The Marine Corps is looking to upgrade 200,000+M16A4s and 80,000 M4s. What is interesting about this is it will bring these up to a standard that many civilian users already have. Adjustable butt stocks, better scope mounts, and free floated barrels are pretty much standard on even middle of the road civilian AR15s. What amazes me is there are still senior Marines in the fleet that actually do not want some of the upgrades because you cannot use the weapon as a club or the two man buddy lift over a wall. Maybe they should us empirical data and actually survey combat vets and ask them how many people have been butt stroked in the head in the last 10 years. Give the Marine as good a weapon as you can and stop worrying about the irrelevant stuff.
As for the new M27 IAR it looks like the Corps is trying to go back to the old Browning Automatic Rifle principle. I am taking a wait and see approach but I cannot for the the life of me figure how they are going to do fire and maneuver with this thing. Maneuver yes but all they did was add another M16 to the fire team and take out a weapon the M249 saw that is capable of sustained fire. Anyway here are some pictures of the weapon in Afghanistan.
