Army's £92m rifles 'still jamming'

Times online ^ | feb-28-2003 | By Daniel McGrory in Kuwait and Michael Evans

[Taipei Personality]

They said that another mechanism, which was supposed to show when the chamber was empty, also jammed, leaving troops unsure whether they still had live ammunition in the magazine. The captain said: “I know we are supposed to count every round we fire, but that is not always possible in the heat of battle.”

Does an empty magazine not lock the bolt to the rear on this rifle? Are the Brits not taught to perform a "press check" to ensure a round is chambered? Does their leadership actually expect them to count rounds expended in a battle?

Evidently, the British Army is being led by accountants.

[harpseal]

Ham fingers struch again vommrnt should be comment

[spitz]

As long as they buy from the original designer, Steyr of Austria, the AUG would be a good replacement.

The Australian built AUG has been used in New Zealand for 20 years and has suffered from fogging optics, junk magazines, a barrel that can not sustain a reasonable rate of automatic rifle fire and fallible safety mechanisms.

The Australian AUG can be summed up by an actual order by the Australian Army, order No. 7196-94 which indicated that the Steyr should not be used on rapid fire for long because the plastic parts melted.

[RogueIsland]

This H&K POS should be scrapped.

H&K are the folks who actually got the thing working to some extent. Ironic that the British had to get the Germans to salvage their new toy.

[The KG9 Kid]

"... The Australian AUG can be summed up by an actual order by the Australian Army, order No. 7196-94 which indicated that the Steyr should not be used on rapid fire for long because the plastic parts melted."

I'm a bit dubious on that claim. All I can find on this through a Google search is some that come from even more dubious sources:

SAS BLOODBATH IN TIMOR: 100 INDONESIANS KILLED

Defences of Australia Rundown? Australia could "face invasion"

Tony Pitt 's Defence Report (1999) - (An Ex-Warrant Officer's View On Australia's Defence)

The only problematic issue that I know of with the Steyr Stg-77 (AUG) is that the recoil spring rods retain water if totally submerged for a good length of time, which can lead to rusting if preventative maintenance is ignored.

The belief that the AUG's plastic parts melt on full-auto fire, I totally reject. The 'plastic' parts are located nowhere near a heat source, unless this is the trigger housing area that covers the receiver. I have never even felt them getting warm after several hundred rounds fired in rapid-fire. Ninety rounds and/or nine seconds of auto fire allegedly causing this is an outright laugh.

From a Australian Army armorer's member report on www.steyr-aug.com:

"...There has been several myths about Steyrs "melting" during firing - these are largely myths. The only case which I am aware of a Steyr actually melting was in 1995 in Singleton. It occurred during a battalion firing exercise. After the shoot was over , one of the firing range safety officers collected all spare ammunition he could find - 25 magazines in all. He fired them one after the other on full-automatic. Needless to say the gun jammed due to the barrel expanding from all the heat generated and part of the polymer stock melted. It was than estimated that the rifle heated up to 500 degrees Celsius - conventional rifles would jam long before that. Other than in the extreme case stated above , the F-88 is not prone to "just melt"....

Australia's Lithgow Arsenal may indeed be having problems with building integrated optics for it's F88 clone licensed through Steyr, and I've heard they're nowhere near as high-quality as the Swarovski-made optics that are made with the same craftsmanship as you'd expect coming from one of Europe's premier jewelry houses.

[The KG9 Kid]

By the way, I didn't know that New Zealand used the F88. Did they adopt it before the Australians?

Does NZ have a common equipment agreement with Oz?

[donozark]

Differing views on IDF switch to M-16. Many feel for the same reason as Abrams tank. U$ "grant$" to purchase back US products. Also, weight of FN-FAL was a factor. As it was for the Galil.

I tend to side with the individual soldiers, in this case the Brits. Most would eagerly trash the SA-80 for a FAL anyday. In early days of Afghan war, I noted Brit SAS carrying M-16s (full size) as well as the M-4 "shorty." Also saw a couple of FAL paras. Of course these elite forces have options. Little guy? Take what ya get and like it...Just hope it doesn't cost anyone his life.

[donozark]

A late thought-you may be aware of it already. DOD has reportedly ordered unspecified number of DS ARM built FN-FALS, SA58. No configuration nor precise numbers given. Apparently destined for Spec. Ops.

DSA rep on FAL FILES confirmed this. No other info given. Apparently seeking a "one shot, one kill" weapon. Wouldn't it be odd if Brits had to do likewise? That is, purchase FALs from a US manufacturer?

[spitz]

Problems with the Australian produced Steyrs have been attributed to the Australian MOD who didn't ask for technical support from Steyr-Mannlicher and suffered quality control problems because of that. It has been suggested that NZ has been holding onto their SLR’s until the problems with the AuSteyr has been resolved. I’ve seen and heard reports that the Aussie and NZ Steyr suffers from trigger pull problems, extensive barrel wear, magazine quality problems , broken lenses on the sights and, possibly the worst aspect, reports of receivers melting and the trigger group deforming when going full auto.

