There's not a ton written about this that I can find, but cracks are appearing in the US military's plan to replace the M4 with a heavier battle rifle designed to defeat body armor. Sig Sauer, which also holds contracts for the current generation pistol and LMG, won a contract last year to also provide the US military with a new rifle. This rifle is to be called the XM7. The civilian equivalent is the Sig Spear. Calling this thing an assault rifle is a bit of a stretch, as it is very heavy and uses heavy ammunition. It turns out that the rifle is failing to penetrate modern body armor without the use of tungsten bullets. Also its reliability is questionable.
My assumption is that you can hit a guy wearing body armor with the rifle and it will do damage.
That was the point, but it's failed at that.
They wanted to penetrate level four armour (rated up to black tip 30.06) with the new 6.8x51mm ammunition without needing any special cores or armour penetrating ammunition, due to the increased efficiency of the 6.8x51 vs the 7.62x51.
But that increased efficiency is no where near as big as they thought it would be, so the new 6.8x51 ammunition cannot do that. Just like the 7.62x51 ammunition, the 6.8x51 needs a tungsten core to penetrate level four armour. Which makes it's entire existence pointless.
The military is in the exact same situation as before, needing the special ammunition to defeat level four body armour. And they can't go back to 5.56 ammunition for the new guns, because even green tip armour penetrating 5.56 can already be defeated by level 3+ body armour.
No I mean take the rifle and clobber the enemy over the head with it.
:think-about-it:
Lol. It is heavier, so honestly probably the only thing it does better than the other guns.
:data-laughing: