As to you question #4 - the comments I was hearing came from troops who had been in combat.  The wanted better accuracy at longer ranges and a higher chance for one hit to disable the target.  The infantry in my brigade prefered to stand off at just outside the effective range of the AK and then challence the enemy to a marksmanship contest.  The logpac people wanted a bullet that was better at penetrating cover. (This was in the days before everybody had up-armored vehicles and the soldiers fired back from the passenger windows while the convoy kept moving.)

Who doesn't, but weight and cost are two bitches, and so is recoil.

 

 

The wanted better accuracy at longer ranges and a higher chance for one hit to disable the target

 

Then they better start using the Barrett .50 Caliber....or hit the head/CNS....and they had better hit the target, too.

 

Higher chance, versus what, BTW?  Were they willing to double their ammunition and weapons weight for this higher chance, carry less water, fewer batteries?  "Better/higher" are relative and come with a trade-off...7.62mm has a HIGHER chance of one-shot kill, but how much higher, at 400-plus metres?  How much are you or they willing to give up for a "higher" chance at one-shot kills?  How much mobility, or water, or armour are you willing to surrender? 

.308 == 7.62x51 == 7.62NATO

 

M1919/M1917/Garand/BAR uses 30-06.

 

Anyway, soldiers don't fight individually, but as an integrated team.

 

There are grunts who do all the door kicking and room cleaning, while there are others who are naturally good shooters and are capable of engaging ranged targets.

 

The environment also determines which rifle/ammo combo and troop composition should be.

 

So the question should be WHICH mission are best suited for WHICH rifle/ammo combo.

 

And there are also other logistic constraints. So you don't want to supply troops with 10 different rifle caliber and 20 different ammo types for each caliber. That would be logistic nightmare.

 

Thus, current combination of 5.56 and 7.62NATO is good enough.

 

While the door kickers are still mostly armed with M4, some troops in Afg needs to be given .308 rifles for ranged engagement.

 

There is no single caliber solution for machineguns, then why rifles? Every platoon needs designated marksmen and DMRs. The combined firepower of an infantry platoon should cover up to 600m against human targets. Then, again, the reality doesn't work in virtual battlefields. In actuality, a platoon does a lot of things. Sometimes some they need to engage targets up to 600m, and other times they are doing house-to-house cleaning. There is no definitive solution for every case, and statistics sometimes don't make any sense.

 

Thus, current combination of 5.56 and 7.62NATO is good enough.

 

While the door kickers are still mostly armed with M4, some troops in Afg needs to be given .308 rifles for ranged engagement

 

 I believe the people with .308 would be called snipers or machine gun crew....

Having heard experienced professional soldiers argue both sides of this, the reason I think we should make the 7.62mm more available is that we will use this advantage.  One thing that stands out about American Soldiers is that they shoot better than most armies.  Going back to the American Revolution, to Sgt. York and up to the present day, it's part of our DNA as an army.  We care about marksmanship and we train more than most for this.  That being the case, our troops should have a rifle that will respond well to being fired via single aimed shots.  We have an army of professional volunteers.  Give them a professional soldier's rifle not a spray and pray machine. 

If we switch, how are we to do this without bankrupting the army?  It's a good question.  I think the clear answer is simply to start issuing M-14/Socoms/7.62mm's as designated marksman rifles, at first one per squad and then one per fire team.  I think the logistics chain can handle this, we already have 5.56 and 7.62mm bullets in the Army.  It might make the most sense anyway.  Don't we already hand out different weapons to guys in the squad/fireteam?  Someone's got a light machine gun, someone has a grenade launcher.  It would make sense to me to have a couple of guys with M4/M26 for door busting and a couple of guys with M14's for longer range sniping. 

Historically American soldiers were terrible marksmen. The Army didn't do much about that until after the Civil War. Even then they screwed up the basic marksmanship training all the way to WW II and Korea.

 

READ.... 

 

Read.... 

 

WW I that was.

 

 

H.

The article badly jumbles up the nomenclature for the parent cartridge of the "300 BLK."

 

Right off the bat, presumably,  "7.62" mens 7.62mm, which is .30 caliber, which is, , to be precise, .308 inches.   If we were intending the new round to be .30 caliber, more or less, we would not omit the decimal point from its nomenclature, so the correct designation would be ".300 B LK"

 

It gets worse.    There never was a ".30-.30 Remington."   The author just pulled that out of, well, out of thin air, or somewhere.  The author means the .30 Remington, a medium-power rimless cartridge roughly equivalent to the rimmed .30-30 Winchester.  To heap up ignominy on ignominy, there is no decimal point before the second "30" in the latter cartridge designation. 

 

American cartridge designations are idiosyncratic and unstandardized.  At one time, it had been customary to call a cartridge by, first, caliber in hundredths of inches, then, separated by a dash, the case capacity or intended charge of the cartridge in grains of blackpowder..  For example, .45-70, .45-90, .45-120, etc.  As the technology shifted to smokeless powder, the old system of naming cartridges clung on for a while, as seen by the names, ".30-40 Krag," and, as we see here, the ".30-30 Winchester."

 

We cannot look for regularity or consistency in non-metric cartridge designations, for it is not there.  We can hold authors and editors of  purportedly technical articles to a higher standard than was exhibited here..

I'm well aware that American marksmanship has not always been good in practice.  But Americans have traditionally cared about marksmanship and when we find out the troops are NOT up to par it's considered a scandle and we try and do something about it. 

 

On a practial level we don't train our troops to spray and pray.  We train them to aim their shots.  That being the case we ought to  have a rifle and ammo that takes advantage of that fact.  Train the troops to fire accurately, give them ammo to train, get them better sights on the weapons than the enemy has and give them a rifle and ammo that reward accuracy and longer ranged shooting and we'll have a practical real advantage in combat.