NEWINGTON, N.H. – On the factory floor at gun maker Sig Sauer’s headquarters, giant shipping pallets of the brand-new M8 Next Generation Squad Weapon rifle sit shrink-wrapped on shelves, ready for dispatch to soldiers.
Fielding of the M8 carbine, which appears set to replace Sig Sauer’s M7 as the Army’s standard rifle less than three years after the M7’s initial fielding began, will begin in December with some units at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, company executives confirmed to Military Times Monday.
The NGSW new weapons rollout also includes Sig’s M250 machine gun, which will replace the aging M249 Squad Automatic Weapon and is expected to reach troops in the first half of next year, said Dave Buehler, the company’s vice president of manufacturing.
Both weapons share an ammunition caliber: the 6.8×51mm Common Cartridge developed by Sig Sauer with a hybrid design intended to withstand high chamber pressure.
The M7 stumbled out of the gate, generating complaints from soldiers about its unwieldy weight and length and undue wear they said the high-pressure rounds were putting on components, including barrels and suppressors.
While Sig Sauer pushed back at the time on a number of the most strident complaints, the company is now casting the transition from the M7 to the M8, also previously called the XM8, as a success story that highlights its ability to act quickly on soldier inputs.
“From our perspective [the M8 is] a far superior rifle to the M7,” Buehler said. “On the M7, our hands were kind of tied [with what] the design criteria or characteristics of the contract required – even if we didn’t like them, we had to meet them. So now, the M8 considers our feedback, the soldiers’ feedback. And we can’t wait to get it out there.”
The new rifle is more than a pound lighter than the M7 and sports a barrel that’s 3.5 inches shorter. It replaces a less-popular folding stock with a fixed stock and includes feedback-based adjustments like added rigidity for the handguard. For soldiers who previously received the M7 rifle, the M8 should be a smooth transition, said Josh Shoemaker, Sig Sauer’s product manager for defense.
“The fundamentals are all the same, really,” Shoemaker told Military Times in an interview. “If guys that have had the M7 already are pretty familiar with that, the M8 will be a well-received transition.”
The foremost design challenge, he said, was achieving weight reduction from the M7, which weighed more than eight pounds unloaded, and nearly 10 pounds with the included suppressor – a radical difference from the legacy M4A1 carbine, which weighs 6.34 pounds unloaded.
Shoemaker said Sig Sauer had reduced the weight difference between the M4 and M8 to a little less than a pound, though that doesn’t include the M8’s suppressor.
“We worked really hard to reduce weight where we could and where it matters. So there’s lots of lightening cuts around the receiver. We pulled some weight out of the barrel, but we’re very careful to do that, because a lot of times when you pull weight out of the barrel, you have risks of some performance decreasing, whether that be barrel life or cook-off,” Shoemaker said. “We’re very sensitive to that, so it’s a long process to be able to figure out where your left and right limit is and how much weight [you can] kind of pull off of that before it’s too much.”
Reducing barrel size and thus altering the weapon’s center of gravity helped in that effort, Shoemaker said.
“When you pick up that M8, the balance of it feels a lot better, with that suppressor being on a shorter weapon system,” he added.
As for the M7, budget documents released earlier this year show the Army is curtailing its procurement, with none additional requested for Fiscal Year 2027 and about 50,000 previously delivered to the force.
The Army hasn’t said what it plans to do with the M7s already in inventory, particularly if it opts to put M8s in the hands of all troops who previously got the M7.
Shoemaker said there were “tons of options” for the Army with regard to M7s, including sending the weapons to basic training units or reassigning them to Guard or Reserve units.
But there’s another option, he said: the Army could ask for conversion kits to turn all the M7s already in its inventory into M8 carbines.
“The barrel is two screws that come out, and the hand guard is two more screws … the lower-end serialized item is the same,” he said. “All in, you could probably convert [an M7 to an M8] in under five minutes.”
If that’s an option Army leaders are considering, they have yet to address it publicly.
“There’re lots of options that the Army is well aware of,” Shoemaker said, “and making decisions on what direction they’ll go with that.”
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