Ken,

Remember "Every Marine is a rifleman first"!

The Marines still require all manner of its troops to qualify annually with a rifle. That includes pilots, air crew and the scopedopes from the Marine Air Control Squadrons. And I believe the requirement includes all Women Marines as well.

Point of fact, after the Fall of Baghdad, the 11th Marie Regt. (Artillery) began rotating their big gun units back to California. Volunteers were called for from the ranks of the cannoncockers to flesh out the Infanty units that had taken casulties. Many of the 11th Marines stayed in Iraq for another three months while 0311 replacements were shipped in to replace them. The volunteers included cooks and bakers from the Artillery Regt who performed as infantrymen.

Picking the fly ash out of the pepper and arguing about the best choice is all well and good. It seems to me the M-16 and its variants wa excellent in Iraq for the most part. More city town activity and not a lot of long range rifle requirements.

Afgahanistan is a wider and more spread out Area of Operations. Seems a 7.62 or 6.5 lupara round is needed to reach out to 800 or 1,000 yards.

There are a lot of Britsh .303 Enfields in Afganistan and the range of that
old man killer is 1,000 yards.

It is very inconvient to have a 20 round magazine that cannot kill the guy who is killing your friends because the shooter is 300 yards beyond their capacity to kill him.

Some where last year in this thread, some Marine units were experimenting with a 12 man squad configeration and possibly using some of the automatic rifles the Marines are concidering to replace the SAW. I believe there are 4 different AR's in the study.

Has any feed back on those activities floated to the top yet?