Tag Archives: M4

The Guns of the National Infantry Museum

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The Army is celebrating its 250th Anniversary this week, and we hit the road to visit the museum dedicated to the American infantry, the grunts, and found some amazing guns.

The National Infantry Museum, located in Columbus, Georgia, just outside Fort Benning, is a non-profit organization that opened its 190,000 sq. ft. facility in 2009. It holds over 100,000 historical artifacts dating from the 1600s to the present, covering uniforms, equipment, bayonets (they have a whole wall of bayonets), small arms, relics, and trophies.

With so much to see, any visitor could spend days there and not be able to take it all in. We’ll do what we’re good at and stick to the guns, but encourage you to visit the museum yourself (it’s free) as we’re only covering a small portion of the exhibits.

Benning is the Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence and supports over 120,000 active and reserve service members, their families, military retirees, and civilian employees daily. It spans some 182,000 acres across Georgia and Alabama. (All photos: Chris Eger/Guns.com)
The “Follow Me” sculpture at the entrance to the National Infantry Museum depicts a 1950s Korean War-era Soldier, complete with bayonet-affixed M1 Garand. The model for the statue was  Eugene Wyles, a 20-year Army veteran, and was created by two soldiers.
The museum “emphasizes the values that define the Infantryman, as well as the nation he protects: Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage.”

One of the most striking parts of the museum is “The Last 100 Yards,” a chronological walk through the American infantry experience over the years, where the weapons and uniforms change, but the courage endures. It is as life-like as possible and gives the visitor a very immersive feel.

For instance, check out this display of the storming of Redoubt #10 at Yorktown in 1781, with the Colonials fighting the British at eyeball-to-eyeball range. The night assault on the key position helped seal Cornwallis’s fate, leading to the end of the Revolutionary War.
The brother-against-brother hell of Antietam. Of note, the figures in the Last 100 Yards are not mannequins; they are cast sculptures of Active-Duty Soldiers “who auditioned for the opportunity to represent their predecessors.”
Fighting inch-by-inch with the Doughboys “Over There” at Soissons, France in 1918. Note the M1903 and M1911.
Storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day and landing atop the “Rock” at Corregidor on opposite sides of the world in WWII. Note the M1 Carbines, M1918 BAR, and M1 Thompson. 
The bayonet charge of Capt. Lewis Millett up Hill 180 at Soam-Ni, Korea in 1951, leading his company of the 27th Infantry Regiment to rout the enemy.
Setting down from a Huey at Landing Zone X-Ray during the Battle of Ia Drang, where the 7th Cavalry Regiment was the first American unit to fight a set-piece battle against NVA regulars in Vietnam in 1965. Note the 40mm M79 “bloop gun,” the early M16, and the M60 GPMG.
The much more recent desert wars, with a dismount team and their Bradley. The era of M4s, M203s, and ACOGs. 

 

Related: Inside the Army Museum Support Center for a peek at the rare stuff!

 

The museum also has a sweeping series of galleries, highlighting the development of the U.S. Army over the years. For instance, the Revolutionary War, complete with British Brown Bess, French Charleville, and Colonial Committee of Safety flintlock muskets and assorted pistols. 
The New Army, immediately after Independence, with the first Springfield Armory and Harper’s Ferry Model 1795 .69-caliber flintlock muskets. Of note, the musket on the Army’s Combat Infantry Badge is the Model 1795. 
How about this impressive evolution, spanning from the left with the Model 1803, Model 1814, and Model 1817 flintlocks, to the M1841 percussion rifle made famous in the War with Mexico, the Model 1855 rifle with its interesting Maynard priming system? To the right are the Civil War-era Sharps and Spencer rifles, breechloaders with a rate of fire of 10 and 20 rounds per minute, respectively. 
The innovative breech-loading Model 1819 Hall rifle. 
This rare gem is a Lefever & Ellis .45 caliber percussion rifle used by a private of the 1st Battalion New York Sharpshooters during the Civil War. Made in Canandaigua, New York, it had a 30-inch octagonal barrel and an adjustable trigger. Never produced in great quantity, Lefever only supplied something like 75 of these guns with the sort of telescopic sight shown, complete with a crosshair reticle. You just don’t see these floating around. 
Securing the Frontier with the Model 1866 Springfield Allin “Trapdoor” conversion rifles, which took .58 caliber percussion muzzleloaders and converted them to .50-70-450 caliber cartridge breechloaders. This led to the Model 1870, 1873, and 1884 Trapdoors in the now-famous .45-70 Government. The museum has all these incremental models on public display. 
A 10-barrel Colt Model 1877 Gatling gun in .45-70. The Army used Gatling guns, which had a rate of fire as high as 200 rounds per minute, until 1911, when they were replaced by more modern machine guns. 
The cavalry isn’t missed, for instance, showing the troopers from the Civil War (left) complete with their M1860 Colt revolver and M1859 Sharps carbine, next to the Indian Wars trooper with his M1873 Trapdoor and Colt Peacemaker. The circa 1916 cavalryman, of the era that chased Pancho Villa into Mexico, sports his M1911.
The Spanish-American War was a time of the side-loading bolt-action Krag-Jorgensen .30 caliber rifle, along with the Army’s staple revolvers of the time: the Colt 1873 in .45 and the S&W .44 top break. To the left is a captured German-made Spanish Mauser, brought back from Cuba in 1898. 
The Great War, with the legendary M1903 Springfield, a French Mle 1907/15, and the dreaded Mle 1915 Chauchat LMG. With an open magazine like that in a muddy trench, what could go wrong?

