

The terrain in Afghanistan isn't very friendly for U.S. troops. In the mountainous east near the Pakistan border, insurgents positioned at the peaks open fire on soldiers' outposts in the valleys, with gravity adding to the distance Taliban bullets travel. So now Army snipers are getting new weapons to help even the odds.

Starting next year, the snipers will be outfitted with the XM2010 rifle, capable of hitting a target from a 3,937-foot distance – about three quarters of a mile. The current sniper rifle, the M-24, has a range of 2,625 feet, by contrast. "You want to give guys the capability to do those things they need to do at those ranges," Colonel Douglas Tamilio, the Army's weapons program manager, told USA Today.

In October, the Army's gear-acquisitions crew announced that Remington got an open-ended contract to revamp the M-24s into longer-range XM2010s, with an eye to making 3,600 guns in all – about 1100 more of them than the Army has snipers. The XM2010's scoping allows for snipers to see further than the M-24 does, and it's got add-ons to stifle the heat and noise it gives off, which can tip off a sniper's position to an enemy.

That's not the only new gun the Army's handing out. Last month, soldiers in Afghanistan started receiving a smart grenade launcher called the XM25. It's not for sniper use, but it has a different approach to accuracy: its onboard computers tell a 25-mm explosive round where to go and when to explode, something the Army wants in order to hit insurgents taking positions in Afghanistan's compounds without destroying the entire structure. The XM25 has a range of 2,300 feet, so it's clearly not sniper-grade, even if snipers used grenade launchers.

And the XM2010 isn't even supposed to be the only new weapon that snipers will soon receive. Darpa, the Pentagon's out-there research branch, has a project called "One Shot" that aims to deliver sniper rifles whoseaccuracy won't be thrown off by high-velocity winds. Those are supposed to arrive in 2011, too. The year after that, Darpa contractor Teledyne is scheduled to deliver a prototype of a smart .50-caliber bullet that can adjust its trajectoryfor wind and humidity fluctuations.

Congress provided $5.6 million over the last two years to develop the XM2010, USA Today notes. And that could touch off a new round of a persistent debate in Army circles: should the Army develop a better general-purpose rifle than the M-4 and M-16 carbines currently in use? As Nathan Hodge noted in May, the M-4 performed worse in firing-range tests than three competitors. And, a provocative 2007 Army Times story reported, Delta Force soldiers use a high-accuracy rifle made by Heckler & Koch, the 416, that "combines the solid handling, accuracy and familiarity of the M4 with the famed dependability of the rugged AK47." As you can hear us describe to Reddit, an attempt over the last decade to design a replacement for the M-4, ultimately known as the XM-8,stalled under the force of bureaucratic resistance.

Even if the XM2010 performs well in Afghanistan, that's hardly a guarantee of any broader rifle-rethink. But better range and accuracy for sharpshooters in one of the deadliest combat environments the Army faces might get the ground service to start revisiting some of its assumptions.

Photo: DoD

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