Picture of Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll, in the green jacket, is shown, from left to right, mockups of the Northrop Grumman-Colt precision grenade launcher, the FN America PGS-001, and the Barrett/MARS SSRS. An M4 carbine and an M320 grenade launcher are also seen at right.
Picture source from the US Army.
So I’m just learning about this for the first time because I sorta just figured the military would have some semblance of Strategic common sense left in maintaining the 40mm under-barrel grenade launcher platform they’ve been using for decades.
Nope. Fuck that.
Apparently the DOD is looking into competing contracts for a 25mm semi-auto magazine-fed grenade launching man-portable shoulder-mounted rifle. They’re estimated to only carry 5 rounds per mag, have whatever shitty computerized Optics they’re gonna slap on their dogwater rifles, be used to shoot down drones, and have shotgun canister rounds for close quarter combat.
Thing is, it’s gonna be fucking heavy, at roughly 14 pounds loaded unless they can shave off more weight. It’s gonna decrease the infantry squad Firepower by at least two riflemen by making each fireteam’s designated grenadier able to only shoot grenades and maybe a pistol sidearm if they’re lucky.
They’re not gonna carry the new fancylad XM7 Rifle because that’s already like 10 pounds of shit as is plus ammo in addition to the proposed 14 pounds of shit grenade launcher rifle plus ammo, that’s just too much shit to move with and just a fucking mess to deal with in general. If they get told they get to use the M4 carbine system as their primary carry, that’s still around 7 pounds plus ammo of extra shit they gotta handle.
XM7 below
M4 below
The fucking Pentagon’s brilliant thought leaders are already bickering over whether or not the new rifle carrying 10 less rounds is a good thing (more stopping power plus range per round) of a bad thing (less massed fire for suppression and less ammo capacity). Introducing what looks to be another fuck up to the standardized infantry squad loadout is sure to really hamstring the footsoldiers of the u.s military if they actually follow through with this.
Fuck me, the rational side of my brains looking at this pulling the hair out of its head but the sicko commie side is going 
That’s a smooooooth weapon.
To play devil’s advocate here, they’re beefing up the main infantry rifle because they want to make suppressors and armor piercing into standard features, and with the extra weight they probably figure that also having an underslung grenade launcher would be too much, so with all that in mind it makes sense that they’re stuck going back to a stand alone grenade launcher.
…but if the XM25 is any indication of how this is going to go, they would be better off modernizing the M79 instead. Those have half the weight of this thing and that’s with a wooden stock so I’m sure they could be cut down a lot and carried as a secondary weapon. Apparently some special and irregular forces already do that.
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.
I mean at the end of the day the primary objective of all of this crap is enriching defense stockholders, which is why it makes sense to pioneer an all new round with reliability issues rather than just use an already-existing and well-understood caliber. The fact that the brass tends to break into two pieces is icing on the cake because it means reloaded ammo absolutely can not be trusted so there’ll be no competition from it when the design migrates to the civilian world.