5 ms·
The smaller bullet is the point. A 7.62mm bullet is overkill if you're aiming at a person less than half a kilometer away. The essence of the assault rifle conc
by azernik 8y ago
The smaller bullet is the point. A 7.62mm bullet is overkill if you're aiming at a person less than half a kilometer away. The essence of the assault rifle concept is to throw away that excess individual bullet power in order to gain volume of fire.
The magazine size alone is not a good indicator of practical rate of fire; that has more to do with recoil, which the M16 reduces by using a smaller bullet.
For an understanding of the assault rifle concept, I recommend reading the history of the first assault rifle, the Sturmgewehr 44 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StG_44#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StG_44#History):
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In the late 19th century, small-arms cartridges had become able to fire accurately at long distances. Jacketed bullets propelled by smokeless powder were lethal out to 2,000 metres (2,200 yd). This was beyond the range a shooter could engage a target with open sights, as at that range a man-sized target would be completely blocked by the front sight blade. Only units of riflemen firing by volley could hit grouped targets at those ranges. That fighting style was taken over by the widespread introduction of machine guns, which made use of these powerful cartridges to suppress the enemy at long range. Rifles remained the primary infantry weapon, but in some forces were seen as a secondary or support weapon, backing up the machine guns.
This left a large gap in performance; the rifle was not effective at the ranges it could theoretically reach while being much larger and more powerful than needed for close combat.
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In the spring of 1918, Hauptmann (Captain) Piderit, part of the Gewehrprüfungskommission (Small Arms Proofing Committee) of the German General Staff in Berlin, submitted a paper arguing for the introduction of an intermediate round in the German Army with a suitable firearm. He pointed out that firefights rarely took place beyond 800 metres (870 yd), about half the 2 km (1.2 mi) sight line range of the 7.92×57mm round from a Mauser Gewehr 98 rifle or less for MG 08 machine gun. A smaller, shorter, and less powerful round would save materials, allow soldiers to carry more ammunition, and increase firepower. Less recoil would allow semi-automatic or even fully automatic select-fire rifles, although in his paper he called it a Maschinenpistole (submachine gun).
- m0zg 8y agoI don't think recoil was the primary driver, actually. Weight was. This becomes readily apparent when you shoot a Kalashnikov side by side with AR15 (a civilian semi-auto variant of select fire M16). A loaded mag for a Kalashnikov is over twice the weight of a loaded M16 mag. And you do need to carry a lot of ammo if you don't want to run out, especially for the AK which is much less accurate. Whoever designed the M16 realized that killing the enemy wasn't really necessary. Heavily wounded enemy is as good as dead.
- azernik 8y agoA Kalashnikov is already an assault rifle - it uses a smaller and lower-recoil bullet than the full-powered rifle cartridges that came before it. An American design that only copied the assault rifle concept would have probably had a similar-weight round to an AK. The M16's even lighter round was the result of a separate American innovation, the Small Caliber High Velocity bullet, which trades bullet size for propellant size. Even smaller bullet than the AK, but a flatter trajectory (hence the improved accuracy, helped along by the M16's interesting operating mechanism), and even lighter weight than first-generation assault rifles.
- int_19h 8y agoThese do not contradict each other. They noted that for the same weight in ammo, it's better to hit the target with a burst three lighter bullets than with a single heavier one. But you also need lower recoil for that burst to be accurate, and M16 is very much designed around that (straight stock etc). The idea that smaller caliber was deliberately less effective on the basis that wounding is just as good as killing is a much later invention, and it only came about back when they switched from M193 to M855, which traded lethality for better armor penetration, and even then as retroactive justification. There's no evidence that this was ever a part of the design spec for any of the M16/M4 series, though, or any official military doctrine. Neither did Soviets consider it when designing AK74. In any case, when 5.56 ammo fragments - as the original mil-spec ammo was designed to, and recently redesigned to do again with M855A1 - it produces wounds far worse than mil-spec 7.62 NATO that preceded it: http://www.rkba.org/research/fackler/figure3.gif http://www.rkba.org/research/fackler/figure3.gif http://www.rkba.org/research/fackler/figure2.gif http://www.rkba.org/research/fackler/figure2.gif
- mr_toad 8y agoI have heard that part of the rationale for a lower caliber round was that it was more likely to wound than to kill outright - and a wounded soldier would be more of a burden than a dead one.
- dragonwriter 8y agoThe real motivation is that wounding is at least as good as killing, and wars are won (or lost) mainly by logistics.
- potta_coffee 8y agoYes. Imagine if one of your teammates is wounded. You and your friends will attempt to drag him out of harm's way, treat his wounds, protect him. You'll call a helo for medevac, etc. Now imagine that your same teammate is dead. You can continue the fight without consuming resources and energy on him until the fight is over.
- ataturk 8y agoI don't think this was ever a real consideration outside of some RAND study or something. It's pretty much just folklore. Wounded, dead, incapacitated, as long as they're out of the fight it doesn't matter.
- jabl 8y ago> The smaller bullet is the point. A 7.62mm bullet is overkill if you're aiming at a person less than half a kilometer away. Some time ago there was some drama wrt 5.56 being too ineffective, as well as having poor ballistics at longer ranges, and there were a bunch of intermediate calibers designed such as 6.8 SPC and 6.5 Grendel. Did anything ever come out of this (or, was it always just an internet gun nut dream?), or was the 855A1 improvement enough that the headache and cost of a caliber change was discarded?
- ranger207 8y agoThe new round has much better terminal ballistics, and better stability at range. It's better, but not perfect for the ranges of Afghanistan. Hopefully we won't have to worry about that for much longer. The Army is still looking at a larger caliber for their Next Generation Squad Weapon program, and that experimental round may wind up being lighter weight as well due to its polymer casing.
- PeanutNore 8y agoThe US military currently has one or more requests out there for companies to submit 6.8mm rifles for trials, so it could potentially still happen. Also, according to Wikipedia, Serbia is adopting a rifle in 6.5 Grendel as its primary service rifle. I don't see the US moving towards 6.5 Grendel, except on the civilian market - I took a deer with a 6.5 Grendel last year, and my cousin has taken several as well as a black bear.
- jki275 8y agoMostly resolved using heavier bullet weights. There are a bunch of different bullets out there (MK262 is the standard as I recall), and I think the 6.5/6.8 are unlikely to be adopted as supply chain logistics says to remain with 5.56.
- azernik 8y agoPart of the issue is that those assumptions of relatively short ranges were reached in an environment of actual fighting in jungle environments in Vietnam, and prospective fighting in built-up or forested environments in Europe. In arid regions, battle rifles with their longer ranges and lower volume of fire are arguably a better tradeoff. See, for example, the use of early-20th-century British battle rifles by the Taliban (https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/taliban-gun-lockers-the-rifles-of-rural-ghazni-province/ https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/taliban-gun-locke...), resulting from terrain like the title photo at (https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/a-firsthand-look-at-firefights-in-marja/ https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/a-firsthand-look-...) (Their use is deterred by other factors, namely ammunition availability and concealability.)