Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "SIG M5 Spear Deep Dive: Is This a Good US Army Rifle?" video.

My inclination is "no." I suspect they're significantly overestimating how effective Russian and Chinese body armor is, if they think a round this hot is necessary to beat it.
14
As soon as I heard that they're going to train with a different, lower-velocity round than what will get used in combat, I immediately thought that's an incredibly bad idea. That means troops will spend long periods of time training with the lower-recoil practice ammunition, then went sent into combat the rifle they've gotten used to will suddenly kick harder because they're firing the hotter ammo. You train the same way you fight, or at least you're supposed to. Otherwise the training becomes less effective at preparing you to fight. Also, I think the Army essentially abandoning intermediate cartridges is an idiotic concept. And Russia's current combat performance (showing their infantry doesn't even understand basic combined-arms tactics and is so ill-equipped that some units are literally using Mosin-Nagants) makes the notion that we need a super-hot full power rifle cartridge to beat them laughable.
6
@ALovelyBunchOfDragonballz Frankly, I think this will likely be a better gun with the training ammo than with the combat ammo. The Pentagon dictated a way-too-hot round that's beyond any realistic combat needs.
4
@ALovelyBunchOfDragonballz The "low power" training ammo seems like it would be perfectly adequate for combat. The Army brass required this round to be higher velocity than there was any real need for it to be. The problem is that by designing the cartridge and rifle to meet that requirement, the cartridge is heavier than it needs to be. 140 rounds of 6.8x51 weighs more than 210 rounds of 5.56x45. I'm all for going with a higher caliber than 5.56mm. The US Army went from one extreme to the other by going from 7.62 to 5.56, and I very much believe something in the 7mm range would've been a better choice. (Such as, you know. The .280 British round that was rejected 70 years ago for being British.) But if the new 6.8 cartridge weighs just as much as 7.62x51, what's the point? 6.8mm Remington SPC already seems to have gotten it right 20 years ago.
3
@ab5olut3zero95 Which works fine for a tank. But when training human soldiers with a rifle, it's not just a matter of the ballistics. It's also a matter of felt recoil. A tank doesn't care about recoil, but having soldiers train with a much lighter-recoiling rifle than what they'll fight with seems like a terrible idea. You don't want a soldier to flinch because his rifle kicked harder than he's used to.
2
The M16 as we know it wouldn't exist. But if NATO had standardized on .280 (7x43mm), there's a good chance that's what the AR-10 would've been chambered for because that's what militaries would've been interested in. The M14 probably wouldn't have existed either. And the US Army might've ended up with a 7mm AR-10 to avoid adopting a foreign rifle. Most likely the 7mm FAL and AR-10 would still be standard-issue rifles today for most of NATO. Whether Britain's EM-2 would've had similar longevity, I don't know.
2
@ALovelyBunchOfDragonballz The problem is that in the process they're abandoning the advantage that the M1 Carbine and M16 had: lighter ammo means every soldier can carry more of it. I'd be much more concerned with soldiers running out of ammo in a firefight than with how effective the rifle is at piercing Russian body armor that Russia is demonstrably too poor and too corrupt to actually put into production.
2
@d540vamartin9 ROFLMAO
1
That's especially going to be a problem when troops are practicing with a different round than they'll use in combat. That means they'll go into battle with a gun that kicks harder and has different ballistics than what they've spent years training with.
1
I'm more concerned about the round being heavier than it needed to be, resulting in soldier's standard combat load being a lot fewer rounds than it is now with the 5.56.
1