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thedrifter
03-07-06, 02:15 PM
March 13, 2006
Army snipers add new rifle, may keep bolt-action favorite

By Matthew Cox
Times staff writer

Army sniper teams will soon add a semiautomatic sniper rifle to their arsenal, but they may get to keep their trusted bolt-action shooter, the M24, as well.

By early next year, Army snipers could deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan with the XM110, a version of Knight’s Armament Co.’s MK11 MOD 0 rifle, the sniper rifle Navy SEALs have used since the late 1990s.

The Army selected the Knight’s Armament rifle in September as the winner of an open competition, but a protest from Remington Arms Co., the maker of the M24 sniper rifle, all but put the program on hold until mid-January.

That’s when a Government Accountability Office report denied Remington’s protests that the Army’s evaluation of its proposal was “unreasonable and that the resulting award decision was improper.”


Weapons officials from the Army’s Project Manager Crew Served Weapons, who are moving forward with the project, hope to have technical and operational testing completed by early summer and to begin fielding the first of 4,492 XM110s by January, said Lt. Col. Kevin Stoddard, product manager for Crew Served Weapons.

“The gun has actually been running extremely well,” he said, describing how additional testing is a priority before soldiers take it into combat.

“Reliability is everything to us. When we accept guns, we are going to shoot them, we are going to look at them and we are going to make sure the reliability is there.”

The XM110 Semiautomatic Sniper System looks like an M16 with a 20-round magazine chambered for 7.62mm ammunition.

It’s equipped with a Leupold 3.5 X 10 scope, a bipod and a removable sound suppressor. It has a maximum effective range equal to or better than the M24’s 800 meters, Army weapons officials said.

It was designed to give snipers the ability to shoot multiple targets at close range in addition to taking longer-range precision shots with the same accuracy of the M24 sniper rifle.

This isn’t the first time the Army has adopted a semiautomatic sniper rifle. Throughout the 1980s, Army snipers used the M21, a customized version of the M14, before it was replaced by the M24 in 1988.

Protecting an old standby

The original intent of the XM110 was to replace the M24, but comments from the sniper community in the past year have prompted the Army to rethink that decision.

There is an argument that bolt-action rifles, which have fewer moving parts, are more accurate than a more complex semiauto design. But Infantry Center officials at Fort Benning, Ga., say much of a weapon’s accuracy is linked to the shooter’s skill and training.

Snipers like the M24’s stealth factor, too, said Maj. Glenn Dean, chief of small arms at the Infantry Center.

“Under certain conditions, particularly when you have to deal with a malfunction of the weapon, a bolt gun can be considerably quieter,” Dean said. “You can load and clear a malfunction more quietly; that’s what the sniper folks are telling us. ... Units in the field have come back to us and said, ‘We would really like to retain this capability.’”

The issue is still under consideration, Dean said, adding that the Army is scheduled to make a decision by the end of the year about whether the XM110 will replace the M24 or serve as a second sniper weapon.

Initial reliability problems plagued the MK11 MOD 0, the forerunner of the XM110 that first saw service with the SEALs.

During testing of the MK11, the weapon’s bolt wouldn’t cycle fully after firing.

The problem, it was later discovered, was that certain lots of M118LR ammunition had been loaded with ball propellant, which is not designed for use in semiautomatics.

The XM110 performed well in the competition, but the Army is in the process of putting the weapon through a number of required technical shooting and field tests now that the GAO upheld the contract award.

“I’m happy it’s resolved,” Stoddard said.

Matthew Cox covers the Army.

Ellie

RLeon
03-07-06, 05:22 PM
Oh great, replace the bolt rifle...paleeeeease... I see the officials from the Infantry Center are not geniuses. They better listen to men in the field who actually use the equipment and know what they're talking about. Also there goes the end of the M14...They have been looking to replace the USMC DMR M14 with a 7.62 AR...