For decades, the U.S. military’s M240 medium machine gun has proven its worth, but now the Army is looking for something new.
The Army’s proposed fiscal year 2026 budget includes a project dubbed the Future Military Machine Gun, or FMMG, which is meant to eventually replace M240s for soldiers in the close combat force. The Army uses that umbrella term as the general label for infantry, cavalry scouts, combat medics, forward observers, combat engineers, and special operations forces.
“The FMMG is a belt-fed crew-served direct fire weapon system that will enable the rifle platoon to organically suppress and destroy enemy personnel targets and maintain operational tempo,” Army budget documents say.
The budget documents do not say how the new machine gun is expected to be an improvement over the M240, what the specifications of the FMMG will be, or when it might be fielded to soldiers. The War Zone first reported on the Army’s request for funding for the FMMG.
No further information about the FMMG was immediately available.
“We cannot provide an update on the Future Medium Machine Gun program at this time, but the Army is constantly working to ensure the warfighter is equipped to remain ready, lethal, and adaptive amid emerging threats,” an Army spokesperson told Task & Purpose on Thursday.
The M240 chambers a 7.62mm round and has a maximum effective range of 1,200 meters, according to the Army’s Program Executive Office Soldier. The machine gun comes in several variants, including the M240B used by infantry units, which weighs 27.6 pounds. The Army has also fielded a lightweight variant of the machine gun that weighs 21.8 pounds.
The question now is whether the FMMG should chamber the 7.62mm round or a different type of ammunition, said retired Brig. Gen. Larry Burris, who led the U.S. Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, from 2021 to 2023.
Although the M240 performed well over the two decades of war following 9/11, the Army needs to maintain its advantage over potential adversaries, who have made advances in their weapons and body armor, Burris told Task & Purpose on Thursday.
Burris also noted that the Army has adopted a 6.8mm round for the M7, its newest rifle, and the M250, its newest automatic rifle.
“We’ve got to question everything to make sure that we have the right capabilities so we can fight and win,” Burris said.
The Army began using the M240 in the late 1970s by mounting the machine gun on armored vehicles, and eventually, infantry units adopted the machine gun. It went on to replace the M60 machine gun, which soldiers nicknamed “The Pig” for its appetite for ammunition, said Christopher Goodrow, arms curator at the National Infantry Museum at Fort Benning.
The M240 proved to be a far more reliable machine gun than the M60, Goodrow told Task & Purpose on Thursday.
In the pantheon of Army crew-served medium machine guns, the M240 is certainly among the top three, along with the M60 and M1919 Browning machine gun, said Goodrow, who said he believes the M240’s optics and other components make it the best of the three.
“When you’re putting on lasers and optics and all these other things, now what you’re able to do with a 240 just far exceeds anything you could have ever done with a 1919 machine gun or an M60 machine gun,” Goodrow said.
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