I told you it would be controversial. Let me just add here a few more of my own thoughts.
As regarding less powerful weapons, and I hate to write about this because it is actually the topic, first you should only speak of the cartridges themselves. A 7.62x39 is pretty much just as powerful fired from an AKM as from an SKS or an RPD. Or just as weak, if that's the way you see it.
Then there's the typically ignored matter concerning exactly what constitutes an intermediate cartridge, thought it is frequently talked about at some length. Imagine this: if you took all the cartridges used within the last 110 years and at least one of them is still in widespread use, and lined them up according to nothing more than muzzle energy, you might notice there is a wide spread from least to most powerful. The most powerful was probably the .30-06. There were more powerful cartridges but their use in rifles was quite limited and mainly intended for machine guns. I'm thinking here of the 8x63mm Swedish, which was for a machine gun but also chambered in rifles used by machine gun crews.
Now why would they use yet another cartridge when they already had a "more powerful cartridge" anyway? Because their standard cartridge, the 6.5x55, was almost an intermediate cartridge, as were all the other 6.5 cartridges then in use and there were several.
They say if you don't learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it. I think a joker said that. The problem is, which history is it you need to learn? Think WWII for a minute, our base for this discussion.
Some combatants went in wholesale for submachine guns. Others switched, or attempted to switch (a difficult thing in wartime) to a more powerful cartridge. Others adopted for some purposes a less powerful cartridge. Who was right? I mean, they couldn't all be right at the same time, could they?
Someone said battles are no longer fought over wide plains and open forests. Think again. Fighting during WWII took place under every condition that has been fought under since then, sometimes in the same places. Jungle, desert, mountains, urban areas, open plains, open forests, even snowy mountains. Come to think of it, There was a lot of fighting in WWI in most of those places, too. So, mostly the battlefields haven't changed. We still don't know precisely where the next battle will happen. Never did unless we were the ones hosting the battle.
Kill ratios of bullets expended per enemy casualty? I don't think that's such a good measure of efficiency. You don't measure the efficiency of a racing car by it's gas mileage, do you, except maybe in the Le Mans 24 hours. You don't necessarily measure it by how fast it goes. The winner is stil the one that crosses the finish line first. The only measure of efficiency in battle may not even be who wins the most battles. It's the one who wins the war!
Still, you have a point. It's the horseshoe nail theory.
The enemy has old weapons and does all right? Well, how old? Every photo I've seen lately usually shows a Soviet AK weapon of some variety or some variation of an AR-15. The Soviets adopted the AK-47 I think in 1948 (there was an AK-46, too). That makes it 64 years old, the design anyway. The AR-15 was around by at least 1962, making it a young 50 years old. The older brother then is the AR-10. Both were in military use by then, though not by the US. Even the British 5.56 rifle has been around for a while now. No one engaged in much fighting over the last few years is using anything especially new. And seeing as how fighting is winding down, hopefully, by the ones more likely to adopt something new, chances are they won't.
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