When Uncle Sam went looking for a lighter .30-caliber round than the ‘Ought-Six they wanted similar ballistic performance in a smaller cartridge.
The Army’s T65 cartridge eventually landed at 7.62x51mm length, the NATO standard for both the semi-auto rifle and machine guns in 1954.
With the specs for the cartridge already commercially available, Winchester beat the Army to the punch and released it on the commercial market in 1952 as the .308 Winchester, chambered for their new Model 70 Featherweight bolt-action rifles and loaded with a soft-point hunting bullet rather than the military’s steel jacketed boat-tail.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Here is our selection for the best semi-auto rifles and bolt-action .308 rifles available today.
