SIG Sauer occupies a unique position in today’s firearms industry. The company currently provides the U.S. Army’s standard-issue handgun, service rifle, light machine gun, and the Direct View Optic used on the Squad Designated Marksman Rifle, an unprecedented position for a single manufacturer.
Unlike some large defense contractors that focus almost exclusively on military sales, SIG also makes a significant portion of its product line available to the civilian market where legally permitted. That dual focus has placed the company at the forefront of several recent developments in small arms and optics technology.
We recently had the opportunity to spend time with the SIG Sauer Cross bolt-action precision rifle chambered in the Army’s new 6.8x51mm cartridge, paired with the company’s Endure suppressor. Running this setup offered insight into the performance potential of the cartridge and supporting equipment now entering military service. It also highlighted how advancements driven by defense contracts often influence rifles, optics, and accessories available to hunters and civilian shooters.
Lay of the Land
Technology has veritably exploded in the past thirty years. Smart phones, personal computers, artificial intelligence, and the Internet have all conspired to both transform our lives and rot our brains. That same tech revolution has had its way with the shooting industry as well.
Radical advances in materials science combined with such out-there stuff as additive manufacturing and advanced microelectronics have excised much of the heavy lifting from long-range shooting. One of the hard decisions that shooters wishing to remain on the cutting edge have to make is whether or not to embrace strange new calibers. There’s quite a lot riding on it.
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Cartridge
For every wildly successful 300BLK or 5.7x28mm, there are a dozen others that just seem to fizzle. The .25-45 Sharps, .257 Roberts, .307 Winchester, .45 GAP, and .250-3000 Savage all had their day in the sun and then faded away. Heck, the same could even be said of the .40 S&W given the way the centenarian 9mm Para has displaced all comers nowadays. The risk is that you will invest gobs of money in some whiz-bang new smoke pole and then find that, a few years later, nobody makes ammo for it. It’s a perennial challenge. For those of us who tend to eschew gambling, such ballistic prognostication can leave one clammy. Nobody wants to be left holding an expensive gun you can no longer feed.
SIG’s new .277 Fury represents just such a quantum advance in technology. After well over a century of relative ballistic stagnation, the SIG approach to enhancing small arms performance was to design a cartridge that operates at markedly higher chamber pressures than its forebearers. Where a .308 Winchester round produces around 62,000 psi, the new .277 Fury runs closer to 80,000. This nearly 30% bump in horsepower produces increased muzzle velocities and significantly enhanced downrange thump. Distilled to its essence, the .277 Fury offers .300 Win Mag performance in a .308 package. But at what cost?
Pushing the Boundaries
This radical new round really does change everything. Prior to the advent of the .277 Fury, the SAAMI limit for chamber pressure was around 66,000 psi. To so willfully violate the rules of physics, the mad geniuses at SIG developed a weird hybrid cartridge case. The .277 cartridge is comprised of a conventional brass case fused with a stainless steel base. The steel component allows the .277 Fury to manage those astronomical chamber pressures needed to give that serious velocity and power bump while remaining reliably safe on the range.
That’s all pretty great. However, all these advanced guns and their associated ammunition are not cheap. Why would anyone be willing to risk the investment in a revolutionary rifle firing a brand new cartridge if there was always a possibility that such a round might ultimately follow the path of the .22 Cooper Centerfire Magnum? I would counter with the observation that, unlike all those other failed cartridges, none of them had an entire ammo plant built from the ground up just to produce them.
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Uncle Sam calls the .277 Fury the 6.8x51mm. The length of the round was chosen intentionally to mimic that of the legacy .308/7.62x51mm. That makes such stuff as magazines and magazine pouches simpler. Winchester Ammunition recently broke ground on a brand new manufacturing facility at the government’s storied Lake City Ammo plant. This entire factory is devoted solely to producing 6.8x51mm ammunition to feed the Army’s new XM7 assault rifles and XM250 light machineguns. Unlike all of those other weird experimental cartridges, the .277 Fury isn’t going anywhere.
The Can
The Endure sound suppressor is 3D printed out of titanium and optimized for use on hunting rifles. It features a high tech internal geometry optimized for efficient sound suppression. It is also small and feather light. The suppressor body is 1.75 inches across and 6 inches long. It only weighs eleven ounces.
Let’s put that into perspective. The Endure suppressor is shorter than a typical mid-sized banana, and it weighs less than two standard Syrian hamsters. You really can thread this thing onto the snout of your favorite hunting rifle and forget that it is there.
This .30-caliber suppressor comes with a Direct Thread, Steel Mount Hub Adapter that is threaded 5/8×24. The new modular end cap accepts accessories if desired, and the exterior of the thing sports a cool geographic pattern that helps minimize glare. The suppressor is finished in black Cerakote. Like all of SIG’s stuff, it also comes with an infinite transferable warranty.
