XM-7 NGSW rifle program apparently stalled?

[the Schwartz]

The not-really Next Generation Weapons Program

On all key technical measures, the Next Generation Squad Weapons program is imploding before Army’s very eyes. The program is on mechanical life support, with its progenitors at the Joint Chiefs obstinately now ramming the program through despite spectacularly failing multiple civilian-sector peer reviews almost immediately upon commercial release.

https://www.armytimes.com/opinion/co...apons-program/

Anybody knows anything about this?

From all appearances, it would seem that not even the US Army is immune from the allure of ''magic bullets'' and the ''lethality'' (P_[I/H], EKE, AKE, what have you...) they presume that they will gain.

Setting aside for the moment that the 6.8x51 might offer (arguably) somewhat better exterior ballistic performance than the 5.56 NATO and 7.62NATO, where the ''rubber meets the road'' is how the 6.8x51 behaves in its terminal phase.

At the risk of speaking over the pay grade of a few folks, regardless of what our peers and ''near-peer'' adversaries are fielding in the way of ductile and ceramic armor materials, what happens at the projectile/target interface is governed by the immutable laws of physics; I give you the Alekseevskii-Tate (1967) hydrodynamic pressure balance relationship—

½ρ_P(V-U)² + Y_P = ½ρ_TU² + R_T

Y_P = projectile yield strength (Hugoniot Elastic Limit)
R_T = target resistive strength
ρ_P = projectile density
ρ_T = target density

—which tells us that in order to defeat any given target, that specific density and velocity (energy) requirements must be met. The relationship expressed in the A-T equation is particularly sensitive to projectile length (it's a function of density) so extremely dense materials like tungsten (e.g., WNiFe alloys) and DU make sense if a suitably compact projectile is required—thinking shoulder-fired small arms here. Even with very dense materials, there remains a minimum velocity, V₅₀, necessary to defeat a specific thickness of a given material. Ensuring that V₅₀ is met within the expected engagement range (say 0 - 500 meters) is the real problem though since there is going to be a significant ''penalty'' in the form of recoil (and minimum necessary platform mass) to meet that objective. That ''penalty'' will affect the performance of the soldier (accuracy, system portability, etc).

The takeaway from this is that when we consider the range of small-arms calibers and the slim dimensional range that they cover, at an unjustifiable expense, the US Army is chasing diminishing returns with these small incremental changes in projectile diameter and the length (sectional density) that the 6.8x51 provides over the 7.62NATO especially in the DMR role. Trying to beat the laws of physics is always a waste of time, energy, and resources that are better spent elsewhere.

Or, more succinctly, in the words of Robert A Heinlein: TANSTAAFL

[TiroFijo]

And in the vast plains of Ukraine, a theater where there is almost no cover and longer range and more accurate rifles could be of use, it is currently the humble AK soldiering on for the short ranges, and drones/mortars/long range artillery doing the distance.

Would state of the art individual small arms, optics and NV make a difference? For the normal soldier, not special units.

I'm sure they would, but the law of diminishing returns apply...

[farscott]

I am curious as to barrel life and accuracy with tungsten carbide rounds. Tungsten is dense, and tungsten carbide is very hard and very brittle. Tungsten carbide seems like a pretty poor choice for a bullet as it would be hard on barrels and fragment at impact. Is the core tungsten carbide surrounded by a more ductile and softer metal? Or is there a formulation that is not as brittle as the commercially available material? Or it it a tungsten core?

[the Schwartz]

I am curious as to barrel life and accuracy with tungsten carbide rounds. Tungsten is dense, and tungsten carbide is very hard and very brittle. Tungsten carbide seems like a pretty poor choice for a bullet as it would be hard on barrels and fragment at impact. Is the core tungsten carbide surrounded by a more ductile and softer metal? Or is there a formulation that is not as brittle as the commercially available material? Or it it a tungsten core?

With rare exception, small arms munitions projectiles encase the penetrator (tungsten carbide, hardened steel alloy) in a lead core and an exterior copper alloy jacket that eliminates contact with the bore.

[TiroFijo]

With rare exception, small arms munitions projectiles encase the penetrator (tungsten carbide, hardened steel alloy) in a lead core and an exterior copper alloy jacket that eliminates contact with the bore.

