US Army OFFICIALLY HAS A NEW PRIMARY WEAPON

the us army is officially switching to the six eight by 51 millimeter xm5 main battle rifle and the xm250 machine gun it's gonna replace the decades old five five six millimeter m4 and m249 this is an expensive switch valued at a total of 4.5 billion dollars over the course of the next 10 years this massive change signals to us that the us military is worried about confronting a major world superpower like china and russia this is the most historic change in over half a century for the us military i have a theory as to why the only weapon they didn't replace is the m240 but we'll get into that later everyone else gets to retire but you back to work m240 any change in the military at this scale will be risky and there will be the possibility that this will be a huge mistake at the very least there's going to be challenges ahead to overhaul the military's training tactics and fighting doctrine in this video we're going to examine if the us army is up to the task did they make the right decision or a giant blunder by switching to the 68xm5 okay i have a quick update on the behind the scenes at task and purpose as you know we're investing a lot of money into the freelance video editors full-time staff we're making the best content we can but in order to do that we need to partner with like-minded companies like deal dash deal dash reached out they said they like our style over here i looked at their app and i said you know what the feeling is mutual as you know i just moved so i'm always looking for deals there's a lot of stuff that i need that i don't have right now and deal dash is a great place to go and get just about anything you can imagine for instance i know they got playstation 5 on there they have cars on there i saw a ps5 get sold for 143 the way it works is you buy bids each bid is about 15 cents then you go to an item that you like and then you bid on it say i want this dunkin donuts gift card it instantly tells you where you are on the competition for that item check out this wilson and miller tactical combat flashlight value of 65 sold for 48 cents here and the best part is shipping is always free if you want to know a little bit more about why i trust dealdash they've been around for 13 years i want to talk about how to scale business they've grown to over 20 million users at this point it's a win-win here because it helps support the channel and it can also get you great deals by next year in october of 2023 the us army will have acquired 16 348 of the xm5 battle rifles and 1704 of the xm250 bell-fed machine guns those will be handed out to the close fighting force once those rifles reach troops the weapons will be reclassified to the m5 and the m250 dropping the x from the name this signifies that the initial trial phase is over and they're ready to go into full production at that point they will scale up to arming 120 000 soldiers with these weapons that number represents all of the infantry cav scouts combat engineers medics and forward observers remember only about 25 percent of soldiers are actually combat arms roles so the rest like your supply logistics soldiers they will all likely be holding on to the m4 for the foreseeable future the initial order will cost taxpayers around 20.4 million dollars an additional 20 million dollars was awarded to begin production of the revolutionary new 6 8 by 51 millimeter steel hybrid brass ammunition at utah's lake city plant this location produces about 2 billion rounds of ammunition each year which will represent the vast majority of u.s military small arms ammo at the end of the competition it came down to the two very different weapon systems the army chose not to go with the bullpup and its polymer plastic cased ammo some of the potential reasons for why i think they made this decision is that it might have come down to the fact that general dynamics did not have a belt-fed machine gun option it could have been seen as the more risky of the two options you know bureaucratic organizations are notoriously risk adverse and it could be the case that the army was worried soldiers wouldn't be able to adjust to the bullpups easily it's also very possible i think that sig's weapons were far more accurate and had better effects on target as many of you know i've been following this weapons competition very closely for the past three years my unhealthy obsession with this program is what brought many of you to subscribing to this channel in the first place over the years i've received a lot of comments about how this weapon would never be adopted and how it would end up on the much beloved forgotten weapons channel in a year's time many people said i was an idiot forever even thinking the army would pull the trigger on this switch well jokes on you it turns out that has nothing to do with the reason why i'm an idiot to put how big this change is into perspective when you look at every other major military around the world pretty much all currently use a weapon and ammo type that is similar to the smaller five five six millimeter m4 including russia and china here just take a look at how much bigger the xm5 is compared to russia's ak-12 yes i got the scale perfect and china's qbz 191 now look at their ammunition side by side compare it to china that's a lot of extra firepower in fact the us military are the very ones who originally created the whole trend of switching away from a giant caliber to a small one back in the 1960s but some analysts believe this is a high caliber mistake the army times published an article outlining all the reasons why some believe this is a return to the old obsolete high-powered battle rifle philosophy from the 1950s the m14 was replaced in the 1960s for a lot of the same reasons that military analysts are critical of the new ngsw because it was twice as heavy it took a longer time to train on because of the higher recoil it only had 20 round magazines instead of 30 rounds you could only carry half the amount of ammo because it was heavier and its recoil was twice as powerful which made it difficult to make follow-up shots so what's going on here it sounds like the army is clearly taking a step backwards to this old outdated type of rifle with the xm5 i believe there are three key technologies that have changed warfare drastically since the 1950s and are forcing this change to happen now first the rise of cheap scopes second the creation of ballistic body armor third new firearms and ammunition manufacturing techniques these are the reasons why i think this concept is necessary today and would have been nearly impossible to pull off if we tried it even 10 years ago since the 1950s there have been an explosion in firearms scope technology it wasn't until very recently in the