New Army "Caliber Configuration Study"

[Tony Williams]

I have struggled with the 'last war' syndrome since 1975 when I first got seriously involved in weapons R&D.

Indeed. From my own amateur readings of military history up to recent times, I have come across far more criticism of militaries for failing to remember and apply the lessons of previous conflicts.

If we're not careful, we could see the same thing happening again: I have read that as the British and US armies are pulled out of more than a decade of irregular warfare (or whatever term is popular at the moment), they are rapidly switching the training emphasis back to the conventional warfare which was what they used to train for pre-Iraq/Afghanistan. How long will it take before the bitterly-won experience of recent conflicts begins to fade from the collective military memory? Sadly, there seems to be only one way of ensuring that such knowledge and skills remain polished....keep using them in action!

The 7.62x54 is an excellent example. It has been around for longer than the 30-06 but still is used by a large number of our actual and potential adversaries.

Exactly, and the combination of this cartridge with the lightweight and widely used PKM LMG is a fact that is not going to go away. If our troops do not always carry weapons which can match its long-range performance, they will find themselves being outranged again whenever the opportunity presents itself to our enemies. So there is no choice at present but to keep the 7.62mm weapons in the squad. A GPC LMG would retain the ability to match the PKM and might (if we are lucky) not weigh any more...

While most people live in urban areas meaning that CQB will always have to be trained for, and in many places (especially Europe) the scope for long-range fire is limited by vegetation as well as buildings (not to mention weather conditions), there are still many parts of the world in which this is not the case, and where opportunities to engage at long range will occur.

These aren't just desert areas - the British found the same in the Falklands, where they learned a great deal of respect for the .50 BMG being used by the Argentinians. Fortunately they still had 7.62mm rifles and MGs at the time - if that conflict had occurred after the switch to 5.56mm, we might have heard a lot more about the limitations of that cartridge a lot sooner.