[JRB]

The Army Times is straight trash. If you want completely uninformed tone-deaf hot takes on Army-ish topics from idiots that were often never even in the military, I suppose it's good at that. Mostly it exists as a publication to sell advertising to bored E3's and E4's on some tedious detail where phones aren't allowed anymore. Calling it fish wrap would be an insult to a fish-wrap worthy paper. It's printed on small ass paper that wouldn't wrap a bigger fish anyway.

Unless the 6.8 AP round uses a novel technology with performance currently not released to the public, I think the US Army lost the armor pen goal before they even started.

The current standard Russian 6b45 from the Ratnik upgrade program will not stop a tungsten AP round...but you don't need a tungsten 6.8 to defeat it to begin with, either. Given that, it's reasonable to assume that 6b45 (roughly level 3) is not a target of the NGSW program especially given that it will likely be replaced in 2025 by the Sotnik program before the NGSW is even fully fielded.

However, the heavier Granit plates already in use and issued to some Russian SOF does stop M993 from 4.5m, which makes me extremely doubtful that the 6.8 AP round will be able to penetrate it at ranges of hundreds of meters, even if it were able to pen it at CQB distance.

Lacking information on a potential novel technology, the program falls flat on its face for its stated goals. Increasing range can actually make sense, though, even if I personally feel it's a misguided goal. After all, you don't need to penetrate their armor at 600m to reduce an infantry squad. Shooting them in the dick works pretty well, too. I get that sounds infantile, and that internet terminal ballistics discussions are usually focused on close range self defense scenarios where immediate incapacitation is necessary, but hitting a dude in the pelvis with a rifle at 600-800 meters is overwhelmingly going to influence the fight in your favor.

Range estimation is extremely hard to do well. It was one of the biggest contributing factors to students flunking out on the range portions of the 10-week USMC scout sniper course, and that's with motivated dudes who are 1) already at the top of their game, 2) were trained in house by the STA platoons prior to arriving at the school house, and 3) had intensive training and practice on the skill within the course.

So, removing that variable by way of technology makes sense, as it's realistically not something we can teach the average grunt to do well. However, that still leaves the actual technical shooting skills/fundamentals in question, and on that note...well...given where the US Army currently is on that skillset, that's akin to asking Pol Pot to establish a human rights commission and expecting it to actually work. I don't think the US Army has that capacity, either technically or culturally.

Thus, lacking any novel technology that isn't public, I give you option c: the US Army doesn't know what the fuck it's doing.

(emphasis mine)

Surge-era Army NCO here. Can confirm option C as correct.

This seems to me to be a classic case of bureaucrats throwing buzzwords around that sound nice in briefings just to get it done and have more ways to say 'yes' to the 'IS THIS THING GUD??' questions from a variety of levels.
"YES IT PENETRATES ARMOR"
"YES ITS LONGER RANGE"
"YES IT HAS AWESOME OPTICS" etc etc. Just pick whichever of those is the most important trait to that leader or bureaucrat and hype that point as the main one until you get the rubber-stamp approval at that level, then onto the next bureaucratic hurdle. Adjust the hype as needed, get rubber stamp, just keep on like that until you've made the deal.

Do I want this rifle anyway? Hell yes I do. But I'll never see one as a logistics dweeb anyway so it hardly matters. I'd hoped a new rifle like might start an internal push toward solving some internal cultural problems with the Army regarding weapons skill and marksmanship, but no dice so far.
Much like how I'd hoped the new M17/M18 Sigs would get Soldiers interested in pistol shooting, but didn't, and it's just the next talismanic pistol to ride in a holster of someone 'too important' to carry a rifle.

Is the state of Army marksmanship instruction that poor? I would have assumed the current standard would be effective point target hits to about 400m using a M68 equipped M4. With 8x magnification and the FCU doing a live overlay aiming solution, it seems like the remaining fundamentals shouldn’t be insurmountable.

Among combat arms units, especially in a deployment prep cycle, no. They'll get tons of range time and ammo and almost universally do decent-to-good work from 0-300M with rifles and out to 800M or so with the M249 and M240 and various DMR's, etc. The latter of which will have BDC reticles in magnified optics of course, which helps a lot with the range estimation problem that's force-wide.

