Firms that produce weapons. The success of the AR-15 showed that this rifle has great commercial potential. Anything that has this potential is produced, marketed and sold. So the German company Heckler & Koch GmbH also started producing automatic rifles based on the AR-15 with the corresponding, of course, German quality. In our language, it is a limited liability company established to manufacture small arms in 1949. Today it is one of the leading companies supplying weapons to the army and police both in Germany itself and in other countries of the world. The company is headquartered in Oberndorf an der Neckar, Baden-Württemberg. Gradually developing, the company has become one of the leaders in the world arms market in several positions at once, one of which is automatic rifles, both of the original design and on the basis of the aforementioned AR-15. However, before we start a story about its German counterparts, let's get acquainted with the history of this company - a well-known manufacturer of modern high-quality weapons.
A firm on … wreckage
It all began with the fact that in 1945 French troops destroyed the Mauser arms factory. However, its chief engineers Edmund Heckler, Theodor Koch and Alex Seidel still managed to save something from the wreckage, and this was the beginning of the arms company they created, registered in the winter of 1949 under the name Heckler und Koch GmbH. However, at first, no one even thought about releasing weapons on it. The company made sewing machines, measuring instruments and just ordinary tools and much more. Only in 1956, when the Bundeswehr needed a new weapon, the company's engineers offered the army men the G3 rifle. In 1959, she entered service and thus the military career of H&K began. The original G3 was not in fact. Its semi-free shutter system was borrowed from one of the developments of the Mauser company. However, it was she who became the hallmark of H&K for many years, and was used both in G3 automatic rifles and MP-5 submachine guns.
Failure with the G11 rifle
Almost immediately after this, H&K specialists began to develop a unique G11 rifle to replace the G3, designed to use caseless cartridges of 4, 7 mm caliber, with a cut-off when firing 3 shots, so that the recoil would act on the shooter only after all three bullets had left would be a bore. There were many unusual solutions in the rifle. For example, three 50-charge magazines were located on its receiver at once, although the cartridges were fed from only one. The work progressed with great difficulty, but by 1990 the G11 was fully developed and even put into service. However, it almost immediately fell a "victim of politics", because at that time the Berlin Wall fell, and NATO decided to unify ammunition for small arms.
Put it further, take it closer
All of this hit the company hard. She was on the verge of bankruptcy and was bought by the British arms concern Royal Ordnance. However, in 2002, the British again sold it to private investors Heckler and Koch Beteiligungs GmbH. A year later, the company split up. One unit began to produce military weapons, and the other sports and hunting. It also has a US subsidiary in Arlington, Virginia. The latter was a forced measure, since, according to American laws, the purchase of weapons by government agencies and the army can only be carried out from national manufacturers who pay taxes to the federal and state budgets at the place of registration. This was done because the American small arms market turned out to be of higher priority for the company than all others. In addition, being in the United States, it turned out to be easier for the company to fulfill all the requirements of the tactical and technical tasks of the American army.
New time, new songs
In the meantime, already in the 90th year, all the armies of the leading countries of the world switched to weapons under low-impulse cartridges, and only Germany, which was once ahead of the rest of the planet in this direction, now trailed in the tail with its 7, 62 × 51 mm NATO cartridge … Which, by the way, has long demanded a switch to a caliber of 5, 56 mm, and the cartridge 7, 62 × 51 mm was recommended to be retained only for single machine guns and sniper rifles.
In addition, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the FRG's military doctrine itself changed dramatically. Now the priorities of the Bundeswehr have become peacekeeping and anti-terrorist operations, the fight against international drug trafficking and arms smuggling, and sometimes in difficult and difficult geographic conditions. The bulky and heavy G3 was not suitable for this, and of course, the fire in bursts with such a powerful cartridge from it turned out to be ineffective.
A purely physical thing was added to obsolescence - old rifles simply exhausted their entire resource and had to be urgently replaced! The Bundeswehr was not doing very well with finances in the early 90s, so they decided not to develop new weapons, but to hold a competition to select the best available samples. As a result, a group of representatives of the Air Force and Navy selected 10 models of assault rifles and 7 models of light machine guns, of which the Austrian Steyr AUG and the German HK50 turned out to be the best. The in-house designation of the rifle was G36, and it was the commission that eventually took it away.
AR-18 in German style
The most interesting thing is that the design of the new rifle actually repeated the American AR-18 rifle by ArmaLite created back in 1963. In fact, it was a simplified clone of the AR-15 / M-16, which also used a gas piston, instead of directly diverting gases into the gate, but the American army chose an earlier model and abandoned the later one. And although this rifle was also produced, in particular in England and Japan, it did not find much popularity, except that it appeared among the IRA terrorists and in the movie "The Terminator".
