The Next Generation Squad Weapon Program - Is SIG the frontrunner?

The Next Generation Squad Weapon rifle and assault rifle are expected to be selected by mid-2022, Major General Anthony Potts told the Army Times ahead of the US Army Association's annual meeting. It took the Army several years to decide on the caliber, but ultimately chose the "intermediate" 6.8mm to replace the existing 5.56mm used in the M4, M16 and M249.

The US Army has put forward a number of requirements for NGSW prototype weapons. While many of the NGSW program specifications are "competition sensitive" and therefore not known, all three NGSW contenders should be capable of firing the 6.8mm intermediate rifle cartridge specified by the army. The NGSW program requires applicants to submit two rifle designs, one to replace the M4 and the other to replace the M249. Army demands require companies to produce both rifle and combat automatic weapons for the NGSW competition, and the industry has since narrowed it down to three candidates.

The goal is to deploy NGSW-R in a separate unit as a planned replacement for the current M4A1 and NGSW-AR as a planned replacement for the current M249 squad automatic weapon. According to the U.S. military, the NGSW plan aims to "develop operationally significant mass lethality to counter the threat of spread" through several plans. The plan aims to improve the command-level lethality of the melee forces. It is an attempt on a prototype consisting of a rifle (NGSW-R) and an automatic rifle (NGSW-AR) with a conventional 6-inch bullet. 8mm and fire control system (NGSW). -FC) between the two systems. NGSW’s weapons and ammunition systems are exploring areas such as reduction of infrared signals, ergonomics and recoil improvement, but also aim to push the plan in new directions.

The plan also includes the development of a new fire control system for small arms that can be used in the NGSW program. As part of its efforts, the Army is pursuing a parallel next-generation fire and weapon control program to provide an enhanced fire control subsystem to improve the accuracy and lethality of fighters on and off the battlefield. The Army is in the final stages of evaluating NGSW prototypes from General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, Textron Systems, and Sig Sauer to replace the 5.56mm M4A1 carbine and M249 unit automatic weapon in infantry and other close combat units.

Sig competes with Textron Systems and the General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems Inc. in the development of the Armys Next Generation Squad Weapon, or NGSW, an effort to begin equipping melee units with a rifle and an automatic rifle chambered for 6.8mm. The approach to the next generation weapons prototype phase for the Army was complex and reflected significant support from a number of Department of Defense organizations, such as the Office of the Joint Arms and Ammunition Program. This work, which included six prototype weapons from five different suppliers, was completed in mid-2019 and provided the actual equipment to further inform the army's requirements.

The SIG SAUER (NGSW-R) rifle is based on the battle-proven MCX platform with additional 6.8x51 bullet firepower; Both NGSW-AR and NGSW-R feature familiar AR-style symmetrical ergonomics designed to seamlessly transition from legacy weapons to the SIG NGSW system. Each component of the SIG SAUER NGSW system offers significant improvements in the performance of weapons on the battlefield, starting with the SIG SAUER 6.8x51 hybrid ammunition, a lightweight cartridge designed to withstand higher pressures, resulting in increased speed and performance. While much of the Army's previous work on modernizing the M4 and advances in development likely contributed to the innovations incorporated into the NGSW, the new rifle is built to expand, retune, and significantly increase lethality in close combat. Admittedly, to some extent this may be due to the fact that these weapons will change and refine as competition develops.

The presentation by NGSW-Rifle, known as the MCX Spear, is based on the SIG MCX platform and, according to officials, is partly related to the 2015 Armys Compact Semi-Automatic Sniper System (CSASS) presentation that won Heckler & Koch. SIG is not only a serious contender for the NGSW program, but it recently won the Army's XM17 modular artillery system and now supplies massive amounts of weapons to the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. The Next Generation Combat Weapons Program (NGSW) is a US military program designed to replace the M4 carbine, M249 SAW machine gun and M240 machine gun, and 5.56 mm cartridge.

The MCX spear has a lot of recoil, which SIG says is comparable to a 7.62x51mm chambered weapon system. Although SIG has produced a short-barreled shotgun comparable to the M4A1, it is a heavy weapon. Although the NGSW ammunition is much larger than the standard 5.56 ammunition, it is lighter due to its composite hull structure.

