Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to take
a look at an interesting transitional, basically a
Special Forces sniper rifle from the British military.
This is an Accuracy International Arctic Warfare, an AW,
which was adopted by the British as the L118A1 and L118A2.
Now this specifically is actually a commercial Arctic Warfare
that has been kitted out to duplicate the 118 type of rifle,
which is actually fairly appropriate because
the British standard army never adopted this rifle.
It was only used in, or is to this day, only used in pretty
limited numbers by Special Forces units.
So we're talking the Special Air Service, the Special Boat Service,
some of the Royal Marines, like mountain and arctic units.
Those guys use these in limited numbers and limited enough (the initial purchase was actually only 48 rifles),
it's limited enough that they ... were rarely marked L118. These are basically commercial
off-the-shelf AI rifles, that were delivered to the British military with some added features.
So it's pretty much what we have here, a commercial off-the-shelf rifle with the military added features.
Now the Arctic Warfare started out as a development of the L96,
which was the first Accuracy International rifle adopted by the British standard military.
It was Accuracy International's PM, or [Precision] Marksman, rifle, originally developed
as a competitive rifle. It became the British military sniper rifle and then once the British adopted it
with its, at the time, pretty revolutionary chassis system, other countries started looking into this concept as well.
In particular Sweden. Sweden approached Accuracy International and said,
"We like that thing you made for the British, and we want one, but we have a little bit different
environmental situations. We need one that will work up here in very cold temperatures flawlessly."
Hence "Arctic Warfare", so around 1998 AI ... they took the lessons they had learned from
developing the L96 for the British, and they put these all together with a bunch of new features for a Swedish contract.
... Apparently they actually did all of the development for this at Fort Greely, up in Alaska.
... Well their arctic testing produced a number of changes. They increased the size of the bolt handle,
they increased the size of the thumb hole in the stock to make it easier to use with gloves,
they added a couple of grasping tabs to the bottom of the magazine,
and then there are a number of other improvements that they made in general over the L96.
Things like the side panels on the receiver are made out of a polymer on this rifle instead of a resin on the L96.
The L96 receiver panels, the AI PM, were really quite fragile when removed from the rifle.
These are a lot more substantial, they're not nearly as delicate.
They introduced a larger, a better scope on this. It's a 3 to 12 power Schmidt & Bender variable.
And the Swedes thought this was great. They adopted the rifle and it worked extremely well for them.
And that started a number of other countries also getting interested in the Accuracy International
Arctic Warfare, and that would come back to the British. So around the same time
that the Swedes adopted this, the British jumped on it.
These are all in 7.62 NATO but they were an improvement over the L96, and so Special Forces
units started ... basically started picking these up in limited numbers.
There are a number of specific improvements that they had over the commercial guns which...
Why don't we go ahead and take a closer look at exactly what they changed on this from the earlier AI rifles.
So the Arctic Warfare retains most of the features of, in fact almost all of the features of, the original AI
[Precision] Marksman rifles. However, little things have been improved, so I mentioned the tabs on the magazine,
down here for easier grasping with gloves. This is still a 10 round detachable magazine in 7.62 NATO.
One of the elements that Sweden very specifically insisted on was a three position safety.
So we'll start all the way in the back. Back here, this locks the bolt in place and
it also locks the trigger. You then have an intermediate safety position here, where the trigger
is still disconnected, but you can operate the bolt. So you can use this to load the rifle on safe,
clear the rifle on safe, anything like that.
And then the front position is your actual fire position, in which you have a two-stage trigger
that is really, really nice. That is a fantastic trigger in there, as as you would expect.
No excuse not to have a fantastic trigger in a rifle like this.
One other aspect that AI had to change for the arctic testing with this rifle for Sweden,
was to add these little cutouts to the back of the bolt body. And this was to address a freezing issue.
When you had the bolt closed, if you had any sort of snow, water in here,
it was possible for the bolt to actually freeze in the downward position, and make it very difficult to operate.
By adding these cut-outs they've reduced the surface area of the bolt that's in contact
with the receiver here, and made it much easier to just break any ice bond open by lifting the bolt.
So that is a distinctive part of the Arctic warfare rifle.
As I mentioned, these polymer stock halves are now much more durable on their own than the original resin ones.
