#RequestForInformation

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. 

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:

It feels like déjà vu: India has once again issued a Request For Information (RFI) for a new rifle, this time in 7.62x51mm NATO caliber. The RFI was reportedly issued on the 27th of September, making it two and a half months between the nation’s government announcing they were preparing the document, and actually issuing it. DefenseWorld reports on the RFI’s contents: