PDWs...and other small arms.

[LRRPF52]

A PDW needs to be so compact, it can be worn on the belt and forgotten about, without any snag hazards, while still addressing terminal performance that most pistol cartridges fail to do well at all. When looking at terminal performance studies of handgun cartridges across thousands of samples, you see a very high survivability rate with pistols, and not so with rifles. You're basically looking at around a 25% kill rate with handguns, and at least 65% with rifles.

Any straight-walled pistol cartridge simply doesn't have the speed/projectile weight to do the job. Any legacy 20th Century pistol cartridge should be excluded on that basis alone, in addition to the fact that they all have terrible effective ranges due to low mv and poor projectile shaping.

When you look at things like the 7.62x25 and other small, bottle-necked cartridges, things start to shift towards rifle performance. 9x25 Dillon is another example of a pistol cartridge that can spit a decent weight projectile at 2000fps or more.

Support MOS soldiers need a little box-shaped weapon that is unobtrusive, goes on their belt, and is out of the way throughout the day, but there if something goes horribly wrong (green on blue, Major Hassan type events, vehicle disabled outside the wire, etc.). We're talking something very small, but with a telescoping stock and flush magazine with a spare built into the frame. Something like the Magpul Folding Pocket Gun would be about perfect, in a bottle-necked higher velocity PDW cartridge.

We don't need pistols for most of the duty positions that carry pistols, because pistols are about worthless for pretty much everyone in the military except investigators and a few units in the SOF community, and the modern handgun/sidearm needs to be brought into the 21st Century as well, not stuck in the rut of the 20th Century.