This is the A2 version of the gun in British military parlance, which means it has the folding stock
The original ones that were purchased were the A1 which still had a fixed stock.
This folder is operated by this button right there. It's got a big ol' metal lug on it.
And then over here we have a little button that snaps in there,
and that just holds the stock in the folded position.
In order to deploy it you just pull it out, there is no positive retention, it's just a spring.
One of the features that the 118 has that it's civilian counterparts did not, is this rear monopod.
The L96 also had a rear monopod, but one with a much smaller foot.
You deploy this by pulling down
on this big band.
That pops out. These little cut increments are in ten mil... well, increments.
So if we pull this down we can then snap it up
individually like that, and then this ... thumb wheel acts as a fine adjustment.
You also got an adjustable cheek pad so you can loosen these guys up,
lift that to wherever is comfortable for you and then lock it back down.
As with previous versions of the rifle, you have
removable spacers on the butt pad so you can adjust this to whatever is comfortable.
One of the more substantial improvements here was replacing the dovetail on the top of the receiver
with a standardised Picatinny rail. The L96 had a unique dovetail to it.
This now has a quick detach optic. They went to a 3 to 12x50
Schmidt & Bender optic here, the L17A1. As we talked about in the L96 video, there would be a
midlife service update to the L96 that would put these scopes onto them.
But this scope first went into service with the British military on these guns.
Adjustments on these are all in milliradians.
So your click adjustments are 1/10 of a mil. And in addition to having those adjustments,
you also have a bullet drop compensator built into the main elevation turret. So this top row of numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 etc
that automatically sets a range or sets your range approximately one might say
to specific ranges in hundreds of metres, and then your fine tuning adjustment is
down here in tenths of a mil. Same thing with your windage adjustment.
Focus distance adjustment dial.
We'll talk about this in just a moment. That's an attachment for a night-vision scope, which is pretty cool.
One of the other military add-ons to the rifle was a Kill Flash and sunshade on the scope.
So this unscrews.
There it is, you don't need to have it if you don't want it, but it will attach to any of the L17 scopes.
Note the markings on here are pretty standard commercial.
We have a serial number, 08 is the manufacturing date, 2008, and AW is Arctic Warfare.
Of course we have our British proof marks up here.
And AI's manufacturer mark on the left side.
This rifle is fitted out with an angle indicator which just bolts onto the rail,
as well as a Picatinny mounted spirit level.
Seems like a simple thing, but that's the sort of element that had never before
been adopted as part of the British sniper system. That's really ... one of those
things of competitive shooting that worked its way into a military application.
The bipod on the 118 is a Parker-Hale bipod. It's a little bit higher than the original
AI bipod on the L96. But functions basically the same way.
Now instead of attaching in a socket inside, this attaches via a plug.
So the standard attachment point was here on the front of the stock, obviously.
However, one of the other interesting add-ons to this rifle is this hand stop
(also acts as a new sling swivel) which doubles as another bipod mounting point.
We can snap the bipod on in there which gives you a
couple inches of extra elevation and also moves the bipod point back,
which means you can get yet more elevation by angling the gun up.This was done for a very specific
reason. Once these guns were adopted by Special Forces
they would end up also becoming the counterterrorism sniper rifle, the CTSR, and
with ... Special Forces training for response to things like aircraft hijackings, they wanted to have
the capability to sit on the tarmac outside an aircraft and be able to actually aim into its windows.
And that requires quite a lot of elevation. You normally don't think about a sniper needing to
fire at a very sharp angle upwards, but a situation like an aircraft on the ground,
you know that's going to require exactly that sort of elevation. So moving a bipod mount back
is going to alter its pivot point and then you combine that with a little bit extra elevation here,
extra elevation from bipod legs (which of course extend), and now you can get that sort of shot if you need it.
The muzzle here has a single chamber brake, and it is threaded.
(Left-hand threaded there.) If we take off the muzzle nut,
which has a little wrench hole in it,
we can apply what the British would call the moderator, or we Americans would probably call a suppressor.
And that's going to...
It's got a little...
(Thread that on.) Gonna come back all the way over the muzzle brake obviously.
So there's that guy mounted on. A lot of accessories available for this rifle.
