Nato Round

I was reading up on NATO round selection in the 1950s and 60s and cam upong this gem:

"8 solider squad with M16s can outgun 11 soldier squad with M14s"

Imagine that! 8 to 11. I wonder how they thought that up. Clearly it's a fight in each other's range. Is it merely becaue of the combat load difference, with M16s carrying more ammo? Or are they easier to swap magazines? Hmmmm...

“Fighting between the big-round and small-round groups reached a peak in the early 1960s, when test after test showed the .223 Remington round fired from the AR15 allowed an 8-soldier unit to outgun an 11-soldier unit armed with M14s. U.S. troops were able to carry more 5.56x45mm NATO ammunition which would allow them a better advantage against a typical NVA unit armed with AK-47s. In 1964, the U.S. Army started replacing their M14s with the M16, incurring another series of complaints from the British.”

Those complaints were because the Brits had developed a decent intermediary round at .280 caliber that they fought for. The US wanted to stick with .30 caliber and insisted, thanks to our bigger pull, on teh .308. A shortened .30-06.

Why were we still married to .30 caliber? Well it is a good beefy round. But we may have switched to something smalled except Old Soldiers, like MacArthur remembered our time in the Phillipines and liked a big stopper, and we were in the beginning of the Depression in the early 30's and switching our inventory over would have been an expensive PIA. So we made the Garand take the venerable 8 .30-06 instead of 10 new-then .276 Pedersen,

I sometimes wish we HAD adopted that .276 Pedersen in 1932. It would have been the NATO round in the 1950s instead of a .308 replacement for the .30-06 or the brit .280. The M14 would have been lighter to carry because of what it ate, and we might not be now saddled with .223. We might have a modernized M14 still in service. Just update the stock and it'd fit in as good or better than the competition.

Or I'd be complaining about some flaw with .276 or .280 right now that only would have come to light after extensive use in WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam, etc.

Would we even KNOW what a .308 was if that had been the case, though? The .308 was an answer to a shorter .30-06 in the 50's, but we'd have been 20 years beyond using the .30-06 by then, had we gone Pedersen in the Garand. No reason to develop a new round.