WASHINGTON — Several prototypes of a next-generation squad weapon were advanced forward for testing and a request for proposal was sent out, said Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Mark A. Milley during a news conference at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Annual Meeting and Exposition, Oct. 8.
A weapons squad of U.S. Soldiers assigned to the 3rd Cavalry Regiment and deployed in support of Combined Joint Task Force — Operation Inherent Resolve fire two M240B machine guns during a live-fire training exercise near Al Asad Air Base, Iraq, Sept. 26, 2018. The Army is currently testing a prototype for a new squad weapon. (Photo Credit: U.S. Army National Guard photo by 1st Lt. Leland White)
Test firing of the weapon prototype indicates that it has an accurate range far in excess of any existing military rifle today, he said.
Additionally, it fires at speeds that far exceed the velocity of bullets today and it will penetrate any existing body armor or body armor expected to exist over the next 25 years, he added. This sophisticated weapon also has a sight system that integrates into Soldiers’ gear that incorporates the latest in information technology.
Producing such a highly capable weapon is clearly in the realm of the possible, Milley noted, after speaking with engineers designing the prototypes. Right now, feedback from the prototypes looks like it will fire 6.8mm rounds.
Because the weapon is so capable and so sophisticated, “not surprisingly, we expect it to be expensive,” he said. “So we’re probably not going to field the entire Army with this weapon. We’ll prioritize to those Soldiers in all components who are in close combat quarters-type duties such as Infantry, Armor, Cavalry, Rangers, Special Forces, combat engineers.”
Soldiers with the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne) hold their position during a live-fire portion of the Saber Junction 18 exercise at Grafenwoehr Training Area, Germany, Sept. 12, 2018. he Army is currently testing a prototype for a new squad weapon. (Photo Credit: U.S. Army photo by Pfc. Matthew Marcellus )
The Army is looking to buy somewhere in the range of 100,000 of these weapons initially and may expand that later on, he said. The Army hopes to have them out on the range at Fort Benning, Georgia, hopefully by next summer.
“We look forward to it. It’s exciting. But we don’t want to speak too much about its technical capabilities because our adversaries watch these things very closely, so we prefer to keep the technical details out of the news,” he said. “The bottom line is we’re committed to a new rifle and a new squad automatic weapon.”
By Mr. David Vergun (Army News Service)
SSD Editor’s note: I cannot stress enough that the 6.8 round being looked at by the Army for NSGW is NOT the 6.8 SPC investigated by USSOCOM in the early 2000s. It is an entirely new capability.
With Wiley E. Coyote-type soooper-geniuses running the show, no wonder all we’re actually going to get out of this will be a bunch of vapor-ware.
Cartridge-based weapons are fairly well-understood; they work. We know how they work, and we know how to design them. The problem is, we’ve been extremely sloppy in what we’ve asked the designers and engineers to do; that’s a function of poorly integrated strategy/operations/tactics with the weapons suite we procure and issue. Buying crap that is cutting-edge technology and which we have no idea how to effectively actually use and integrate into what we are doing operationally and tactically? That’s a waste of damn money–What does it avail you to have an MG that is theoretically capable of 1800m of effective fires, if we only ever mount the damn thing on a bipod and someone’s shoulder for dismounted infantry operations?
The problem here is not in the weapons; it’s in the rest of the system. This uber-waffe is not going to fix problems that actually stem from doctrine, training, ROE, and how we’re doing business tactically. Right now, there are better, far more cost-effective things we could be doing–Like, figure out how to actually employ the machine guns we already issue so that they’re really, truly effective out to the 1800m they’re theoretically capable of. Put the ‘effing things on a Goddamn remotely-operated PackBot, if that’s what you have to do, but wring the most we can out of what we’ve got before you go haring off after some wil’-o-the-wisp BS like “transformational capabilities”.
