, it was because the L85/86 replaced three weapons, two of which were automatic, the Sterling and the Bren, and the SLR. It also allowed us to take over the M16 jungle fighting role.
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You seem to be swivelling between the 3/8 inch carbine being very rare or freely available for urban and jungle work, which means it's a two gun/cartridge solution to the infantry's problem. Personally I'm not opposed to the idea of tools for the job, sometimes you need a hammer, sometimes a screwdriver, the problem comes when you try to use a screwdriver as a hammer or vis versa.
I don't understand the comment about the weapons I mentioned not being in service, they all are still in use, with the exception of the Minimi and the 60 mm mortar which are now in storage.
The challenge with deciding on weapon purchases based on ownership is that it can change. As you mentioned, BAE bought H&K, which made it in someway British, but the reverse can also happen, a British based manufacturer could be purchased and ownership moved offshore. Getting involved in industrial policy through military purchases is a messy business, better to specify to anyone who is bidding for a contract where production should be done and get on with selecting the best option. For many of the weapons we have purchased recently, there really wasn’t a justification to build in the UK, the numbers were in the hundreds or thousands, which hardly justifies the investment and the need can be met by a one off lifetime purchase.
As regards producers of weapons not selling them to us, that's their right, you can't force people to sell you weapons if they disagree with what you'll do with them. It's a question for us to decide on homeland manufacturing and stock piling.
Reading the CNA report it mentions "Reports of weapon stoppages at least one time while engaging the enemy were 30 percent or less across all weapons. Most stoppages were reported to have a small impact on continuing in the engagement with the weapon.” That doesn’t really support making weapons semi auto only. A stoppage could happen for multiple reasons, but this is most telling, “soldiers issued cleaning kits were less likely to experience stoppages and more likely to be confident in weapon reliability.” Cleaning with appropriate kits for the environment you’re working in seems like a substantially better idea than removing machine guns from the infantry.
While the Chinese have settled on a single calibre for the infantry platoon, that’s no different from the US platoon. The 7.62 is still there for support weapons in the battalion. The differences between the performance of the two cartridges are slight.
I’m interested in the idea that "the lower density of the modern battle space demands longer ranged weapons”, while this may be generally true, that doesn’t mean that rifles have to get longer ranged, more that guided missiles, UAVs and artillery will play a dominant role. If anything the increased urbanisation of human civilisation means we are more likely to see short range urban warfare dominate. The essential role of the infantry remains to close with and destroy the enemy. The Infantryman's Half Kilometer Reconsidered in the the small wars journal shows an interesting perspective on the response to this challenge.
Hello Jim Davies,
as the British Army has demonstrated twice in the last century,big wars are not won by armies,they are won by industries,often without a single shot being fired.
Long ago the Mongol hordes conquered much of Asia and Europe due to their successful horse breeding industry.
The wind powered saw mill allowed the Dutch Republic to become an economic and naval superpower,and defeat the Royal Navy in it's home base.
It was industry which equipped millions of new recruits when "The Old Contemptibles" of the regular British Army were ground to dust in just three months at the start of the First World War.
Twenty-six years later it was industry which equipped millions of stout hearted civilian recruits after the professional British Army handed it's equipment to the Germans and then ran away (several times).
The United States of America defeated it's most powerful opponent,the British Empire,by out manufacturing it during the Second World War,and did the same to the Belgian,Dutch,French,German and Japanese empires.
The Soviet Union lost the Cold War because it's civilian economy could not keep up with that of the West,not because the Red Army was defeated.
China has become a military and naval superpower as a by product of it's powerful civilian industries,not because of it's military victories.
When wars are fought by robots,the winner shall be the nation with the best robot building industry.
We are now,always have been and always shall be in an age of industrial warfare,yet General Nicholas Carter says "We must chart a direction of travel from an industrial age of platforms to an information age of systems.”,perhaps he does not understand that information does not kill people,bullets do.
