Army testing new rifle for infantry to use against targets out of range of M-4 and too close for snipers

The Drive:

U.S. Army personnel at Fort Bliss in Texas are conducting a limited user trial of the service’s new 7.62x51mm Squad Designated Marksman Rifle, or SDM-R. This is the latest in a series of efforts to give individual infantry squads, as well as scout and combat engineering units, the ability to more precisely engage targets at longer distances.

The service revealed the ongoing evaluations on Dec. 27, 2018, in a year-end wrap-up of developments associated with its new Futures Command, which includes a team dedicated to improving the lethality of individual soldiers. The first batch of nearly 120 rifles had gone to the 82nd Airborne Division and other select units in September 2018.

“The Army's current rifle technology is most effective below the 300-meter [nearly 330 yards] range,” U.S. Army Captain Weston Goodrich, the Assistant Program Manager for Soldier Weapons at the Program Executive Office Soldier, said in an official interview in June 2018. Trained snipers, however, are not typically expected to engage targets less than 650 yards away. The SDM-R is supposed to help bridge that gap.

The rifle is a variant of the Hecker and Koch HK417, which is itself a derivative of the AR-15/M16 series that fire the 5.56x45mm round. The German-headquartered firm also makes a rifle, the increasingly popular HK416, in the smaller caliber.
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There is more.

The old M-14 fired the NATO 7.62 round.  This would be an intermediate range rifle and the name implies that at least one member of an infantry squad would carry the weapon.