 

Related: Visiting The Best Helicopter Gunship Collection in the World at Fort Rucker!

 

Lots of other hardware abounds, including a British .303 caliber Mark III Lee-Enfield and Mark I Lewis gun, along with companion German Mauser Gew 98 and MG08/15 in 8mm. 
Bringbacks from France in 1918, including a 35-pound German Tankgewehr 13.2mm anti-tank rifle and a Spandau MG08 machine gun, both captured by American troops. 
The original “Belly Flopper,” an experimental two-man weapons carrier developed at Fort Benning in the 1930s, complete with an M1917 water-cooled Browning machine gun and not much else. 
The iconic M2 .50 cal “Ma Deuce” has been around for over a century and is still “making friends and influencing people” worldwide. It is seen next to its smaller cousin, the .30-06 M1919 light machine gun. Both have the same father, John Browning. 
The M3 Carbine, a select-fire version of the WWII-era M1 Carbine, was outfitted with an early infrared scope during the Korean War. With the battery pack, it “only” weighed 31 pounds. 
A Viet Cong-made pistol captured in Vietnam. The museum also has a carbine that looks even crazier. 
Cold War experiments on display include the circa 1964 SPIW, chambered in XM144 5.6x44mm with its box-magazine fed 40mm underbarrel grenade launcher. 
Can you say, “Stoner?”
The museum has an amazing display on the evolution of the modern “black rifle” from the Winchester .224 caliber LWMR, Eugene Stoner’s early 5-pound AR-10s complete with carbon fiber furniture, and the slab-sided Colt-Armalite Model 01
…to the XM16E1 in gray phosphate to the rare M1 HAR, and the Colt “Shorty” whose 10-inch barrel led to the XM177 and today’s M4. The green guy in the corner is a drum-magged SPIW variant, of course. 
The museum even has the Next Generation Squad Weapon winner, SIG Sauer’s M7 and M250…
…along with the other competitors in the NGSW program.
Who doesn’t love a good steel-on-steel Mossberg M590 12-gauge? The Army has used shotguns going back to World War I. 
Speaking of shotguns, how about the M26 MASS? Fed via a 3 or 5-round detachable box magazine, this 3-pound 12-gauge can either be mounted Masterkey-style under the handguard of an M16/M4 or used in a stand-alone configuration.
A gold electroplated Romanian AKMS clone captured by the 3rd Infantry in Iraq in 2003. Even the internal parts are plated. Note the “Vader” style helmet of Saddam’s Fedayeen.
Hallowed relics: M4 and M249 remains after an IED strike in Iraq. 

Again, we only scraped the surface of the holdings of the National Infantry Museum, and if you are ever within striking distance of it, you should stop by– and block off your day. It is ever more important to visit such places and remember why they are there.

Keep in mind that the Army plans to close more than 20 base museums in the next few years, and places like this carry the torch for future generations… lest they forget.

(Photo: Chris Eger/Guns.com)

Meet the New Army Small Arms Ammo Facility

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In WWII, the Army had 12 War Department-owned and operated plants dedicated to making small arms ammunition, around the clock.

These plants slowly shuttered post-war, with brief respites caused by Korea and Vietnam, until the Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant, which had been placed on “standby” in 1976, was finally closed in 2005, leaving only Lake City AAP in Independence, Missouri as the only remaining Army small arms plant.

Even at that, Lake City was run on contract at first by Olin-Winchester, then Northrop Grumman, and, since 2019, by Olin-Winchester once again.

Well, the Army is moving ahead with the construction of its first new small arms ammunition factory in decades, and it will be dedicated to making ammo for the Next Generation Squad Weapons.