There was a General in the British Army who held the ancient position of "Master-General of the Ordnance" which was recently abolished after nearly six hundred years (probably because it was not transformational,or diverse),amongst other things,he was responsible for the design,manufacture and supply of weapons,ammunition and equipment.
That position's current equivalent,Director General (Land),is held by a civilian former Royal Air Force officer,perhaps ministers got tired of decades of ill conceived and badly managed army procurement projects.
Today it is common for generals from other countries,particularly in the United States of America,to talk of the importance of maintaining their defence industrial base and to plan their procurement projects for that purpose,as was once the case in the United Kingdom,but today the British Army seems to think that it can always rely on a supply of weapons,equipment and ordnance from countries hostile to the interests of the United Kingdom,such as the United States of America (a nation created by people who loved Britain so much they declared independence and waged war on it),history suggests otherwise.
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Which is most difficult for a frightened soldier in a potential ambush situation to do,remembering to put the selector on the right setting for the situation and controlling full automatic fire without "spraying and praying" or just pulling the trigger more than once?
Surely it is much easier for a stressed soldier to just point the weapon and pull the trigger without having to worry about selecting the right fire mode?
There was a fascinating debate in parliament about the controversial adoption of the Fusil Automatique Léger during which were made some points pertinent to this dicussion,the Prime Minister,Sir Winston Churchill,said:
"As a matter of fact, these two rifles, if used on automatic gear, can fire at the rate of over 600 rounds a minute.".
He went on:
"In the stress and excitement of battle, the soldier would be far more likely to fire away his limited amount of ammunition, the supply of which is always a main interest especially on the move in the front line.".
He added:
"Perhaps I may just mention that, because a lot of Members have experience of actual warfare, and they must know perfectly well that everything is not settled exactly by technical and mechanical considerations.
For instance, while being fully up to date in ease and rapidity of fire, a rifle should be carefully safeguarded against too rapid expenditure of ammunition, leading to exhaustion of any supplies which soldiers, or platoons, or even companies, can carry to the front.
This is at any rate partially achieved by preventing our new rifle being used as an automatic weapon, unless individual weapons have been specially converted by the field armourers on superior orders, for some particular contingency.
The private soldier cannot do it himself.
Thus the terrible danger of a convulsive grip pouring away hundreds of precious cartridges is averted.
This is quite important, although I have not heard it mentioned.".
Are these the Victorian views your refer to?
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He has a good point with respect to the ammunition,there was only so much which could be carried and that is still a problem today (5.56x45mm may be half the weight of 7.62x51mm but soldiers also now have to carry a great weight of armour and electronics),however,his views on using the rifle for exercising or as a club certainly were rather Victorian,or perhaps he was just fishing for excuses to justify a political decision,like Philip Hammond's laughable claim that a nuclear reactor would be required for steam catapults on the new aircraft carriers.
If restricting the Self Loading Rifle to semi automatic fire was a mistake,then the Australians,Canadians,New Zealanders,Indians and Rhodesians also made the same "mistake" for the same reasons.
See here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRKmvIec6YQ
There is a link on this page to an article about Rhodesian Cover Shooting,here are some quotes from it:
"Riflemen usually carried 7-8 magazines of 19, or even 18 rounds each (Placing a full 20 round load into an FN magazine damages the magazine spring in the long term and caused stoppages).
These would be supplemented with a few extra boxes of 20 rounds each for reloading.";
"Terrorists generally fired on fully automatic - "spray and pray."
This would often start high,and would rise.
The indiscriminate use of ammunition on fully automatic usually meant they would run out long before the Rhodesian troops.";
"FAL 7.62 long rounds have the power to punch through the tree trunks generally found in the African savanna and jesse bush!
AK47`s using 7.62 short, on the other hand, generally did not.
