More on Army/Marines moving from 5.56mm to 6.8mm NGSW

[Kswhitetails]

Nobody of relevance is talking about a future for the 6.8 SPC for a service rifle cartridge.

We already have several threads on this if you read through this sub forum.

6.8 NGSW is a current competition that I will be surprised to see get awarded due to weapon weight, recoil, and magazine profile/bulk on the soldier's load.

As to the comment about "just exchanging 5 F-35s", I'd take 5 F-35s any day over giving Infantry a new rifle without thinking twice about it.

We already have a great carbine with the M4 that does what is required of soldiers who pick through the rubble after echelons of fire in conventional war, or police neighborhoods and provinces in COIN under cover of their buddy's SAWs, M240s, M110s, M2010s, 60mm and 81mm mortars, with Reaper Drones overhead if needed.

The capabilities that the F-35 brings to the modern and future battlefields far outweigh anything we will ever do with small arms. Small arms are almost negligible in an open conflict, and are already well-suited for COIN in the mix.

Our legacy aircraft are aging and have been worn out by constant deployments, and have degrading survivability compared to current and emerging IADS networks.

Your comments here are music to my ears. Having not been military, but a military info buff, my mind has been screaming this since I started listening to the JPATS chatter over a decade ago.

And it's high time we start making our small arms from carbon fiber and give up on metalic cartridges all together. Everything we can do with brass we can now do with plastic; and with less weight and more speed.

It seems to me that if real solutions to the problems our military boys faced on the actual battle field were ever really pursued, we'd have long ago put Johnny 5 on the desert sands and given the grunts joy sticks from the comfort of the basement of the farm...

The future belongs to the digital masters.