[ OICW Mockup ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today
in HK's Grey Room in Ashburn, Virginia,
where we are taking a look at a bunch of cool,
historic, and fairly modern HK firearms.
Now, I initially was planning to start this video
to talk about the XM8, but as I was plotting it out
I realised we can't really talk about the XM8 properly
without talking about the OICW that came before it.
Now this guy is not a functional OICW, unfortunately, this is a dummy solid mock up.
But it'll show you a lot of the things that I need to get across
... for you to properly understand the OICW program.
So, first off, OICW stands for Objective Infantry Combat Weapon.
And this was one of a family of weapons that was planned ... basically in the 1990s.
And this is an outgrowth of the ACR program,
which was an outgrowth of the SPIW program,
which was an outgrowth of the SALVO program.
This is a continuous idea that just never quite dies,
despite the fact that in basically every test and trial it fails.
But the idea has so much appeal to it that it just keeps coming back.
And that idea is, well, it's kind of twofold:
it is one, to increase the hit probability and lethality of the soldier.
And two, maybe a little more directly related to this, is to consolidate.
... Logistical folks always want to consolidate the weapons systems that the military is using.
We saw this for example with the M14.
The M14 was going to replace the M3 Grease Gun submachine gun, the M1 rifle, and the BAR.
Right, it's great, take three guns, change them into one. It can do everything just great.
And you've reduced by two thirds the number of spare parts that you need,
the amount of training material that you need, all this sort of stuff.
Well, as you'd think someone discovered with the M14, that doesn't really work.
It's not a very good submachine gun, and it's not a very good light machine either.
And so they end up replacing those other two guns,
not so much with the Grease Gun, but anyway, that concept falls apart.
Now the SPIW and SALVO programs were projects from the '50s and '60s
looking to increase ... hit probability with a rifle,
and they also added this idea of integrating an area effect weapon.
So what we have today with the M203 underbarrel grenade launcher
actually originated with those programs.
And ... that started as the idea of bolting a grenade launcher onto the end of every rifleman's rifle.
Now that didn't end up working very well at the time in the '60s in the SPIW program,
(which was Special Purpose Infantry Weapon).
They wanted a 3 round repeating grenade launcher,
and the technological hurdles to make that happen were simply too high,
and no one managed to make it happen.
Although they did come up with some interesting-looking attempts at it.
So that went away, and they went back to just trying to improve hit probability
in the form of the ACR trials, a project that ran basically through the '80s.
And that involved the Steyr ACR (we have a video on it if you're interested),
and the HK G11, and a couple of other guns as well.
That program didn't end up working either.
Its goal was to increase the effectiveness of the rifle by 100%.
So double the effectiveness of the rifle over the M16, and it utterly failed at that goal.
And by the time it was over, the Army brass,
the logistical elements of the US military establishment,
had a new plan, which is kind of the same old plan brought back to life.
And that was going to be the Objective System of weapons.
And it was a plan to replace I believe eight standard military firearms with three.
So this specifically was the infantry weapon, the Objective Infantry Combat Weapon.
And it would replace the M16, the M4, and something else, oh, and the M203 grenade launcher
by combining it all into one package that was way more effective.
And the way it would be more effective is that it would use smart grenades
that could be programmed to detonate wherever you wanted them.
It would have a super-powerful awesome optic built into it,
with a laser rangefinder to use for programming your grenades.
This was the ... high explosive or area effect weapon half of the system.
And then it would also have what was slickly called a "kinetic energy system".
Which is to say - a gun - bolted onto the bottom half
that would give you a point target effect - a bullet.
Combine the two together and every infantryman now has
more accurate, more effective, grenade launching capability than some guy with a 203,
and they've got everything now, and it'll be great.
This grenade launcher is magazine fed, ... 20mm smart grenades.
And the problem is this whole thing didn't really actually work all that well.
There turned out to be a lot of technical problems getting the thing to work.
Once it did work, there were complaints about the lethality of the grenades.
In part because of all of the electronic components that had to go into them,
thus reducing the amount of actual explosive payload that was able to be carried.
Perhaps the worst thing about this, they were never able to get it down to the goal weight.
Which isn't surprising looking at this: far too heavy, far too bulky, complex.
Can you see all of this stuff, there's like four switches, and a couple of buttons.
You've got 3 more buttons here on the ... back of the magazine well on the rifle half.
A selector switch, and a second selector switch, we'll take a closer look at those in just a minute.
But this was just way too big.
And this is the most successful part of the Objective ... family of weapons.
