On the post about China’s funky military gyrocopter, a discussion of just how bad the British SA80 assault rifle (AKA Enfield L85A1) sucked broke out. And boy did it suck.
Almost immediately, the rifles were plagued with problems. The L86A1’s bipod tended to fail to lock, were weak, and generally crappy. Additionally, the plastic melted when it interacted with bug repellant, and the metal rusted easily. The weapons were found to be unreliable in both arctic and desert environments.
The SA80 family used stamped steel, which the Brits had experience with in the form of the Sten gun. However, the Sten had much lower tolerances than the SA80. The tighter tolerances required more skilled labor and better machinery. This led to tons of waste and slow production of the SA80 family of rifles and squad support weapons.
Their first trial by combat came to be in the Gulf War and then later in African operations. It’s tough to say anything nice about these weapons’ performance in the desert. Both the L85A1 and L86A1 proved to be unreliable. The L85A1 worked best on fully automatic, and the L86A1 worked best on semi-auto. This created was the inverse of how the weapons were intended to be used.
The polymer furniture fell apart easily. The magazines and the magazine catch proved problematic. It was too easy to access and would cause soldiers to accidentally drop magazines. The top cover catch required tape to hold it in place. The weapons needed to be kept incredibly clean and could deform if gripped too hard.
The weapon overheated quickly, the firing pin was fragile and broke easily, and dirt could accumulate behind the trigger and prevent it from being pulled. The safety selector could swell when it got wet and render the weapon useless. SAS operator and Gulf War commando Chris Ryan stated that the SA80 was “poor-quality, unreliable weapons at the best of times, prone to stoppages, and it seemed pretty tough to have to rely on them.”
It’s easy to see why the rifles sucked. The British Ministry of Defence commissioned a report that stated,
“The SA80 did not perform reliably in the sandy conditions of combat and training. Stoppages were frequent despite the considerable and diligent efforts to prevent them. It is extremely difficult to isolate the prime cause of the stoppages.
It is, however, quite clear that infantrymen did not have CONFIDENCE in their personal weapons. Most expected a stoppage in the first magazine fired. Some platoon commanders considered that casualties would have occurred due to weapon stoppages if the enemy had put up any resistance in the trench and bunker clearing operations.
Even discounting the familiarisation period of desert conditions, when some may have still been using the incorrect lubrication drill, stoppages continued to occur.”
Commenter BigFire noted that Ian McCollum had done a video on the weapon, and he’s no less scathing:
Making simple weapons that can be turned out on prosumer grade CNC machines gets easier and easier every year, but designing automatic weapons that reliably work across a wide range of combat situations is still hard…
Tags: 5.56 NATO, Desert Storm, Guns, Heckler & Koch, Ian McCollum, Military, rifle, SA80, video
CNC heck, things are getting closer and closer using even consumer grade 3d printers, especially as the 3d print feedstock materials also evolve. Not ‘there’ yet as far as I can see, but every time I dig in things are much further evolved.
Youtuber Bloke On The Range also has several good videos (several years old) about the L85. I believe he was an actual royal army veteran and gives good insight into what it was like training and using the god awful thing.
Others might not, but I think the SA80 is a prime example of just how devolved an industry can become when its parent culture ceases to value it. Just 100 years before this atrocity was produced the British were at the forefront of small arms and machine-gun development, on par with any other nation. “Bullets from Birmingham” was a cliche precisely because of the quality and innovation in arms that took place there. How the mighty can fall.
It is perverse that the Brits were unable to adapt the AR-180 as a bullpup design. Brownells has utilized this same platform with considerable success.
Eugene Stoner considered the Armalite AR-180 to be an improvement on his earlier design, the AR-15 because it keeps hot gasses out of the receiver and allows for the use of a folding stock.
Firearms seem to have a better track record when designed by private parties, e.g., John Browning and Eugene Stoner than when submitted to a committee or the Pentagon’s convoluted procurement program.
If the NFA were to be scrapped, it would allow for entrepreneurial enterprise to design the next generation of battle carbines unencumbered by the constraints of political nicety.
“British were at the forefront of small arms and machine-gun development, on par with any other nation.”
There was a time when they firmly believed themselves to be the foremost agency of Christian civilization, enlightenment and progress in the entire world. World War One destroyed this vision.
Why didn’t they try to license-build the AUG, which was already available at the time?
