Replies

I hope the Army will at least issue these guys 168- or 173-grain match loads, but I fear they’ll just get regular M80 Ball (which would be completely inadequate for the job).

I get the impression that the military is looking at their ammo requirements a little closer these days. I recently bought a bunch of 7.62x51 manufactured by Israeli Military Industries (IMI). The US military also buys ammo from them regularly. They were loaded with 175 grain Sierra Match King bullets. And, the bullet seating depth was optimized for semi-auto rifles. I can pound steel silhouettes at 1,000 yds with them pretty consistently out of my HK-91.

That's good to know. My concern is that the government will do what it has always done and show more concern for the waste of not using existing stocks of weapons and ammo (which is relatively small in the grand scheme of bloated defense budgets) than for equipping our men with the best weapons and ammo available.

They've been doing it since the black powder era. Why did the Army choose the Trap Door Springfield in 1873 instead of other, more reliable rifles, or even, God forbid, a repeater? Because they could convert existing 1863 Springfield Muskets to Trap Doors for five bucks a pop rather than buy whole new rifles, and because they thought soldiers would waste ammo if they could actually fire more than one shot without reloading. As cool as Trap Doors are, they really were junk compared to what was available. How many guys paid for that five-dollar price tag--and the cost of cheaper copper-cased 45-70--with their lives, mowed down at Little Big Horn by Sioux armed with modern Winchester repeaters while trying to clear stuck cases out of their Springfields?

Then fast forward 60 years. The Army was looking to replace the 1903 with something more modern. Far and away the winner was a gas-operated rifle designed by a guy named John Garand. No, it wasn't the rifle chambered in .30-06. It was the one chambered in a newfangled 7mm cartridge called .276 Pedersen. As great as the results were, then-Army Chief-of-Staff Douglas MacArthur rejected it because he wanted to use up all the mountains of .30-06 M2 Ball left over from the last war. The result was a great, but not perfect, rifle that could have been that much greater, and who knows how many more guys would have lived to come back home if they'd gotten that much more performance out of their weapons.

It's an old story.