I’m not enough of an expert to know whether the new M7 U.S. battle rifle chambered in 6.8x51mm is a good idea or not. But I’m pretty sure Ian McCollum is such an expert, and he says it’s a bad idea:
“I have thought from the very beginning that this program was a bad idea.” As evidence by this snippet from 2019.
“I really didn’t expect that that the US Army would adopt anything from the NGSW program. We do have a long history of doing weapons development trials, looking at all the options, and adopting nothing new. And that’s what I thought would happen here. Obviously, it didn’t.”
“I had a chance to do some shooting with a civilian 68 by 51 or 277 Fury Spear rifle, the civilian version of the M7 several years ago. It was a good rifle. Um, like as a technical thing, it worked well. It handled well, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea for the military to adopt it.”
“This video isn’t about the rifle itself. It’s about the doctrine and the concept behind its adoption, which is the part that I think is a really bad idea.”
“There were two main justifications that are typically given for the decision to get rid of the intermediate, light recoiling, highc apacity cartridge, the 5.56 [NATO], and replace it with a much higher pressure, much heavier recoiling, much physically larger and physically heavier cartridge, the 68 x 51[mm].”
“The first one is when we were in Afghanistan, US troops were often taken under fire by enemy forces from ranges at which they could not effectively respond with their little wimpy 5.56 M4s. And that’s very true. Something like 50% of combat engagements in Afghanistan took place in excess of the practical engagement range of the M4.” Taliban would routinely ambush U.S. troops from higher in the hills “800 or 1,000 meters away.”
“And so the justification is often given that if we had some big honking rifle with a magnified optic on it that could reach out to 800 yards, well then, by gosh, we could have taken that dude out.”
“And my counter to that is that the world has changed since we were fighting in Afghanistan.”
“But if that were happening today, you know what the answer would be? It’s not rearm everybody in the Humvee. It’s you have a box of a couple of little one-way attack drones sitting in the Humvee.”
“We’ve all seen the drone footage from Ukraine. Like that’s exactly what would happen if we were in Afghanistan dealing with that situation today. There’s no need for a new small arm to do it.”
“And it’s so totally counterproductive to make all the sacrifices of going back to a full power battle rifle in order to be able to do what you can do more effectively with, I don’t know, a couple thousand military procurement one-way attack drone.”
“The second justification was armor penetrating capability. Our potential near-peer allies are developing really good, next generation body armor and we need our infantry weapons to be able to defeat that body armor. And I think this is also a mistake, or I think the adoption of the M7 is not the ideal solution to that problem either.”
So they needed armor penetration but want to keep the rifle short for usability, and to put a suppressor on it. “This is how we end up with a 13-in barrel that has to achieve 30 something feet per second, which means you have to jack the pressure, the chamber pressure of the cartridge way up in order to get a high, you know, 140 or 130 grain bullet at 3,000 plus FPS.”
“Now we have an 80,000 PSI cartridge. And interestingly, looking at Cappy Army’s video, in order to try and mitigate the weight issue, Sigs M71 actually cuts the barrel down even shorter to 11 in. And the SIGR rep that they had in that video was talking about potentially upping chamber pressures to 125,000 PSI…Maybe that’s that’s a typo. Maybe that’s a misspeaking thing.”
80,000 PSI is already really high. Most cartridge pressures top out around 65,000 PSI. At 80,000 PSI, the M7/.277 Fury is already the highest pressure cartridge in the world. 125,000 PSI is simply insanely high.
“To me, that’s just mind-bogglingly insane. Like, at that sort of pressures your barrel life is going to be abysmal. Your parts life and everything is going to be abysmal. Like that’s that’s not a really good compromise to achieve higher velocity.”
“There are capabilities out there for armor penetration that are much more focused on bullet construction and don’t need to have necessarily the sort of super hyper velocity that you get out of an 80,000 PSI cartridge.”
“I recently had the chance to visit CBJ in Sweden. The 65 CBJ cartridge is a pistol caliber cartridge that uses some velocity, but also a lot of material science and projectile design to create a remarkably effective, to many people a shockingly effective, armor penetrating cartridge without having to do a whole lot. And they do it in the chamber pressures of 9 by 19 parabellum.”
“If you took the guys from CBJ and you told them, ‘Right, here’s a DoD contract. We need you to come up with an armor-piercing loading for standard 5.56 carbines that will go through and whatever they want to get, whatever they want to be able to defeat with the M7, with the 68 x 51. Give that standard to the guys at CBJ. Tell them they’re going to be doing it out of a 14.5 in barreled M4 carbine with a .223 chamber. And I’m willing to bet that they can they can do it. They’ve got 30 years of expertise developing, designing the small details that make so much difference on a project like this.”
That ammo is always going to be expensive, but not as expensive as adopting an entirely new battle rifle.
