We might as well get a whole new rifle and carbine before further modifications anyway. Even if the military won’t select/develop a new caliber, there are plenty of 5.56×45mm designs that would offer an improvement in my opinion. I fear the AR15 fans will beat me to death for saying that however.

Having been in both branches, the Army puts far less emphasis on close combat that the Corps (the Army National Guard never even issued us bayonets or K-Bars). Therefore, the Marines are going to take Army opinions with a big grain of salt.

One thing: We didn’t have this problem with M1s and M14s in previous generations because previous generations didn’t have the armor today’s troops have. Though sometimes uninformed boobs want to go overboard and make every possible piece of armor available mandatory “to protect the troops,” I don’t think anyone wants to get rid of ALL the armor.

Tam, don’t screw up my Corps. Things were different in the old Corps, so dammit, stop screwing up my Corp.

KsR

You’ve got a shorter LOP for use in armor, and a fixed stock for defensive maneuvers.

How about designing shoulder of the vest to fit the stock?

The A2 stock would have been even longer, but the proposed length made the rifle too long to fit in existing rifle racks. Lutz justified the extra length as being based upon Aberdeen Human Engineering Lab data. However, he specifically stated that he based it upon the 95th percentile measurements, believing that this meant that it would fit all but the upper 5% in size. Of course, some of us pointed out that this actually meant that the proposed stock length would be too big for 94% of the users.

Simple viewing of photos of deployed soldiers and Marines with M16A2 and A4 will show some users having to hold the stock over their shoulder in order to get proper eye relief with their iron sights or RCO.