It’s pretty fucking telling that these jagoffs aren’t talking at all about how these things will actually affect what we’re doing on the ground–Because they haven’t thought about it enough to articulate it, and because they really don’t understand the realities of life down at the fire-team and MG-crew level. I can about guarantee you that the “needs requirement” for this whole raft of BS wasn’t generated with a start point from some squad leader or experienced platoon leader down at the pointy end of things saying “Yeah; we need new calibers and guns…”. It’s just like the assholes who didn’t take steps to solve the end-of-life problems with the M60. All of us down at the rock face knew those things needed either replacement or a complete re-capitalization of the fleet, but not a damn thing was done about it officially until the Rangers and Marines did their end-run around the dysfunction to get us the M240. Which, I will submit, was a huge ‘effing mistake–The M240 is a great gun, for mounted operations. Dismounted? Everyone who has carried that bitch to war has wound up replacing it, whether it was the Israelis with the Negev, the South Africans with the SS-77, or us, with the lightened M240L and the Mk48. Had they actually done the proper assessments and fielding tests with the M240, we’d have known that before taking it into the Hindu Kush, and finding out that the PKM was a better gun for dismount ops.
To reinforce what I’m getting at with all this: We aren’t even using what we’ve already got to the full potential of the cartridges and weapons capabilities, and the solution to the problems this generates is supposed to be… Moar and betterer cartridges and guns? WTF?
It’s still going to go into the field and be fired off of the same PFC’s shoulder and a bipod; what’s the damn frequency, Kenneth?
Not to mention, we’re probably still going to issue the M122/192 as the tripod, and train on the same flat-as-a-pancake ranges with fixed firing points, like we’re training to defend against human wave attacks in Korea all over again…
There’s a massive reality disconnect here, and it’s frightening to see that our higher leadership is completely oblivious to it all.
Damn, preach. Weapons are only as effective as implemented.
And, the implementation needs to be fully integrated with the strategy, operational intent, and tactics for it to work effectively with the weapons.
This whole thing reminds me of dealing with some of the teenagers I know–Instead of concentrating on working on their basic sports skills, it becomes all about buying the latest and greatest gear from Nike, Adidas, or Reebok. The reality is that the gear is only a fraction of what goes into being effective on the sports field or the battlefield, and probably the smallest fraction, at that.
Show me that we’re using what we’ve got to the utmost, and that we have performance gaps we need to fill, and I’ll be the first person to sign up for supporting this. But, like all too much in the culture these days, it’s all about the inability to distinguish the flash and bang from the blast effect.
Well put. I am becoming increasingly concerned with our propensity to focus on shiny objects and newer, “better” innovations. Every time that we introduce a new capability or system into the infrastructure, we do it without a holistic understanding of how it fundamentally impacts every other facet of our infrastructure. It makes me furious that the seemingly unimportant deep-thinking that is the cornerstone of making men and women succeed in any field (be it in the field or in the office), is being discarded for attractive-sounding buzzwords and quick-fixes to create “overmatch”. I can guarantee that we can accomplish the end result of what this program wants to do (which seems to me like more “overmatch” and increased lethality) by tinkering with the way that our existing systems integrate together on multiple levels, and perhaps make minor changes to our existing equipment and TTPs. But…. Is that as cool as a bunch of shiny new toys? Admittedly no.
Currently being in the private sector and around a number of startup, “startup-like”, and larger, established companies on a daily basis, I can’t help but to agree that the flash and bang that you mention is a serious cultural issue. Increasingly more and more, people want to be sold on something for the sake of the sell or the aesthetic – I see this all the time now in pitch decks for startups trying to attract their first round -or even subsequent rounds- of funding. Most of what comes onto the screen or out of their CEO’s mouth is utter manure which sounds great, but doesn’t have any “blast effect”.
I want them to show me the hard numbers; I want them to show me how they got to/intend to get to the milestones they reference, and tell me why that’s important to them, and also why that should be important to me; I want them to sell me on what’s under the hood of the car so that I really want to drive that sucker. I don’t want them to sell me on the fact that the exterior is painted ruby red (which makes it go faster, of course). So many companies – big and small- make this amateurish mistake because they want to sell the dream first, and then build the product, that’s absolutely the wrong way to go about it.
