Fine-Tuning of Army's New Rifle to Continue Until 2004.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold

U.S. infantry soldiers--the "grunts" who fight the nation's ground wars--are beginning to receive a new generation of powerful and versatile weapons designed to help them in non-traditional missions, such as peacekeeping and anti-terrorism.

* In November, the Marine Corps received the first 400 of 3,997 copies of the latest version of the military shotgun, the M1014. Also known as the joint services combat shotgun (JSCS), the M1014 is a compact, lightweight, semi-automatic 12-gauge weapon capable of firing both lethal and non-lethal rounds.

* At its Aberdeen Proving Grounds, in Maryland, the Army has just completed a round of tests of an advanced .50 caliber sniper rifle--the XM1O7--that promises to make it easier to hit distant, even fortified targets more precisely, while minimizing collateral casualties and risk to the shooter.

* The Army's Armament, Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC) in August awarded a $95 million contract to a team of contractors to refine the design of the objective individual combat weapon (OICW), which is scheduled to replace many of the M16A2 rifles, M4 carbines and M203 grenade launchers carried by U.S. soldiers before the end of this decade.

The contract--for the program-definition and risk-reduction (PDRR) phase of the weapon's development--requires the contractors, over the next four years, to resolve design problems that turned up in 1999, during tests at Aberdeen. Under the terms of the contract, the design issues must be settled before the OICW enters the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase in 2004. EMD is the final step before full production, now scheduled for 2009. Originally, it had been scheduled for 2005.

The contractor team includes Alliant Techsystems Integrated Defense Company, of Hopkins, Minn.; Brashear Ltd., of Pittsburgh; Heckler & Koch (HK) Gmbh, of Oberndorf, Germany; Octec, of Bracknell, in the United Kingdom, and Dynamit Nobel AG, of Cologne, Germany.

The OICW is the latest in a long line of hand-held firearms dating back to the 1300s. Smooth-bore muskets were deadly when fired at masses of troops, but inaccurate when fired at individual targets. Rifles, which came along in the 1700s, had spiraling grooves inside their barrels, forcing bullets to follow a more precise trajectory. In the 20th century, automatic weapons and rifle-mounted grenade launchers further increased infantry firepower.

The OICW boosts that firepower even higher, according to Army officials. In 1999, Maj. Gen. Carl Ernst--then commanding general of the Army Infantry Center and commandant of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Ga.--described it as "the first revolutionary capability provided to the infantry soldier since the musket."

Like the M16 and the M4--with an attached M203--the OICW can fire both rifle bullets and launch grenades. The OICW fires the same 5.56 mm kinetic-energy round as the M16 and the M4, but it spits out a 20 mm high-explosive, air-bursting grenade, compared to the standard, 40 mm, ground-impact version launched by the...