07-11-2011, 04:47 PM
Mav714 Wrote:What's amazing to me is that my dad and other relatives carried either the Garrand or .30 carbine all over WII and got the job done. Countless soldiers carried the 30:06 all over with a 9+ lb rifle plus the gear. what I especially don't understand about our military is why they want to stay with a varmint round. I know it's a NATO round etc, but putting combatant down quickly vs multiple shoots doesn't make sense. Don't even get me started on the 9mm vs the 45 acp! Once again a heavier bullet will do more damage as well stop a vehicle.
There's nothing really wrong with 5.56 NATO. I'm a self-admitted 5.56 Nazi, so you can ridicule me all you like. I've seen what it does, and I'm more than impressed with it. I've never seen a clean 5.56 injury or fatality-they have all been ugly. For dismounted riflemen, it's an excellent cartridge with formidable performance characteristics. Whether I'm carrying an M4 or a 7.62 NATO rifle, or even a 7.62x39 weapon, I'm not going to be shooting one round, then assessing target feedback. I'm going to place continuous well-aimed fire into the target until it is squirming in the dirt, and then shoot again if possible.
I wouldn't assess the bulk of US military success in WWII on the small arms they had then, because the Germans had several better weapon systems when looking at the MG42, MG34, G41, and later the Stg44, but those really were put to the most use on the Russian and Eastern European front. Our dismounts were really policing up what was left of only 1/3 of the Wermacht back in Germany, after being bombed tortuously by thermite munitions from B-17's & B-24's. We literally burned scores of German cities to the ground in hellish infernos that often reached unearthly temperatures. The same thing was done to Japan.
I wouldn't attribute the small arms mix we had as a decisive factor in any US victories in Central Europe, speaking from a holistic picture of warfare in that conflict. Had we been fighting the two-thirds of the German Army that was on the Russian front since 1941, it would have been an entirely different outcome. Millions of Russians lost their lives in numerous spearheads and campaigns from the German Blitzkriegs, which has been adopted by the US for combined-arms warfare since the Germans pioneered it.
5.56 NATO is not where we have a weakness in the current small arms mix. Even though it isn't an intermediate cartridge in the idea behind 7.62x39 and 7.92x33, the SCHV concept has proven itself an excellent component as far as small arms go for dismounted riflemen, and even support personnel. The real area for improvement is in our Light Machineguns, General Purpose Machineguns, and sniper rifles. As you might have seen before in the discussion, I'm a huge proponent of fixing this area of small arms chambering from the 7.62 NATO to something lighter, with equal or better ballistics.
LRRPF52