[ Most Changed 20th Century Rifle? ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another "Ask Ian" Q&A on Forgotten Weapons.
I'm Ian McCollum, and our question today comes from Nick on Patreon who asks,
"What small arm of the 20th century do you think
got the most updates and changes from first production model to last?
And was the effort worth it, and should this country or company have adopted
an entirely new design at some point before that last production?"
So the critical element here that I'm taking from this question
is updates and changes to the design of the rifle.
So I've spend some time thinking about this. My first reaction was the Mosin-Nagant.
You know the Mosin went through a number of changes, and what really brought this to mind
is that the Mosin was in service for a very long time.
As we've seen in Ukraine in some situations, it's still in service today.
But there weren't that many actual changes made to it.
So it went from a long rifle to a shorter rifle, and it was turned into a sniper rifle.
Well, it had a scope mounted on it.
There weren't really any fundamental changes to the Mosin
to make it a sniper rifle, they just put a scope on it.
And they made some carbine versions as well, but
that's about the extent of the changes made to the Mosin-Nagant system.
From there I go to thinking about the Lee-Enfield.
Because the Lee-Enfield was in ... front-line military service arguably longer than the Mosin.
It went through some of the same evolutions,
although as a sniper rifle there were some actual mechanical changes to it.
The stock configuration was changed, the barrel configuration was changed.
The Lee-Enfield went through a couple of different cartridges.
It actually started as a black powder cartridge until 1891,
this being first adopted by the British in 1889.
If you go back a little bit, basically the same rifle
is adopted by the United States (mechanically the same rifle),
in the 1870s in .45-70. That's more of a substantial change to the system.
And of course it's in service until the 1980s, at the minimum, as a sniper rifle.
But we're still talking about the same basic roles:
it's an infantry rifle and a sniper rifle, and really nothing more than that.
And it occurred to me that while the initial assumption, at least in my mind,
was to go to long term of service, that's not actually the question.
The question is changes from first design to last design.
At this point I then start thinking about more modern rifles,
and like so many other arguments I think this actually comes down to AR versus AK.
I'll go through both, and then tell you which one
I think is actually the winner in terms of this particular question.
So the AR system starts as a 7.62mm battle rifle.
It then transitions into one of the early assault rifles.
In the technical ... definition of that term,
that is it's a select fire, intermediate calibre rifle in 5.56 now.
And then what's important to me in terms of this question is
the AR actually sees a lot of diversification of what it is.
So yeah, it goes from call it infantry rifle to infantry carbine.
It's also used as a sniper rifle.
We have developments in the 1990s through to today
turning it into very much a precision marksman's rifle.
Guns like the SR-25 that are in fact adopted by the US military as sniper rifles,
or at least designated marksman's rifles.
We see it used as a PDW.
We see developments from Colt that are ... experimental,
but the little tiny 1960s ... pilot survival version of the AR.
... They don't see use, but they're developed.
There are certainly very compact versions of the AR that are developed.
And we're seeing more of that today.
Now the AK is a little bit different.
I'm going to go with the RPK version here because it fits a key element of this question to me.
That is the AK ... sort of skips the battle rifle stage,
it goes straight to an intermediate cartridge assault rifle.
But there are significant mechanical changes between the ... first pattern of AKs,
and then the milled receiver, the second generation of AKs.
And then ultimately the AKMs, and that's a transition that we don't really see in the AR.
There are tweaks and improvements made to the AR,
but not fundamental changes to the mechanical system of the gun.
And you do see fundamental changes to the receiver design
of the AK between 1947 and 1959.
To the point that a lot of the parts don't necessarily interchange the way they do on ARs.
One of the other things we'll then see with the AK is, yeah, it gets developed into a PDW,
that would be the AKS-74U, the "Krinkov".
... So it's actually used for that role in a way that the AR isn't so much.
And what I'm getting at here is that it is also developed into a successful light machine gun.
There are versions of the AR that are attempted to be turned into light machine guns.
There's the heavy-barrelled stuff that's tested.
You sort of have that with the Marine Corps M27 IAR today, but not really.
Certainly not in the way that the RPK was a very successful long-term light machine gun
that is fundamentally still an AK.
Now the AR was used as a designated marksman's rifle, or a sniper rifle.
Well the AK was as well. Not by the Russians, the Russians developed the Dragunov
which is a different mechanical system.
But other people used the AK as a precision rifle.
The Yugoslavs developed it in 8mm.
So we have a couple of different calibres that are being used in the rifle at this point,
similar to what we see with the AR.
The Romanians would also develop the PSL as a designated marksman's rifle,
and that and this are both legitimately just scaled up AKs.
They are not different systems like the Dragunov.
So when I look at this - in terms of what the question is actually asking,
which is updates and changes to the basic gun design,
I think the AK is the one that comes out as the gun with the most.
Because you have mechanical changes to the system early on that you don't get in the AR.
And you have basically every infantry small arm role being filled by this rifle.
... I mean, the AK was intended to replace the submachine gun
in a tactical role in the very beginning, that's what it was originally designed for.
It's obviously used as a rifle. It's used extensively as a light machine gun.
It's used as a sniper rifle or DMR.
It covers all those bases to a larger extent than the AR does.
I think it's a close competition, but it's really the light machine gun
implementation of the AK, to me, that kind of fixes this.
That's the last straw that pushes the AK into the winning category for purposes of this question.
So the follow-up being was it worth it? I would say yes.
I think the AR is better at most of these roles than the AK,
but that doesn't mean the AK is bad at it, it just means the AR is a little bit better.
So yeah, I think it was absolutely worth it for the Soviet Union turned Russia,
and also for all of the other countries, or at least a lot of the other countries,
that adopted and manufactured AKs.
They were able to extend the lifespan of this basic design,
and iterate on it, and improve it, and make it a very mature platform.
And it still does really quite well today,
as long as you actually build it right and put optics on it. So ...
There you go, Nick, hopefully you enjoyed that answer as well as the rest of you.
This turned into a question that was more interesting than I initially anticipated it would be.
So, if you would like to have your question answered in a video format like this,
please consider heading over to Patreon or Utreon.
I have threads on both of those platforms each month
taking questions for Q&A videos just like this one.
And of course you'll be helping to support Forgotten Weapons,
and make sure that it continues to happen every day.
Thanks for watching.