Textron Systems completed its prototype phase and delivered all of it's weapons for government testing; we are closely following the further steps of the army. A source linked to Textrons' involvement in the NGSW program confirmed that Textron is no longer part of the project and that the US Army's next-generation weapons program is now likely among the SIG Sauer and Lone Star Future Weapons proposals (General Dynamics). The program is currently in a competitive prototype iteration with three weapons and ammunition suppliers (SIG Sauer, General Dynamics - OTS and Textron Systems) and two fire control suppliers (Vortex Optics and L3Harris).

Unlike the SIG Sauer and Textrons NGSW prototypes, both General Dynamics two NGSW prototypes are bullpup models, with magazines loaded behind the trigger, for a fairly compact platform. The SIG Sauers rifle and submachine gun models are perhaps the least radical of the three companies seeking a contract with the Armys NGSW. The Sigs NGSW prototype rifle is a version of the AR-style platform developed by weapon manufacturers, and features familiar symmetrical ergonomics to all soldiers and marines, making it easy to upgrade to a new weapon system, officials said.

As part of the collaboration, Beretta also produced components for the second round of testing of the NGSW prototype and performed a range of analyzes including numerical evaluations, finite element analysis and simulations.

During visits to SIG Academy, writers came into contact with various weapon systems, including two prototypes from NGSW, a suppressed version of M17 and MCX Rattler that the military recently adopted as part of the modular pistol system program, which are currently being used by units And review. Special operations forces around the world. SIG is currently in conflict with General Dynamics-OTS and Textron Systems to obtain the privilege of replacing the M4 carbine and M249 Squad assault rifle in the military arsenal. In the following decades, it repositioned itself from the global war on terrorism to an almost equal opponent. The U.S. Army’s infantry, airborne rangers, and special operations forces are developing next-generation automatic rifles, ushering in a new era of close combat between combatants.

• https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/02/03/sig-sauer-delivers-final-next-generation-squad-weapon-prototypes-army.html 
• https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/ngsw-what-the-next-generation-squad-weapons-look-like/
• https://asc.army.mil/web/portfolio-item/fws-cs-2/ 
• https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2021/11/18/textron-ngsw-program/ 
• https://www.textronsystems.com/products/ct-weapons 
• https://tworx.com/the-armys-next-generation-squad-weapon-is-a-big-hit-with-socom/ 
• https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/01/sig-sauer-army-next-generation-squad-weapon-winner/ 
• https://www.sigsauer.com/blog/sig-sauer-completes-final-delivery-of-next-generation-squad-weapon-system-to-us-army 
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Squad_Weapon_Program 
• https://warriormaven.com/future-weapons/next-generation-squad-weapon-ngsw 
• https://taskandpurpose.com/military-tech/sig-sauer-next-generation-squad-weapon-prototypes-hands-on/ 
• https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2021/01/05/armys_next_generation_squad_weapon_could_be_historic_655367.html 
• https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/next-generation-squad-weapon-what-will-army-choose-new-rifle-196500 
• https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2021/10/7/sweating-to-next-gen-soldier-lethality 
• https://engage.l3harris.com/next-gen-squad-weapon-fire-control 
• https://www.defensenews.com/news/2021/10/11/the-armys-m4-m16-and-saw-replacement-is-on-its-way/ 

The VG 1-5 / Gustloff Gerats 507

The Gustloff "VG1-5"

In the final years of WWII, the Nazi regime in Germany was desperate. Desperate for men and the weapons to arm them with. The wild successes of '39 and '40 were almost forgotten; British, American, Canadian, and free European armies had routed the Germans from Africa, tied them down in Italy, and would finally breach the Atlantic Wall. Germany's cities burned under their bombardments. Worst of all, Hitlers adventurism in Russia had ended in complete disaster, and the churning, endless tide of the Red Army advancing on The Reich marked the writing on the wall.

In October of 1944 Hitler founded the Volkssturm, or "peoples militia." Comprised of those previously considered too young, too old, or somehow invalid for service, the Volkssturm was intended to shore up Germany's defenses and help stop the Soviet advance. Volkssturm units were armed with a rag tag assortment of modern and obsolete equipment, including captured Russian, French, and Italian rifles, and even some black powder cartridge rifles ('71 Mausers). They had no uniform or insignia save a black identifying armband, and their training was brief and rudimentary.

In an effort to equip the Volkssturm with more effective weapons, several designs entered production that were developed to maximize the potential of Germany's rapidly shrinking manufacturing capacity, i.e. a lot of bang for a little buck. The Gustloff Gerats 507, or, as it is more commonly and erroneously known, the VG 1-5, is one of those designs.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

The Gustloff is a semi-automatic rifle chambered in 7.92x33 kurz, sharing ammunition and magazines with the famous and innovative StG44 assault rifle. It operates using a gas-delayed blowback system; the bolt does not lock into place and is held against the breech face only by the pressure of the recoil spring. 

