15-077 Garand Picture of the Day - .280 Garand

[browningautorifle]

Well, certainly. I was the first guy to state clearly..."I'll take it"...but no one told me where to pay. Yes, I'd love to at least have a hands on look. Maybe a few round to pattern and see...?

[CINDERS]

Funny how things change the .280 nice and light but never got far now we use 338 LM's or 300 WM's to shoot and scoot from afar, no more whites of their eyes stuff or as one person says on this site just use a 500 pounder!

[browningautorifle]

We seem to have gone back to the theory of "You can't kill a man with anything smaller"...

[Paul S.]

"Horses for courses" is what applies.

Generalizing here:
100 years ago it was trench warfare with opposing sides living like moles and trying to kill each other with artillery, trench raids, and massed attacks. Ranges were generally 300 metres or less. 70 years ago, it was combined arms, and small unit tactics with a lot of shoot and scoot and scoot. 50 years ago, it was jungle warfare micro-managed from Washington DC by a president and State Department who feared Soviet/Chi-Com intervention and a nuclear holocaust more than losing a war. That war was fought at short range (+/- 100 m) with lots of rounds down range, by highly mobile (air) units. Recently, it has been open country, mountains and desert and an enemy who learned to use distance to his advantage that has reversed the shrinking range cycle. Engagement ranges are often 300 m or more which in turn leads to heavier bullets and often less of them being used.

At least, that is what I take away from what I've seen.

[us019255]

Generalizing here:

Are you saying that the Army is always ready to fight the last war not the next one?

[Bob Seijas]

When it looked like we would adopt the Pederson in .276, the only holdup was how effective the new cartridge was, so Ordnance really dug into it. The Pig Board and the Goat Board were only two panels that tested it for killing/wounding power. The results were quite impressive, it was a hell of a cartridge and probably better than the .30-06. I'm thinking if the M1 had been a 20-shot box mag in .276 we might still be using it

[CINDERS]

Just asking what General Pig and General Goat had to say on the effectiveness of the Pedersen round or the 280 as I gather the test subjects were well past caring! It is a fine balance getting the hitting power V's recoil as you may have a lighter framed soldier who is deadly accurate with say the M1 carbine but cannot hit squat with say a 30/06 bolt gun.
Though in saying this after 4 years in the field a soldier would be pretty much recoil intolerant and deafened, I know that we have an application where you fire 106 rounds on the day out of the 303's and you certainly know that youv'e been there but we have no external interference to worry about like arty or motar's dropping in to muck up your day.
In the heat of a conflict one would not notice anything to do with recoil energies from what was happening externally to their position in the field.

I would like to think most potential development would hinge on the type of field operations envisaged, as we have seen in the last full on conflict stand off weaponry was the norm whether it was Scuds or Tomahawks and I seem to recall Mighty Mo has a hand in lobbing a few shells here and there to entice the white flag.
The current focus from what we have all seen in todays latest adversary is from an enemy who is faceless and like a rat in a hay stack with no modus operandi that can aid our ground forces in getting to grips with them drones can only do so much which leaves the PBI to go into the haystack and sort the wheat from the chaff. That takes guts

[bearrowland]

I would imagine that would be a real joy to shoot.