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After 13 years of searching for the US Army’s next pistol, a successor to the Beretta M9 has been selected. However, with the selection of the SIG P320 as the M17 and M18 Modular Handgun System, many individuals in the industry have been compelled to cry foul and demand the Army retry the competition between the two finalists, Glock and SIG.

In three previous articles, we briefly discussed some of the tradeoffs involved in the bullpup concept, and some of the challenges they face in the field of military procurement specifically.  Today, we’re going to continue this deep-dive into the bullpup concept by examining how the selection of either a bullpup or conventional layout affects concurrent development of a new ammunition system. In other words, we are going to address the question: Given the same performance requirements, how does having a longer or shorter barrel affect the characteristics of a new type of ammunition?

Since its introduction in 2009, the Marine Corps’ M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle has proven itself as an effective support weapon that offers more firepower and range than the Corps’ other squad level weapons, the M4 Carbine and M16A4 Rifle. This good reception has led many within the Corps to reach an obvious conclusion: The USMC should simply replace their M4s and M16A4s in the Infantry Battalions with M27 IARs. This idea gained so much traction that the USMC has experimented with arming an entire battalion with IARs, and even released an RFI to the industry for 11,000 more IARs.

Regardless of whether you own firearms for recreation, sport, or defense, it is a fact of life that any gun is an attractive target for theft. For the most part, gun enthusiasts would rather keep discussions within a comfortable zone of topics about technical and aesthetic characteristics of the guns themselves, but from time to time it is necessary to sober up and talk about theft prevention and mitigation. No, it’s not always fun to talk about the possibility of someone else entering your home or domicile and taking that which is not rightfully theirs, but that is what we will be tackling today.

Much of the recent discourse regarding the future of infantry combat has centered around the long engagement distances encountered during the Afghan campaign, and the rise of designated marksmen as key elements in the infantry squad. However, arguably more important than the long-range ambushes of the Taliban were the urban engagements in both that campaign and the operations in Iraq. It seems the highest echelons of the US Army agree, as Chief of Staff General Mark Milley commented recently about the future urbanization of the battlefield (via Military.com):

Recently, I wrote  an article about one negative aspect of bullpups which is caused by their much-touted rearward balance. Even though its scope was extremely limited, this article caused a lot of discontent in my comments section, and many of my readers expressed a feeling that I was trying to slam bullpups or otherwise promote conventional rifles as the ideal weapons. In this post, therefore, I wanted to address the underlying issue behind this: How do I really feel about bullpups? Put differently, which do I think is better, bullpups, or conventionals?

I know that I am not going to make any friends by writing this, but that never stopped me before, so why not? Here goes: Pistol caliber carbines don’t make a whole lot of sense for the American rifle buyer, or at least not most of the offerings on the market right now.

Quick: What’s the definition of “assault rifle”? I’ll give you a moment to think about it.

As a researcher and history enthusiast, one of the issues I often have to wrestle with is that of eyewitness accounts, specifically when to trust them and when not to. That subject itself is one for another time, but today I want to look at a specific example of an eyewitness account as an illustration of how they can be misleading to someone trying to reconstruct historical events.

Is the Steyr 1907 Still Relevant?

In what appears to fly in the face of the Bureau’s prior attitudes towards enforcement of gun laws, a white paper by BATFE Associate  Deputy Director Ronald Turk was recently leaked which proposed loosening or modifying gun regulations in sixteen ways, to be discussed below. If you have not yet read Nicholas’ post on the leak, you can do that, and also follow the link here to the white paper itself. In this article, I’ll be taking a (hopefully) brief look at what the white paper means and why it’s so significant (and it is significant, don’t get me wrong).

This is a matter that I don’t see a good reason to spend much time on, so I’ll keep it brief. One thing that I find curious in the firearms world is the rejection of the term “accidental discharge” (often shortened “AD”) referring to a an unintentional discharge of a firearm in favor of the variant “negligent discharge” (ND). Under most circumstances this would seem like just a quirk of the community and its own specific vocabulary, but we see something a little stranger than that. Often, we see policing within the firearms sphere which demands the use of the word “negligent” in lieu of “accidental”, as if the latter were for some reason damaging or improper.

Military procurement is a very precise business, in which the costs, drawbacks, and benefits of different ideas and proposals are weighed in the balance, and those that don’t make the grade are relegated to research status or cancelled outright. It’s also a very messy business, rife with opportunities for graft and corruption, and one that by its nature is prone to wasting money. It’s certainly true that our current system of military procurement badly needs reform to prevent waste of taxpayer dollars and to ensure the best equipment is purchased at the right price.

In the first two parts of this article on a new long range infantry rifle paradigm, we painted a picture of what sort of weapons would be needed to maximize the infantry’s long-range capability, in theory allowing them to achieve “overmatch” versus enemy infantry armed with existing .22 and .30 caliber weapons. We created estimates for both the cost and weight of the infantry rifle, and we also examined the problem of training soldiers to maximize their capabilities with the new longer-ranged weapons.

Recent experience in Afghanistan, coupled with concerns about the effectiveness of the M4 Carbine – and perhaps also just a general long-term swing of the pendulum – has spurred many to advocate for a new configuration of infantry weapon centered around long range fire enabled by compact, efficient ammunition firing low-drag projectiles. I am not one of these advocates, and indeed it’s no secret that I find serious flaws with this approach to infantry small arms weapons systems. Still, this idea of having a long-range sharpshooter-centric force does seem to be gaining ground, and therefore I think it would be worthwhile to take some time to go down that rabbit hole and see where it leads. Our eventual goal in this endeavor is to paint a picture of a future infantry force that lives and works with these weapons, and what compromises they have to make to reap the benefits of such powerful long-range weapons.