jcchartboy

Float it is almost inconcievable to me that you could make a statement that is so ignorant of basic facts.
You are attempting to say that you are more knowledgable about the US Army than the US Army is about itself! That is absolutely unbelievable. Next I expect you will tell us that the US ARMY doesn't really know what a sniper is!

This it not meant to be personal. However the ease with which people discount known facts is simply amazing.....

The following was published by The Association of the U.S. Army in ARMY magazine in 2003.


The Army’s selection of the Barrett M82A1M as its new XM107 .50-caliber sniper rifle is already enhancing U.S. Army sniper teams. In fact, the need for the firepower increase was so great that the systems arrived in Afghanistan with their XM designator still intact. "It’s an XM because we haven’t completed full materiel release on it yet," explains Lt. Col. Rob Carpenter, U.S. Army product manager for crew served weapons (under Project Manager Soldier Weapons within the Program Executive Office Soldier). "But we’ve been buying and fielding the weapon under an urgent materiel release based on what we know about it: it is safe and it meets our requirements operationally. We have already started putting them out in the field; we have probably fielded over 200 of them now with the majority of the first 100 or so going straight over to Afghanistan into the AOR [area of responsibility]."

According to Carpenter, the beginning of the XM107 program dates back to the mid-1990s when Army planners began looking for a heavy sniper rifle in .50-caliber. The requirement generation and subsequent acquisition process focused on a bolt operated .50-caliber design, primarily based on the prevailing belief that bolt-action guns were inherently more accurate than semiautomatic designs. The researchers went through down-selection but they were not really happy with what they came up with. So they started looking at the autoloader candidates that were on the market. And to pass the ‘make sense’ test, they checked what the Marine Corps was using and saw that they were using the M82. "It was off the shelf and, from an economy standpoint, if some other government agency is already buying, we could tap into it. So we made some minor tweaks in the way the package was equipped and we came up with the XM107 program," he added. In its U.S. Army application, the XM107 will serve as a supplement to the current M24 7.62 mm sniper weapon system. We’re not replacing M24s. We are supplementing them and actually increasing our sniper capabilities with a long-range anti-materiel system," Carpenter said.

Here is the link to the entire article.
http://www.ausa.org/www/armymag.nsf/(soldier)/20034?OpenDocument