The latest technological improvement that the army is looking at is new lighter ammunition for its Squad Automatic Weapon. The new ammunition has a lightweight plastic casing instead of the traditional brass casing of the regular round. The immediate advantage of the new ammunition is that it is much lighter than the traditional ammunition presently in use.
The new cased telescoped ammo has proven to be just as accurate and reliable as the standard ammunition, but there had to be some modifications done to the SAW in order to use this ammunition. I hope that if it is proven to be useful to our military ring customers that there won’t have to be any changes required in order to get it fielded and into their hands.
The advantage of using light weight ammunition is that the soldier has less weight to carry around on the battlefield. When you have to hump all of your food, ammo, and equipment around with you a little bit goes a long way. When the weight of the new ammunition was compared to the basic load of the SAW with traditional ammunition the new ammunition lightened the load by sixteen pounds. That may not sound like much but when you are operating in the extreme terrain and weather conditions of Afghanistan sixteen pounds makes a world of difference.
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