Fullboar1
Member
USSR said:No, the .30-06 was never a consideration. The reason was that some in our armed forces wanted a .300 Win Mag instead of the standard service .308 round. The bean counters at that time refused to have more than one rifle firing anything other than the current service rifle round, but left the door open to rebarreling to the larger round at a later date by using the long action.
Don
Maybe you should rewrite Wiki, Sniper Central and a number of other websites content.
http://www.snipercentral.com/m24.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M24_Sniper_Weapon_System
Quote:
"The rifle had a very quick development cycle as the US Army had decided it wanted to get snipers back into the US Army and was in the process of developing the B4 identifier and the school to award it. There was a major short fall of M21's which was the standard sniper rifle at that point of time and the Army figured it would need 10,000 sniper rifles of which they didn't have nearly that many M21's. So a new sniper rifle was developed at the same time and it was done in a record 22 months. The Weapon System Matrix Manager for the M24 was Major John Mende and he explains that the long action actually had nothing to do with the ability to convert to a .300 Win Mag but was a product of that quick development time. The rifle was intended to be chambered in the .30-06 as the -06 was a type classified munition for the Army unlike the .300 WM at the time. They wanted to have a high power load for the .30-06 eventually developed. As development of the system was moving forward they discovered that there was not enough .30-06 ammo in a single lot in the Army's inventory to test and develop the system so they quickly changed to the 7.62x51mm NATO (308 Win) and left the action the same as there was not enough time for the manufacturers of the stock and floorplate to make the change to short action. They also fully believed they would later do a product improvement update and convert all the M24's to .30-06. The fact that they could convert them to .300 Win Mag was an unexpected benefit to the SF groups and was never actually designed into the system".