The new 450,000 sq. ft., facility, built on the Lake City AAP campus, had its groundbreaking on Feb. 5.

It will feature modern manufacturing systems capable of producing “all components” of 6.8×51 Common Cartridge ammunition as part of the NGSW program.

The 6.8x51mm, seen in SIG-loaded 113-grain ball for the NGSW program and a .277 Fury commercial load (white tip). (Photos: Chris Eger/Guns.com)

The Army specified this includes “cartridge case and projectile manufacturing, energetic operations for loading and charging ammunition, product packaging, process quality controls, testing laboratories, maintenance operations, and administrative areas.”

Opening by 2028 (ish), it is expected to be able to make upwards of 400 million rounds a year– against Lake City’s legacy capacity to make 1.4 billion rounds of all other calibers. Until then, 6.8 is sole-sourced through SIG.

More in my column at Guns.com.

The NGSW You Have at Home

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The Army’s Next Generation Squad Weapon program, which SIG won in April 2022, aims to use the XM7 rifle to replace the M4 Carbine series with America’s warfighters and the XM250 machine gun to do the same for the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. While the M4 and M249 are 5.56 NATO platforms, the new NGSW series will use the Army’s new 6.8 Common Cartridge family of ammunition.

An infantryman with the 2nd Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment (Strike Force), 2nd Brigade (Strike), 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), executes chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear defense (CBRN defense) day qualification with the Next Generation Squad Weapon-Rifle and Fire Control while operationally testing at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. (Photo Credit: Mark Scovell, Visual Information Specialist, U.S. Army Operational Test Command)

That’s what makes the newest MCX Spear variant offered commercially so cool, as it is chambered not in SIG’s consumer .277 Fury variant of the cartridge but in 6.8x51mm – and SIG plans to make overruns of Army ammo available to consumers.

The rifles will still be able to shoot dimensionally identical .277 Fury, while other caliber options such as .308 and 6.5 CM are a barrel swap away.

Plus, there is military overrun ammo inbound.

The military overrun ammo on hand was 113-grain copper solid ball in 20-round boxes, 460-round cans, and 920-round crates. With a .330 ballistic coefficient and 3,200 FPS velocity out of a 16-inch barrel, these rounds spec out at 2,569 foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle. The case is a brass/stainless steel hybrid that allows for increased muzzle velocity/energy compared to traditional brass.

More in my column at Guns.com.

First National Guard Unit Gets Hands on Next Generation Squad Weapons, Navy Next?

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A North Carolina unit is the first in the National Guard to field test the new SIG Sauer-made XM7 and the XM250, which is replacing the M4/M4A1 carbine and M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, respectively.

The 30th Armored Brigade Combat Team, a National Guard outfit that carries the “Old Hickory” lineage of the World War I & II era infantry division of the same number, earlier this month conducted a qualification table range session with the Army’s Next Generation Squad Weapon platforms at Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg), North Carolina.

The unit is the first in the Guard to receive the XM7 and XM250, just months after the first regular Army unit, the famed 101st Airborne Division, began receiving their NGSWs.

A soldier of the 30th ABCT, a North Carolina Army National Guard unit, with the XM7 on the range at Fort Liberty earlier this month. (Photo: Cpl. Nigel Hatcher/U.S. Army)

This comes as ADM Daryl Caudle, commander of the U.S. Fleet Forces Command, toured SIG Sauer’s new Academy and SIG Experience Center in Newington, New Hampshire, earlier this month. Images released by the Pentagon show Caudle and staff inspecting the state-of-the-art facility where over 480,000 M17 and M18 handguns have been produced for the military thus far. 

And include Caudle handling an NSGW.

240610-N-XX999-1001 NEWINGTON, N.H. (June 10, 2024) Adm. Daryl Caudle, commander, U.S. Fleet Forces Command, examines a firearm during a leadership meeting and tour at SIG SAUER Academy and Experience Center (SEC) in Newington, New Hampshire, June 10. 

Of note, the Marines have been interested in the platform going back to 2020.

101st Airborne Starts Getting Its New Guns

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Part of the famed 101st Airborne Division recently became the first unit issued with the new Next Generation Squad Weapon system.

A March 28 social media post from the PEO Soldier office detailed that the 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, a unit of the Fort Campbell-based 101st, received the NGSW, marking a key milestone for the program that intends to replace the 5.56 NATO M4 Carbine and M249 Squad Automatic Weapon with a new family of weapons chambered in 6.8mm.

The new guns will be used in an upcoming New Equipment Training, an in-depth, train-the-trainer course, set for this month. From there, the systems and training will fan out across the brigade.

