Wrong as usual.
The Pentagon Has Slowly Fallen In Love With H&K's Take On The AR-15
The HK416 and its derivatives are quickly becoming the combat rifle that all others are judged by—and the Pentagon is having a hard time denying that fact.
FEBRUARY 24, 2017
Operationally, its career in the US Military started out among the highest rungs of the special operations community, and was made famous by SEAL Team Six as the assault rifle that was used on the raid that killed terror mastermind Osama Bin Laden. Now, a half-decade later, the Army and the Marine Corps have selected versions of the rifle, but for wildly different uses. The Marines in particular have anted up with orders for thousands of units, and these weapons also represent an evolutionary change in tactics for the UMSC, one spurred by hard lessons learned over the past 15 years of perpetual warfare in the Middle East.
German small arms manufacturer Heckler & Koch is world renowned for making some of the finest, most durable firearms on the planet, and they aren’t afraid to go their own way when it comes to design. From being the
first adopter of polymer for combat firearms to their super-accurate
“lemon squeezer” P7 series of handguns to
firearms designed to be used by combat divers underwater—as well as legendary and widely used weapons like the MP5 submachine, PSG sniper rifle, USP handgun, to the G3 battle rifle. The company's achievements go on and on. But outside the special operations community, where budgets aren’t so generous or flexible and procurement is a precarious bureaucratic maze, H&K has struggled to achieve big orders from the Pentagon. Price has a lot to do with it. The company’s firearms aren’t cheap to say the least, even when manufactured in large quantities. But this situation has slowly started to change with the advent of the HK416 assault rifle.
For a company that likes to go their own way design-wise, building yet another AR-15 derivative seems too pedestrian. But after being spurred by the Army's tier one counter-terrorism force, better known as the
1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta or just "Delta Force," it wound up being a wildly good business decision. Built with the special operator in mind, the HK416 adopts the usual AR-15 format but gets rid of the
direct impingement style gas system that
Eugene Stoner came up with well over a half century ago. Instead, a gas piston and pushrod is used to cycle the weapon when it’s fired, similar to the famously indestructible AK-47 and similar to
H&K’s G36 assault rifle.
