Almost Adopted: The H&K XM8 Family (2024)

“Doctrine and tactics need to be supported by the weapon, not the other way ’round.” Well yes – unless a new tech comes along, e.g. machineguns needed new doctrine and tactics to be effective.

In our time an example might be precision guided small high explosives, like a precision guided 60mm mortar, or the XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement (CDTE) System, which did quite make it but someone will get it right: a 25mm grenade that can be auto-set to detonate at a precise distance. And in that world of precision micro-high-explosives Kirk’s point about information sharing during a firefight becomes extra important.

Anyway my point being that a new tech will sometimes result in new doctrine

Your point is refuted by multitudes of historical examples–The one that springs first to mind is the Montigny mitrailleuse, where we see where a truly innovative and entirely new weapon never reached its full potential, and because they had no damn idea at all how to use the thing in combat.

Granted, the mitrailleuse was not perfected at the time it was deployed, and it had significant technical issues that were never resolved because the feedback that might have led to those issues being identified and solved didn’t happen, but the fact remains: New, innovative weapon, no real tactics or operational idea of how to employ it, followed by failure. And, another twenty-thirty years of people saying that the concept of machine gun fire was a failure…

You have to have a decent set of doctrine and underlying operational intent to make a new weapon work, or you’re going to find that you’ve wasted a lot of your money, and probably not an inconsiderable number of lives while conducting on-the-job-training for using your visionary weapons. You could, for example, think of WWI as an extended (and, very painful) experiment in working out the issues inherent to modern weapons. Nobody had a really good or effective idea of how to best utilize the machine gun or artillery, and almost all of that got worked out on the fly.

Again, you absolutely must have a solid idea of how you intend to fight with a weapon before you put it on general issue; anything else is almost certain to be a waste of lives, effort, and money. There are some things, like smokeless powder, that are relatively simple and obvious, but many of the implications from those weapons innovations are going to have to be worked out before you wring full potential out of everything. With regards to smokeless powder, one of the things that wasn’t readily apparent was just how much effect on maneuver the lack of black powder smoke was going to have on the battlefield, as well as how much more difficult it was going to be to locate the enemy. The men adopting smokeless powders intuited some of all that, but the full range of implication was not realized until there was widespread use of the technology, and it changed a lot of things about war that nobody had really considered.

Doctrine, tactics, operational intent–And, only then, start thinking about what weapons you need to support all that. Some technologies will change what is possible, but you will still need to have a framework within which to realize that potential and possibility, and that framework is something you have to build in the mind of the leaders and led, before the weapons are going to do you a damn bit of good.

“The current 6.8 insanity”

Part of the “taking back the infantry half kilometer” doctrine, as per this;

https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a512331.pdf

Originally, the idea was “use the infantrymen’s rifles to control a 300 meter radius, leave everything else to the SAW”. A doctrine which, BTW, was straight out of the WW2 Wehrmacht playbook, and one still followed by the Russian and Red Chinese armies among others.

(NB; The 7.62 x 39mm cartridge and AK rifle were designed to be able to inflict at least debilitating wounds out to 400 meters; beyond that, the work was to be done by the support MGs firing the old, .30-06 class 7.62 x 53R.)

The present-day 6.8 mania reflects the ideas of a century ago, with the .276 inch class of rifles developed as “ideal military caliber” proposals between 1910 and 1930. The British .276 Enfield, American .276 Pedersen, the various 6.5 and 7mm rounds, and etc. were all intended to provide adequate accuracy and killing power out to about 500 to 600 yards (500 meters more or less) with low enough levels of recoil, etc. so as to make rapidly training conscripts easier.

What actually happened was that the accuracy and marksmanship advocates wanted higher velocities for flatter trajectories. Ending up with unacceptable blast, flash, and recoil, not to mention bore wear. (Notable example; the .280 Ross.)

What got overlooked was that working to the original specifications re velocity, bullet weight, drop at various ranges, and etc., the various “ideal cartridges” were essentially ballistic twins of the 1892 vintage 7 x 57 Mauser.