past 10 years that optic manufacturing had matured to a point where it finally was relatively cheap enough to mass produce large quantities of 8x magnified scopes for every single rifle an additional 2.7 billion dollars will be spent over the next 10 years on the new computer-powered 1 to 8x xm157 vortex fire control system this allows for the creation of up to 250 000 of these optics which would cover the entirety of all of the combat arms roles in the military the new caliber makes absolutely no sense without this scope here picture it this way if the us soldier were to run into a russian with an ak-12 or a chinese soldier with a qbz 191 the new rifles that they just switched to this year what would now happen is that the us soldier would have 300 extra meters of range on them but doesn't it take an insane crack shot with thousands of hours of marksman training to hit targets that far when the operator presses a button it takes into account sensor data for laser rangefinder humidity temperature elevation it all gets fed into a ballistic computer chip and it adjusts the red dot automatically this doesn't come without a trade-off though i handled a similar prototype from l3 harris that weighed a whopping 2.5 pounds this means the standard infantry rifle will likely weigh an extra 5 total pounds but why does the army need such powerful ammo does it all come down to increasing range the rise of another relatively new military invention since the 1950s is the mass production of ballistic body armor they only appeared in large numbers in the us military in the early 2000s china and russia caught on to this and have now equipped their own soldiers with ballistic plates ballistic plates didn't even exist when the m4 was created even though i'm obviously biased towards the m5 i think it's great truth is i know only time will tell how it's going to perform in combat so i want to present some of these counter arguments these counter reasons so that you can make an informed decision some analysts believe this weapon is not well suited for dense jungles like in vietnam or the street fighting of iraq the main thrust of the claim against the ngsw is that it's overkill and the army went from one end of the spectrum arming troops with this underpowered peashooter m4 and they're now over arming them with this overpowered xm5 the proposed alternative solution here would be to split the difference between the two rifles part of the reason why i don't think this weapon is as unreasonable as it appears is because of some of the advances in firearms and ammo manufacturing that have recently happened so in the 1950s the battle rifle had to be incredibly long it was cumbersome with 20 inch long barrel in order for the bullets to have enough muzzle velocity to be accurate beyond 600 meters this made the weapons unwieldy and poor for door-to-door combat it's part of the reason why we switched away from them right so what has changed since then that has made the xm5 a practical weapon today the battle rifle today can have a shorter barrel of 16 inches to eight inches without having to sacrifice muzzle velocity or barrel life a large part of the reason for this is the new high pressured ammunition firing at around 80 000 psi now detractors of the ngsw program will point out that an 80 000 psi has never been done before in small arms and that it potentially could be too high causing too much recoil and it could wear out the barrel quickly winner of the bid a company named sig is based in new hampshire they went from a relatively unknown manufacturer that made weapons in west germany starting in 1976 to today becoming the sole creators of all the majority of the small arms in the regular infantry's inventory the only weapon left that hasn't been replaced yet is the m240 and a lot of people are probably wondering what's going to happen to it now last month in march 2020 we got a hint at the m240s fate when the u.s army released a request looking for a 6 8 millimeter conversion kit the plan appears to be to convert all of the m240s into the new ammo type since the only thing it will require really is a barrel change this would make all of the weapons in the infantry use one common ammunition type which we all know has been a dream for the army since the 1950s the m249 saw is kind of a notoriously inaccurate weapon i think it has a minute of angle of 12. if i'm not mistaken the xm50 is more accurate with a minute of angle of around eight i think so the reason they're keeping the m240 is because it has much higher level of accuracy and you don't want to just get rid of it the primary weapon of an infantryman has always been more than just a gun it's an extension of yourself as a soldier and your capabilities all of your confidence is placed in that rifle your rifle is unique to you because no one else has your exact marksman skills yet at the same time it's uniform to everyone else in your unit military history is littered with examples of infantry switching their primary weapon and then devastating the enemy with new tactics just look at the ancient greeks with their sarisa spear or the greek phalanx and you'll see the massive potential here soldiers have always been encouraged to give their weapon a human name usually we name them after a girl far away back home who we hope hasn't forgotten us yet the primary rifle is a personal topic close to many so i can understand why the debate around it gets heated because ultimately when you're done sifting through all the data and you're done talking about barrel sizes and scope specifications at the end of the day actual lives are at stake with this decision we saw how the deficiencies and reliability problems of the m4 may have played a part in the deaths of soldiers in afghanistan during the battle of one not but as far as i can see personally as an average infringement i would rather take my chances with the xm5 on the modern battlefield

Channel: Task & Purpose

Views: 1,199,413

Keywords: new us army rifle, battle rifle, XM5, XM250, future weapons technology, world war III, near peer, M4 replaced, 5.56mm, 6.8 x 51mm, 6.8 mm, NGSW, next generation squad weapon, belt fed machine gun, recoil mitigation, recoil, informational, explainer, steel brass hybrid, general dynamics, department of defense, pentagon, US Army, us military, XM157, fire control system, optic, scope, 1 - 8 x magnification, long range, chris cappy, m249, m240, M17 pistol, special forces, news, reporting

Id: D3oWZhjCrk8

Length: 12min 24sec (744 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2022

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Task and purpose youtube channel have been pumping out some good shit lately. 👌

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Great vid. Thanks for sharing