To follow up in light of the prior post, I want to share my tangible dislike for 5.56 NATO, and offer why I think that there is such an effort underway to replace it without admitting that, for too many decades, the NATO countries have been fielding an inferior round, whether in a civilian or military context.
Let's start with some quick history on the "Generations" of war.
1st Generation - people line up in formation and directly attack each other. Think phalanx.
2nd Generation - people use indirect means to attack each other and then move. Think artillery and guns.
3rd Generation - people move quicker than indirect means can react to directly collapse fighting ability. Think supply lines.
4th Generation - people move quicker than direct and indirect means to indirectly collapse fighting ability. Think troop morale.
The 5.56 NATO round was developed for participation in 2nd Generation warfare. As of the end of World War II, the Allies still had not yet adopted 3rd Generation warfare, instead largely overwhelming the Axis 3rd Generation forces with raw production capacity. The Allies sat on more resources, so even if what they made was of lower quality, they could make more of it and bring it to bear to a sufficient degree to find success.
And yes, these are gross oversimplifications of complicated topics, but for the sake of this conversation it doesn't really need to be more complicated than this for now.
After World War II, the fixation with controlled automatic fire really took hold. It had started in World War I with trench warfare, where instead of a fighting force being arrayed on a battlefield and "fighting" according to "rules", a lot of the conflict from the perspective of the average foot soldier was considerably more intimate and less organized.
Running across an open field between trenches was often suicide, either because it was dark, you might step on a mine, or perhaps most commonly because automatic weapons were able to provide a relatively small number of forces the ability to provide suppressive fire over a very large area. Presuming you did make it into an enemy trench, you weren't taking shots from long range either, but instead were in very close quarters, and without a lot of time available to react to stumbling upon an enemy in the same trench.
World War II didn't have quite the same amount of trench activity, but many of the dynamics were instead replicated in urban environments. Instead of a trench, it was a building, and again the engagement range for the average solder wasn't going to be nearly as far away as past conflicts where likely apocryphal advice such as "don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes" may have ever made sense, let alone be considered good advice.
With the average foot soldier not being the primary means by which force is applied, the requirements for the firearms that such a solder would wield also changed. While in the entry to World War II the rifles were rather similar in power to hunting rifles, this was "overkill" in the tight constraints of urban or trench warfare. The rounds used were very effective well out to a thousand yards, but nobody was lining up at a thousand yards or more and marching towards each other anymore either.
The need was for something lightweight, able to deal with basic body armor, able to fire rapidly, and able to carry the quantities of ammunition required to provide suppressive fire. This is where the AR-15 is a genuinely good rifle in concept, except that even in World War II, trying to operate on a 2nd Generation warfare mindset was still detrimental and cost the Allies many more lives than was necessary.
This disparity is seen in that, not much more than a decade prior, the 7.62 NATO round had been developed and adopted. Criticized for recoil and the inability to easily control automatic fire, the 7.62 NATO was maligned because it was, in essence, a round meant for 1st Generation warfare, and so while it offered better portability than the rounds it sought to replace, it was not a universal solution.
The 5.56 NATO was the tacit admission that the solder, the individual, was no longer the most important resource on the battlefield. Their judgment, their lethal capacity, was now secondary. The failure of the round in Vietnam is largely due to the fact that, without clearly defined "fronts", you cannot wage 2nd Generation warfare.
If you and the enemy are in the same jungle, fighting over inch by inch, then it won't matter if you've got access to napalm and artillery, because there's no clear "their territory" for you to soften up with indirect fire so that your soldiers can then sweep in to mop up whatever is left and occupy the newly claimed territory. Vietnam showed the folly of the desire for controlled automatic fire, in that while there are certainly circumstances where it is beneficial, it is not a universal solution either.
Oh, there were certainly efforts to save face. There was a study which apparently showed that more smaller caliber bullets put into roughly the same area as a single larger bullet would do more damage than the single larger bullet. This is what drove the need for controlled automatic fire, the idea being that a soldier could do more damage. Except that there is always a trade-off. If it takes 2-3 smaller bullets to surpass the damage from a single larger bullet, then a magazine of 30 smaller rounds does not necessarily have "more firepower" than a magazine of just 10 larger rounds.
The next attempt to save face was in trying to address 3rd Generation warfare dynamics. If, instead of outright killing, you only severely maim an enemy, then they'll have resources caught up in trying to help their fallen but not yet dead comrade. That, if instead of killing, you can overburden your enemy such that their supply chain falls apart and they can no longer fight effectively against you, then you "win". Instead of indirect, this was a direct statement towards reducing the lethal capacity of the individual soldier, while at the same time trying to pretend that we weren't literally weakening our soldier's ability to do their job of being the best at killing people and breaking things.
By the time these types of discussions wore thin and it became clear there wasn't much to them, one of my all-time favorite excuses shows up:
"It would be too costly to change now."
You know, because prior bad decisions mature like wine, and show themselves to be better over time, right?
Because the USA and NATO countries can rely on mass production power to deal with hostiles, right?
How many rabbits would it take, outside your door right now, before you started worrying about your safety?
Large quantities of relative impotence does not make that which is relatively impotent less so, but the popular theory is that if it's popular, and it's common, then it must be good.
Now, the 5.56 NATO is not something I'd want to be shot by. I do say relative impotence, because I don't ever want to get shot at all. But if I am in a hot civil war, I'd much rather be shot by the modern 5.56 NATO from an AR-15 than a bolt action .30-06, or old lever action .45-70 Govt.
You see, because while the theory behind controlled automatic fire seems solid, if you're in an urban or trench conflict, you don't want to announce your presence any more than is necessary, and if you're doing automatic fire that's a huge giveaway of your position and location if you're doing anything other than really short bursts for very short periods of time.
A single shot is hard to trace because you can't be quite sure if what you heard was reflected off a surface or not. Our positional location system for hearing requires more than a single data point to operate effectively. That's why, when even simple animals hear a noise, they turn to face it and keep listening. Sure, there are some animals that are sufficiently skittish that at certain sounds they'll just run, but those ones tend to be survivors of when they heard that noise and didn't run before, and learned shortly thereafter to just run whenever they heard that sound again.
On top of that, if you are under suppressive fire, the idea that you don't have time to take an aimed shot would also mean you don't have time to jump out and spray-and-pray either. The weapon being automatic doesn't change that you have to expose certain important parts of your body to take even a quick and poorly aimed burst of shots.
So the 5.56 NATO was really only ever "good" for a war that ended before it was developed, and yet is still being touted as effective today. 3rd Generation warfare may be thought of a "Guerilla Warfare", but the 4th Generation is most easily associated with "terrorism". No longer do you even have a formal fighting force, let alone supply lines to be disrupted, and you're fighting in an asymmetrical war where deescalating at the physical level helps to win the conflicts at the moral, exactly where does the need for controlled automatic fire find its place?
If the only acceptable uses of force must be quick and decisive and infrequent, exactly what benefit is there to carrying around the capacity to provide suppressive fire?
What we're seeing is a breakdown of those higher tiers of hardware and a return to the value of the individual soldier. It won't matter if you've got air superiority if the people who would man the aircraft carrier are demoralized and don't want to fight. It won't matter if you've got thousands of rounds of ammunition stored away if it's no more effective than what everyone else is carrying and the best you can do is equal someone else. It won't matter if you've got the latest technology if you don't have the hearts of the people you're supposedly fighting for.
What we're seeing is a shift back to a prior dynamic, as seen in the "Wild West" mythos. The Sheriff has a band of bandits that are causing problems, but there is hesitance because if the Sheriff is "just as bad" as the bandits, then the townspeople are as likely to evict him as support him in driving out the bandits. The different generations of warfare address a scope of conflict that requires "a state" in order to act for or against. A nation, a people, some sort of formal group that can be clearly identified.
We're already seeing how modern conflict looks more like the Sheriff maintaining order in a frontier town than the soldier in a trench trying to claim control of more dirt. There aren't clearly defined "sides", nobody is wearing a uniform, and there is no "front line". People can attain a position of power through both legitimate and illegitimate means, and the difference between a "good" or a "bad" Sheriff may only be down to perspective and whether their actions benefited you or not.
I ultimately dislike the 5.56 NATO because it represents a solution to a single problem which was then used on every other problem whether it made sense or not, and this was sustained for so long not because of superior performance but because of a lack of viable competition. It's not a "bad" round, it has a role and a purpose, but from the standpoint of a civilian in a country on the brink of a hot civil war, it's only popular because it's popular, not because it is the best solution to any of the problems we'll face.
The United States government has started looking to replace the round because the possibility of armed conflict, whether national or international, is looming, and the methods and equipment we've got are all rather old, optimized for philosophies which are no longer viable, let alone whether they were a "good" solution in the first place. The 5.56 NATO round owes its current status due to inertia more than its actual performance capability.
Certainly, 5.56 NATO will be plentiful for a long time, but trees are also not in short supply either and I don't hear of many folks bragging about their stockpiles of arrows. A weapon, absent any competition, can certainly be competitive, but for tacticool folks relying on 5.56 NATO, they're quickly going to find themselves outclassed by even just their local hunting community.
History has many examples of those who can make the most being ruled over by those who can make the most of what they have.
Don't blindly buy into hype. Maybe the 5.56NATO would work in your situation, and if so, use it. Make that determination honestly by evaluating the performance of the round, not just on whether you can sufficiently accessorize the gun that shoots it, or find replacement parts for keeping it maintained properly when you've shot a few thousand rounds through it.
Wrapping up, if everybody has the same tools, then there is no longer any advantage. Stack the odds in your favor now, while everybody else is busy trying to conform to what is "popular". Think ahead and don't just go with what "worked before".
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