The German G36 was built according to the same principle, that is, with the use of automation with a short piston stroke, which has its own spring. Experts noted the comfortable nature of shooting from this rifle, excellent ergonomics (you can control the rifle with both left and right hands) and good performance in terms of shooting accuracy. The store made of transparent plastic made it possible to control the consumption of ammunition, and the butt was made reclining, which was never achieved in the case of the M-16 rifle.
The rifle was adopted and the German units began to use it in Afghanistan. And it was only here that it became clear that with prolonged firing, the rifle overheats so that it can no longer be used. Even if its heating was not too great, its accuracy still drops significantly, cleaning its piston group is difficult, and the trigger is simply impossible. In addition, plastic magazines cracked in the cold, and the rifle itself turned out to be heavier, albeit not much, than our AK-74.
As a result, in March 2015, both the German Ministry of Defense and the government were forced to admit that the G36 did not live up to hopes, and in April it was decided to completely remove from service all 167,000 G36 rifles that had been released by that time. This is how another clone of the American AR-15 rifle suffered a crushing fiasco.
Zigzag of luck
But then the firm quickly drew conclusions and managed to correct the situation. A new HK416 assault rifle was created, but already based on the AR-15 rifle itself and very similar to the American M4 carbine. With the same T-shaped cocking handle, but with a gas engine with a short gas piston stroke. The devil is in the details, and in this case, keeping in general all the main details of the system, the Germans went through minor alterations and improvements. They increased the survivability of the barrel, which is made by the cold forging method, improved the operation of the piston group, and the new machine gun stopped overheating (as well as the M4), or, rather, let's say, the heating from firing became acceptable. True, I had to abandon the butt, reclining to the right. Therefore, the HK416 had to be equipped with the same multi-position telescopic butt, similar to the one that was previously on the M4.
Meanwhile, the American military decided that assault rifles based on the M-16 / AR-15 no longer meet all the requirements of modern combat. Moreover, this system has completely exhausted the possibilities of modernization. As is customary, a competition for new designs was announced. And according to its results, the US Marine Corps just chose the NK 416 rifle (American designation M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle (IAR)). The fact is that the US Marine Corps does not obey the army and decides what its fighters should shoot from.
It was decided to purchase 50,814 M27 automatic rifles, which were to be produced by Heckler & Koch. The rearmament process began a year ago, so the company can be congratulated on its success. She also went into service with the Norwegian special forces, which, of course, speaks of her rather high combat characteristics. However, experts say that the NK416, although it surpasses the M-16 in reliability, still falls short of the Kalashnikov assault rifle. Moreover, it is higher for the FN FNC, FN SCAR and Sig Sauer 550 rifles. So the Norwegians complain that in winter temperatures typical for Norway, it happens to fail. Increased dustiness also harms it and leads to failures, although there are fewer of them than under the same conditions for the M16, and cleaning a new sample is much easier.
But the greatest success awaited the German company in Europe, where Heckler & Koch managed to win a tender for the supply of new assault rifles for the French army. It featured the HK416F rifle, which competed with samples from Beretta, Sig Sauer, HS Produkt and FN Herstal and was able to outperform its competitors. As a result, it was accepted into service and its massive deliveries began.
The HK416F model of 5.56 mm caliber, designed to replace the "old woman" FAMAS, exists in two versions (with a long and short barrel), and it will take about 400 thousand units of new "equipment" to completely replace it, plus American order, so in this case Heckler & Koch worked very, very effectively. In addition, the new model is also all sorts of accessories for it, civilian models, which will immediately follow to the market, following the main army models, so that the profit in the end, and a very considerable company, is guaranteed. However, the German quality is inherent in the AR-15 rifle and other German firms, but more on that in the continuation of this material.
P. S. Very rarely it happens that you prepare some material, and the information for him literally floats into your hands. In this case, I was lucky to be in Paris on July 14 and be present at the celebration of the Bastille. On this occasion, an exposition of modern weapons of the army of the French Republic was launched at the Army Museum, starting with the Mirage fighter, drones and BA and ending with its modern rifle. These photos were also taken there, and most importantly, we managed to hold all these rifles in our hands and talk to those who represented them. "Our FAMAS is outdated!" - was told to me by the officer at the stand. "But … what about the traditions of the French shooting school … the prestige of the nation …" "We take the best, but where it comes from, it doesn't matter today." That's the opinion, yes! However, the rifle is comfortable to hold in your hands (not heavy and very handy), although due to the abundance of corners on the Picatinny rails, the forend is not very comfortable to hold. But in those gloves that are shown in the top photo, this inconvenience is probably not felt.
But this photo is quite funny. Although it is strictly forbidden to take photographs of the soldiers of the French army and they suppress all attempts to persuade them in the bud, I still managed to persuade this to be photographed with my granddaughter. Well … he could not refuse such a blonde, and as a result we have a photo of a soldier in full outfit for performing security missions in an urban environment. Moreover, his rifle is still old - the FAMAS, although many of the soldiers who patrolled Paris on July 14 already had brand new HK416s
