Special Ops Ammo Spreads to Other Services.

• Author: Gourley, Scott

After nearly a decade of being fired by U.S. special operators, polymer-cased ammunition is moving into several new calibers and being adapted by other services.

Polymer-cased ammunition replaces the traditional brass cartridge case with a plastic material. Its advantages include significantly lighter weights and greater performance consistency.

Widely fielded on an international basis, recent U.S. military polymer ammunition examples range from True Velocity's participation on the LoneStar Future Weapons team during the Army's 6.8 mm Next Generation Squad Weapons competition to multiple designs for a new .338 Norma Magnum medium machine gun for Marine Corps and Special Operations Forces use.

One of the earliest special ops applications involved its use on Special Operations Command's AH-6 "Little Bird" helicopters. Joe Gibbons, manager of government programs for Nammo MAC LLC, said that about six years ago the company's .50 caliber polymer ammunition design eliminated the weight tradeoff between fuel and ammunition, allowing the helicopter the ability to carry more fuel at full ammunition loads and spend longer time on station.

The .50 caliber applications are "very close" to expanding into broader use by the Marine Corps, he said. The company has been qualifying the polymer .50 caliber ammo with the service so they can receive a fully approved, or "catalogued," round.

The Marines are also conducting limited user evaluations at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, by different units and at Camp Pendleton, California, where they are currently doing demonstrations with the light armored vehicle group, he said.

Early reliability testing at Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division earlier this year should pave the way to catalogue the round by this fall, he said.

As for other missions, Gibbons said, "We believe--although we don't know for a fact--that some of our polymer ammunition has made it from some of the people that we've supplied polymer ammunition to in Europe into Ukraine, partially because I have an inquiry for polymer-cased ammunition to go to Ukraine. And that's about all I can say about that."

In addition to the expanded applications for the .50 caliber rounds, Gibbons said that the company is working on both .338 Norma Magnum and 7.62 mm NATO polymer designs.

Acknowledging that the .338 Norma activities focus largely on the emerging SOCOM/USMC medium machine gun requirement, he said, "We've been working with all the gun...