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A question that I have always wondered why the British Army didn't use the M16... especially now days as, as far as I understand, the SAS etc. use a version of it??

Does it use that same bullets as the gun the lads are using now?? or did it when they had the FN rifle in 60's/70's???

Comments from the informed would be welcomed

Cheers

Von Boy wrote:

> A question that I have always wondered why the British Army
> didn't use the M16... especially now days as, as far as I
> understand, the SAS etc. use a version of it??


There was an interesting programme on a few months ago (I think it was Dispatches) about wastage in the MOD. One of the things that stood out was that the SAS buy their own equipment, thus only having small purchase power of a few hundred units, but they still managed to get their preferred rifle (I only remember it was a Colt) for about half the price of the hated SA-80.

A superior weapon, for half the price, with no bulk purchase power. Ridiculous situation for the MOD.

They also pointed out we had, at current usage rates, enough jettison-able fuel tanks for a certain type of plane, to last 480 years, yet we're still buying more thanks to the stupid contract the entered into.

At the time the US supplied the M16 to their Army the British Army was well into a reasonably new weapon with superior range and penetration and stopping power utilising the 7.62mm round. Also, the British Military has a habit, as do the Yanks, of using home produced weapon systems. Historically, as far as small arms are concerned, this has proved to be an extremely good decision by our MOD.
Many years later the fucking Yank armaments industry forced NATO to accept the smaller 5.56mm round. Therefore, with the SLR coming to the end of it's usefull life in our Army a new weapon was designed and eventually issued. The SA 80. What a pile of shyte this has turned out to be. It may be lighter but it is more complicated and not as robust as the SLR. In all the years I used an SLR around the world I never heard of any real faults. It was robust, accurate in the right hands, and easy to field strip and assemble. My son, when in Afghan, with his comrades wished they had SLR's as they could get at the taliban at the same range the bastards were at using kalishnikovs, which also uses a 7.62mm round.
The M16 suited the Yanks but not the British.

The basic story is that in the 70s it was decided that all NATO armies would use 5.56mm rifles. Rather than buy one off the shelf, Royal Ordnance developed its own rifle, the SA80, which is essentially an American Armalite AR18 turned into a bullpup, with the magazine behind the pistol grip. The MoD selected the home grown rifle, but at the same time Royal Ordnance was privatized and sold off to BAe. They sold off the armoury at Enfield for housing, and set up a new factory in Nottingham. The upshot was that a new rifle had to be built in a new factory by people who didn't know what they were doing.

The original SA80, the L85A1, was rubbish, badly made and prone to breaking and jamming. Rather than ditch it and buy something that worked, the MoD decided to pay Heckler & Koch some ?90 million to rebuild about half the 200,000 odd rifles that had been built. By all accounts these now work quite well, but cannot alter the fact that the SA80 is heavy and badly balanced, as that is inherent in the design.

In Afghanistan, the need for longer range 7.62mm rifles has emerged again, but the old SLRs have been long since scrapped, so the MoD has bought a bunch of rifles from an American firm called Lewis Machine Tool. These are essentially a modern take on the Armalite AR10 first designed in the 50s. It seems everything comes back if you wait long enough.

As for the SAS, they are not going to carry a rifle that weighs 10lb when they can buy an American M4 off the shelf which weighs about 6lb. We should have bought them for the rest of the army, but that would have been too embarrassing for the MoD, and after all, it's only our money they are spending.

Royal Ordnance Nottingham has now closed, and Britain no longer has any capacity to build military rifles on a large scale, so when the SA80s are replaced in the 2020s, we will be buying them from abroad whatever they are.