A. Nonymous says, “Why didn’t they try to license-build the AUG, which was already available at the time?”
As someone above mentioned, WWI and WWII ended the British empire, but someone forgot to tell the Brits that. If the financial slapdown they received from the USA during the Suez Crisis didn’t convince them their empire was over, the Labour party nanny-state governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan in the 60s and 70s surely should have.
They just weren’t willing to admit they didn’t have the financial or technical capabilities under a multi-decade socialist government to develop soup-to-nuts an indigenous design. Then Margaret Thatcher provided the final glimmer of hope they still mattered globally by almost losing a war to Argentina (a few more naval transport losses and Goose Green wouldve never happened) over some islands populated with more sheep than people…but at least they used the FAL.
The final nail in the coffin was Soro’s victory over the British Pound in 1992 and the ever increasing expansion of unlimited immigration. They tried a hail mary with Brexit, but neutered that on the back end when they lost their nerve to follow through. Now the Prime Minister of the UK is a Brahmin, London’s Mayor is a Muslim, English is becoming a 2nd language in London homes and Brits will be a minority in their own country by 2050.
The same thing is happening to the USA, but I’m hopeful that it will be at least until 2100 before we no longer have the ability to design high quality indigenous firearms….if the private firearms industry even exists and the 2nd amendment hasn’t been voided at that point. I wonder if someone will have the balls to tell us when it’s our turn?
There is so much to unpack with the SA-80 program, and how it went wrong…
Probably one of the biggest issues is how the conflict between the government numpties running Royal Ordnance had it in for Sterling over a bunch of issues, mostly stolen IP. Sterling had taken the AR-18 and made something workable out of it; the actual Armalite product wasn’t quite ready for prime time. Sterling fixed that, built the production machinery, and was ready to go. They had the expertise, but since they weren’t the “right sort” of people, they watched Royal Ordnance take their product and screw it up by the numbers. Some of the early prototypes of the SA-80 were actually reworked AR-18s they’d purchased on the open market…
The numpties at Royal Ordnance didn’t consult with anyone at Sterling. Indeed, there’d been conflict between them, mostly over Royal Ordnance shenanigans taking IP from Sterling over the Sterling SMG. There’s so much that went on that you quite literally need a damn program to keep track of all the idiocy.
And, in the middle of the SA-80 program, what did they do? Shut down the Royal Ordnance center doing the work, move it, and then wonder why all their trained and experienced people weren’t around any more. Most of the small arms expertise that was still in existence was deliberately done away with, and they hired all-new inexperienced people fresh out of university to finish the design and take it to production. In a new facility, with new people who’d never done small arms work…
It’s a wonder the poor thing worked, at all.
One of the Brits I got to know was a part of the testing program for the SA-80. His take on it was that they’d basically told the idjits-in-charge that the best option was to just chuck the SA-80 and buy the M16, but that was absolutely out of the question. You’ll note that the SAS, SBS, and Royal Marines all use something other than the SA-80 as their basic infantry weapon, and that the British Ranger Regiment is going to field something else.
Biggest thing I dislike about the SA-80 and bullpups in general is that you have to put so much attention on your weapon for clearing and reloading drill that you lose situational awareness. Watch the videos of close quarters battle training with the SA-80, and you’ll see British soldiers stop in the middle of battle drills to do reloads, which requires that they take the weapon off their shoulder and then lose complete track of their surroundings while they clear misfires or reload. It’s amazing to watch; you recognize that the people who designed the damn thing have no earthly idea how to conduct oneself in combat with a rifle.
You can do everything you need to do to an M16-series rifle without ever letting the weapon leave your shoulder; you don’t have to lower your eyes, and if you train enough, it’s all muscle memory anyway. Eugene Stoner somehow got the ergonomics right, and I’ll be damned if I’ve ever been able to trace out the provenance of the whole thing… It’s like there’s these rough prototypes looking like traditional rifles, and then, BAM, the early prototype AR-10 suddenly appears like Athena from the head of Zeus, with no intermediate steps.
Also, nobody taking real credit for it, either. Stoner, if he was the guy who came up with it all, was a genius for designing that thing the way he did.
“[T]he early prototype AR-10 suddenly appears like Athena from the head of Zeus, with no intermediate steps.
Stoner adopted existing design elements from several different sources:
1.) Direct gas impingement of the Ljungman AG42
2.) Hinged receiver and safety location from the FN FAL
3.) Intermediate cartridge from the StG44
The straight-line stock, carry handle w/integrated charging handle and magazine release location seem unique to Armalite at this time.