Elements of the 101st had been previously involved in an extensive series of more than 100 tests spanning over 25,000 hours and 1.5 million rounds of ammo with the platform. 

An infantryman with the 2nd Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment (Strike Force), 2nd Brigade (Strike), 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), executes chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear defense (CBRN defense) day qualification with the Next Generation Squad Weapon-Rifle and Fire Control while operationally testing at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. (Photo Credit: Mark Scovell, Visual Information Specialist, U.S. Army Operational Test Command)

The program includes SIG Sauer’s XM-7 rifle, which will fill the role currently held by the M4 series, the SIG XM250 light machine gun slated to replace the M249, and the Vortex-produced M157 Fire Control optics system used on both platforms. SIG also supplies suppressors for the platforms. Of note, the XM-7 is based on SIG’s MCX Spear series.

Next up for NGSW is to equip a National Guard armored brigade in May.

More in my column at Guns.com.

Denali Paratroopers Test New Next-Gen Weapons at 25 Below

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The only Arctic, Airborne, Recon cavalry squadron in the U.S. Army has been busy trying out the service’s new Next Generation Squad Weapon systems in some of the worst weather Alaska can offer.

The 1st Squadron (Airborne) of the 40th Cavalry Regiment, working with Fort Greely’s Cold Regions Test Center in one of the coldest parts of Alaska, has been putting the NGSW platform through its paces. The program includes SIG Sauer’s XM-7 rifle, which will fill the role currently held by the M4 Carbine series, the SIG XM250 light machine gun slated to replace the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, and the Vortex-produced M157 Fire Control optics system used on both platforms.

“Extreme environmental testing is critical to ensuring reliable systems,” noted Col. Jason Bohannon, the Army’s Project Manager Soldier Lethality on Feb. 9.

Meanwhile, a social media page for the 1st Squadron-40th Cav noted that they have been experiencing “sub-Arctic conditions in the vicinity of Ft Greely where temperatures haven’t topped above -25 degrees.”

If your range gear includes “Mickey Mouse” Boots, you may be testing an NGSW in Alaska in winter. (Photo: PEO Soldier)

That just seems…really cold. (Photo: PEO Soldier)

The 40th has a long military history of making it work under terrible conditions. Based in its current form in Alaska since 2005– from where they deployed to Iraq (Southern Baghdad) once and Afghanistan twice (Paktya and Khost Provinces)– it draws its lineage from the old 40th Tank Battalion which entered combat on August 15 1944 fighting across northern France into Belgium where it made a significant contribution to the defeat of German forces at St. Vith during the Battle of the Bulge then drove into Germany linking up with the Soviets on the Baltic coast.

M4 Shermans in temporary position near St. Vith, Belgium, fire on enemy positions beyond the city. 40th Tank Battalion. 7th Armored Division.” Date: 24 January 1945. Salis, U.S. Army Signal Corps photo 111-SC-199467

FN 15 Guardian, after 2,000 rounds…

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FN’s motto for the past several years is “The World’s Most Battle-Proven Firearms,” and it has the lineage to prove it. Founded back in 1889 to make Mauser pattern rifles for the Belgian government, FN promptly out-Mausered Mauser and remained in that bolt-gun business with its in-house upgraded Model 24 and Model 30 as late as the 1960s. By that time, FN had the FAL in production and later superseded it with the FNC and today’s SCAR – all of which have seen combat around the world. Much like the way it took over where Mauser left off in the 1920s, FN jumped into the M16 biz in the early 1980s and out-Colted Colt, winning a $112 million contract to produce 266,961 M16s for the U.S. Army in 1988.

Now, with over 40 years in the AR game, FN has the game figured out and tends to market a lot of more top-shelf options such as the FN15 DMR3, which costs almost SCAR kinda money. That’s where the FN-15 Guardian comes in, as a more mid-shelf offering with an MSRP of $999 and a cost at retailers usually a bit lower than that.

I’ve been kicking one around for the past several months, passing 2,000 rounds drawn from 20 different brass and steel-cased loads through it, including shooting it suppressed, with assorted optics, a dozen different types of mags, the works.

It may be “budget” but it holds up.

See my column at Guns.com for the full review.

Rangers and 101st Beat on the NGSWs

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The Army’s Next Generation Squad Weapons program just completed an important milestone with the SIG Sauer-produced firearms wrapping up testing at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

First arriving in quantity at the base in early October, the NGSW just finished new equipment training and a limited user test with troops drawn from the 75th Ranger Regiment and the “Screaming Eagles” of the 101st Airborne Division.