VG 1-5 disassembled

Recoiling sleeve and gas rings visible

The design of the Gustloff is as simple as it is unique. Blowback systems rely entirely on the mass of the recoiling assembly as well as spring pressure to counteract the forces of the cartridge being fired and to keep it inside the chamber until pressures drop to a safe level. Practically, there are limits to the power and pressure of cartridges available to be used in such a simple system, and the 7.92x33mm kurz - a cartridge with just a bit less juice than a 7.62x39mm common the Kalashnikov & SKS rifles - is beyond them by no small measure. 

The large barrel sleeve seen above is actually part of the bolt assembly itself. It reciprocates under recoil and is actually used to charge and clear the weapon, much like a giant pistol slide. The barrel of the rifle is ported towards the muzzle area. Gas rings behind the porting and in the barrel sleeve create, in essence, an enormous piston: When the rifle is fired, gas bled off from the barrel of the rifle creates a spike in pressure inside the barrel sleeve, effectively slowing the rearward progression of the bolt in recoil. Once the bullet exits the muzzle of the gun, pressures drop, and the bolt assembly completes its recoil cycle. This is not the most effective method of retarding a blowback system, but it is probably the simplest and cheapest. By all accounts, recoil on the Gustloff was sharper than on similarly chambered rifles, though still not unmanageable. 

Some 10,000 rifles were built before the end of the war. Altogether, it was not an elegant or refined weapon, with crude, non adjustable sights mounted on a recoiling body and spartan furniture. The inability to adjust sighting for elevation in particular was relevant to its effectiveness, because the curvaceous trajectory of the kurz round meant that the rifle hit a foot high at 100 meters and almost a foot and a half low at 300.

Like most last ditch wartime innovations, the Gustloff or VG 1-5 was simply too little, too late for its developers. But it's an interesting footnote in firearms history.

Anyone need a T Gewher?

James Julia auctions has a particularly nice one up on the block. Everyone's gun collection should include a good anti-materiel rifle. 

http://jamesdjulia.com/highlights/?Auct=358&Cons=52022

Finding ammunition could prove to be a problem... I didn't see any 13.2mm TuF on the shelf the last time i was in my local gun store.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJjx2-XmwW0

But then again the bang might be worth the search. And the buck.

The Quest for the Cheap 1911

Probably the ugliest single action only .45acp ever produced.

Another beauty shot of the stamped 1911

 

Move over, Hi-point - there's an even uglier pistol in town. I think referring to this pistol as a 1911 may be a bit of a misnomer. I doubt you could slap that slide onto a mil-spec Colt and expect it to run. And check out that custom trigger. Match grade, no doubt.

The brass framed 1911a1

Another angle of the Brass 1911 

This one is reminiscent of Confederate armories building copies of Colt and Remington revolvers using brass frames to reduce cost. There's precedent for it. Brass is slightly heavier than steel which would have both positive and negative impacts on the pistols utility and performance. 

The Huot: The Light Machine Gun that Almost Was

Timing can make all the difference between a new firearm becoming an obscure and forgotten prototype relegated to either a scrap bin or a museum, and becoming a timeless symbol of the cause and conflicts of its day.

 

  The Huot Automatic Rifle

Joseph Huot's ingenious and resourceful design for a Canadian machine gun was poised to become a military (and for him, commercial) success - then World War 1 ended, no one was desperate for a better automatic rifle, and his foray into the machine gun business ended with him out $30,000 of his own money - about $450,000 in today's currency.

The ingenuity of Huot's project was not in its complexity or sophistication. It worked, and it worked well - outshining its competitors in many respects - but the really fantastic thing about it was that there were already hundreds of thousands of them half built, sitting around waiting to be used for something.

While the Canadian Expeditionary Forces were desperate for more machine guns, they were equally desperate to divest themselves of the failed family of Ross rifles. The Ross is an interesting piece of history in and of itself: smooth and accurate, it would have likely enjoyed a good reputation as a sporting platform if it hadn't had the misfortune of ever encountering French mud.

