Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look
at a very scarce rifle that wasn't really
publicly known until just, well, about 2019.
This is the L119A2.
And this is a UK Special Forces standard pattern of rifle,
and there are actually, as you can see here, two of them.
As they did with the L119A1s they have two barrel lengths,
they have a 10 inch barrel length and a 15.7 inch barrel length
that were both issued and both used.
If you haven't seen the video that I did previously on the L119A1
it's probably worth going back and checking that one out, because that has
a lot of the backstory of where these rifles came from.
What ended up happening is circa 2013 UK Special Forces had like a 23 million pound contract
to update, and improve, and purchase new rifles for the Special Forces units.
So part of this was they'd been using their L119A1s for close to 15 years,
a lot of the guns were getting worn out, they needed replacements, they needed new guns.
And at the time they figured, "Well, you know, we can do some stuff better."
There were some shortcomings of those 119A1s.
There were some new developments that were being basically done in doctrine
for Special Forces, in particular things like hanging laser aiming modules off of the rails.
Now, they were fortunate with the 119A1s
that the bottom rail of the handguard ... did actually hold zero.
But if you look at a lot of Special Forces guys, you'll see they put the laser on the side rails.
And the side rails of those early RAS units didn't hold zero.
So it's also, by the way, possible that Colt Canada at this point
(and it was now Colt Canada having changed hands, it was no longer Diemaco, it was now Colt Canada),
was looking at some of the new developments in the industry,
like these monolithic uppers from Lewis, and going,
"We've got this cool new thing, let's see if we can sell it to the UK government," and presented it.
And it happens to coincide very nicely with the need to have ... zero hold rails out here,
which this monolithic upper assembly does quite nicely.
So this goes through a bunch of testing and they end up adopting it.
It takes a little longer to get into service than the L119A1s,
but, by something like 2016, these guns are actually in service for UK Special Forces.
So, there are a number of elements that are different in this compared to the 119A1,
so let's take a closer look here at what's involved in this rifle.
Alright, so I know one of the things people are going to be wondering is,
if these rifles are so secret and recent, how on earth did I get my hands on one?
Well the answer is: this is effectively a clone of the rifle.
So our lower receiver here is actually just a semi-auto clone.
It has the markings that are correct for a 119A2.
So L119A2, 5.56mm.
The owner has asked me to blank out the serial number, so.
Instead of a Diemaco mark like the A1s had, these are now a Colt Canada mark.
And if we look over here we have the rest of the Canadian markings.
These are made under licence from Colt.
We have selectors that are Canadian pattern,
"S" for ... safe, "R" for semi-auto, "Auto" for auto.
Those are also effective markings in French, because - Canada.
Some of these guns were issued with ambidextrous selectors,
not all of them, you'll see both patterns actually in the field today.
So this one does not have an ambidextrous selector.
And there are no other markings on the other side of the receiver.
When it comes to the upper assembly, (the lower is a put-together clone),
the upper is manufactured from
correct original Colt Canada parts that have come into the United States.
Because I think much to the surprise of especially UK MOD,
there are actually a decent number of these that are in the US.
They can be hard to find, they are often mis-labelled as LMT parts, but they are out there.
And this upper has been built from all the correct original parts.
Now if we start at the back of the rifle and work our way forward.
One of the obvious distinctive differences is that these have Magpul CTR stocks on them
instead of what the A1 had, which was essentially the original-style CAR-15 stock.
It is a bit more comfortable this stock, it's also a six position collapsing stock.
You can see there are more holes down there.
So a little more modular, a little more adjustable.
They also changed pistol grips, they went with the Ergo Grip.
Although interestingly, it's an Ergo Grip that has a rubber texture on it
that is not the same as the standard commercial one.
It's something that was done specifically for the 119A2s.
The grip plugs in the bottom are often missing, they're issued with them,
but guys apparently often just throw them away.
One other interesting little anecdote here, one little detail,
is Colt Canada, through some detail of their manufacturing and licencing process,
can only sell these guns with Colt Canada made or licenced items.