Maybe a lot of time and effort (and money) could have been saved by simply developing self-loading rifles, etc., around that one. Which, interestingly, begat the .257 Roberts and the .300 Savage, the latter of which begat the 7.62 x 51 NATO, aka “.30-06 Lite”, which in its turn begat the sporting 7mm-08, bringing things full circle, more or less.

Today, the 6.8 proposals all seem to be once more reiterations of the 7 x 57, just with a slightly different bore spec. And of course designed to work through the AR-15/M-16 action, which limits case dimensions.

Which is just fine; you could do a lot worse in developing a military rifle round than duplicating the 7 x 57’s characteristics.

But don’t pretend that it’s anything new. We’ve already fallen off that bridge once.

cheers

eon

Without being unduly partisan (and yes, you are right about this ‘avantguard of 50s’) the M16 had become an epitome of stalemate of U.S. forces small arm development. Some may keep saying it is “good enough” and they are not wrong. It is basically an offshoot of the type of product company was making at the time – aircraft landing gear. And it actually looks like one. They had experience with aluminum forged parts with pistons and springs inside and that’s what you get.

However, the times are moving on and that brings with it new technological applications (word “technologies” is often exaggerated or too generalized). As I mentioned before-look at designs by BT, there seem to be direction into near future.

Second part of your writeup, discussing intercommunication and data sharing is intriguing and I’d give it high degree of credence. I would also ad to it use of drones. Yes, this makes sense, mostly in situation when your side has things under control.

However, if you were up to opposition of comparable capability (such was case in WWI on western front) you will find yourself sooner or later in ‘managed chaos’ and I cannot tell you with certainty if even the best of training will help a lot. We are all prone to panic and act in accord with highest of instincts – self-preservation.

@ Eon,

Since we seem to have bottomed out the comment system, I’m replying to you here…

Vis-a-vis that “taking back the infantry half-kilometer” thing–I’m right there with the whole idea, right up until they start talking about the universal intermediate cartridge. That is a particularly bad idea, and if you look at the actual track record, it ain’t happening.

Germans tried it, giving everyone in the rifle squad a Sturmgewehr. Didn’t work out well; wound up supplementing liberally with their old-school MG34/42 family. Soviets tried it, post-WWII, and found that their intermediate cartridge didn’t quite cut the mustard, so they put the PK-series down in the squads to supplement. Vietnam? Same stuff, different army–We learned the hard way that there was a requirement for a 7.62mm MG in the squads, and so the M60 abortion happened.

The fact is that the characteristics you need in an individual weapon cartridge are not the same ones you need in the support weapon role. Because of that, attempting to come up with a “one cartridge to rule them all” thing is never, ever going to work. The Chinese are trying it, right now, with their 5.8mm whatzit round, and they’re having to have two different loadings for the MG and the individual weapon. Even with that, the odds are pretty good, in my mind, that once they garner some actual combat experience with that system, they’re going to go out shopping for a PK-equivalent MG to use in their squads–Especially dismount light infantry.

Until someone figures out how to do dial-a-yield with the propellants, we’re going to be stuck here, where two cartridges are necessary down in the squads. You’re either going to do that, or you’re going to have to suck up the grief of having an over-powered individual weapon cartridge. Alternatively, you could have an under-powered support weapon cartridge. Up to you… Me? I want something slightly more powerful and more effective than 5.56mm, while still being controllable on full-auto, and a MG cartridge for support that is more like the old Swedish 8X63mm M/32 round. I can’t really justify or see the need for gawdawful oversized .338 Magnum system that they’re touting now, but something more than the current 7.62mm, and still less than that would be about my sweet spot…

Experience has shown that a dual-cartridge system down in the squads is what works; why argue with physics? There are reasons why everyone has wound up defaulting to that solution via hard-won experience, and I would love to hear justification for why we’re trying for a universal cartridge, yet again…