David Pugliese reports on the US Army’s work on a new, significantly lighter, Squad Automatic Weapon:
“We are using cased telescoped ammunition which uses a strong plastic case instead of a traditional brass case,” said Kori Phillips, a systems management engineer with ARDEC.
Weight reduction for the weapon was achieved by designing the new weapon platform using the latest materials technologies as well as modeling and simulation to achieve minimal weight without compromising performance.
With a basic load of 1,000 rounds, the LSAT light machine gun and its cased telescoped ammunition is 20.4 pounds lighter than a traditional SAW with the same amount of standard, brass-cased ammunition.
[. . .]
“The cased telescoped ammo still provides the same muzzle velocity, range and accuracy as the brass-cased ammo,” Phillips said. “We’re not sacrificing lethality for weight. The plastic case does the same job.”
In addition to significant weight savings, the LSAT is designed to provide other advantages over the current SAW. With a rotating chamber design, the cased telescoped light machine gun improves reliability.
“We’ve avoided the common problem of failure to feed and failure to eject,” Phillips said. “In the current SAW system, that’s one of the places where you primarily have failures and malfunctions.”
Of course, if the new ammunition works well for the SAW, it’ll certainly be adapted for other small arms (in a hot combat zone, you never have “too much” ammunition available, but you often have “too little”).
