Why the US Can’t Build Long Range Guns?
BY Herschel Smith
2 hours, 42 minutes ago
I don’t really think this is all that difficult. Recall that I mentioned a few months ago I managed to put a 7mm PRC round on IPSC steel at 1000 yards, and was shooting with a friend who did the same thing four-rounds-for-four at 1000 yards with the 5.56mm? This isn’t magic.
And then, you can always use the same lowers and replace the M4 uppers with 6mm ARC uppers. That would make the job of engaging at 1000 yards even easier and more effective.
Longer term, if the US is going to have a professional military, it might make sense to (a) raise entrance ASVAB scores, (b) make enlistments 5 years instead of 4, (c) revamp the Scout Sniper program to ensure many more personnel could go through it, (d) add more schools for the infantryman such as high altitude shooting, cold weather combat and survival skills, etc., and in general make the American man a more effective, intelligent, well-training fighting machine.
To do that would require that they continue to dump DEI programs, limit combat to males and eject females from the infantryman MOS, and manage their money much more effectively.
But a change to 6mm ARC would be simple, cheap, and relatively painless. Or just teach infantrymen to shoot at 1000 yards with the use of Kestrels or some ballistic application.
On February 23, 2026 at 12:54 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ H.S.
Re: “But a change to 6mm ARC would be simple, cheap, and relatively painless. Or just teach infantrymen to shoot at 1000 yards with the use of Kestrels or some ballistic application.”
Herschel, via your son, you are dialed into the USMC more than I am – but with that caveat, I have seen rum-int that the Corps has retired their world-renowned scout-sniper program. This would have been under now-departed Commandant General David Berger, however, so maybe this decision has been reversed. Do you have any up-to-date knowledge?
IF I understand it correctly, Berger’s thesis was that the maturation and ubiquity of man-portable UAVs and drones on modern land battlefields had made traditional snipers obsolete.
The U.S. Army, which also has a very fine scout-sniper program of its own, continues to turn out graduates. As do the Navy SEALS and other JSOC entities.
Not that I am any great authority, but the Marine Corps will be making a big mistake letting all of that hard-won institutional knowledge go down the drain, if they follow through on Berger’s plans. After years of stop-and-start ad-hoc programs to train scout-snipers for wars which had caught the Army and Corps unprepared, the Corps finally institutionalized its program during the 1960s, which is how it remained for decades. During that time, it was world-famous as perhaps the finest training of its kind available anywhere.
The U.S. has plenty of companies – large and small alike – as well as armorers and gunsmiths who are capable of building world-class precision LR and ELR rifles. That isn’t the problem: the technology is there, but the military has to commit to using it. Not just purchasing it, but the painstaking development of doctrine and operation use, training programs, funding and training cadre for those programs, and so on.
Prior to the widespread adoption of assault rifles and battle carbines by the Army and Marine Corps in the late 1960s, the trained infantryman was supposed to have mastery of his rifle such that he could command the “rifleman’s quarter mile,” or roughly 0-500 yards/meters distance. The rifleman could engage any target within that range envelope and have fair assurance that he could score hits reliably under most field conditions.
And indeed, a skilled rifleman can hit regularly at 500-600 yards using an iron-sighted M-1 or M-14 rifle and issue ball/FMJ ammo, slung up and from the prone. The typical Marine was required to demonstrate mastery of field positions at 200 and 300 yards also, off-hand/standing
at 200 and sitting or kneeling at 300 yards, with the assistance of the sling.
Since 7.62x51mm 147-gr. FMJ-BT/Ball ammo tends to “cone out” at ~ 4 moa or so, 500 yards is the limit at which the typical rifleman can score hits reliably using a rack-grade M-14 with issue M80 ammo, against a 20-inch wide steel silhouette.
Beyond that is considered the domain of the designated marksman and sniper.
But since the widespread use of assault rifles in 5.56x45mm NATO, and changes in doctrine to reflect this, modern ground troops – whether Army or Marine Corps – tend to rely less on aimed precision fire to deal with targets in the 300-600 yard/meter range, and more on crew-served weapons, i.e., mortars, GPMGs, artillery fire-missions, tactical air or UAV strikes.
Over the last half-century since the 1970s, there has been a concomitant move away from precision-based fires towards tactics which emphasize superior small arms firepower – rounds fired/minute – and high round counts to suppress the enemy, instead of aimed fire as in the previous eras.
For the first time in a very long time, neither the Army nor the Corps is requiring recruits to demonstrate mastery of iron sights prior to using optics. Issue RDS, reflex sights and LPVOs are now considered so reliable that iron sights are not taught as a back-up to any great extent.
This, too, is a turning of the back institutionally, upon the ethos of the rifleman.
LR and ELR riflemen continue to be among the most-effective tools on the modern battlefield, scoring around one confirmed “kill” of a human or hard target per each ~ 1.5 shots fired.
Looking at LR marksmanship, I don’t know how hard a sell it would be to convince Big Green or the Corps, for that matter, to adopt LR marksmanship training in something like 6mm ARC.
Thorough training in LR and ELR marksmanship, scouting and the other aspects of sniping is both time-intensive and expensive. Do you propose to send every Marine through such training, or only those slated for combat arms such as infantry and special ops? And over on the Army side, aren’t the scout-sniper advocates going to regard routine LR training of line soldiers as encroachment on their turf and responsibilities?
Obviously, if making a skilled LR rifleman out of every soldier or Marine infantryman is the objective, then it is going to take a pretty big overhaul of how those services look at the problem and how they solve it. And for that, you’d need advocates inside and outside the military to push the changes through institutionally and political clout to get them funded. Not an easy task under the best of circumstances…
On February 23, 2026 at 1:03 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
And to add to the previous remarks….
Bringing us back around to drones and UAVs, while we can probably confidently state that the “death of the scout sniper” is not yet at hand, and that Commandant Berger was wrong; we should also recognize that he was not 100% wrong: Drones have changed the game significantly for all ground combatants in the 21st century. A good deal of in-depth study must be done to understand how and to what extent, before green-lighting any ambitious new programs for LR shooting within the ranks.
If scout-snipers are not to become endangered species on modern battlefields, then reacquiring and maintaining air superiority over the battlefield vis-a-vis unmanned aerial vehicles/drones – must become a very high priority for the Army and the USMC. The conflict in Ukraine has taught us just how easy it is for high-value targets to be taken out by small, relatively cheap drones. Until effective countermeasures are developed, this is going to remain a big problem for the guys down in the grass…