"I’d like to nominate the Browning M-2 .50-caliber machine gun, in all its incarnations," Dutch reader Bart van der Schoor writes in. He praises the ubiquitous heavy machine gun, which sees daily combat use in Iraq and Afghanistan, for its:
low-tech, vehicle-mountable firepower and historic value. And you can't deny 1.27-centimeter-thick lead fingers eating up your cover. It doesn’t need batteries and every idiot can fire and clean it -- albeit not that precisely, but that makes it even more dangerous! In 14 years it will be 100 years old. And the thing that would be replacing it, the Objective Individual Combat Weapon -- with the complicated high-tech airburst stuff -- I haven’t heard of for a while. Scrapped?
The planned replacement for the M-2 is the XM-312, which is supposed to be more accurate and have less recoil. The Army tested the XM-312 in 2005. There hasn't been much news about the new weapon in a couple years, but Army documentation still lists it as the intended machine gun for the Future Combat Systems family of vehicles. My take? Don't hold your breath. Near-perfect weapons like the M-2 are damn hard to replace.
Read the rest of the series here.
--David Axe
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