This fact was used to great effect by the Rhodesians.";
"To "Win the Fire Fight," riflemen would consume the first two magazines as quickly as it remained practical to maintain accuracy, using single rounds or double taps (While trained to use the double tap, my Commando`s policy was the use of single rounds - Aim, Squeeze and
Switch).";
"Each stick member was responsible for monitoring his own ammunition usage during
the fire fight, and running out was an unforgivable sin!".
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Back in the day,if you did not have a moustache on your face,an innertube on your head,black tape on your buttons,paracord on everything,a Bren magazine in your Self Loading Rifle and an overwhelming desire to convert it to full automatic then you were not a British infantryman.
But given the limited amount of ammunition which infantrymen could carry across the Falklands (victims of an epic failure of logistical planning),had they wasted it by firing rifles on full automatic then they would have had even bigger problems with running low than they did have.
It would not be at all surprising if infantrymen had used any enemy weapons they could pick up,they do things like that,but they would have had to kill the enemy with their semi automatic rifles before they could pick up and use the enemy's fully automatic rifles.
Which implies that the side with the semi automatic rifles was more combat effective than the side with fully automatic rifles,isn't that a sign that automatic rifles aren't very good?
As technology,terrain and the enemy change only slowly,military opinions should also change slowly,as should the policies based on those opinions,when an armed force's policy exhibits frequent,radical changes it is an indication that it is the product of opinions which are not based on technology,terrain and the enemy,rather the fleeting whims of officers,politicians (Winston Churchill being the exemplar) and civil servants who happen to be in post but who are not subject matter experts.
It is a terrible shame that the Rifle,No.9,Mk.1 (EM-2) was withdrawn from service shortly after Winston Churchill said "We still think that the 280 rifle is the best",it was the United Kingdom's direct equivalent of the Avtomat Kalashnikova model 1947 and is still highly regarded today,it was credited with eighty-four aimed shots per minute.
You are correct,experience tells us what works,after eight years of experience using the fully automatic M16A1 in the jungles of Vietnam,where a third of engagements were close quarter ambushes,the United States' armed forces decided unequivocally to eliminate the automatic setting on it's successor the M16A2.
You are saying that those British infantrymen who were firing four rounds per second semi automatically,on a live fire range,are not firing rapidly because firing at more than twenty rounds per minute is too fast to be rapid?
Earlier you said "Training someone to rapidly fire the rifle is a new ask and will increase range time and cost.",now you are saying that training a soldier to fire more slowly will "increase training time and cost"?
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The British Army used to have an Ordnance Department to design and manufacture weapons,as did most other armies but,unlike most other armies,the British Army has long neglected (and allegedly sabotaged) the development of all kinds of equipment and this is why British infantrymen fought the Second World War with an obsolete bolt action rifle.
The L85 is the perfect example of why weapon development should not be neglected,having developed the highly regarded Rifle,No.9,Mk.1 (EM-2) and then withdrawn it for political reasons,the United Kingdom neglected small arms development for decades and then found it's self without the institutional expertise required to develop a new rifle,despite this being a rather simple undertaking which many small companies are capable of,for example the British Army's Ordnance Board and Infantry Trial and Development Unit was apparently unable to identify numerous problems with the SA80 family before they entered production,or chose to ignore them,the Ajax vehicle is currently suffering from the same problem,after the British Army neglected armoured vehicle design for decades.
There is always a conflict of interest when procuring foreign weapons from countries whose political,military and economic interests differ from those of the United Kingdom,which is all of them,that is why the British Army does not use Russian or Chinese weapons,the adoption of the Self Loading Rifle instead of the EM-2 is an example of the malign effect of foreign interests on weapon procurement,Finland maintains it's small arms manufacturing capability due to lessons learned the hard way during the war,the United Kingdom learned similarly hard lessons but then chose to ignore them.
The Short Magazine Lee Enfield was about to be replaced by the British Army before the First World War but it stayed in production as a matter of convenience,it was still a decent rifle at that time but very outdated a quarter of a century later.
The British Army had a quarter of a century to get a semi automatic rifle in to service before the Second World War,there is a very interesting account in Hansard of official resistance to the Farquhar-Hill rifle during and after the First World War.