There was also supposed to be an Objective Crew Served Weapon system,
which was basically a 20x95mm automatic grenade launcher.
Which was supposed to take the place of the M240 machine gun,
and the M2 heavy machine gun, and the Mark 19 Automatic Grenade Launcher.
That one got not even as far as this thing did.
There was then going to be an Objective Sniper Weapon, which
did actually sort of get into development, because it was a lot less ambitious.
It is basically a Barrett .50 calibre M82 or M107 rifle chambered for that 25x95mm grenade.
And that was kind of sponsored by Special Operations, and did actually get some development.
Although with the end of the program and the end of ammunition manufacture, it's a little hazy.
There was originally going to be an Objective Personal Weapon,
(this whole thing is built around cool buzzwords like "Objective"),
the Objective Personal Weapon was going to replace the pistol.
That one really fell apart quickly, because no one really had any problem with their pistols.
Although I believe that's actually part of
what eventually would lead to the HK MP7 and the FN P90
is the search for sort of a more modern Personal Defence Weapon.
Alright, so a little bit of a closer look here.
We can take a look through a few of the theoretical features of this thing.
Although, like I said, this is just a solid dummy mock-up.
It's got a few real parts on, it's got a pistol grip, it's got a magazine in it. ...
Oh, and they did actually give it spring-loaded charging handles,
but it is a wooden dummy gun.
So first let's take a look down at this half.
We've got a bunch of controls here, of course the magazine release is on the opposite side.
But then we have a selector switch to go between kinetic energy and high explosive.
Very important to get those right, especially if you're shooting at a close-range target.
You then have your 3 buttons here for programming the grenade.
... This one is for setting your laser designator.
Point the optic at whatever it is you want to hit, hit that button,
and it will lase the target, get the range.
And then you can use the plus and minus buttons to increase or decrease the range.
The idea being there's some circuitry in the grenade that counts rotations,
which can tell the grenade how far it's travelled
and allow you to set it to detonate wherever you like.
So for example, if someone's hiding behind a wall you lase the wall,
and then you add say 2 metres or 1 metre to your range, and then fire over the top of the wall.
And it will go right over the top, and explode just behind the wall and be great.
Or in theory, if someone's right in front of a wall or in front of another object,
you lase that object, reduce the range a little bit,
and the grenade will detonate before it gets to the obstacle.
Again, it's cool, but it's a lot of stuff in my opinion
to be going on before you can actually pull the trigger and fire.
Then of course lastly we do also have a selector switch for the rifle between safe, semi, and auto.
So, a bunch of stuff going on there.
Now to be fair, this optic could probably be done by a $200 knock off smartphone today.
But when this was developed, literally 20 years ago,
more than 20 years ago in the mid '90s, it took a lot of space.
And the controls are a little bit ... well, there's a lot going on here that you have to deal with.
You get to choose what sort of fuse you want, whether you want the magazine engaged or not.
This FCS, I don't know off the top of my head exactly what it stands for
(although I'm sure someone will tell me), but you can certainly set it.
You've got night-vision capability built into the scope.
Not sure what TV was set for, but control your scope settings there.
The on/off button.
Again a lot of switches to keep track of, and a lot of things to potentially go wrong.
They don't seem to have caught on to the "bullpup" buzzword
back during the project when this was being done,
but in theory that grenade launcher half of it is.
This pin here would allow you to detach the rear section from the grenade launcher section,
and ... you were supposed to be able to use each of these as standalone weapons.
I believe this was intended to be an ambidextrous grenade launcher.
You could swap it around to whichever side you wanted the cases to come out.
Although to be honest, I have not put my hands on a real OICW, so I don't know for sure.
But that ... yeah ... a little heavy, a little bulky.
So we've gone on at quite some length now about the OICW, and all the problems with it.
One might be wondering, "... Like, what's the later point to this?"
And well, by the mid-90s this thing was done, gone, not going to happen.
However, parts of it lived on.
Namely the kinetic energy weapon part of it which became HK's XM8.
They basically separated this off, it was always supposed to be modular,
you were supposed to be able to detach this,
and put a buttstock on it and use it as a standalone carbine.
You know, if you're insane and didn't want to have all this awesome capability of
10 pounds of grenade launcher sitting up there.
Anyway, mechanically this system went on to be the XM8.
So that is, I think, a reasonably decent quick overview of the OICW,
and the Objective Combat Weapons System idea/concept that failed.
And now I think we have the context to go on and talk about the XM8
in a separate video, which will be coming shortly.
Thanks for watching.