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The Rifle
The SIG Sauer Cross is the cutting edge hunting rifle crafted for the Information Age. Featuring a 20-inch cold hammer forged steel barrel, a 15-inch free-floating M-LOK handguard, and a 2-stage adjustable match trigger, the Cross brings the state of the art in military technology to your next hunting trek. The barrel is tapered specifically to accept a sound suppressor, and there is a 20-MOA Picatinny rail for optics.
The skeletonized buttstock is widely adjustable and folds to the side for compact storage. The safety is a handy bilateral thumb lever. The gun is trim and lithe while feeding from a 5-round polymer Magpul magazine. The rifle itself only weighs 7.1 pounds despite its full-length barrel.
The Glass
Full disclosure—just like the rest of this amazing rig, I really love this scope. The Tango DMR 5-30x56mm features a big, hungry 34mm tube, a multi-lock zero stop elevation dial, and peerless glass quality. By folding SIG’s extensive tactical experience into this optic, they have created a lightweight hunting and tactical scope that will shoot farther and better than do I.
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SIG offers lots of different flavors, but this particular first focal plane optic features a wide field of view along with enough magnification to wring all of the available horsepower out of the 6.8x51mm cartridge. Adjustments are easily managed on the fly, and the illuminated reticle is driven by a common CR2032 button cell. The removeable throw lever makes magnification adjustments fast and easy without breaking your concentration. I was smitten with this example.
Tactical Synergy
In addition to everything else, SIG operates their own sprawling ammo plant outside of Little Rock, Arkansas. Heck, bring a little grub and eschew underwear as any real man might, and you can pretty much live out of their extensive product catalog. Their ammunition has a well-deserved reputation for precision, repeatability, and quality. I recently settled in behind the SIG Sauer Cross rifle and faced off against a 12-inch steel plate located 1,000 yards downrange that had clearly been talking bad about my momma.
The weather was chilly and bright with a wee crosswind running left to right. The rifle was already nicely zeroed with some reliable dope. I connected with the steel on the second round. With appropriate technique I subsequently beat that plate slap to death. Thanks to the Endure suppressor, the gun also remained nice and stealthy. The overall package offered surprisingly benign recoil characteristics and a simply divine 3-pound trigger.
The action runs like warm snot across glass, and follow-up shots are fast and mean. This radical round really does offer .300 Win Mag numbers in a relatively compact short action cartridge. It is also simply great fun to run. Recoil was shockingly comfortable despite the rifle’s trim dimensions and modest weight.
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Impressions
Humankind had squeezed about all of the innovation we could out of the traditional brass-cased cartridge. Short of reliable, shelf-stable, temperature-resistant caseless ammo or a phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range, this was about as far as we could go with legacy tech. This new hybrid case amps up both the power and the velocity in a round that still fits into a compact chassis. Running this thing at serious ranges is indeed a delightful new experience.
After a little trigger time, you can tell this is something seriously different. The 6.8x51mm cartridge projects authority downrange while offering an exceptionally flat-shooting experience. Ammo is hardly cheap. However, this is a bolt-action precision rifle. You likely won’t be burning through the stuff a case at a time.
| Component | Specification |
|---|---|
| Platform | SIG Cross Rifle / Tango DMR 5–30x56mm Optic / Endure Suppressor |
| Caliber | 6.8x51mm |
| Barrel Length | 20 in |
| Overall Length | 40.5 in (rifle) / 6 in (suppressor) / 46.5 in (total) |
| Weight | 7.1 lbs (rifle) / 31 oz (scope) / 11 oz (suppressor) / 9.7 lbs (total) |
| Magazine Capacity | 5 rounds |
| Trigger | 2-Stage Adjustable Match |
Ruminations
If you’re not terribly picky, you can land a decent bolt-action deer rifle from Walmart that will drop a whitetail at a football field or two. Such a mass-produced box store gun is cheap and it’ll get the job done. However, that’s also fairly pedestrian. Everybody’s got one. Some folks have several.
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If you’re ready to take your precision rifle shooting to the very next level, the SIG Sauer Cross in this revolutionary 6.8x51mm chambering employs the same radically-advanced tech that drives Uncle Sam’s sparkly new infantry battle rifles. The end result is indeed fresh, effective, and cool. The overall package is easy to pack in the field while offering a whole new world of power and range for weight.
The 6.8x51mm round would be proof against most any North American big game. Even serious beasties such as moose, elk, and brown bear would be on the menu. This round is perfect for whitetail and mulies. GI loads will penetrate a BRDM Combloc armored personnel carrier at 150 meters. That should be adequate performance to drop most any reasonable game animal on Planet Earth.
I grew up hunting whitetail deer in the American Deep South with my Dad. Traditional bolt-action and lever-action sporting rifles littered the landscape. The SIG Cross is different. Lightweight, rugged, and preternaturally accurate, the Cross with the diaphanous Endure suppressor and superlative Tango DMR scope is also actually quite stealthy. No matter where your hunt takes you, this rig will reliably put meat on the table while remaining exceptionally placid in the process. This is a glimpse into the future of precision firearms.
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