I really hope that this isn’t going to become the norm, because if we do on a widespread scale, our much more pragmatic enemies with significantly smaller budgets will take note, and there will be a very steep learning curve on our end…
I’m not sure our system is capable of learning, in any real sense. Witness the way we’ve gone back to the “old ways” as soon as we ceased operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nowhere in any of the latest MTOE changes will you see an acknowledgment that there needs to be an organic personal security detachment for the commanders and other key leaders, in order to enable battlefield circulation and “eyes-on” for those key leaders. We came back from Iraq, apparently decided “We’ll never do that again…”, and promptly dissolved all those elements from the force structure. Next time around, we will again be pulling those assets out of our ass, stripping line units of already depleted numbers of troops, and having to throw together both equipment and bodies at the last minute to do what is arguably probably the most critical thing on the battlefield–Getting the commander into personal contact with the problem.
Were we a learning organization, we’d have come out of Iraq looking at all the work-arounds and improvisations we had to do, and started building those into the force structure. The PSD issue is only a part of the problem–There are other things all over the entire force, from the logistics weenies up to the front-line infantry.
My take on “future war” is that there is no more room for specialization; we cannot afford to say that there is a clear line between “combat”, “combat support”, and “combat service support”. Those delineations are artifacts of a linear battlefield that was ceasing to be a “thing” back when the Germans were dealing with the Soviet partisans on the Ostfront. You cannot say that the CS and CSS guys are not going to do combat; they have to be trained, equipped, and possessive of the mentality to close with, engage, and win whenever they encounter the enemy, or we’re going to find that wars like Iraq are unwinnable, and any conflict between our forces and peers is going to result in those peers targeting our weaknesses in the rear areas, just as the Chinese did in Korea. The infiltration tactics that they used after they entered the Korean War following the Chosin Reservoir campaign are precisely the same things we’re going to be seeing again, only they won’t have the weaknesses they did during the 1950s; instead, they’ll be fully equipped with all the things that enabled us to win back then, in terms of firepower and logistics. Next time we do something like Korea, it’s going to be exponentially harder.
Basically, if you’re in a US uniform, you need to be as combat-capable as the average infantryman is, and be willing to take the fight to the enemy whenever and wherever you encounter them. If it’s at the port in Kuwait, the streets of Las Vegas outside Nellis AFB, or the mountains of Korea, you’re going to have to recognize that the only way to survive and win is going to be by being better than they are, and be willing to fight.
I honestly think we’re going to start seeing a lot of the supposed “safe areas” we rely on psychologically being turned into combat zones; imagine the effect on operations and morale if even one or two cells of Hezbollah or ISIS went into operation and targeted off-duty drone operators and their families here in the US. My guess is that the dislocation of that happening would probably give the enemy a solid week or two of relative operational freedom of action in their chosen operational areas. “Reach-back” really only works if there’s somewhere to reach back to… Which is a point our many Wiley E. Coyote types have failed to recognize.
Kirk, I’m with you on this one. I believe situations such as this are based upon the broken army acquisition process- the one in which you forecast money years ahead of requirements, then be damned if you don’t spend the money.
Even at a tier 1 unit, the justification process for items that you MIGHT need 12 years down the road and partition off monies for said items is absurd. As a result, we end up buying products that there is little to no use for (not all the time of course).
PLA doesn’t fight like they did in 1950, they tried that short attack stuff in Vietnam and got their butts handed to them just as bad as they did in ’50-51 and spent the time since then completely reforming their army. Now they plan to fight combined arms mobile warfare, well armed infantry supported by AFV and artillery with air support, emphasis on supply, signals, etc. They’re not going to be doing human wave point attacks, nor infantry-centric infiltration/road block techniques they learned from the IJA in WW2. With modern ISR, that style of warfare isn’t even possible without getting raped by the defending side.
I await with confidence the moment when you discover a couple of things: First, that the Chinese are not likely to do anything different than the Soviets, avoiding direct peer-on-peer conflict with us, and that the same techniques and tactics used against us by the Soviets in their proxy wars against us are going to work just as well for the Chinese.
Defending against this style of war isn’t as easy to do as you think–Especially when most of our forces are in denial that they will need to do so, as your attitude typifies. I laugh my ass off, remembering how assholes with your attitude laughed off what the South Africans were dealing with, when the subject was brought up. The whole issue was hand-waved away on multiple occasions, with similar confidence that we would “rape” anyone daring to try the same against our wonderful forces.