The Ross mkIII

 The Ross was a straight pull design that retained rotating locking lugs - a threaded interface between bolt head and body "screws" the lugs into battery. When the action was clean, it was faster to operate than a normal bolt action rifle. Unfortunately, when it was filthy dirty in nasty trench mud, it had a tendency not to operate at all. Without going into too much detail, as the war progressed, the Canadian Expeditionary Force ditched the Ross, and re-equipped themselves with SMLE's.

Which brings us back to Joseph Huot, tinkering away in his shop in Richmond, Quebec.

The Huot Automatic Rifle is essentially a heavily modified and rebuilt Ross. Joseph Huot added a gas piston system to the left side of the rifle that acted on the bolt body, added a buffer system to cushion the recoil, and sheathed the whole reciprocating mechanism in sheet metal. The internal magazine was replaced by a 25 round drum. The stock ahead of the magazine well is pared away to accommodate a steel cooling sleeve inspired by the standard commonwealth light machine gun of the day, the Lewis gun.

The Huot (top) and the Lewis compared

The Huot gun was subjected to extensive military trials; by all accounts it performed very well, even outperforming the venerable Lewis in many side-by-side tests. It was a whopping ten pounds lighter, thus handling much faster, and it proved to be more reliable under muddy conditions than the Lewis gun, firing and feeding a wide variety of .303 British ammunition. But the real kicker was the price tag: $50. It only cost $50 to rebuild a Ross rifle into a Huot Automatic Rifle. By comparison, a new Lewis cost $1000. 

Naturally, the Huot was recommended for adoption by both the Canadians and the British, and in late 1917 individual weapons began to trickle their way over to France for field testing. Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the CEF, approved of the new weapon immensely, described them as being popular with the troops that used them, and requested an additional 5000 units. Over the next year further refinements were made to the system - and then the war ended, and the idea was dropped. 

And so the Huot Automatic Rifle did not become an icon of WWI, or Canada's war effort, or see use all through WWII as a supplement to the Bren gun. The Lewis gun did. Timing is everything.

Bizarre Offspring of the M1 Garand.

The M1 Garand was the standard service rifle of the United States Armed Forces for 21 years, from 1936  until 1957 when it was replaced by the M14. A thoroughly dependable, robust weapon, it was the first semi-automatic rifle to become standard issue to any army. It was called "the greatest battle implement ever devised" by Patton, and at that time, he may have been correct; however, that didn't mean Springfield Armory wasn't going to try to improve on it. Years of experimentation and tinkering driven by conflict and curiosity spawned many prototypes and experimental small arms. Some were interesting concepts that simply never made it to production; others were somewhat absurd, and still others eventually evolved into the M14 and it's offshoots. 

Here are a few of them. 

 The mighty Garand.

The M1C and M1D; the M1's well known sniper variants. 

The T20. A select fire Garand that uses BAR magazines. Developed by John Garand himself for the US Army.

The T20E2 had it's own magazines, and couldn't accept BAR magazines. T20E2 magazines however were compatible with the BAR.

A heavy barrelled version of the T20E2 designed to serve as a light machine gun. It is curious that the E2's magazines were compatible with the BAR, but not vice versa since this weapon was essentially conceived to be the BAR's replacement. 

                                          

The T22 was yet another fully automatic, detachable magazine fed variant of the Garand, this time developed by Remington. 

This curious looking light machine gun is designated T22E3HB, "HB" standing for "heavy barrel."

Another T22E3HB, with a slightly different stock. The butt of the rifle is angled up rather than down, to reduce muzzle climb. 

This is the T23. Like the T22, the stock is angled up instead of down. Can you even use the sights effectively on this gun? If anyone knows anything about it, let me know! 

 

The T26 Garand was an experimental carbine that never reached production because of its excessive muzzle flash and extremely loud report. Often referred to colloquially as the "Tanker Garand," this is a misnomer as they were never developed for, never mind issued to, American tank crews. "Tanker Garands" are in fact commercially modified or assembled weapons made for civilian shooters. 

The T27 was a standard Garand that was modified for fully automatic fire. Developed by Remington, Garands already in the field could be converted using a replacement fire control system. You can see the selector switch directly above the trigger.

The T31. Everything needs a bullpup variant!

An offshoot of the T20E2, the T36 was chambered in .30 T65/7.62x51mm NATO. 

The T37 and T47 prototypes. 7.62x51mm, select fire, feeding from 20 round box magazines and sporting shortened gas systems. The T47 competed unsuccessfully against the T44 (better known as the M14) and the T48 (better known as the FN FAL) in US Army trials. The T44 won out, and the M14 was born.