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In the end it is not about shot placement, it is about physics.
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Ok, WHAT, in the end, is not about shot placement, but physics??
Stopping power? Or however you want to phrase it, the ability to put an enemy down and out? Seems to me that shot placement is kind of important, if you don't HIT the enemy, I don't think the physics of the round matter much. (Thermonuclear weapons / high explosives excepted)
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The US has been in a state of war for 222 years,
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This has me curious, how do you define "a state of war"??
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the 5.56 has been in use for 55 years,..
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And the .30-06 was in use for 51 years as the service rifle round. We've covered this before. The only thing the length of service tells you is the length of service. It has nothing to do with the actual effectiveness of round A over B when both get the job done to the military's satisfaction.
And that's the big point, The round has to be effective enough to accomplish the mission and be cost effective. AND any new round not only has to do that, it has to do it well enough to justify the COST of replacing the existing round, AND the weapon systems that use it.
This is the lesson you should take away from the failure of the US to adopt the .276 Pedersen. While the .276 was superior to the .30-06 in several ways all of them added together were not enough to convince the powers that be, (at the time) that it was worth replacing the .30-06. For general service use, there is a lot more involved than just new rifles.
You may think the 5.56mm has been in service so long because tis the best thing since sliced bread, canned beer, and girls who smell nice, OR you might think it's been in service so long because the govt is too cheap to buy something better and too obstinate to admit they should have gone with something else in the first place.
My personal opinion, considering how many "upgrades" and modifications we've made to the 5.56 and the M16 over the years, looks to me a lot like "this is what we're stuck with, lets keep trying to make it work better..."
Today, with those people who gave /forced the 5.56 to/on us long retired, their careers and their place in the history books is no longer threatened, so people are beginning to actually look at the fact that there MIGHT be something else, possibly a better alternative.
However, millions and millions of $ worth of inventory has an inertia all its own. Overcoming that takes either a seriously significant performance AND cost improvement, or a top down "
Fuehrer Directiv" from the Sec Def or higher.
I don't see either of those on the horizon, ….yet