Wednesday, May 24, 2017

THIS old story

And again.

The elusive .270 I've chewed over many times.

I'll believe it when I see it universally deployed throughout every part of the War Department.  Er, DoD.

And when that happens peeps will whine "we can't achieve fire superiority over time because we can't carry enough rounds"

2 comments:

Jonathan H said...

According to the article, they want greater range and accuracy with little change in weight - that doesn't seem likely to me; it takes more powder and a bigger bullet to reach out further, and when carrying a bunch of ammo the difference adds up quick.
It mentions long range fights in Afghanistan; to me that is an unusual case and not a reason to change what everyone does, only what those in that arena do - I see the Soviet and German research from WWII still being true in the future; most engagements will be under 75 yards. The major exception is deserts and open fields but since they are a great place for the US to use vehicle mounted weapons, air support, UAVs, mortars, etc, the range of infantry weapons isn't an important factor there.

Will said...

Jonathan:

you might buy into that until your squad/platoon is out of range, or the weather is poor, or too much is happening for your incident to be serviced in a timely fashion.

The other factor that has bothered me since the advent of the M-16, is the need to hit your opponent many times with that little bullet. That was generally not required back in WW2, with full power battle rifles. The claim is that it allows one to carry three times the ammo, but if you have to hit them with 6 rounds to stop them from continuing to act warlike, you only have half as much useful load, in reality. That's a bad trade-off, from my perspective.