Cross Purpose Compromise

The answer is always, "More Dakka."

But how much?

Infantry rifle selection is a compromise.

On one hand you want the round it fires to go out as far as possible and hit hard when it gets there.

On the other, you want to carry a lot of rounds.

On the gripping hand, almost every round you fire isn't hitting the enemy.

You can see these three hands going on with the M7 selection and the decision to use an electronic wonder optic:  "What if almost every round DID hit?  Then the reduction in rounds carried doesn't matter so much!"

The digital optic is supposed to make every round be the round with someone's name on it. 

Except, suppressive fire is sending rounds downrange with all the rounds labeled, "to whom it may concern."

If you can get the enemy to keep their head down while you're carefully aiming, it's a lot easier to carefully aim.

None of that is new.

But if you're going to take away 1/3 of the ammo, you have to teach the troops different suppression schedules.  They're not gonna learn that without doing some shooting in training...

Which brings us to something that a lot of shooters already know viscerally.

That bigger round is more expensive.

So getting training where rounds are expended will be more expensive.

Units in the Reagan Largesse were deferring live fire for budgetary reasons when 7.62 was a dime a shot, not a buck.  6.8x51mm is a LOT more than a dollar a round for the, lower powered, training ammo; and budgets are tighter.

So we've adopted a more expensive, and heavier, "rifle"; that uses very expensive, and heavier, ammunition; that's dependent on a very expensive, and cantankerous, optic; and all that requires more live fire training to learn how to use it because it's so very different from the weapon it replaces.

Americans, traditionally, are good at learning WARRE on the fly.

Yaay? 

By the way, there's nothing about that whiz-bang computerized optic that couldn't be applied to 5.56.

The entire justification for the 6.8x51mm round is to be able to punch our own body armor and we appear to be the only nation issuing such armor at scale.  What makes the 6.8x51mm round so damned expensive is using a 13" barrel because we're insisting on every infantryman carrying a suppressed rifle and trying to keep the overall length manageable.

It's 3" longer than the M4, and 3" shorter than the M16A2.  Winning?

I can't help but think that if we're going to insist on .270 Winchester performance, it'd have been simpler to just skip the suppressor and hang a 20" barrel out front and have $1.28 a round ammo instead of $2.60 a shot; because that bullet can be loaded into a conventional brass case at normal chamber pressures too.

That $2.60 a shot is 3,200 fps from a 16" barrel, not sure if that's the same cartridge that does 3,000 fps from a 13" barrel.