huntzing@PICA.ARMY.MIL (CCL-S) (10/24/89)
From: "Hugh A. Huntzinger" (CCL-S) <huntzing@PICA.ARMY.MIL> From: gwh%typhoon.Berkeley.EDU@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (George William Herbert) > >[mod.note: To which I'm sure many readers will respond, "wouldn't > it have been better to design a gun to handle the specified > ammo ?" Seems to me that there must be a NATO standard for > 9mm, that being, supposedly, why we dropped the .45. Does > the US use a more powerful load ? - Bill ] There is a NATO standard for cartridge size, not laoding. They figured it wouldn't be a problem with breaking commercial standards for loading... I have no comment on the sensibility of decisions like this. ...my full-screen editor just went belly-up & it's 3:30pm on a Friday afternoon and want to get this sent out, so bear with me - I won't be able to escape up any lines on the screen. The above is an unedited cut & paste of the topic. NATO standardization of small arms ammunition always confuses people. Here goes nothing: NATO delegates representing each country get together and say, "hey, lets standardize Caliber .50 ammo!" They thrash around for months/years/etc. to come up with a set of requirments that everyone (or at least the major players) can live with. These requirements include, in 7.62mm for example, a chamber drawing, a cartridge case drawing, bullet weight, kinetic energy, penetration, tracer performance, functionality, climatic storage, reliability, pressure, action time, trajectory matching, primer sensitivity and more, as well as test procedures to inspect all of these. ...and so forth. If you use a NATO design envelope, you *may* designate so by putting the little cross in a circle on the headstamp (if you're NATO-qualified, you must). This does not mean you've got a NATO round! It only means you followed their guidelines. If you go through all the testing (performed *by a NATO designated test agency*) you are assigned a NATO design number and you are allowed to put the NATO Symbol of Interchanability *on the packaging* of your ammo - this looks like and is referred to as the "cloverleaf". In the U.S, the 7.62mm Ball & Trace rounds are the NATO design & are NATO qualified, so they have both the design mark and the cloverleaf. The 5.56mm rounds for the M16A1 do not have either. The 5.56mm rounds for the M249/M16A2 carry the design mark but NOT the cloverleaf as they have not yet been qualified In 9mm, the NATO STANAG was developed years and years ago & the US ignored it (because we had the .45). When the M9 program came along, no U.S. NATO-qualified 9mm ammo existed to test the guns in; I forget excactly what they did. I b believe the US is either working on or recently got a NATO-qualified 9mm round. Bottom line is that the 9mm NATO ammo requirements were cast in stone before the M9 existed and should not be in any contention with the M9 program. One interesting problem in military pistol calibers is the problem of powering both pistols and submachine guns (M3 grease gun & M1911A1; M9 & ???). If you provide sufficient power to the SMG's to prevent "rat-tat-tat's" (short recoils causing uncontrolled fire), your pistols take a pounding. -hummer P.S. - a note on the M16's history: the propellant was changed (I think from an IMR to a ball propellant) because the muzzle velocity was increased significantly. Unfortunately: a. Noone beefed up the operating rods (they broke) b. The powder being used contained calcium carbonate homogeniously mixed in as it was recovered cannon powder, which plated out at the gas port. This problem has been solved for a long, long time. Why was the muzzle velocity boosted? Because of the "little bullet can't kill anything" criticism from people who preferred the 7.62mm M14 rifle.