Now, I would suggest, there’s no smoke without fire, but these accusations are based on rumours, hearsay, and an accusation of a cover-up by AUSteyr. It is certainly very hard to substantiate these allegation in NZ because the local media rarely if ever reports on these types of military issues. The truth is the NZ public don’t care about military equipment issues, so the media don’t regard this as a newsworthy issue.

I’ll try to track down some official government sources and post you the links if I find any.

[Born on the Storm King]

Effective range of the rifle is a function of the restrictive gear the average soldier is wearing at the time. Compounding the analysis of the effective range is the potential damage done to the Brit by the AK-47/74 rounds hitting said soldier: Maximum effective range is 15 meters - horizontal, unless the throwing arm is shot to pieces before hand. Or vice versa.

If you can't figure out the "restrictive gear" interfering with your firing capacity on the range, you are SOL (SH** out of luck.)

Your maximum effective range maybe 15 meters but if this "girly" weapon was placed in my hands, I can assure you that I would use it effectively

[Eaker]

He insisted that it was wrong to make a judgment about the rifle based on a few random remarks from a soldier.

One never wants to trust the word of the individual soldiers, especially when it is merely their lives that are at stake.

Stay safe; stay armed.
Eaker FReeper Status

[archy]

LOL.....Can't be .....Archy told me they were good rifles ? Not the piece of original piece of brit crap I fired at Patton's little behind the fence operation in MD.

Stay Safe !

I've happily carried the L85A1 on several occasions, both firing off blanks with MILES gear, at which it generally worked better than an M16A1, and a couple of times where it was quite possible that any targets I fired on might well shoot back. I had none of the reliability problems noted in many reports, and found the things to be considerably more accurate than most 5,56mm rifles, due both to the full-length barrel made possible by the bullpup layout and the SUSAT telescopic sight mounted on the ones I packed, though not on all rifles the Brits have fielded. And on one happy occasion, I got to haul a L86A1 LSW, a sort of half-hearted cross between an SA-80 and a SAW, built heavier, fitted with a bipod, and which fires from an open bolt. The LSW has also come in for its share of criticism, though my limited exposure to it was also at least satisfactory.

The worst failure of the L86 rifles was probably the stories of firing pin breakage, which seemed to have no rhyme nor reason. The ones that came my way worked fine and without problems; others reported a breakage every 80-100 rounds, or worse, suggesting that heat treatment problems in certain batches may have been the culpret. That flaw, at least, seems to have been cured by the H&K workover process.

The reworked rifles are now to be known as the *SA80A2,* though in fact the things are in their fourth generation, fifth if you count the old .280 EM-2 rifle that was blended with Armalite's AR18 to produce the original 4.85mm Enfield XL70 rifle that itself went through several versions before the requirement for a rechambering to the NATO standard 5,56mm cartridge was pressed on the Brits. Sid Hance, Cliff Jewell and Jack Ward, among the other boffins at Enfield charged with reworking the design did a credible job with the resulting XL70E3, though somewhere down the road you have to ask if they wouldn't have been at least as well served just by having had Sterling at Dagenham crank out a quarter-million AR18s that in any event wouldn't have become a political football and would have been a great deal less expensive to issue, then replace. And I'd likely have been just as happy with one of them, too. But I understand that both the L85A2 and LSW are out of production now, and when the British police recently required a batch of 5,56mm rifles for antiterrorist response unit and security purposes, they went with H&K G36s.

The greatest lists of complaints seem to be coming from those units that use rifles very little in their daily duties and aren't used to repeat daily maintenance as a soldier's common first task, and those units that use them a great deal and use them hard, such as the Royal Marines. The SAS simply aren't bothered by such things, and have the relative luxury of substituting foreign or allied weaponry instead, though the sasmen sometimes masqueraded as regular Tommies in Northern Ireland, and accordingly had to use the ordinary soldier-issue rifle and kit. I suspect theirs worked just fine.

One large problem seems to be from the 30-round magazines, adapted from the US 30-round M16 magazine. Since the original M16 magazine was a 20-round straight magazine, the magazine well of the M16 family of weapons was cut in a straight line to accomodate it, so the later M16 30-round version was curved at the bottom to improve feeding, but straight at the top where it enters the straight magazine well- perhaps not the best arrangement for certain reliability. And since the FAMAS G2, H&K G36 and M16A2/M4 share that same magazine, they too might share similar magazine-induced reliability faults, if that's the case. The Stoner 62 or Galil magazines might have offered an improvement, but the Sterling and Radway Green-produced 30-round steel magazines work very well in M16 and AR15 type rifles in my experience, though they're a bit heavier and can be prone to rusting once their external and internal finishes are worn. You have to wonder why the Brits didn't use stainless.... but at least one quick-and dirty soldier's answer is to use the old 20 shot magazines.

