.280 Enfield...Ahead of its time

[Tony Williams]

Like the British, the Americans wanted to have a rifle of their own design. To this day, the US Army has disliked bullpup rifles, which ruled out adoption of the EM-2, and they clearly weren't ready to accept the AR-10.

I've been re-reading Dugelby's EM-2 Concept and Design and the only reason which the US gave for rejecting the EM-2 rifle was that it wasn't ambidextrous. Well, there are lots of different ways to achieve ambidextrous bullpups, so they could have designed their own.

The plain fact is that just as there was only one way to achieve the US Army's requirement for a 2,000 yard performance matching the .30'06 in a lightweight automatic weapon (i.e. by reducing the calibre), there was also only one way to achieve the requirement for a rifle with such long-range performance that was also compact enough to replace an SMG (i.e. a bullpup).

Any serious attempt to meet the US Army's requirements inevitably led to a reduced-calibre bullpup - nothing else stood a chance of ticking all the boxes. If they didn't want to drop below .30 cal and didn't want a bullpup, they should have come up with a different set of requirements.