See here:
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1938-03-22/debates/b5e2745e-9413-49da-b439-fc1b464e4fd4/ArmySupplementaryEstimate1937
There is a video of the rifle the British Army did not want.
See Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXpgJ4JydN4
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The Czechoslovakian designed Bren Gun did turn out to be an excellent weapon,but it went in to production in the United Kingdom only a couple of years before the Third Reich invaded Czechoslovakia (at that time,Czechoslovakian factories were manufacturing armour for the British armed forces).
In Nineteen Fourteen,Birmingham Small Arms obtained a licence to manufacture the Lewis Gun from a Belgian company,just before the Germans invaded Belgium.
The 12.7mm Browning M2 entered production in the United States of America in Nineteen Thirty-three,at a time when the biggest military threat to the United States was the British Empire.
The British Army adopted the 40mm Bofors Gun in Nineteen Thirty-seven,just three years before Sweden was cut off from the United Kingdom when Germany invaded Norway and Denmark.
The Royal Navy ordered 20mm Oerlikon Guns from Switzerland in Nineteen Thirty-nine but few had been delivered before Switzerland was surrounded by the Axis powers a year later,fortunately the plans were smuggled to the United Kingdom.
In Nineteen Forty,Dieudonné Saive,the chief designer of Fabrique Nationale escaped from Belgium after the German invasion,as did plans for the 9mm Browning Hi-Power pistol which eventually went in to production in Canada.
There is a pattern there,weapon designs (which often existed only because foreign governments had invested in their development) obtained only as a matter of luck,which is not a sound procurement strategy,and in each case it took many years to generate adequate production capacity as that had been neglected along with weapon development,who knows how many British servicemen died as a consequence?
Even though British companies were exporting large numbers of tanks between the wars,British tank design was neglected by the British Army and hobbled by it's absurd infantry tank and cruiser tank concepts,by the end of the Second World War the excellent Comet and Centurion tanks were in production which were better than anything the United States Army had (the Americans bought many of the Centurions).
The whole of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation adopted 5.56x45mm because of the Americans and the Americans adopted 5.56x45mm specifically for automatic fire,they found out the hard way with the M14 that automatic 7.62x51mm rifles were not a good idea and later found that automatic M16s were not a good idea either.
The use of the M16 for jungle fighting is very interesting,quite apart from the British Army using it before the Americans,presumably because Malaya had been the Armalite Rifle's first buyer,it's poor long range ballistics are not a problem in a jungle and it's light weight is beneficial,jungles are also amongst the few places where automatic fire may be of any use,on the other hand,it's long length is a disadvantage in thick foliage,as is it's limited penetration.
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The dismounted British infantry section currently uses five cartridges (40mm,9mm,7.62x51mm,5.56x45mm and 12 guage),fired by six different weapons,these would be replaced by just two cartridges,the Quarter Inch Rifle Cartridge and Three Eighths Inch Carbine Cartridge,fired by just three weapons,a rifle,a carbine and a pistol,only a small number of carbines shall be needed to allow them to be freely available as only a very small proportion of the army shall ever have any need for them.
It is always a good idea to use the right tool for the job and if you engage targets at longer ranges or use a short barrelled weapon then 5.56x45mm is a screwdriver doing the work of a hammer.
The earlier statement was that "some of those were only purchased because other countries used them and have since been discarded,long before the end of their service lives",neither the Light Machine Gun nor the 60mm mortars are being retained according to the British Army,unless they have changed their minds,which they often do,one should never believe anything one reads in the Sunday papers but they recently claimed that the Minimis were being sold by a South African company along with many Sig pistols and other weapons.
The United Kingdom should not make "weapon purchases based on ownership",it should maintain the capacity to design and manufacture weapons,who owns that capacity is neither here nor there.
The government already has the ability to prevent strategic assets falling in to the hands of undesirable owners or being moved overseas,the problem is that it does not see the design and manufacture of small arms as a strategic asset.