Among the rest of the Army that's support dweebs like me, and doesn't ever get the sexy stuff - there are still some Army Reserve units with M16A2's. Yes, in 2023. In February I had to show an E7 SFC how to adjust the buttstock length on an M4A1 - because he'd never been issued one before, just M16A2's. Three deployments and he'd never had an M4. Or an M68 for that matter.

So there's a massive gap Army-wide on genuine competence and knowledge with existing systems, let alone relatively new stuff. That's largely, IMHO, from an unspoken cultural bias against marksmanship or competency with weapons, especially in non-combat arms units.

Where being a PT stud or any other measure of you as a Soldier would get kudos or at least grudging respect, absolutely no Commander I've seen in the past 5+ years gave a shit about a Soldier who shot higher than the bare minimum 23/40, or otherwise recognized skill or excellence with a weapon. Shooting Expert and being proud of it is more likely to get an eye roll from senior leadership than a coin or an attaboy. The amount of straight-up cheating I've witnessed in the past to 'just get them qualified' or 'just get them green' is astonishing. If the same integrity breaches were done to falsify a PT test, or height & weight, or piss test, or anything else to 'just get them green' would cause a massive upset. But few leaders seem to give a shit about the weapons qual beyond seeing a pretty green percentage of qualified Soldiers on the weekly update brief or whatever.

The level of utter incompetence with an issued weapon that I've witnessed is simply beyond belief. It's really sad and I hope we turn that around internally before we get our ass kicked because of it.

[DpdG]

The Army Times is straight trash. If you want completely uninformed tone-deaf hot takes on Army-ish topics from idiots that were often never even in the military, I suppose it's good at that. Mostly it exists as a publication to sell advertising to bored E3's and E4's on some tedious detail where phones aren't allowed anymore. Calling it fish wrap would be an insult to a fish-wrap worthy paper. It's printed on small ass paper that wouldn't wrap a bigger fish anyway.


(emphasis mine)

Surge-era Army NCO here. Can confirm option C as correct.

This seems to me to be a classic case of bureaucrats throwing buzzwords around that sound nice in briefings just to get it done and have more ways to say 'yes' to the 'IS THIS THING GUD??' questions from a variety of levels.
"YES IT PENETRATES ARMOR"
"YES ITS LONGER RANGE"
"YES IT HAS AWESOME OPTICS" etc etc. Just pick whichever of those is the most important trait to that leader or bureaucrat and hype that point as the main one until you get the rubber-stamp approval at that level, then onto the next bureaucratic hurdle. Adjust the hype as needed, get rubber stamp, just keep on like that until you've made the deal.

Do I want this rifle anyway? Hell yes I do. But I'll never see one as a logistics dweeb anyway so it hardly matters. I'd hoped a new rifle like might start an internal push toward solving some internal cultural problems with the Army regarding weapons skill and marksmanship, but no dice so far.
Much like how I'd hoped the new M17/M18 Sigs would get Soldiers interested in pistol shooting, but didn't, and it's just the next talismanic pistol to ride in a holster of someone 'too important' to carry a rifle.



Among combat arms units, especially in a deployment prep cycle, no. They'll get tons of range time and ammo and almost universally do decent-to-good work from 0-300M with rifles and out to 800M or so with the M249 and M240 and various DMR's, etc. The latter of which will have BDC reticles in magnified optics of course, which helps a lot with the range estimation problem that's force-wide.

Among the rest of the Army that's support dweebs like me, and doesn't ever get the sexy stuff - there are still some Army Reserve units with M16A2's. Yes, in 2023. In February I had to show an E7 SFC how to adjust the buttstock length on an M4A1 - because he'd never been issued one before, just M16A2's. Three deployments and he'd never had an M4. Or an M68 for that matter.

So there's a massive gap Army-wide on genuine competence and knowledge with existing systems, let alone relatively new stuff. That's largely, IMHO, from an unspoken cultural bias against marksmanship or competency with weapons, especially in non-combat arms units.

