BluntForceTrauma Wrote:Good article HERE questioning the whole premise of a belt-fed SAW.Hmm. Calling the belt-fed SAW a "failure" seems a bit of an overreach, considering how many armies use them.
I read the article, and must say I find some of it not only badly flawed, but some even dishonest. For instance:
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"[The SAW] burdens the squad with (literally) thousands of rounds of extra ammunition needed just to feed the two belt-feds. In the Army’s [rifle squad], each rifleman carries the same 7 magazine loadout, but on top of that they carry 200 round belts for the SAW..."
If the seven riflemen in the squad each carry a 200-round belt of SAW ammo, that totals to 1400 rounds, not the "thousands of rounds" claimed by the author.
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"In the video below, a USAF JTAC engages the enemy with a 7.62mm Mk. 48 machine gun, a close relative of the Minimi. Note the large amount of downtime of the weapon during reloading, and how difficult it is for the gunner administer the weapon by himself in combat."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_fzViwKnAY
This is blatant dishonesty. The author uses a 7.62mm LMG being reloaded with loose belts of ammo that are twice as heavy per round as 5.56mm ammo.
Compare to 5.56mm SAW reloading using 100-rd and 200-rd "nutsacks":
[video=youtube;uZ2SWWDt8Wg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ2SWWDt8Wg[/video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ2SWWDt8Wg
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"A magazine-fed automatic rifle, on the other hand, may be either based on and share parts with the infantry rifle, as in the Russian RPK, or the infantry rifle itself may serve both functions, as the M16A1 did prior to the M249’s introduction."
IIRC, the M16A1 rifle proved inadequate in the automatic rifle role, one of the reasons it was superseded by the M249 machine gun.
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"...the significantly higher accuracy of a closed-bolt automatic rifle gives similar effectiveness to the belt-fed, open-bolt SAW, while using far less ammunition."
The automatic rifle's "significantly higher accuracy" would seem of little value in suppressing an enemy who cannot be seen due to effective use of cover or concealment.
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"Although [the SAW] is capable of prodigious firepower, it sacrifices key characteristics of individual weapons to achieve it, and in doing so becomes something that is neither fish nor fowl. It is too heavy, cumbersome, and finicky to be a good individual weapon, and its caliber is too small to serve as a very good crew-served machine gun. Therefore it exists in a space where it is neither one nor the other."
The SAW is not meant to be a crew-served weapon. It is intended to be an individual weapon.
Perhaps what should be done is not to replace a poorly-designed SAW with an inadequate IAR, but with a much better SAW.