#NextGenerationSquadAutomaticRifle

The NGSAR is dead, long live the NGSW. We haven’t heard much from the US Army about its next generation infantry weapons programme since the announcement of six contract awards for the Next Generation Squad Automatic Rifle (NGSAR) back in June. Just a week before the Association of the United States Army (AUSA)’s 2018 annual meeting Army Contracting Command has released a new draft Next Generation Squad Weapons Prototype Opportunity Notice (PON).

Confirming our report back in June that the US Army’s future Next Generation Squad Automatic Rifle program has identified five current contestants and awarded opportunity notice awards to facilitate prototype development.

The US Army’s Next Generation Squad Automatic Rifle (NGSAR) program is moving forward with a Prototype Opportunity Notice scheduled for publication later this week. The US Army Contracting Command has issued a draft Prototype Opportunity Notice (PON) for the NGSAR. Before the PON is issued the Contracting Command is looking for feedback on its draft PON from industry partners. The Army has previously held industry days for the NGSAR programme. Feedback is requested no later than 8th March, making the publication of the final PON imminent.

At an AUSA breakfast conference yesterday, US Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley gave us a hint at exactly what the US Army’s next rifle could look like, and the focus was on extended range capability. The rifle, Milley said, will give a 10x improvement in capability through the type of ammunition, optics, and degree of chamber pressure specific to it, with the aim of providing the soldier a weapon with much more accuracy and range than the current M4 Carbine. Milley also clarified that the term “10x” was not intended to be a precise measurement of the capability growth, but rather a term indicating significant improvement. The new rifle will come as part of an effort that also includes new artillery, tanks, aircraft, and virtual reality training facilities, Milley said.

It’s almost 3 in the morning, and I’m lying awake in bed thinking about small arms. I’m trying to put everything out of my mind so I can go to sleep and wake up in the morning, go to the range, and bring you some raw ballistic data. So of course what pops into my head is an almost complete article about just why the Army’s latest whizzbang rifle program is doomed to collapse in a heap. All I have to do is write it.

Is the US Army pushing for a new high-powered 6.Xmm caliber with their new NGSAR program? Recently, the listing for the NGSAR industry day in December was updated with a document describing in part the agenda of the second conference. Scheduled for 9:45 in the morning in the document is a 15 minute long presentation on “Ammunition Data – Surrogate Projectile and Specs”, presented by Todd Townsend, David Charowsky, and Mark Minisi. Minisi’s name may not be well-known, but it will be familiar to astute students of recent wound ballistics literature: It was Minisi who developed the finite element analysis-based tissue damage model, which has been refined over the past decade at ARDEC through PM Maneuver Ammunition Systems (PM-MAS). Mr. Townsend is also likely representing PM-MAS, now under the leadership of Colonel Hector Gonzalez. 

Rest in Peace Interim Combat Service Rifle, we hardly knew thee. The Army’s ICSR program has joined the much more ambitious Advanced Combat Rifle program of the 1980s and the more recent ill-fated Individual Carbine program in the annals of US Army rifle procurement history.

The US Army will be holding a second Industry Day for its Next Generation Squad Automatic Rifle program, which seeks to replace the M249 light machine gun with a new longer-ranged, lower signature automatic rifle. The Industry Day will be held at Picatinny Arsenal on December 12th and 13th. The Army is also accepting white papers concerning NGSAR by January 16th, 2018. The updated NGSAR listing is available here.

After over 30 years of using the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, it seems the US Army may be moving away from the concept of squad-level belt-fed automatic firepower in favor of a lower-capacity but more precise (and probably magazine-fed) weapon. In a recent Special Notice posted to FBO.gov, the US Army formally announced its intention to replace the M249 with a magazine-fed weapon, dubbed the Next Generation Squad Automatic Rifle (NGSAR). The Special Notice also announced a classified set of Industry Days for demonstration of potential NGSAR weapons, to be held July 25-27 of this year. The new Special Notice seems more similar to a Request for Information (RFI) than a Request for Proposal (RFP), and explicitly states that no contracts will be awarded or offers accepted: