I've ranted about this a few times. Whenever we discuss needing to replace the M16/M4 there's rarely a satisfactory answer to the "why". You get a lot of "we've been using it since the 60s!" & occasionally a rational "we're approaching the upper limits of body armor penetration" https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1278719254909550592

but the more commonly raised concerns "need a more accurate rifle" "need greater range" are squarely at odds with our current capacity to train Marines and soldiers to exploit those benefits. Currently the Marine Corps trains out to 500m for its yearly qual, and the Army trains

out to 300m. The rifle will perform slightly past 500m under ideal circumstances. But even with the introducion and standardization of magnified optics, training combat troops to engage targets at 500m, who almost certainly will not be laying still for the shooter to line up and

take that shot and hit their target. 500m is an incredibly long distance (not to mention WELL outside of most common combat ranges) and training someone to consistently hit targets at that range even in ideal and calm circumstances is difficult enough the Army doesn't even bother

and the Marine Corps really only expects that kind of marksmanship on a known distance range in a training environment. A common refrain in the "we need more range!" argument is that our opponents use weapons that outrange us. That's occasionally true. The PKM (which is a literal

belt fed medium machine gun) can significantly outrange the M16 (roughly 800m with a well serviced gun). But the point of a service rifle is not to compete with medium machine guns or DM rifles. It's to compete with... other service rifles. Set aside that engagements are not

generally occurring at such ranges, part of the reason we incorporate designated marksman and machine gunners with more potent rounds is to be able to respond to more distant threats than the rifleman can. And at present the primary service rifles of our opponents either

underperform (for range) the M16/M4/M27 (the AKM, the AK74 and derivatives, and the QBZ series) or at best match it. So let's set aside range for a second and return to the more pressing concern. Let's pretend the rifleman does need to have equal range to the machine gunner.

The machine gunner achieves results not through single well placed shots but through a steady stream of fully automatic fire (ideally with marksmanship fundamentals, it's not just wild fire). At the upper limit of the machine guns range (say M240/PKM), the machine gunner's trying

to fill a given zone with lead and hope to hit anything entering the zone. A human body at 800m is not a super easy thing to see and a machine gunner isn't squeezing off bursts at a man size target with much hope for precision. His best targets are groups of troops, vehicles, or

other larger targets they can actually see.

For a rifleman to score hits, firing one shot per trigger pull,they need to actually be able to see their individual target. And then actively apply the fundamentals of marksmanship to translate what they see to a hit. The introduction

of magnified optics increase this ability, but it really begins to fall off as shooting ability (and negotiating the variables that become exponentially more important the further away from the barrel you get) falls off.

So my big question, for any future rifle acquisition, with

"MOAR RANGE" and "MOAR ACCURACY" in mind, is what are the Army and Marine Corps planning to do improve individual marksmanship? Beyond the known distance ranges too. What are we doing to ensure that we don't spend billions on new systems that are technologically far superior to

what we field now, but that the average soldier or Marine can't even come CLOSE to actually taking advantage of?

Perhaps there's a serious plan & I just haven't heard of it. But in the absence of that the best gun in the world means nothing if you can't hit anything with it. End