How could or should the 6.5 mm Grendel be improved?

[Trooper]

As power goes up, so does recoil, taking us away from an assault rifle. The gun is controllable with a 100gr for close quarters, but still not like a 5.56 NATO, and won't be without some other changes. Pushing a 123-130gr closer to .260 Velocities takes us away from that, and we're not going to get .260 velocities, nor do we want them when weight/recoil is considered.




A 25rd magazine capacity is a good change for the DMR and SASS, not any assault rifles. Trends in assault rifle magazines are going towards higher capacity than 30rd, not backwards.

My conclusions after mulling over this for most of my life are that approaching the small arms mix from the intent to fix assault rifles, is futile, because we have excellent assault rifles currently. We need to approach it from a big picture new generation of small arms, with fixing the SAW/LMG concept, and making a better DMR/SASS, while employing some other indirect assets lower in the organization. I see the Grendel as a great candidate for addressing the SASS and LMG, while displacing 7.62 NATO to vehicle-mounted only.

The problem is logistics. We have too many systems in the mix. We need one caliber, one rifle, on machine gun. The same problem is there with the 20mm, 25mm and the 30mm. There they are planning to go to the 25mm round that is used on the Bradley's Bushmaster gun and on the F-35 and the Harrier.