And they don't make the Ergo Grips or the Magpul stocks.
So when these come out of the factory to ship to the UK,
they actually come with standard A1 pistol grips and no buttstock.
The stocks and grips are put on by armourers in unit in the UK.
The earlier 119A1s had a sling plate back here that wasn't all that great.
For the A2 they decided to upgrade that to something that's almost certainly worse.
That is a Magpul ASAP plate, which has this permanently attached ring
that is great for when you're trying to be sneaky, and it's always making noise.
So a lot of guys don't like this, a lot of guys will tape it down
just to make it quiet and make it go away.
And then come up with alternative sling solutions.
Interestingly to me, for all the things that were improved on this gun,
the charging handles remain the same as on the A1s.
And they're of this design so that they're ambidextrous,
and you can use them with one hand, either hand.
... If you're using them with this hand, you're pulling the lever and you're unlocking it.
If you're using them over here, you're squeezing this which unlocks it.
But this lever is really obnoxious, especially for the right-handed guys.
And so they are often cut down like this.
It'll still work fine, but you don't have this big extension that pokes you when the rifle's slung,
and gets hooked on your gear from time to time.
So if we switch to the 10 inch gun here for just a moment so I can fit this all easily in camera.
The most distinctive feature of the A2 is the fact that it uses an ... IUR.
Which is, I think, Integrated Upper Receiver, might be Improved Upper Receiver.
It is in fact a monolithic single piece upper receiver and handguard.
This was actually licenced from LMT, and it actually has an LMT patent number on it.
And the idea here was to give positive zero hold on the rails out here.
They did scallop out these sections for hands, which is a good thing, that's good for weight reduction.
You don't really actually attach anything here,
so you could leave the rails and then put handguard covers on them, and have all the extra weight.
Or you can just scallop them out like this.
And this is something that was being done on other products at the time,
Knight had a rail that did this sort of thing.
There were sling adapters that were clamped onto the rails, either out here, or on this section.
The idea of having this one rail slot was for a sling adapter.
Sometimes gets used, sometimes doesn't.
Both the long and the short patterns continued to use the same SureFire FA556SA suppressors.
Welded end caps, they're a slightly newer pattern than what we saw on the 119A1,
but fundamentally the same suppressor.
And they are still using the 216A funky flash hider underneath there.
... Again I don't know what the exact purpose of having that unique muzzle device is,
but they kept them for the A2 guns.
The trigger was also changed.
The A1 rifles all had standard mil-spec triggers, all of the L119A2s had Geissele triggers,
which is a very nice upgrade that I'm sure the guys did very much appreciate.
Also worth pointing out here that the A2s have ambidextrous magazine releases.
Apparently there was actually a ... survey done of UK Special Forces personnel
that found a significantly higher proportion of left-handed operators
than you would expect out of the general population.
And that led to the inclusion of some things like ambidextrous mag releases for those guys.
There are a couple of other unique interesting sort of features under the handguards here.
It's a bit hard to see, but there is a sort of a weird, almost rubberised looking,
coating on the barrel that extends up to the gas block, but not in front of it.
And the purpose of that is unclear to me, but it is there on all the rifles.
There are a number of elements on this monolithic upper to try to assist in disassembly.
So the gas block here, first off, is a very tall gas block.
And it has that ... bolt in the front.
You can take that out, and it allows you to actually remove the gas tube from the front of the rifle.
But it's worth pointing out that the gas block is high,
that screw is in line with the gas tube.
It is, by the way, a straight gas tube, not a dog-leg one like you would normally have.
And it's running very high up in the top of this receiver, which doesn't help with heat transfer.
Back here we have these two holes which support a roll pin
that also holds the [gas tube] in place. ... You can see the tube there.
The barrel indexing is assisted by this screw, which actually
goes through and indexes into the screw.
Although apparently these are virtually always lost.
The lug in the back here is a rear support for an underbarrel grenade launcher.
Although those don't appear to have ever actually been purchased.
