Part of the famed 101st Airborne Division recently became the first unit issued with the new Next Generation Squad Weapon system.
A March 28 social media post from the PEO Soldier office detailed that the 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, a unit of the Fort Campbell-based 101st Airborne Division, received the NGSW, marking a key milestone for the program that intends to replace the 5.56 NATO M4 Carbine and M249 Squad Automatic Weapon with a new family of weapons chambered in 6.8mm.
The new guns will be used in an upcoming New Equipment Training, an in-depth, train-the-trainer course, set for this month. From there, the systems and training will fan out across the brigade.
The program includes SIG Sauer's XM-7 rifle, which will fill the role currently held by the M4 series, the SIG XM250 light machine gun slated to replace the M249, and the Vortex-produced M157 Fire Control optics system used on both platforms. SIG also supplies suppressors for the platforms. Of note, the XM-7 is based on SIG's MCX Spear series.
Related: Testing The Army’s New Battle Rifle – SIG MCX Spear
"The process of developing and fielding new equipment is never without challenges and setbacks and speed bumps, so we’re celebrating the fact that we’re delivering on schedule, as promised," said Lt. Col. Mark Vidotto, the NGSW lead for the Soldier Lethality Cross-Functional Team (SL CFT) at Fort Moore, Georgia. "It was a team effort from start to finish."
A press release from Army Futures Command detailed that soldiers have invested more than 25,000 hours in development and testing of the NGSW system, which came about after a 2017 study identified the need for weapons that will perform better at longer ranges than the 5.56, which has been the Army's bedrock cartridge since the late 1960s.
The guns have completed over 100 technical tests and fired more than 1.5 million rounds of 6.8mm ammunition. This comes as the NGSW has completed extreme environmental testing in Alaska.
Next up for NGSW is to equip a National Guard armored brigade in May.
Winchester Building 6.8mm Facility
Meanwhile, earlier this month the Army awarded a contract to Olin Winchester, the current contracted operator of the service's Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Missouri, to construct a facility at Lake City to manufacture NGSW’s ammunition. This caps an 18-month design period between Winchester and the Army's Joint Program Executive Office for Armaments and Ammunition.
"The facility will house modern manufacturing systems designed to produce all aspects of the Next Generation Squad Weapon’s ammunition, including metal parts manufacturing, energetic operations for loading and charging ammunition, product packaging, process quality controls and testing laboratories, maintenance operations, and general-use administrative areas," notes the release on the expansion at Lake City.
Ammunition for the NGSW program is currently made in-house by SIG.
