02-15-2022, 04:25 PM
Morvandium Wrote:Initially I thought that this wouldn't affect me much because I only buy US made ammo (moral and ethical reasons), and I prefer brass cased for my nicer barrels, which currently my only Grendel setup is.
But then something else occurred to me.
The military is in the midst of migrating to a next generation platform for its small arms, and their carbines/rifles are going to be in 6.8mm caliber. There's going to be transition both away from 5.56 for some manufacturers, as the demand for 5.56 decreases as the military stops buying it. (Yes, there's a huge civilian market.) It will become a question, for manufacturers, of how they can make the most money. There's not much driving domestic production of 6.5mm ammo currently except the civilian market.
Whenever cheap ammo imports finally stop, it'll do two things. First, with cheap ammo having fewer suppliers, economy priced ammo may get more expensive in the short term. After time, demand could provide impetus for increased domestic production of low cost ammo to fill that void.
However, if manufacturers that might consider moving into the supply of 6.5mm economy priced ammo see more profit in producing the new military round, it could mean that the 6.5 ammo isn't picked up by as many manufacturers. So, for fans of cheap Grendel ammo, it might be better in the long run if that foreign ammo supply dried up sooner, so that niche in the market for cheap 6.5mm ammo has a chance to be filled domestically, before the 6.8mm production is just so much more profitable that it becomes bad business to not produce the new mil spec ammo.
That said, I've read some interesting things about the next-gen ammo with possible polymer cases and/or combined steel/brass cases. I'll be curious to see how that pans out. Maybe it takes the military a couple tries to get their ammo right, and manufacturers shy away from the new ammo in the beginning. We'll see.
Just some thoughts.
If we're talking about the current ammo offerings for the military 6.8 program, one requires a case with a steel head bonded to a brass body, and one requires polymer cases. I think both versions are angling for SAAMI adoption (not 100% sure, actually) since both are being offered on the civilian market. So, if someone wanted to make standard brass or steel cased ammo for this caliber, they'd either have to produce ammo that is non-SAAMI or get yet another SAAMI spec published for standard-cased ammo.
I think it'll be a long time before we see anything approaching cheap ammo for .277 SIG Fury or whatever else the civilian ammo is called.