I heartily agree that the AR-10’s successor is the best ergonomic design in production. If only something could be done about the M-4’s anemic cartridge…
It looks hideously ugly to boot. It definitely breaks the rule that ugly = mean vis-a-vis the AK47. Sorry Brits, it’s not….it’s just ugly.
i remember seeing a writeup from Jim Dunnigan’s Strategypage on the SA80/L85. He claimed the original MoD request for procurement file only demanded a Meat Time Between Failure of about 200 rounds… because based on historical data, no infantry fight would last any longer than that.
@Malthus,
I can quibble, therefore I must:
1.) Whatever you want to call the gas system on the AR-10 and all its design successors, it ain’t even close to “Direct gas impingement of the Ljungman AG42”. That system does not use a rotary bolt like the AR-10, and the gas doesn’t just hit a cylindrical hole milled in the front of the bolt carrier and push it back. The Stoner system is unique in that that channels the gas back into the bolt in order to “assist” the bolt unlocking; that’s why there are those fussy little piston rings on the bolt, and the gas vent ports on the side of the bolt carrier. It’s a uniquely Stoner thing; the gas serves to blow dirt, mud, and water out of operating mechanism. People say that the AR-10 gas design “sh*ts where it eats”, but the actual fact is, that gas serves to blow a lot of crap out of the action as well as depositing carbon and metallic stuff on the surfaces.
Whatever you want to call it, it ain’t “direct impingement”, not by a long shot.
2.) Hinged receiver? Yeah, he might have gotten that off of the FN FAL. No idea, for sure; it’s not like they were telling anyone where they cribbed design features from.
3.) Nope. Nope, and nope again. Stoner never believed in the entire “intermediate cartridge idea”. At. All. The AR-10 was designed in a full-house caliber, and the majority of the design choices were meant to support that. Stoner wasn’t actually the guy who adapted the AR-10 over into the AR-15, either… That was mostly Sullivan. And, others; the work was done after Stoner was working at Cadillac Gage, as I recall.
And, overall, I wasn’t talking about those pieces of the design; the thing I was getting at were all the ergonomic features, which lend themselves in sublime near-perfection to actual “gunfighting” with the rifle. You can do everything you need to do with an AR-10 series weapon without it ever leaving your shoulder or you having to shift your focus from maintaining situational awareness. Few other weapons allow that…
About all I’d really do to the original design would be to do away with the forward assist, make all the controls fully ambidextrous, and copy the Robinson Arms horseshoe bolt release system. If your dominant hand has to leave the pistol grip for immediate action or a reload, you done screwed the pooch, ergonomics-wise. I can’t think of a single bullpup that really affords you the ability to fight really effectively with it, especially if there is a stoppage of some sort. Things like the FN-2000? Sweet babblin’ Baby Jesus, but that thing scares me… You damn near need an armorer to hand it to, for immediate action drill.
You are well-versed in small arms design and have the rare gift of literary precision.
My only point is that Eugene Stoner was continuing a developmental process that originated with the StG44 and carried forward with the FAL, CETME, et. al.
The resultant AR-15/M-16/M-4 product line is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Germany’s StG 44 was a revolutionary development that Armalite refined and arguably would have perfected if a way had been found to incorporate the German 8mm kurtz or similar round into its construction.
@Malthus,
It’d be way more accurate and honest to say that I’m a pedantic, petty as*hole that won’t let imprecisions pass without correction… Highly annoying, in person.
Which stems from spending a career correcting the casual BS that arises about these things, like “Mattel made the M16 for Vietnam…” I’ve had to stomp out so many “Old Soldier’s Stories” by this point that doing so is nearly and autonomic reflex.
Personally, I wish that a.) The idjits at Ordnance had gotten behind the damn .280 British, instead of falling prey to the siren call of the gravel belly in .30-somewhat less, and that b.) Stoner had had his AR-10 inspiration a bit earlier, and developed around that cartridge. I remain dubious of the Small Caliber High Velocity proposition, to this day.
Unfortunately, Ordnance was run by one Rene Studler at the time, and Stoner was mentally married to the .30 due to his Marine Corps background. The entire paradigm of the “Individual Rifleman uber alles” is one that I devoutly wish had gone away about the time of the Revolution, but here we are with the latest and greatest iteration of that fantasy, the NGSW.
The real fact is that the MG rules the firefight; the individual weapon is just there to keep the crews alive and the gun in the fight. As such, the two-caliber solution is the way to go, as evidenced by all combat since WWII.
Speaking of pedantry,
furniture on a rifle is not the stock.
A term from now antique weapons has been picked up, misunderstood and misapplied.