Another cool accessory for this is this little camo pouch,
which of course has AI's Union Jack flag there, and has backup iron sights, which would be
put on the rifle, zeroed, and then taken off and put in this pouch, because they don't fit on the gun with the scope.
So we have a front sight post here that attaches just into that block,
like so.
That gives you a front post.
And then you have a rear sight here with six different apertures with
BDCs set up for 200 out to 600 metres. And a really big open one,
zeroed for 200 metres, which is like your low light or a really quick acquisition sight.
So that just drops on. You would want to remember exactly where on your Picatinny rail
you set it, just to make sure that you maintain a zero when you apply them.
But this sort of sight wouldn't normally stay on the rifle.
As you can see, you can't have the scope on here at the same time as that backup iron sight.
That front sight allows you to do a few other things as well. For example, a mirage strap.
... The idea of a mirage strap is that it prevents heat coming up off the barrel from getting into your sight picture.
We're going to loop that around the front sight block there,
and then we have a little Allen head screw, socket head screw, there that attaches to the rear end.
So you might not think that you're gonna shoot a sniper rifle like this enough to get the barrel hot enough
to create mirage. However, that doesn't take into account, for example, thermal optics
where that mirage is going to be much more obvious and much more of a problem.
You may have noticed that there are a couple of mounting screws there in that front block.
Well, this was also set up with this offset Picatinny rail attachment block, which mounts right on here.
Why would you have an offset piece of rail (I haven't tightened this all the way down, of course),
but why would you have that here facing inward?
Well, that was there to mount the Sniper Thermal Image Capability Scope, or STICS,
which was obviously a thermal scope that lines up with the regular optical sight,
so you don't have to change your zero, ... you don't have any change in reticle.
You simply have your daytime scope turned into a thermal capability scope.
There is this piece of little single unit Picatinny rail that I said we would come back to.
Very much a military only feature because that is the mounting point for a Simrad brand
image intensification scope, or a night vision scope. You'll notice there is no lens on the back of this.
This actually is viewed down here, so you can take this and slide it right on there,
I've got a locking lever, and now instead of your scope being thermal capable through here,
now it is image intensification. So a lot of different add-on capabilities for this rifle: iron sights, scope,
thermal, daylight, night-vision, folding stock, fixed stock. That's what this rifle really brought to the table.
And a lot of these capabilities would also be basically backward engineered onto the L96
and, of course, they would be used going forward for the L115
rifle that the British would adopt as a standard military sniper, largely on the basis of this.
Cool accessory for you guys here. A lot of this sort of material, these add-ons to the rifle were
standardised. So, you know, the L118 was not the only rifle in British service, obviously.
So this for example, is a case, a kit for attaching that thermal scope to different guns. And inside here
we're going to have an AI mounting block. This would fit the Arctic Warfare rifles, so the 118 and also the L115.
There's a separate mounting block which is backward compatible to fit the L96 with its bipod mount there.
And then you've got the mounting rail that you just saw, so this will fit that thermal optic to
(you can read it here, there you go), the L96 and the L115 A1 and A2.
And then the .338 rifles because they have a larger objective lens, require a different
geometry to the mounting rail. So this is for your L115, the .338 rifle.
And you've got all of that in one convenient armourer's kit.
So you can put that thermal on anything you want.
So these rifles are actually still in service with the British military today,
again still in relatively limited numbers.
What this rifle would do in the long run is serve as kind of the developmental link between the L96
and what eventually replaced it as the British standard sniper rifle, which is the L115.
That is an Accuracy International in .338 Lapua Magnum,
which is quite the hard-hitting serious sniper rifle. So we will touch on - in fact
we will talk about the L115 in a follow-up video, but I thought it was
important to to talk about this thing as the developmental link between the two.
So if you haven't seen the video on the L96, definitely check that out.
We'll have a link to that at the end of this video.
And if you want to know more about the development of British sniper rifles, both these
quite modern ones and also the British sniper program going all the way back to World War One, take a look at
Steve Houghton's book, "The British Sniper Rifle A Century Of Evolution". It has just recently come out,
we have a link where you can pick it up in the video description text as well.
That book has a lot more detail on this and it's accessories and everything back to the SMLEs built up as snipers.
Thanks to Steve for access to this rifle out of his collection to show to you guys,
and thank you very much for watching.