But horse, you don't wear jackboots on your hands. I mean maybe you do because you are a horse, of course.

Well the thing is that they could already do pretty much all of that with the m4 platform as is. The only real notable difference is that the increased caliber size supposedly makes it superior to the 5.56 and both Soviet primary round calibers while still not completely biting the bullet and going for the 7.62x51mm NATO round. Now you'll have to forgive me for being extremely skeptical of such revolutionary predictions for a completely war untested firearm, especially with stiffled reports from combat arms branch soldiers saying it's a finicky little shit that ultimately trades off increased engagement range and potentially increased stopping/neutralizing power for decreased overall Firepower and ammunition pool.

The 6.8mm mags themselves are 5-10 rounds smaller that the standard round count a boot carries shrinks from 210 rounds spread across 7 mags to 140-175 rounds depending on which sr-25 mags they're using - but realistically the armys gonna standardize the 20 round mag because its cheaper. That's a drastic reduction of Firepower a squad can bring to bear for a firefight. The number of rounds in the magazine in addition to how many mags you can mount to your FLC directly correlates to how long you can sustain a firefight before being forced to break contact in order to reload mags with spare ammo.

This isn't even touching on the XM250 LMG variant which is going to have a theoretical base load of 400-rounds spread across four 100-round pouches which is a downgrade of 200 rounds from the basic base load for the 249 which it's replacing which required three 200-round pouches, though today's base loads has been increased to 1000 rounds spread across five 200-round pouches. Anyways the point is, that whatever possible benefit the entire weapons platform is supposed to bring to the table is objectively dwarfed by the fact that its gutting the time infantry can spend in the field before being forced to pull back to friendly defensive lines. One could say it could be a more beneficial rifle to use on the defense, but infantry are supposed to be the most versatile unit in any army.

Now if we throw in this jackass smort grenade launcher, unless the Army's just planning on further decreasing the infantry squads Firepower by making grenadiers literally just carry these and a pistol or make them as fucking miserable as the squad Automatic rifleman and force them to carry a rifle alongside this shit-stick you're ultimately just stunting the potential lethality of your most basic building block of the army. Honestly just making a more fancy m320 to slap on the XM7 that can be its own thing would save so much headache. But nooOooOooOooOOOOoooo, the fancy lads in the Pentagon want to modernize the war machine for Afghanistan conditions instead of paying the fuck attention to what's working and what's eating shit in Ukraine.

And honestly, thank God for that.

They want an easy way to precisely get a grenade behind cover at long range.

Isn't this what mortars are for though? Or are they too specialised a piece of a equipment to do the same job?

...[S]omething like eight rounds failed in a row. A military police soldier and I slowly counted the shots as I took photos, marking each time that another two weeks of our pay had gone downrange and failed to explode.

that's incredible actually, what a quote.

A look into America's fighting future...

I mean there's a reason