Army's new machine gun will blast like battle tanks

apdst said:

Not completely different. What they have in common is the use of highly accurate fire to engage and destroy specific point targets, usually of high value to the enemy. Both are expected to deliver fire that is far more accurate at greater ranges than a rifleman.

The designated marksman is one of the squad's/platoon's counter-sniper assets. His accuracy needs to be above average.

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I'm not sure that's correct.

By "highly accurate fire" you mean they hit man sized targets that they aim at. However they don't have to be of particular high value.

A sniper may just be taking out enemy soldiers to slow an advance - yes he will look for officers/leaders and radio operators but not exactly high value.


The sharp shooter(s) is really there to increase the range of the section/squad. So if a patrol comes across an enemy say 500+ meters away, it might be out of the range of the 5.56mm rifles. Desert and mountainous terrain usually see fire fights at greater ranges.
The sharpshooter isn't looking for high value targets as such, just any enemy he can see that's firing as his section/squad.

StillBallin75 said:

Maybe the SAWs I have experience with are just ****ty SAWs, I dunno. One of my friends and squadmates is a prior service Marine said he would take an IAR over a SAW any day of the week. I think we need to challenge the conventional wisdom that suppression due to volume is somehow worth more than suppression due to rapid/sustained, accurate fire which is what the IAR gives you.

And yes, not to fellate our sister service but I think the Army does need to change the way we teach marksmanship and take a page out of the Corps' book. I'd rather spend a whole day on a zero range or a KD range refining my fundamentals than trying to qual at pop up targets repeatedly. However, even given a poor shooter (which a lot of SAW gunners are lol), the IAR is still a smaller MoA weapon system.

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The saw has a massive benefit of high ammo capacity meaning sustained rate of fire much greater than magazine fed. The main use of the saw I have seen in the military is suppressive fire, given how many rounds it can hold, and having hot swappable barrels makes it perfect for that task, especially when there is a team of saw gunners.


On army marksmenship, there is some variability, their basic marksmen skills required are very well basic, but they go up to competitions like shooting 500 yards with open sights with an m16 with a spotter, and spotters for iron sights are a dying breed. The m16 and ar15 platform in general has highly effective range of 300 yards/meters, and it's effective kill range is higher, with 500 meters pushing the platform to it's limits of accuracy. The ar15 platform was never meant to be a sniper rifle, it is 3-5 moa and designed to handle short through long range shooting, and allow the common soldier to carry a rifle capable of most tasks in the military, rather than issuing multiple special weapons forces wide.

Your average soldier is not going to shoot past 300 meters in any situation, even in the battle fields of europe 2-300 meters was usually where they would fire at, and anything past 1000 meters with iron sights was often considered volley fire, meaning raining down bullets with little accuracy hoping it would hit something. I have a ww2 russian mosin made in russia, the sights go up to 2k meters, or arshin or something because they often meshed metric and russian standard together depending on when it was made and what rifles they merged together, but 500 meters was often the safe point, 1k was pushing the 7.62 round short of heavy modifications and specially selected sniper rounds, and 2k was volley, meaning it will hit in that general area.

Rich2018 said:

I'm not sure that's correct.

By "highly accurate fire" you mean they hit man sized targets that they aim at. However they don't have to be of particular high value.

A sniper may just be taking out enemy soldiers to slow an advance - yes he will look for officers/leaders and radio operators but not exactly high value.


The sharp shooter(s) is really there to increase the range of the section/squad. So if a patrol comes across an enemy say 500+ meters away, it might be out of the range of the 5.56mm rifles. Desert and mountainous terrain usually see fire fights at greater ranges.
The sharpshooter isn't looking for high value targets as such, just any enemy he can see that's firing as his section/squad.

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I said "usually" not strictly high value targets. The point is, a fire support element will have a machine gunner and a designated marksman. The machine gunner is going to be lighting up the whole area. The designated marksman will be looking for targets such as leaders, machine gunners, mortarmen, anti-armor gunners, radio operators, etc. Obviously there will be scanarios where there's an exception, but the objective is always to degrade the enemy's ability to inflict casualties. A designated marksman can help do that by specifically targeting three elements of combat power: firepower, leadership and communications.

apdst said:

I said "usually" not strictly high value targets. The point is, a fire support element will have a machine gunner and a designated marksman. The machine gunner is going to be lighting up the whole area. The designated marksman will be looking for targets such as leaders, machine gunners, mortarmen, anti-armor gunners, radio operators, etc. Obviously there will be scanarios where there's an exception, but the objective is always to degrade the enemy's ability to inflict casualties. A designated marksman can help do that by specifically targeting three elements of combat power: firepower, leadership and communications.

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I don't think that's right either

The USMC seem to be ditching the machine gun at squad level and going for automatic (and aimed of course) rifle fire.

At section/squad level, yes if issued a machine gun, the gunner will be firing at the area in front of them...often where the concentration of enemy is the greatest.

Riflemen will be taking out individual targets.

The sharpshooter has a rifle with greater range so whilst he may be taking out higher value targets, often he is the only one firing because the other riflemen don't have the range and the machine gunner is too inaccurate.


Perhaps an 8 man section should have 4x HK-416 and 4x HK-417.

(two of the HK-416 armed soldiers also having a grenade launcher attached to the rifle).


It may be that the machine gun is relegated to a company level support weapon or a weapon mounted on vehicles.