For a service rifle round, 7.62x51 represented an absolute refusal to learn anything about small arms and combat from World War 2 on the part of the US military (and to ignore our own pre-war R&D, such as the Pedersen 276 round).
Had the people making decisions back in the late 40s/early 50s about such things had a shred of sense we'd have wound up with NATO using the British 280/7mm round that improved on the 7.92 Kurz concept rather than adopting a round that was just 30-06 reinvented with more modern powder and a consequently shortened case.
It's what if's and such, but had US forces with FALs (or M14s or even EM-2s) chambered in 280 Brit gone head to head with the AK-47 in Southeast Asia, I doubt 5.56mm would have ever turned up as a military cartridge. It's appearance had a lot to do with the hardware guys dropping the ball so utterly with the 7.62x51/M14 combo that it opened the way for advocates of pure theory to jump into the game, from which we got the SCHV idea and the resultant 5.56x45 round (and 5.45x39, eventually).
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