Where being a PT stud or any other measure of you as a Soldier would get kudos or at least grudging respect, absolutely no Commander I've seen in the past 5+ years gave a shit about a Soldier who shot higher than the bare minimum 23/40, or otherwise recognized skill or excellence with a weapon. Shooting Expert and being proud of it is more likely to get an eye roll from senior leadership than a coin or an attaboy. The amount of straight-up cheating I've witnessed in the past to 'just get them qualified' or 'just get them green' is astonishing. If the same integrity breaches were done to falsify a PT test, or height & weight, or piss test, or anything else to 'just get them green' would cause a massive upset. But few leaders seem to give a shit about the weapons qual beyond seeing a pretty green percentage of qualified Soldiers on the weekly update brief or whatever.

The level of utter incompetence with an issued weapon that I've witnessed is simply beyond belief. It's really sad and I hope we turn that around internally before we get our ass kicked because of it.

As a municipal civil servant, so much of what you wrote makes cold, hard, painful sense. Having had to teach a part-time cop who is also a AGR/NG Captain in command of the state's civil support team how to shoot a patrol rifle with a dot, I can imagine some of the things that occur in the support arms of the military when it comes to weapons training and qualifications. I had never before considered that someone would think a dot would simultaneously need to be centered in the objective and placed on the tip of the front post of the intact FSB, and as such I never specifically cautioned against it.

Anecdotes aside, is there a chance that the NGSW program, which (at least for now) is aimed towards combat arms personnel specifically, is being unfairly judged against the competency standards of the average support services soldiers? Meaning that the folks who are saying "the average Joe can't possibly take advantage of the NGSW's capabilities, therefor its liabilities outweigh the benefits" may be both factually accurate, but contextually wrong? Again, I might be placing too much faith in the infantry and other combat arms, but I would have thought those wings would value skill at arms more than the support services and therefor the culture of achievement would be greater.

Finally, I bolded a portion that makes me cycle back to my prior emphasis on the optics package of the NGSW- if it works as advertised, it seems like the average infantryman really could function in the ranges currently occupied by the DMR. Without the need for range estimation, inclination, dope, dial or hold-overs, all the person would really have to do is hold steady and execute a clean trigger press, which is not that far off of what's required for a M4/M68 at 300m using most common zeros. If anything, it may be less skill-intensive than an ACOG with a true'd BDC.

[Wake27]

As a municipal civil servant, so much of what you wrote makes cold, hard, painful sense. Having had to teach a part-time cop who is also a AGR/NG Captain in command of the state's civil support team how to shoot a patrol rifle with a dot, I can imagine some of the things that occur in the support arms of the military when it comes to weapons training and qualifications. I had never before considered that someone would think a dot would simultaneously need to be centered in the objective and placed on the tip of the front post of the intact FSB, and as such I never specifically cautioned against it.

Anecdotes aside, is there a chance that the NGSW program, which (at least for now) is aimed towards combat arms personnel specifically, is being unfairly judged against the competency standards of the average support services soldiers? Meaning that the folks who are saying "the average Joe can't possibly take advantage of the NGSW's capabilities, therefor its liabilities outweigh the benefits" may be both factually accurate, but contextually wrong? Again, I might be placing too much faith in the infantry and other combat arms, but I would have thought those wings would value skill at arms more than the support services and therefor the culture of achievement would be greater.

Finally, I bolded a portion that makes me cycle back to my prior emphasis on the optics package of the NGSW- if it works as advertised, it seems like the average infantryman really could function in the ranges currently occupied by the DMR. Without the need for range estimation, inclination, dope, dial or hold-overs, all the person would really have to do is hold steady and execute a clean trigger press, which is not that far off of what's required for a M4/M68 at 300m using most common zeros. If anything, it may be less skill-intensive than an ACOG with a true'd BDC.

Everything TGS and JRB have said has been true in my frustrating experience as well. Below are some random, specific circumstances to continue to help highlighting where the Army is regarding marksmanship.

1. “Lollipopping” the dot on the front sight has happened at least once on every range I’ve been on unless I’ve specifically made the point to tell them not to before it started. I’ve even had someone use the entire CCO body (like the whole objective) as the rear sight and align the front sight in it because they didn’t even turn the dot on. Just like you said about never specifically cautioning against it, this was a huge learning point in my “instructor” (used lightly) path of asking the shooter what they were seeing when aiming because I had just assumed the dot was on for several groups that she shot while I was trying to help diagnose.

