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Originally Posted by speeder
What is the current rifle on the battlefield for the U.S. military? I'm sure there is more than one but I recently watched "Hurt Locker" again, (great film), and the scene where they ran into some Aussie guys out in the desert and got fired on, they returned fire w some bolt action rifle? Maybe a U.S. sniper gun...super long range battle over open desert if you haven't seen it. Like needed the scope to even see the enemy.
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Haven't seen the movie, but if the rifles were bolt action, they were indeed some form of sniper rifle. The most common is simply a militarized version of the most popular civilian bolt action hunting rifle of all time - the Remington Model 700. The military versions are known as the M24 and M40. The M24 is a .300 Winchester Magnum, the M40 is a .308. They are just a heavy barreled, fiberglass stocked variant of the Model 700.
Our military does use other rifles in the sniper role, chambered in calibers with a bit more "reach". Next up the list would be the M24A3, chambered in the .338 Lapua Magnum. This one is being phased out in favor of the recently improved .300 Winchester Magnum loads. Beyond that, they use the .50 Browning Machine Gun (BMG) round in rifles for special applications, usually anti-equipment rather than anti-personnel. This is the same round used in the machine guns in B17's, P51's, and other aircraft of WWII - a seriously powerful round.