National Guard units are beginning to receive the Army’s new automatic rifle replacement, the M250.
Though a number of active duty units are already using the M250, the Minnesota guard’s 34th Infantry Division was “among the first” guard units to bring it online, Army officials announced in a release. Soldiers learned the basics and began training with the new automatic rifle at earlier this month at Camp Ripley, the unit’s training base.
The M250 machine gun replaces the M249 as the heaviest and most powerful weapon carried by individual infantry squads. Generally, one member of a squad carries the weapon and, in combat, is tasked with providing covering fire for other squad members as they maneuver with lighter rifles.
The machine gun is one of two new weapons the Army is fielding that will use new 6.8mm rounds, a major shift from the 5.56mm ammunition that has been standard across the U.S. military since the 1970s. The 6.8mm rounds are heavier than those they replace but soldiers will make up some of that weight with the gun itself, which weighs about four pounds less than the M249. The new rifle is 13 pounds with a bipod and 14.5 pounds with the suppressor, versus 18 pounds for the M249.
The M250 is part of the service’s Next Generation Squad Weapon program to replace the Army’s close combat weapons. The NGSW switch includes bringing online the M7 rifle to replace the M4. Both of the weapons were developed by gunmaker Sig Sauer. In May, the Army announced the M250 would move out of testing and experimental status into full deployment as the Next Generation Squad Weapon machine gun.
The new machine gun was fielded to early active duty units earlier this year, including the 101st Airborne.
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The M250 rollout has so far gone smoother than the early arrivals of the M7, which sparked debates over volume of fire and public criticism including from one infantry officer who said it was “unfit for use as a modern service rifle.”
Meanwhile, the light machine gun has also gotten attention from other countries. In January, The War Zone reported that the Israeli Defense Forces were planning to buy the new light machine gun.
Both the M250 and M7 will be fielded with the XM157 fire control optic system, an optical site that received less-than favorable feedback during soldier weapons testing, according to a fiscal year 2024 report from the Pentagon’s Director, Operational Test and Evaluation. Soldiers who tested the optic found its usability to be “below average/failing,” and that an M7 with it “demonstrated a low probability of completing one 72-hour wartime mission without incurring a critical failure.”