2003 forward put a somewhat different perspective on things, which all too many have managed to forget.
You’re all over the place. You clearly were referring to Chinese “short attack” doctrine, which the PLA scrapped 30+ years ago, replacing infantry-centric infiltration methods (that didn’t work well) with tried and true combined arms mechanized warfare. There is absolutely nothing the South Africans in the 70s had to do with this, when the PLA reforms didn’t start until the early 80s, when they got clobbered by the Vietnamese trying to do the same bugle led crap they did in the 1950s. They don’t fight that way anymore. The Russians don’t fight like they did back in WW2 either, nor do they even fight like they did back in the 80-early 2000s, because they too have massively reformed their army after the Georgia debacle.
And yes, defending against an infantry-centric enemy doctrine involving stealth infiltration of enemy lines at night, in the age of night vision/PEQ-15, thermals/FLIR, drones, DPICM, and cluster munitions, is a bit different when GIs with M1 Garands and BARs, equipped with the super unreliable MK I eyeball for ISR, were needing to rely on mortar or artillery overhead flares to stay alive while the Chinese tried to infiltrate lines with short attacks.
I can’t believe they are going with the 6.8 SPC. SOCOM already tried that!
I can’t believe you didn’t notice the big bold Editor’s note….
“SSD Editor’s note: I cannot stress enough that the 6.8 round being looked at by the Army for NSGW is NOT the 6.8 SPC investigated by USSOCOM in the early 2000s. It is an entirely new capability.”
They aren’t. RIF
They clearly are not going to go with the 6.8 SPC, if it “will penetrate any existing or proposed body armor” which can only mean one thing: depleted uranuim cores in 6.5mm jacketed bullets, fired from a 6.5-300 Weatherby magnum.
‘Cause that’s how you get through any known body armor. [palmface]
The other question is, what’s the use case for this capability? How many of our opponents are actually armored, and what sort of armor do we actually need to penetrate?
My thinking on this issue is that we need to wait a bit, and assess the actual effect of drones and remotely operated vehicles on the battlefield, and then start to consider if individual weapons are actually going to be targeting more people, or more machines. If it’s machines, then we’re gonna have to re-think this whole issue again, and in very short order.
I can’t help but think that this is another episode in our ongoing caliber/weapons dysfunction, in perfect keeping with the rest of the historical record.
I think you’re right on here, especially with the price points to play in that particular arena being reduced by magnitudes of scale… There’s a real reason there is interest in figuring out how we will fight and win in signal-contested/signal-denied environments,
I’m also beginning to wonder how this will dramatically affect provisions of the Geneva Convention in years to come.
It is going to be interesting, with regards to that whole can of “humanitarian” worms.
I’ve always been very dubious about the entire premise, to tell you the truth. One thing that’s always struck me, aside from the entirely disingenuous way that the the Imperial Germans got that train started, after criticizing the Brits for supposedly using the dreaded “dum-dum” bullets in the Boer Wars, was that the entire premise is fundamentally flawed, in terms of actual “humanitarian effect”. Allow me to explain:
The premise was based on lessened human suffering. So, to achieve that, they didn’t want to have projectiles that did “excessive damage”. This was back in the late 19th Century, long before either sulfa drugs or true antibiotics. So, instead of a dum-dum bullet tearing a bloody great hole in someone, and killing them relatively quickly from blood loss and other damage, the idea was to use FMJ, and poke little holes in them, carrying dirty uniform bits and dirt from the battlefield deep into their bodies…? Which would lead to long, painfully lingering deaths in the casualty treatment pipeline, instead? WTF? Were they all a bunch of sadists? From today’s perspective, with modern medicine, the prohibition on expanding/exploding projectiles looks humane and decent; from the actual perspective of the time, with then-extent medical technology? Dear God, but that’s the most horrifyingly deranged and disgustingly demented sadism I can imagine. Option “A”: Arm torn off at shoulder; relatively quick death. Option “B”: Small penetrating bullet wound in shoulder, shattered joint, eventual gas gangrene, and a long, lingering death, screaming in a hospital ward somewhere in the rear areas as your body rotted out from under you.