They did have a rubber Ergo Grip cover to go over this sort of annoying lug,
but there's no positive retention on those covers, and apparently
they almost immediately fall off and get lost when the rifles are actually put into service.
Now that we've looked at how the guns are actually put together,
we can get to how the troops actually liked them.
And the answer is not really all that much.
There's a lot of argument to be made that the 119A1 is actually a preferable gun to the A2 here.
So the benefits that we have are largely weight.
By going to a smaller profile barrel, the long A2 here actually weighs less
than a 10-inch L119A1, which is kind of remarkable.
But the A1s had really heavy profile barrels, these not quite so much, and that's a good thing.
However, that's pretty much where the good things end.
Oh, and the Geissele triggers are really nice.
The problems were heat and cleaning.
So this monolithic upper, especially in conjunction with a really high gas block
that puts the gas tube right alongside the inside of this rail,
if you dump two magazines in fairly short succession
you can make this thing basically too hot to handle.
Part of that is the suppressor as well.
But that's a problem, so guys in the field would often ... have some workarounds
like wrapping cloth around these things, suppressor covers on the handguards, that sort of thing.
The monolithic uppers also are extremely difficult to clean.
Oh, and I should point out, there are heat shields in here
but they are incredibly finicky and difficult to reinstall if you replace a barrel.
And so armourers often had trouble with those heat shields,
and it's not uncommon to find them missing, well, to not find them. Anyway.
They are hard to clean, because you can't take ... the handguards off
because this is one complete monolithic aluminium unit.
So if you are out in the field and, say, drop this in the mud,
and the inside of the thing gets full of mud,
short of hosing it out with some high-pressure water, there's not really anything you can do to clean it.
Changing the barrels is a significant pain in the butt compared to a regular upper,
because you have to have a specialty tool that goes all the way down.
You have to take the gas block out first, then the tool goes all the way down
in the monolithic upper to take off the nut that holds the barrel in place.
So that was a bit of an issue.
The sling points weren't really very well liked.
Which allows me to transition into the most iconic use of these rifles,
and the ... biggest single reason that we kind of know about them today,
and that is the very iconic terrorist incident in Nairobi in 2019.
There was a UK Special Forces soldier who was in Kenya at the time training local forces,
and happened to be basically on the scene
when six terrorists broke into this shopping mall in Nairobi and started killing people.
And he essentially saw that there was a sub-par local response and went in himself.
And didn't quite handle the entire situation by himself, but kind of came darn close to it.
And he was armed with ... the short version, the 10 inch L119A2.
And the pictures of him in that incident really brought the gun into the public view.
So a couple of things that are worth pointing out.
In those pictures you'll see that he has actually wrapped paracord
around the front end of the handguard.
And that was to make himself a sling point,
because the sling setups on these guns just really aren't all that effective.
He also, people noticed this very quickly, he was actually running a
SIG Romeo4T red dot on that rifle, which caused all sorts of speculation.
As it turns out, that optic had been provided to him as part of a T&E program,
and the British did in fact later on buy a small quantity of SIG Romeo4T red dots.
But that was not at the time standard issue.
These would have been issued with ... ACOGs for fixed sight optics
as well as Vortex Razors, 1-6x and 1-10x power Razors.
It's also worth pointing out that the requisition for the guns
did not actually include money for new optics, and didn't include new optics.
And so you'll see 119A2s in service with a wide variety of optics,
including optics pulled off of very much older L119A1 rifles.
So overall not a hugely popular rifle in service.
The idea was to improve a bunch of stuff, and they sort of did it.
Like, yes, this will hold zero on its rails very nicely,
but in doing so they have brought in a whole selection of new problems.
Every design decision on a rifle like this is ultimately a set of compromises.
And I think people would argue that the A1 made a
better set of compromises on things than the A2 did.
Anyway, these are extremely rare rifles to find,
although not quite as uncommon as people might think.
Because a decent number of these uppers did in fact come into the United States
through a variety of, actually legal, means.
So they can be found if you're interested in them.
At any rate, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.