Australia,Austria,Canada,China,Croatia,France,Germany,India,Israel,Italy,Japan,Korea,Poland,Russia,Serbia,Singapore,Spain,Sweden,the United States of America,and just about every other industrialised nation,are all "Getting involved in industrial policy through military purchases",they take industrial policy seriously because they understand that armies don't win big wars,industries do.
See here:
https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jan/14/2002565328/-1/-1/0/21ST-CENTURY-IND-STRAT-INFOGRAPHIC-FOREWORD.PDF
Even the United Kingdom is getting back in the game.
See here:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/971983/Defence_and_Security_Industrial_Strategy_-_FINAL.pdf
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There are many small arms manufacturers which make a profit from designing,manufacturing and selling thousands of weapons a year,the design and manufacture of small arms is not a very expensive business,a tiny company called C.G.Haenel designed and builds the weapon selected to be German army's new assault rifle (before lawyers stepped in),the several hundred thousand small arms required by the British armed forces provide more than enough volume to economically sustain the capacity to design and manufacture small arms in the United Kingdom,as many smaller countries have demonstrated.
See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.G._Haenel
You are quite right to say "you can't force people to sell you weapons if they disagree with what you'll do with them",which is why it is so important to maintain a domestic capacity to design and build small arms.
You are also right that it is up to the Ministry of Defence to ensure that the United Kingdom is not exposed to such a strategic vulnerability,but it has long been failing in that duty.
It is shocking that up to thirty percent of American soldiers suffered stoppages in combat and also noteworthy that refurbished weapons performed so poorly.
But given that a stoppage in combat can get a soldier killed,why would you not want to significantly reduce that risk by eliminating automatic fire?
As the report said,a properly cleaned weapon is more reliable than a dirty weapon,and a clean weapon firing semi automatically is more reliable than a clean weapon firing fully automatically.
Giving the infantry semi automatic riles and the equipment and training to keep them clean seems like a better idea than giving them fully automatic "widow maker" weapons which will let infantrymen down in their moment of greatest danger.
The Americans have 7.62x51mm machine guns and designated marksman rifles in their platoons in addition to 5.56x45mm carbines,the Chinese appear to use 5.8x42mm for all of those roles.
There do not appear to be any 7.62mm weapons in the Chinese High-Mobility Combined Arms Battalions.
See here:
https://www.benning.army.mil/infantry/magazine/issues/2020/Fall/pdf/5_Arostegui-HIMOB.pdf
Compared to the 5.56x45mm,the Chinese 5.8x42mm DBP10 may be similar at short ranges but has less drop,less windage,less time of flight and more impact energy at longer ranges from a similar cartridge weight.
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Weapon systems such as mortars and rockets are most effective when used in conjunction with rifle fire,for example,because mortar bombs have a long time of flight,enemy infantry may escape the lethal area of a Three Inch Mortar if their movements are not impeded by rifle fire,similarly,rifle fire may encourage the enemy to seek the protection of buildings or armoured vehicles which are within the target set of the proposed Six Inch Rocket Launcher,heavier weapons such as artillery are few in number and are likely to be in high demand for other tasks.
Increased urbanisation shall draw more infantrymen in to urban areas (where the increased penetration of the Quarter Inch Rifle shall be useful),leaving even fewer members of the every shrinking British infantry to cover the less densely built up areas which still make up the vast majority of the planet's land surface and thereby requiring each infantry platoon to cover a larger area,for which it shall require longer ranged weapons.
In the assault,the infantry must first win the long fight before it can close with and destroy the enemy in the short fight,conversely,in the defence,the infantry which wins the long fight saves it's self from being closed with and destroyed by the enemy in the short fight.
Some years ago there was a well considered paper called "Increasing Small Arms Lethality in Afghanistan: Taking Back the Infantry Half-Kilometer",it is possible that "The Infantryman's Half Kilometer Reconsidered" was a response to that,the platoon weapons proposed herein are intended to "take back the infantry half mile",and beyond if you count the machine guns.
