With little-to-no fanfare, the U.S. Army put out a solicitation in 2019 for a project they deemed NGSW: the Next Generation Squad Weapons program. The goal of the program isn’t exactly new: to “build a better mousetrap” than the M4/M16 for an individual soldier to carry into battle. It’s an idea that has been tried numerous times before, from the Advanced Combat Rifle program of the mid 1980s to the Objective Individual Combat Weapon program spawned a decade later, and multiple attempts since the start of the War On Terror.
Thus far, there’s been no weapon system conclusively objectively better than the gas impingement, 5.56x45mm rifle that warrants the military revamping its entire supply chain system to accommodate it. The NGSW program seems to have progressed farther than previous attempts, coming down to only a handful of companies who have submitted weapons or optics (known as “fire control systems” in the contract lingo of NGSW) with consistent talk from the Army of fielding the first NGSW guns as soon as Fiscal Year 2022. (Author’s note:
