The light machine guns outperform assault rifles and submachine guns in terms of their combat capabilities, are designed to defeat the manpower at ranges of up to 800 m where their fire is of little effect. The light machine guns have the same caliber as submachine guns and assault rifles adopted for the service and differ from them by their more heavy barrel, magazine capacity, availability of cartridge-belt feeding, fire from bipods support. This ensures better fire accuracy and more high effective rate of fire in bursts-up to 150 rounds per minutes. The overall weight of light machine guns is usually 6-14 kg and their length is nearly that of rifles. This allows light machine gun firers to act directly within squad formations. The modern light machine guns fill the niche between individual and group support weapons. The main way of firing a light machine gun is delivered from a bipod, from shoulder rest and there is also a need to fire it from the hip, from standing position and on the move.
The main shortage of a light machine gun lies in the need to combine its small size and weight with more intensive fire, low dispersion shot pattern and ammunition load as compared to an assault rifle. This problem my be addressed in various ways. The more simple and cheap way is to fit the assault rifle with bipods and magazine with increased number of cartridges (Israeli light machine gun "Galil" ARM, German MG.36). The second way implies the development of the light machine gun derived from a submachine gun or an assault rifle with more heavy barrel and new arrangement of controls as is the case with the Soviet RPK and RPK-47 or the Britain L86A1. In this case the infantry weapons on the level of platoon-squad will be unified in terms of the cartridge and system. And at last, it is possible to develop the new design configurations. Such an approach is demonstrated in the Belgium light machine gun "MINIMI" and the Singapore "ULTIMAX-100".
