New Army "Caliber Configuration Study"

[Tony Williams]

Are there any new developments in caseless ammo? The last I heard about was with the HK G11 and that was about 30 years ago.

The US Army's LSAT project (Lightweight Small Arms Technologies) for a 5.56mm MG and ammo to be made as light as possible resulted in two parallel development tracks: for caseless telescoped and plastic-cased telescoped ammo. The pic below shows the caseless (red) and plastic-cased ammo belts next to the usual brass 5.56x45.



An HK info package on G-11 caseless ammo was bought in order to speed up development, but even so it has been problematic due to the host of problems which bedevil caseless rounds. Around 90% of the development has been on the plastic-cased variety. This seems to work reasonably well, but funding has been reduced to a trickle.