“Every new military weapon out there has some sort of whoopsie, we messed that up and we had to recall a bunch of guns and fix them. Like everyone in history always has it. It’s going to happen on the M7 if it’s not already. It’s going to happen on the M249 or the M250s if it hasn’t already. And all that’s incredibly expensive and I don’t think actually necessary for the goal of being able to defeat significant good armor.”
“If you put a tenth that amount of money into development of a 5.56 armor penetrating cartridge, you now have the ability to issue that really fancy expensive ammo when it’s necessary, or standard 5.56 ball and retain all of the benefits that we already have in 5.56 carbines.”
Then there’s the issue that most infantry soldiers aren’t really good at hitting anything out in the ranges the M7 is supposed to fill a need for. “And my concern with that is every time the US has gone into a war, they’ve ended up in the aftermath doing some research and trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t.”
“What is the effective range of an infantryman with a rifle? The answer that pretty much always comes back is 100 to 300 meters. At 100 meters, infantry are really good at hitting stuff with rifles. At 200 meters, they’re reaching their effective limit. And at 300 meters, it’s really rare that anyone’s doing anything very effective.”
Plus NATO studies showed “In 70% of cases, 300 meters was the maximum range that you could actually see a person standing up.”
“So when you consider all of the compromises that go into, and the expenses that go into, trying to generate a rifle that can give an infantryman a 600 meter effective reach out and touch that guy range, well, 70% of the time it’s a total waste, because the dude could be standing upright and walking around slowly with no idea he’s under observation, but he’s not under observation, because you can’t actually see someone 300 meters away when you’re prone.”
And that’s when someone is standing up. “Go look at footage from Ukraine and tell me how often are guys just standing up straight in the middle of nowhere.”
“Compromising a lot of the other capabilities of an infantry small arm in order to attempt to give the infantry a rifle that is effective at 500 meters, in my opinion, is a waste of time and it’s a really bad choice, because most of those infantry cannot make any sort of practical, effective use of that capability at 500 meters. They can do it to 200. The really good ones can do it to 300. And that’s where it falls apart.”
“It would be much better to maximize the effectiveness of the rifle within the the operational envelope that we know they’re really good in. Take a rifle and optimize it for one to 200 yards and go with that. Embrace that and then accept that you’re going to need other options for longer shots.”
Then take better marksmen and give them sniper rifles optimized for that role. “That’s absolutely well worth it. But what’s not well worth it is trying to turn everyone into the unit into that guy and in the process massively compromising their ability to maintain fire superiority because they run out of ammunition.”
And here’s the video that McCollum’s video references:
In this video, you can clearly hear the Sig rep claim the gun was designed to withstand 125,000 psi. Like McCollum, I have my doubts…
We’ve covered some of this before, but here’s a nice roundup of why Russia’s major weapons systems suck. It’s a handy tour through the world of over-promised, under-performing vaporwear.
“Before February 24th, 2022, the Russian Federation looked like it would deploy or soon be able to field some pretty formidable new weapons.” At least among those who hadn’t noticed Russia’s previous vaporware claims.
“In everything from fifth generation fighter jets to modern tanks, to new body armor and even tsunami-causing nuclear torpedoes, there was enough hype to make even informed Western national security experts worry about what they were seeing.”
“Little wonder that they believed Ukraine would fall in days in the months prior to the invasion. Those predictions did not turn out to be the case. And now two years later, Russia still finds itself fighting a war of attrition with no end in sight.”
It covers Russia’s one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, how it’s been under repairs since 2018, is markedly less technologically advanced than American carriers, and how it has a history of corruption as well. It”s supposed to enter service again this year. I wouldn’t count on it.
Admiral Kuznetsov isn’t Russia’s only naval problem. “It is steadily retiring its Soviet-era ships and replacing them with lighter, less combat-worthy vessels.”
There’s the new, formidable (on paper) Lider-class destroyers, first unveiled in 2015 and capable of using a host of advanced new weapons. Tiny problem: “On paper” is the only place you can see them, since they haven’t started building them yet.
Then there’s “the Belgorod submarine, and particularly its Poseidon Torpedo, are two other items of hype in the Russian Navy that don’t seem to stand up to scrutiny. The Belgorod and Poseidon have often been items of fear in Western media and national security circles, which have nicknamed the former Russia’s ‘Doomsday Submarine.'”
“According to the Kremlin’s hype, the submarine and its arsenal of smart drone Poseidon torpedoes can unleash a 100 megaton yield capable of creating radioactive tsunamis that would inundate coastal communities and make them unlivable.”
“However, tests of the Poseidon have seemingly proven less than satisfactory. That shouldn’t be too surprising, because for the Poseidon torpedo to work as the Russians claim, it would need to be able to house all of the equipment needed for a nuclear reactor to convert atomic fission into electricity and propulsive force, while ensuring negligible waste heat (to avoid detection). It would also need the hardware to shield its sensitive electronics from the nuclear fission process.”
