Where's my thinking

War has shown that the theory of wounding one enemy and thus forcing their squadmates to carry them away thereby reducing the total amount of enemy combatants is no longer effective in the age of bodyarmor. Thus the US Army is implementing a program called the Next Generations Squad Weapons Program or NGSW program to combat these new found issues. After mutliple testing from five major companies, SigSauer M7 Rifle and M250 Machinegun have been selected to replace the venerated m4 carbine platform and the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon System both of which take the 5.56x45mm NATO round. As the Army has begun the transistion from the 5.56 platform to the M7 and M250 platforms that fire the 6.8x51mm round. they have also implemented a new smart scope by Vortex optics that allows for electronic linking of scopes between warfighters, range finding, and other abilities that tradition optics cannot do. However the NGSW program has received backlash from the civilian gun community that has historically been both very politically aligned with the right and rather hesistant to accept changes in gun culture especially when it comes to major ones like caliber changes for the US army. Conversely recent reports from the 101st and 82nd Airborne have shown praises of the M7 rifle and M250 MG (machine gun) cover penetration, range and ability to supress adversial warfighters. However there have been complaints regarding the new weapons systems's weight, and reduced ammo capacity from 30 rounds to only 20 rounds. However those complaints seem to be far and few between as many of our warfighters who have fired the NGSW system have stated it is a great change for the US military in the face of a possible war with either RU or CN forces.

As of now my question regarding this program is how will this change affect the US Army's ability to move supplies from the manufactures to FOB and Permanent Bases around the world. How long will the change from the 5.56x45mm round to the new 6.8x51mm round take seeing how we have used the 5.56x45mm round since the 60s.

DMU Timestamp: February 26, 2025 22:37