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We all know how deadly a 5.56mm cartridge can be. The round worked wonders in Vietnam, thanks to it's low weight and light recoil compared to 7.62mm NATO. It's gotten to the point where most of today's NATO countries, along with many non-NATO countries, are adopting or have adopted weapons that fire 5.56mm or a similar round. People like the bullet.

Here's the issue. 5.56mm was the perfect round for Vietnam. I don't doubt that. Against unarmoured NVA/Vietcong targets it was devastating, and you could carry more 5.56mm cartridges than 7.62mm NATO cartridges, a lifesaver on a jungle patrol. That's all in the past, though. Nowadays soldiers have to deal with body armour, especially in a conventional warfare scenario. (Keep that in mind. I'm talking about conventional warfare against a well equipped enemy, not an Iraq-style insurgency in this thread.)

From what I hear, 5.56mm doesn't penetrate body armour well, if at all. It just doesn't have the velocity. With today's modern vests, is this a risk one can afford to take? Yea, you can talk about how 5.56mm tumbels and causes a massive amount of damage while 7.62mm punches a hole, but what does that matter if you can't penetrate the target's bloody armour to do any damage? Isn't it better to punch a hole than to do no damage at all? Then again, is even the all mighty 7.62mm NATO powerful enough?

That's the whole topic of this thread. Is 5.566mm totally insufficient for modern day use, and is 7.62mm NATO any better? If they are insufficient, what is sufficient? Do we want a larger and heavier round (with all the disadvantages that entails), or a smaller, even higher velocity one (with all the disadvantages that entails)?

I think we should move up to something .40+ for our AR. Something like .458 SOCOM or .50 Beowulf. It's fat enough it doesn't need to penetrate vests to kill/maim, and it's big enough you won't need to worry about cover very much, and it would definitely be a stopper.

Longer distance stuff could be solved by mounted MGs or DMRs. (Not that something like an ACOG w/ BDC could be made...) rolleyes

We need to ******** our reliance on the Hague convention, because it DOES NOT APPLY IN IRAQ, and start using hollowpoints. You wanna put an unarmored insurgent on his a**, and a hollowpoint will do that incredibly well. I've read the Hague convention, the whole text of the treaty is shorter than this post, and it specifically states that fragmenting or expanding rounds are banned between signer nations. It makes no restrictions outside that. Needless to say, the Taliban failed to sign the treaty in 1899.

Also, in the competitive circuit, 7.62NATO was the round of choice for long-distance for a very long time, but believe it or not, 90+ grain .223 is making an incredible surge since it was recognized as a legal Palma caliber a year or so ago. A 90 grain .223 out of a 30" barrel at case-popping pressures will CONSISTENTLY outperform a .308 no matter what you do to it. And for medium-short ranges, 600 yards or less, there's not a man on the field using anything but .223, unless they're willing to spend the money for a TUBB-2000 in a 6.5mm caliber, or they're shooting a Garand and not expecting to win (and they never do). I admit we're shooting paper and not people, but the ballistics don't change based on the target. If ever there was a group who had the time and money to test every possible combination of caliber, pressure, and bullet weight, it's competitive shooters... and they've settled on .223. Also, it's cheap. razz

AFAIK, we're not coming up against kevlar too much, but even if we did, .223AP is pretty good s**t... even heavy HPBT rounds can punch through light steel.

Being able to make a lot of ammo doesn't make much difference if the person who needs the ammo can only carry so much of it.

I think you need to stop watching future weapons. razz

I doubt that 5.56mm NATO would have a big issue with just Kevlar. A ceramic plate would cause problems with just about any standard round though.

Actually, I brought it up because my military guild is having a debate over whether we should keep 5.56mm as our standard round, or adopt either 6.8mm or 7.62x39mm.

I stopped watching Future Weapons years ago.

7.62x36 is probably the optimum balance between energy transfer and recoil force. Any thing bigger really kicks, and any thing less isn't quite as efficient. Russia really got it right with that round.