Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog by Ian McCollum 12/7/2025
I’m not enough of an expert to know whether the new M7 U.S. battle rifle chambered in 6.8x51mm is a good idea or not. But I’m pretty sure Ian McCollum is such an expert, and he says it’s a bad idea:
• “I have thought from the very beginning that this program was a bad idea.” As evidence by this snippet from 2019.
• “I really didn’t expect that that the US Army would adopt anything from the NGSW program. We do have a long history of doing weapons development trials, looking at all the options, and adopting nothing new. And that’s what I thought would happen here. Obviously, it didn’t.”
• “I had a chance to do some shooting with a civilian 68 by 51 or 277 Fury Spear rifle, the civilian version of the M7 several years ago. It was a good rifle.
Um, like as a technical thing, it worked well. It handled well, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea for the military to adopt it.”
• “This video isn’t about the rifle itself. It’s about the doctrine and the concept behind its adoption, which is the part that I think is a really bad idea.”
• “There were two main justifications that are typically given for the decision to get rid of the intermediate, light recoiling, highc apacity cartridge, the 5.56 [NATO], and replace it with a much higher pressure, much heavier recoiling, much physically larger and physically heavier cartridge, the 68 x 51[mm].”
• “The first one is when we were in Afghanistan, US troops were often taken under fire by enemy forces from ranges at which they could not effectively respond with their little wimpy 5.56 M4s. And that’s very true. Something like 50% of combat engagements in Afghanistan took place in excess of the practical engagement range of the M4.” Taliban would routinely ambush U.S. troops from higher in the hills “800 or 1,000 meters away.”
• “And so the justification is often given that if we had some big honking rifle with a magnified optic on it that could reach out to 800 yards, well then, by gosh, we could have taken that dude out.”
• “And my counter to that is that the world has changed since we were fighting in Afghanistan.”
More:
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=69046https://youtu.be/kqlKXrwmRMQhttps://youtu.be/n06vpf-vaSg
