Decide first which rifle you like the best. If it happens to be a short action you already have your choice made for you, (of the three only the .308 is available in a short action). If the rifle choice is a standard (or " long" ) action then you may as well avail yourself of either the .270 or the .30-06. After all....why carry a longer/heavier rifle and settle for a " short action" cartridge!?!

As far as to effectiveness...I have taken deer with all three of those calibers. And if there was any difference in their effectiveness on game...it would not have amounted to a sneeze. If someone has had a problem with the .270 on Whitetails they might have either used varmint weight bullets.....or I' d question the shot placement. (And I am not talking about the odd, " single" incident either. I personally saw my brother hit a rather smallish doe on the point of the front shoulder with a 150 grain Hornady Interlock bullet at a range of approximately 20 yards. (A standard .30-06 load out of a 760 Carbine.) At impact the shoulder momentarily collapsed, as if hit by a sledgehammer, the deer flipped over on its back. All four hooves flailing in the air. Moments later she jumped back up, ran up the hill and out of sight. Neither of us thought another shot was needed. We believed we would find a very dead deer within 50 to 100 yards at most. That doe topped the hill, circled around the top, went down the far side to a small river where we lost her track admidst many other deer tracks. The blood trail had went completely dry. And try as we might for the next four hours....we never found another sign of her track....or her. To this day I am not certain what happened, or what went wrong. I only know what I saw and it did not make sense with any experience I had previous or since. It was certainly enough gun, enough bullet, and a very solid hit. Whether the bullet came apart on the point of the shoulder and didn' t reach the vitals, or maybe it didn' t expand at all and simply punched through with a small hole in and a small hole out....I have no idea!) But other than that one single, very isolated, incident.....I assure you as far as Whitetail deer are concerned...there is NO difference between a .308 Winchester, a .270 Winchester, or a .30-06 Springfield.

Buy the rifle you like the best.....and never look back!