FORT GREELY, Alaska — It is vital that military equipment work wherever in the world American Soldiers need it, and extreme cold is a weather condition troops have had to contend with frequently in American history.
From Korea to Afghanistan, the lives of American soldiers have frequently depended on properly functioning equipment in inhospitably frigid environments.
This fact led to a multiweek test of the Army’s Next Generation Squad Weapon at the U.S. Army Cold Regions Test Center at Fort Greely, Alaska early this year.
The XM7 and XM250 are successors to the M4 rifle and M249 light machine gun that American forces have used for decades. The new weapons boast improved accuracy and range, weigh less, and fire with less recoil even though their 6.8-mm round is larger than the two legacy weapons’ 5.56-mm cartridge.