#ARDEC

Army Contracting Command, New Jersey, have issued a synopsis/solicitation to negotiate a five year indefinite quantity contract with firm fixed price orders for a number of SIG Sauer weapon systems including rifles, submachine guns, pistols and suppressors.

The US Army Contracting Command, New Jersey, posted a sources sought notice for a ‘Modular Combat Shotgun’ based upon the Remington 870 on 23 May.

The concept of stacking projectiles on top of each other inside a self-contained cartridge dates back to the 19th century. It has subsequently been revisited dozens of times by arms designers from all over the world. In the 1950s the US Military experimented with duplex (two projectiles) and multiplex (multiple projectiles) cartridges during Project SALVO. This experimentation eventually led to the creation of the 7.62x51mm M198 Duplex round.

A confidential source has revealed to TFB the current contestants that have passed the most recent phase of the Next Generation Squad Automatic Rifle Competition (NGSAR). This phase is less of an actual competition between small arms prototypes but more of a theoretical feasibility of design concepts before any trials progression ensues. Results from this recent Prototype Opportunity Notice (PON) showed that out of ten industry contestants, only six were advanced to the next stage of the competition. These six companies are in order of most successful: Aircraft Armaments, Inc. Textron (AAI Textron), PCP Tactical (a division of PCP Ammunition), Sig Sauer, General Dynamics Ordnance & Tactical Systems (GT-OTS), and two entries from FN America (labeled as Lightweight and Adaptive).

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. 

In the comments section of my recent Brief Thoughts article regarding caseless ammunition, there was a discussion about whether the cookoff issues of caseless would also be problem for LSAT-style polymer cased telescoped ammunition. Based on conversations I have had with subject matter experts regarding polymer cased ammunition in general, I noted that a lower cookoff threshold is one of the challenges I would expect CT ammunition developers to face. However, after some back-and-forth in the comments, I decided to contact LSAT/CTSAS program officer Kori Phillips regarding this issue (as it was not something I covered in my three-part interview with her), and she kindly agreed to allow her comments on the matter to be published here on TFB. They are below:

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.

Caseless: The ammunition designer’s holy grail, and the engineer’s worst nightmare. It would obsolete the cartridge case overnight, resulting in cheaper, lighter, and more compact ammunition. Weapons would be able to carry 50, 60, or more rounds in slim, inexpensive magazines, and expel them at a rate of fire much higher than current weapons are capable of – not only because the ammunition is lighter and therefore more could be carried to feed such thirsty guns, but because the extraction and ejection cycles of the weapons themselves could be eliminated.

Working under contract from the Army’s Research, Development, and Engineering Command (RDECOM), AimLock, a subsidiary of Rocky Mountain Scientific Laboratory, developed an actively stabilized weapons chassis for AR-15 rifles. AimLock has been in the news before for their stabilized rifle platform, which was shown off in a presentation at the 2016 National Defense Industry Association conference and subsequently reported on in Futurism and Popular Mechanics, and, of course, here at TFB.

At the 2017 Association of the United States Army annual meeting (AUSA 2017), US Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command (RDECOM) presented a concept for the US Army’s future soldier of the 2030 timeframe, which promised everything from powered exoskeletons, to futuristic optics, to individual network capability. I captured the Command’s two future soldier concept demo videos that were running at the conference, embedded below:

We have already seen the 6.5mm CT Carbine prototype brought out by Textron for the 2017 Association of the United States Army annual meeting, but TFB also got an up close and personal look at Textron’s cased telescoped machine guns. Textron has two different cased telescoped belt fed weapons in testing right now: A 5.56mm CT light machine gun, and a 7.62mm CT medium or general purpose machine gun.

At the 2017 Association of the US Army (AUSA) Annual Meeting, Textron System displayed for the very first time their firing 6.5mm CT Carbine prototype. Previously, only non-firing mockups had been shown to the public, but after successful tests this summer the real thing was brought out to show at the conference, where TFB got its first look at the weapon.

At the 2017 National Defense Industry Association’s annual Armament Systems Forum in April, representatives of the US Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC) presented a new method for measuring and quantifying gas blowback with suppressed firearms. The testing was conducted in the service of creating a new standard test procedure for gas blowback, for the Army, NATO, and the industry. Importantly, the test procedure involved mounting air inlets in locations corresponding to the shooter’s face when firing the rifle, which gives accurate measurements for what quantity of toxic gases reach the shooter’s face during operation.