“Unfortunately for Moscow, the torpedo is too small to do this, meaning that it is either an object of hype or Russian engineers have come upon a technological leap enabling exotic engineering methods. We’ll let you decide which of the two scenarios is likelier.”
“The likeliest scenario is a yield of about one to two megatons per torpedo, which would be enough to inundate a coastal area with dangerous radioactive waters, but not to create a tsunami.” And the hundred knot speed is also bunk for numerous technical reasons.
“We now journey from the sea to the skies and look at the Russian answer to the American fifth generation F-22 and F-35 fighter jets – the Su-57 Felon. To be fair, the Su-57 does have some impressive features, like its 3D thrust vectoring engines, climb rate of 64,000 feet per minute, 66,000-foot service ceiling, Mach 2 speed, and range of 2,186 miles without refueling. In a plane vs. plane battle, the Su-57 should be a capable opponent against almost any fighter jet on the planet.”
“However, the Su-57 has a big drawback – its comparative lack of stealth. Aviation experts regard the Su-57 as being by far the least stealthy of the fifth generation fighters currently in service. For example, the F-22 Raptor is detectable at a range only under 10 miles, while the Su-57 would be detectable at a range of 35 miles.”
“Its stealth features are also concentrated in the front of the plane, meaning that if it turns or maneuvers, it is far more detectable.” Good thing fighter aircraft never need to turn or maneuver…
“Some aviation experts are even less kind and believe the Su-57’s radar cross section is similar to that of the F/A-18 Super Hornet, which is 1,000 times less stealthy than the F-35 Lightning II.”
“The Su-57 has played little part in the war in Ukraine, as the Russian aerospace forces have refused to field it in Ukrainian airspace. Instead, it has only attacked targets at long range from within Russian airspace.”
Then there’s the ridiculously low production rate. “The Kremlin ordered 76 Su-57s in 2019. 22 are in service as of December 2023, after several years of delays.” And we only have Russia’s word that they’ve produced that many. The real total could be lower. By contrast, Lockheed Martin has produced over 1,000 F-35s.
Next it’s a familiar punching bag, the T-14 Armata. “To be fair, the T-14 Armata does have significant improvements over the tanks Russia has usually fielded in Ukraine – the T-72, T-80, and T-90. These tanks have been lost in their thousands during the fighting in Ukraine, thanks to bad doctrine and their own design flaws. Because they do not segregate their ammunition magazines in a sealed compartment, they have often suffered from complete destruction with jack-in-the-box explosions.”
“The T-14 Armata mitigates this flaw with a protective capsule isolating the crew from their vehicle’s ammunition magazine.”
Unfortunately, the video goes on to say the T-14 has a low profile, which simply isn’t true. As I’ve noted before, the T-14 is 3.3 meters high vs. 2.44 meters for the M1A2, 3 meters for the Leopard 2, and 2.49 for the Challenger 2. 3.3 meters is higher even than the World War II M3 Lee tank the Soviets (who got them via Lend-Lease) called “a coffin for seven brothers.”
“The Armata’s main weapon is a 125mm 2A82-1M smoothbore gun which can fire related rounds and laser-guided missiles. This weapon would be a significant threat to the Western main battle tanks that Ukraine began fielding in larger numbers last year.” The “large numbers” are pretty small numbers.
“Unfortunately for Russia, this gun is not backward-compatible with its older tanks, which means only the Armata can field it, and that’s a problem, because there has never been a confirmed sighting of the T-14 in Ukraine. Russia has even fewer T-14 Armata tanks than it does Su-57 fighter jets.”
There follows a discussion of the T-14’s X-shaped engine that has evidently engendered a lively debate online, so I’m not going to get into it here.
“Meanwhile, the electronics for the Armata’s sensory and fire control systems are no longer as widely available due to the sanctions put in place as a result of its invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, there has not even been an assembly line built for the Armata and all of the prototypes have been made by hand. Given all of these problems, don’t expect to see the Armata fielded in large numbers, if at all, anytime soon.”
“Russia’s body armor has also been a subject of embarrassment. Many of Russia’s soldiers, especially the conscripts Putin mobilized in the autumn of 2022, have lacked proper protection. Infamously, some Russian troops were issued airsoft versions of the Ratnik body armor. Despite its problems in this area, Russia has made bold claims about what it has coming down the pike – its next-generation Sotnik body armor, which it says will be able to stop a .50 caliber Browning Machine Gun round.” Yeah, no.
We’re not even going to bother with the MiG-41, which doesn’t exist yet. Vaporware all the way down.
It’s always safest to assume that the latest Russian wunderwaffen is vaporware unless proven otherwise.
In my continuing series of “Videos of .50 BMG Rounds Hitting Things Make Great Lazy Blog Fodder,” here’s Kentucky Ballistics testing SLAP, Raufoss, and other exotic .50 BMG rounds against body armor plates.
