RUSI is the UK’s oldest and best known defence think tank (professional academics and SMEs producing scientific type papers and articles on defence subjects). So when Jonathan Ferguson highlighted this paper they published I obviously had to sign up and have a read.
Very interesting piece for many reasons. Some of the language might seem basic to you if guns are ‘your thing’ but every statement made had a source cited and every source is a significant piece of work in and of itself – every one I saw being conducted by a significant organisation with weight behind their findings. This is basically the complete opposite of someone getting paid to mag dump in to a berm then say to a camera that a gun is great and you should buy it.
In this papers’ analysis of key criteria that they believe the MoD should use for selecting the L85 replacement, the writers specifically examine the small arms that other NATO nations have adopted over thr past few years. Perhaps the most unique of which is the M7.
Characteristics of the M7 were of course derived from the NGSW program’s requirements, and this paper discusses 2 stand out points in that area (to my mind at least). First is the well known desire to penetrate modern Russian and Chinese body armour plates. Second is the distance at which there is a desire to achieve said penetration, which in this case is 600m.
Why 600m? Well according to the paper, that is the DoW’s minimum calculated safe distance from a target for friendly troops when said target is being struck by medium artillery. Artillery has of course done the majority of killing in many major wars (to include both wold wars) and doctrinally I’d imagine that was still expected to be the case when NGSW parameters were set. That distance however includes a large safety margin for shrapnel, as well as the possible error factors of both infantry designating targets and of artillery aiming their guns.
Of course in order to achieve modern armour defeat at 600m, a hefty round is needed. Then you need a serious optic to give high hit probability at that range.
The document recommends, for various reasons, that the Grayburn rifle should be highly lethal at 150m, with significant suppression at 400m. Which overall, is roughly in the ballpark of the current characteristics of the L85A2 and A3. Those rifles of course are somewhat heavy and not ideal ergonomically. Obviously this is a social media post and the paper is 38 pages so this an extreme summarisation to say the least. But creating an account to read it for yourself is totally free:
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