You stop and think about it, and you come to a rather different conclusion about the supposed humanity of it all, and you develop a somewhat jaundiced opinion on the good intent of those behind all that crap. Personally, I’ve come to the conclusion that the lot of them were a bunch of dangerous psychopathic sadists.
If we ever face mass wave attacks of people/infantry that are armored if N.Korea has Armor? A simple solution would be drones loaded with lazy dog bombs. Let a chunk of steel and gravity do the work to penetrate said armor.
Or just use HE or cluster munitions to shred the 90% of the human body not covered by body armor.
The 6.8mm round is a waste of money. The bullet is the same weight as the 7.62mm M80A1 bullet so there won’t be a weight savings. The recoil will likely make it hard to control in full auto or bursts. We won’t have common logistics with our allies because they don’t plan to buy all new weapons. Why would the ARMY just upgrade deployed troops? I guess the non-deployed active troops, National Guard, and Reserve forces don’t matter. The 6.8 round will not penetrate level 4 body armor. There are quite a few brands of level 4 armor on the market.
E.R. – OPSEC! Since you have been involved in testing and evaluation for the new round and know as much as Army leadership, and have been involved in all of the same cost-benefit analysis and other decisions (including the priority over equipping close-combat forces vs. everyone else)… don’t let our adversaries know about the limitations you’ve expertly pointed out for the “new” 6.8mm SPC round (of course, definitely not some new round and associated weapons systems with real overmatch capabilities).
One more time, it’s NOT 6.8 SPC.
SSD – I probably didn’t adequately convey sarcasm, I’m aware as a reader the only thing in common with 6.8 SPC is the diameter of the projectile.
Good
Seriously, as a PSA not directed at anyone, and common knowledge to most, but be alert for social engineering attempts to obain information on the capabilities and limitations of new systems like this… provocative posts (with excessive generalities/factual errors) in forums such as this could be a great way to elicit responses that “set the record straight” but reveal sensitive information.
Get it over with and give the contract to SIG. Like everything else lately. Not hating, just a joke.
I don’t care who gets it so long as it isn’t LSAT.
Let the hate flow through you. lol.
In all seriousness, LSAT seems to have the advantage. So your wish may not come true.
LSAT has many problems that need to be addressed, new technology and all.
Im not sure how them weapons are going to get any lighter than current generation brass cartridge ones.
I’m not sold on the projectile diameter, but I love .30 Remington brass!
Why hasn’t anybody told the Generals about the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator Rounds?? They have been around for years and used by some top level operators.
Whats MSRP on those?
The Army has a target of $10,000 per Automatic Rifle.
Hahaha Oh wait….you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder. Hahahahahahahahaha.
I have a feeling they will downgrade, and downgrade, and downgrade the requirements more and more until they are essentially what the M4 requires, but the weapon will cost more, weight more, break more, have more recoil, and generate more heat.
All that hoopla of “hypervelocity, self guided scopes, and unbeatable bullet penetration” is just that, this years buzz words.
Last time it was overmatch, now it’s hypervelocity.
Tungsten formed hypervelocity armor piercing ammo was the primary means of anti-tank rounds during WW2. Actually, even before WW2, but definitely during when that was sometimes the only way to get pre-existing AT guns to have more effectiveness against new and thicker armored AFVs in the never ending arms race that occurred from 1939-45.
But imagine if tanks were actually covered by cardboard besides only a small portion augmented by thick steel plates, only the frontal turret mantlet. If that was the case, would anyone have bothered with hypervelocity AT rounds?
Milley was appointed as COS in August 2015, he has less then one year left before he’s thankfully replaced. The only thing he can currently claim as a success besides the Dragoon Stryker and new PT and service uniform is that he integrated women into combat arms and pushed for transsexuals to be allowed to serve openly. Meanwhile the Army went to complete Hell under his watch, to the point that the Secretary of the Army and the rest of the DOD has to intervene to fix his mess.
This NGSW, as stupid as it is, is his lasting legacy. He’s the only one pushing for it, and when he goes, it dies, so he has to push push push to make it happen to the point his successor can’t stop it.
Don’t forget the ICSR, COTS 7.62 rifle for everyone! To defeat muh Russia!!!