Thread: Ideal .308 barrel length.

Jeff Cooper had it figured out in the 80's.

The scout rifle is a conceptual class of general-purpose rifles defined and promoted by Jeff Cooper in the early 1980s that bears similarities in the design and functionality of guide guns, mountain rifles, and other rifle archetypes, but with more emphasis being placed on comfortable portability and practical accuracy, rather than firepower and long range shooting.

"The general-purpose rifle will do equally well for all but specialized hunting, thus it must be powerful enough to kill any living target of reasonable size. If you insist upon a definition of 'reasonable size', let us introduce an arbitrary mass figure of about 1,000 pounds (454 kilograms)."

Length: an overall length of 39 inches (990 millimeters) or less and a barrel length of 19 inches (480 millimeters) or less. These two characteristics place scout rifles into the general class of carbines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scout_rifle