The training started with classroom work on the new systems, including SIG Sauer’s XM-7 rifle, which will fill the role currently held by the M4 Carbine series, the SIG XM250 light machine gun slated to replace the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, and the Vortex-produced M157 Fire Control optics system used on both platforms.

An infantryman with the 2nd Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment (Strike Force), 2nd Brigade (Strike), 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) (Screaming Eagles), installs the suppressor on the Next Generation Squad Weapon-Rifle during new equipment training while operationally testing at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. (Photo Credit: Mark Scovell, Visual Information Specialist, U.S. Army Operational Test Command)

Then came live fire on static ranges, compared to the legacy systems, and a series of drills in the LUT segment.

An infantryman with the 2nd Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment (Strike Force), 2nd Brigade (Strike), 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), executes chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear defense (CBRN defense) day qualification with the Next Generation Squad Weapon-Rifle and Fire Control while operationally testing at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. (Photo Credit: Mark Scovell, Visual Information Specialist, U.S. Army Operational Test Command)

An infantryman with 2nd Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment (Strike Force), 2nd Brigade (Strike), 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) (Screaming Eagles), fires the Next Generation Squad Weapon-Automatic Rifle during the buddy team live fire exercise while operationally testing at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. (U.S. Army photo by Mark Scovell)

More in my column at Guns.com.

Screaming Eagles Get Hands on NGSW

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The Army’s Next Generation Squad Weapons program is rolling right along, with the SIG Sauer-produced firearms making an appearance at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

The base, home to the iconic “Screaming Eagles” of the 101st Airborne Division, will be the first to field operational units with the new guns under current plans, and Campbell brass appeared on the firing line to get a feel for the new hardware.

U.S. Army Fort Campbell Command Sgt. Maj. Chad Stackpole fires a Next-Generation Squad Weapon (NGSW) Machine Gun during a weapon familiarization demonstration, Sept. 25, 2023, at Fort Campbell, Ky. (Photo & caption: Kayla Cosby/U.S. Army)

U.S. Army Fort Campbell Garrison Commander Col. Christopher Midberry fires a Next-Generation Squad Weapon (NGSW) Machine Gun during a weapon familiarization demonstration, Sept. 25, 2023, at Fort Campbell, Ky. (Photo & caption: Kayla Cosby/U.S. Army)

As outlined by Soldier Systems Daily, Company A of the 2nd Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, a historic unit that has been part of the 101st since World War II, will begin a Limited User Test with the NGSW platforms this week, comparing them to legacy systems. The Army plans to have the 101st’s 1st Brigade be the first unit fully equipped with the NGSW, likely sometime early next year.

FN 15 Guardian, after 500 rounds…

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Light, affordable, and ready for the range or field, the new FN 15 Guardian offers one of the iconic company’s most obtainable 5.56 caliber rifles.

Billed as a light, fast-handling carbine, the Guardian complements the rest of FN’s AR (FN 15) line of rifles in the respect that it is priced at a more entry-level (MSRP $999, more like $899 at retailers) rung on the ladder than some of the company’s other offerings, which have an ask of $1,350 (FN 15 Patrol Carbine) to $2,350 (FN 15 DMR3). Thus, according to the marketing materials, the new addition is “making FN quality accessible to all home defenders and sport shooters.”

The FN 15 Guardian has a retail price of $999, which is typically lower at the point of sale.

In a nutshell, the FN 15 Guardian is a carbine-sized (16-inch, 1:7 twist barrel) direct gas impingement action AR with a mid-length gas system that has a flattop, smooth-sided (no forward assist) upper, a 15-inch aluminum handguard with a couple dozen M-LOK slots, and a lot of mil-spec parts. This keeps it light, at just 6.6 pounds, and with a streamlined aesthetic.

The all-up weight of the Guardian as shown below, well outfitted with a Magpul PMAG loaded with 30 rounds of M855, an Aimpoint Patrol Rifle Optic red dot reflex sight on a QRP2 mount, a full-length direct-thread SilencerCo Omega 36M can, and a field expedient Israeli-style sling, is just a hair over 9 pounds.

You could shave off a bit of weight by going with a set of irons or a smaller red dot, or reducing the baffle stack on the suppressor, and still have a lot of capability.

So far, I have put it through a bit over 500 rounds, a quarter of that while suppressed, from across at least 15 different brass-cased loads I had around the house, including German, Malaysian, and South Korean military surplus, Federal XM855 Green Tip, Winchester NATO-marked overruns, Winchester black box BTHP Match, and bulk pack Wolf M193 NATO, all running the gamut from 55-grain to 77-grain in weight.

And have few complaints other than the funky furniture.

Full review over after the jump to Guns.com.

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