[dingaling]

The irony is that the Minimi ( M249 ) was originally developed by FN as a Baby MAG ( M240 ) to bring GPMG firepower to the squad. It was originally chambered in 7.62x51

It was rechambered in 6x45 and then 5.56x45 for the US SAW competition. It never seemed to adapt well to the smaller rounds, less power for the mechanism.

[woodman]

I think you're right about the lack of power being the biggest contributor to the problems we had - which remained even after they tried to reduce the feature set (emergency magazine-well, user selectable gas tube aperture).

I think it was a poor idea in the first place to push a beltfed machinegun down to the fireteam level. People generally have a misconception about what machineguns are for - while volume of fire certainly figures into effective suppression, accuracy is more important. An effectively employed machinegun should be treated like some kind of sniper shotgun, where you can put 50% of your shots into a vehicle sized target a mile away. You aren't going to be doing that while playing the I'm-up-he-sees-me-I'm-down game.