See here:
http://www.forte.jor.br/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Increasing-Small-Arms-Lethality-in-Afghanistan-Taking-Back-the-Infantry-Half-Kilometer.pdf
Technically,"The Infantryman's Half Kilometer Reconsidered" was rather lacking,and some statements were very odd,for example,to support the idea that long range fire was not practical there is a quote that says "The chances of hitting a German head at six hundred yards with a telescopic sight, if there is any wind blowing at all, are not great.",given that a rifle of the day would have produced a group about two feet wide at that range,few rounds would hit a six inch wide human head even if perfectly aimed in windless conditions,but that same group size would give a high probability of hitting a standing man.
Later it is said that "The fact that less than a generation before the minimum battle sight setting for the Gewehr 98 was 400m represents a significant evolution.",the Gewehr 98 would have had a very flat trajectory and little drop within four hundred metres and thus there would have been little need to graduate the sight for such close ranges because targets would have been within the weapon's "battle zero",this does not mean the weapon is unsuited to short range fire,quite the opposite,it means that it has excellent ballistics at short ranges.
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Armies of the day had considerable experience of riflery and knew that it was far easier for a soldier,carrying few rounds and firing over open sights,to hit his mark if the target was engaged on the flatter part of the trajectory where errors in estimating target movement,windage and range were less of a problem,therefore there was considerable emphasis on designing rifles with the flattest possible trajectory,the resulting long rifles were also well suited to close range combat which,because it took so long to cycle a bolt,was still dominated by the bayonet until the advent of automatic loading rifles,only then did rifles displace bladed weapons in the melee and,as a consequence,eventually became shorter for better use in close quarters.
Another benefit of those long barrelled rifles is that they could be used for volley fire against large numbers enemy infantrymen,this was important as field artillery of that era was primarily used in the direct fire role but was less mobile than the infantry who had to provide their own long range fire until it caught up with them.
Another odd comment was that "The problem with 5.56 in nearly all of its forms is that it does not readily suppress well compared to many other intermediate cartridges",perhaps the author was trying to say that it is unsuited to firing heavy subsonic bullets?
The opinions of a Navy SEAL were cited,and whilst one should never dismiss the opinions of the Supporting Forces,they do not do the same work as the combat forces which is why they do not use the same equipment.
There was a recommendation for the adoption of 300 Blackout,which is a cartridge case,but no mention of the intended bullet weight,barrel length or muzzle velocity,given that that cartridge can fire lightweight bullets at supersonic speeds or heavy bullets at subsonic speeds,that omission makes it quite impossible to understand exactly what is being proposed.
Most military rifle cartridges tend to be both poorly suited to firing heavy subsonic bullets and unsuited to short barrelled weapons,while pistol cartridges are poorly suited to long range fire,which is unimportant at short ranges,as their bullets have short nose lengths which give poor aerodynamics,but allow short cartridge over all lengths,which is important for a pistol.
A third family of cartridges developed which was suited to use from short barrelled weapons as it presented a large working area to the combustion gases whilst also having a long nose length to reduce aerodynamic drag for longer range fire and sufficient volume to accommodate heavy subsonic bullets,examples of this family include J.D.Jones' Whisper cartridges,the Russian 9x39mm,300 Blackout (a Whisper clone) and the Three Eights Inch Carbine Cartridge proposed herein.
There are two good reasons to use such a cartridge in a military weapon,one is if it is to be fired from a short barrelled weapon and the other is if it is intended to fire heavy subsonic bullets,but when firing supersonic rounds the external ballistics of 300 Blackout are far worse than 5.56x45mm which has been criticised for it's poor external ballistics.
In addition,300 Blackout is heavier than 5.56x45mm because of the higher bullet weight and the author's proposal still leaves the infantry squad with a handful of men equipped for the long fight and a handful for the close fight.
Grand Logistics.
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