{"id":193203,"date":"2009-01-10T06:30:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-10T11:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/01\/10\/marine-corps-looks-to-reduce-firepower\/"},"modified":"2009-01-10T06:30:00","modified_gmt":"2009-01-10T11:30:00","slug":"marine-corps-looks-to-reduce-firepower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/01\/10\/marine-corps-looks-to-reduce-firepower\/","title":{"rendered":"Marine Corps Looks to Reduce Firepower"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>About 4 months ago I mentioned that <a href=\"http:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/2008\/09\/marine-corps-eyes-m249-saw-replacement.html\">the Corps was looking at a magazine fed automatic rifle to replace the belt fed M249 SAW<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>At the time, I wondered if this was intended simply to replace one M16\/M4 in the fire team with something that was full auto, and it&#8217;s not.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.military.com\/news\/article\/corps-seeks-replacement-for-m249-saw.html?col=1186032310810\">The Marine Corps has awarded 3 contracts to investigate a replacement<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>They are looking for a lighter (12 lb as opposed to 17 lb) <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">magazine fed<\/span> weapon without a quick change barrel.<\/p>\n<p>Seeing as how the barrel cannot get as hot, because you cannot quickly swap it, and that the firing time is less, as a 30 round mag is a lot less than a 200 round belt.<\/p>\n<p>It seems to me that it&#8217;s going back to the concept of the BAR, which was a great weapon (John Browning was an artist), but was never able to find a particularly good application in service.  It was too big, too heavy, and did not fire enough rounds to suppress the enemy.<\/p>\n<p>While the successor, in 5.56 should be lighter, it still will not throw enough rounds down range.<\/p>\n<p>It will also be costlier than the obvious solution: Give that one guy in the fire team the Canadian M-16, which does do full auto.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About 4 months ago I mentioned that the Corps was looking at a magazine fed automatic rifle to replace the belt fed M249 SAW. At the time, I wondered if this was intended simply to replace one M16\/M4 in the fire team with something that was full auto, and it&#8217;s not. The Marine Corps has &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1126],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weapons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193203"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}