2. As a CPT and CO CDR, I got into a heated debate with the BN S3 (who was an SF MAJ) that it was stupid that the multi-faceted individual competition the BN was planning should not require the M4 live fire to use iron sights. He, with the BC present and in agreement, argued that it’s good to test the fundamentals which I agreed that people should know, but I got heated as I argued that they are literally called Back Up Iron Sights and we were being adverse to the primary sighting system that every one of our M4 and MK18s had. When they argued that optics can fail, I told them that by such logic, the communications portion should be done with hand and arm signals instead of radios because those go down way more often than our Eotechs, Aimpoints, and Elcans.

3. In that same audience, I briefed that at one of my company ranges, we were going to spend all of our ammo on the M4 range to really try and build proficiency before we actually qualified, so there was a good chance we wouldn’t even get to the qual (ammo constraints). This meant that my stats would be red for individual weapons qual which is usually a big problem. Part of me expected a fight. It didn’t come, mostly because of the organization I was in, but I still expected it.

4. I’ve had a BN CDR force us into cancelling the practice qual portion of a machine gun range because we could then allocate that ammo so that more shooters could qual (different unit from #3). Unsurprisingly to us, even though we doubled the amount of shooters on the range, almost all of them failed as it was almost everyone’s first time doing that type of range (USMC has a damn MOS for machine gunners…). Years later and with different leaders but in that same big Army organization, the BN S3 and CO CDR literally agreed that because the rounds hit close to the targets on a different MG range, they counted as hits and guys were qualified.

4. I wasn’t trying to get into a dick measuring contest so I didn’t argue with the GB that clearly didn’t understand MOA when he was helping run the zero range.

5. I had a SSG in my first PLT that said she didn’t need to shoot higher than 25/40 because she’s not infantry.

6. I watched an infantry E8 (who supposedly was sniper qualified) was “teaching” ROTC cadets about MOA. He literally drew a cone with yard markers in 100yd increments and pointed and rhetorically asked “there, does that make sense?”

The guy in the last example fucking sucks in a lot of ways. I got close to pulling his ERB to see if he actually was sniper qualified, but unfortunately, he is not alone. Where the support branches have a stupidly large deficit of knowledge and even desire to promote good marksmanship, the maneuver branches are filled with egotists that are never wrong or simply can not teach. The institutional parts of Army marksmanship that I’ve seen were almost all fantastic. But the best example of that was a two week course taught by our division school on the M4 and I think we had about 30-40 in the class that ran once a month. The target audience for that course was SSG-1LTs so that we could help drive new knowledge and change at the unit level but even then, there was a ton of resistance from the top when trying to implement those changes because the old guys in charge had never seen it done that way (zeroing slick, specifically).

Long, poorly organized, story short, the Army has a lot of things it should do across the board to improve marksmanship before buying a new gun that now suddenly needs all new ranges and SDZs much less every other problem.

Oh and on the optic, if we have people that don’t know how to use an Aimpoint, I’m not optimistic about them working that thing. Understanding the several buttons on a thermal MG sight is too much for most of the support world already. The maneuver guys may be better at that one, but I’d bet a whole paycheck that it won’t actually be as simple as it sounds to get most 11B PFCs achieving first round hits at 700m.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

[Sensei]

There are now several .308 version of the SPEAR on GB for $5-6K. I suppose the switch from the .277 FURY made a lot of sense…especially when you need to quickly recoup all that R&D before everyone realizes that the military version is going nowhere fast.

[Trigger]

Oh and on the optic, if we have people that don’t know how to use an Aimpoint, I’m not optimistic about them working that thing. Understanding the several buttons on a thermal MG sight is too much for most of the support world already. The maneuver guys may be better at that one, but I’d bet a whole paycheck that it won’t actually be as simple as it sounds to get most 11B PFCs achieving first round hits at 700m.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

Good information. Thanks for your insight.

On your last sentence I quoted, that could prove to be a bridge too far. I guess it depends on the size of the target. I just came back from shooting the Altus AI LR Classic match. I think a large majority of the shooters would have difficulty with first round hits at 700m. I was shooting a top grade competition rifle, a great optic, using a Kestrel on ranged targets, and it was still tough. Heck, even the 300yd cold-bore on Sunday was a challenge. I think only 7 shooters out of 75 maxed it.