Army, Marines face new pressure to use same ammunition

[Shawn Dodson]

Interesting article about Congressional push to choose between M855A1 and Mk318. The Marines are rightfully concerned about M855A1's damaging effects on rifles and reliability, which would seem to favor Mk318 over M855A1 in terms of life cycle cost.

I don't agree with Larry Vickers' comments about terminal effectiveness, especially when it comes to barrier blind performance. However, based on my personal experience with the media, I suspect many of his comments were omitted and the ones that were chosen for the article reflect a very narrow viewpoint.

See - http://www.defensenews.com/story/mil...tion/26657177/

[Unobtanium]

Interesting article about Congressional push to choose between M855A1 and Mk318. The Marines are rightfully concerned about M855A1's damaging effects on rifles and reliability, which would seem to favor Mk318 over M855A1 in terms of life cycle cost.

I don't agree with Larry Vickers' comments about terminal effectiveness, especially when it comes to barrier blind performance. However, based on my personal experience with the media, I suspect many of his comments were omitted and the ones that were chosen for the article reflect a very narrow viewpoint.

See - http://www.defensenews.com/story/mil...tion/26657177/

"I am not in favor of pushing for one round for all uses for our military"-What Someone May Have Said.

"I am...pushing for one round...for our military"- What CNN heard

[bfoosh006]

Save how much money ? .... One "Smart Bomb" ? One F35 ? One Abrams ?

Seriously.... does anyone know the cost for the two different styles.

[Chuck Haggard]

We could have saved millions, if not billions, if we had gone to mk318 for carbines, green tip for the belt feds, and called it a day.

Nope, political correctness and anti-lead bullet hysteria rules.

[Jeep]

We could have saved millions, if not billions, if we had gone to mk318 for carbines, green tip for the belt feds, and called it a day.

Nope, political correctness and anti-lead bullet hysteria rules.

Precisely. Now the civilian appointees in the Pentagon will try to bully the Marines into adopting the Army's "green" round.

[DocGKR]

The USMC Mk318 Mod1 is lead free.

[Jeep]

The USMC Mk318 Mod1 is lead free.

The article says that the USMC would like to adopt the 318 Mod 0, though, which I understood wasn't lead free. Did I get that wrong?

[rwa]

I don't agree with Larry Vickers' comments about terminal effectiveness, especially when it comes to barrier blind performance.

The article you linked to has some of Vicker's comments about training vs. ammo. Tackle the training first seems to be his priority. What did he say about ammo performance in relation to barriers, etc. that is in question? What did I miss?

[Unobtanium]

Part of the issue with A1 as I understand is that it flys through current shoot-houses, making training an issue.

[rcbusmc24]

One of the biggest problems we (USMC) will have with the M855A1 is that our current SDZ's (Surface Danger Zones) and range configerations will no longer work in order to utilize the new round, while max range , ord and such remain largely the same, M855A1 has a tendancy to ricochet much father than legacy M855, this affects our safety allowences and will result in many current ranges, such as ranges along property lines or with roads running along the side and such, no longer being considered safe as these features would now fall within the new safety fan. Many of our training areas contain multi use range fans which means that multiple ranges are shooting into the same impact area, the SDZ's as currently designed allow for this but with the new M855A1 we would have to either shut more ranges down or spent alot of money to build mitigating factors into the ranges, money that we don't really have or could be better spent else wear. M318Mod0/1 maintain the same SDZ footprint as legacy M855, thus requiring no changes or modifications to facilities. There is, as mentioned above, the problem of accelerated wear in shoot houses and the accelerated wear on the weapons themselves, which in the end is also largely a money issue as well.

There are two MK318 rounds currently- Mod 0(Lead) and Mod 1 (lead free). We have currently "adopted" the Mod 0 as a interium solution until the final decision is made as to whether to adopt M855A1 or the lead free Mod 1 Mk318, officially we are saying it doesn't really matter, however many of the CWO Gunners are strongly in favor of the Mk318mod1 as our final solution due to the above mentioned issues and not because one round is dramatically more effective than the other.

Vickers is right though, for the ammount we will spend on either round we could roll out ALOT of m193 as training ammo and fix our collective softwear issues, but to 99 percent of the USMC bullets is bullets, most don't know the difference.