My only real beef with the L85A1s I dealt with is that they're awfully clumsy with a 40mm M203 grenade launcher attached...and the British way of dealing with that problem seems to be to issue an M4 with M203 attached instead. That may be a foot in the door for FN or Colt to peddle M16 variant replacements, or possibly for the Canadian firm of Diemaco to sell their C8 version of the M16 family to the Brits instead. And there's always the Israelis, and at least the possibility of the Australian F88 version of the Steyer AUG peeking its way into the British tents, though the F88 has hardly been without its own problems in Australia.

Likewise the Gurkhas don't seem to be the source of many complaints about the L85A2...though they may not be depending on them that much, either. In one report of a recent Royal Gurkha Rifles' unit demonstration of their techniques, they charged up to the objective, unloaded from the back of an armoured personnel carrier, threw their L85 rifles to the ground, and took on their targets with their drawn kukri knives- but that may well have had much less to do with any lack of confidence in their rifles as a decided preference for doing things up close and personal with cold steel. Ayo Ghorkhali!

[archy]

DOD has reportedly ordered unspecified number of DS ARM built FN-FALS, SA58. No configuration nor precise numbers given. Apparently destined for Spec. Ops.

Betchya that the metal forearm of the parent Austrian Stg 58 from which the DSA weapons are derived was NOT one of the desired features, though DSA makes a very decent copy of the FN black fibreglass 3-hole foreend as well.

And just think about some folks who have plenty of longer-ranged support weapons for uses beyond the range of individual shoulder-fired weapons, and sufficient close-up equipment for routine guard posts and perimeter security particularly at night, with expertise and familiarity with the FAL or L1A1 SLR that quickly translates to easy use with the DSA commercial rifles, quite suitable for their intended purpose.

-archy-/-

[Dan(9698)]

Sell them to the French, It will cause them no problems.

[Monty22]

I'd bet on bad magazines too. I have 2 AR-15s, one a CAR-15 shorty. They 100% picky on magazines. Either they work for 1000's of rounds without fail, or they will jam every 5-10 shots with particular mags.

[archy]

By the way, I didn't know that New Zealand used the F88. Did they adopt it before the Australians?

Does NZ have a common equipment agreement with Oz?

The New Zealand peacekeeping troops working with Oz and other forces in East Timor for the last couple of years have been photographed carrying Australian F88 rifles, and that was also what NZ peacekeeper Private Leonard Manning was carrying when shot twice in the head during an ambush in the Summer of 2000. His rifle and ammunition were taken by his killer.

The Australian small arms factory at Lithgow was the source of most of New Zealand's previously used L1A1 rifles, as it has been for the #1 Mk III S.M.L.E. rifles used before those, clear back to the Great War. The New Zealanders first replaced their L2A3 Sterling 9mm submachineguns with the L88, perhaps hedging their bets a bit, never having adopted the Australian F1 *lawndart* SMG as their standard. So though there are logical commonalities and similarities between the Oz and Kiwi forces' equipment, they're not necessarily identical. Some of the Kiwis sent to East Timor were also wearing Auscam-pattern uniforms, which should seem to be very suitable for either country, though some British-style DPM camo unigforms have also been photographed.

Both the US M60 MG and the FN MAG 7,62 LMG were seen in Kiwi use in East Timor. I don't know if they were using the Australian F89 Minimi SAW, quite popular with the diggers, or not.

[donozark]

No mention of asbestos gloves!

On FOX last week, report showed two sailors walking across the deck of an air craft carrier with M-14s slung over their backs. "Deck rifles" is the term the reporter applied to such weapons. But these guys didn't look like your average sailor...

Isn't it odd how the military cannot seem to give up these weapons, completely? Will be interesting to find out which configuration of FN-FAL DOD got from DSA.

[archy]

On FOX last week, report showed two sailors walking across the deck of an air craft carrier with M-14s slung over their backs. "Deck rifles" is the term the reporter applied to such weapons. But these guys didn't look like your average sailor...

Isn't it odd how the military cannot seem to give up these weapons, completely?

The Navy has also found the M-14's grenade launching capability with a M76 grenade launch adapter installed to be useful for firing an orange nylon *messanger line* from one ship alongside another, which can then be used to carry across successively heavier lines, until those used to transfer electrical cables, fueling hoses and other such equipment are trades between the ships.

A couple of years back we ran the military record file to determine the number available for reissue should it be required and it was fewer than a hundred thousand- I'd guess by now it might well be a fifth of that, and many of those remaining required rebuilding even back then. When the Marines prowled the storage depots for suitable rifles to augment their newly developed M40A3 bolt-action sniper's rifle, of which only 600 or so are to be built and many of which are in the older M40A1 or A2 configuration, I understand they accepted fewer than 5 out of a hundred of those considered, largely due to damage in storage, including rust, or to damage sustained when the rifles were taken out of service.

And note too that the military has recently [08/30/2002]relet a contract for 4100 M14 bayonets, nickel plated...allegedly for *ceremonial purposes at Annapolis.*