Soldier Systems Daily first reported on the Aimpoint M5 powered by AAA batteries almost a year ago. Oddly enough, it was spotted by an avid reader of SSD that noticed an optic being shown at a Diplomatic Security Service information seminar in Washington D.C.

Not shown at SHOT 2017, what we know about the M5 is vague. Mainly that it is essentially a combination of the technology used in the popular T2 optic but fitted in a package that uses design features from the extremely popular and used all over the world Comp M4, adopted by the U.S. Army as the M68 CCO. What SSD reported is that this “M5” optic fills a U.S. State Department solicitation for a small, lightweight optic that operates on AAA batteries as these are in abundance among many third world countries. Not disagreeing with the solicitation but from my own experience living in South East Asia, I would argue that the opposite is true in that AA batteries are much easier to get a hold of than AAAs. However, the solicitation might have been dealing with the smaller RMRs and red dots that do take much smaller batteries.

Either way, the latest information we have on this “M5” is from an Instagrammer named Shashpl who posted this photograph with the following caption-

shashplAimpoint CompM5 sneak peek. AAA powered #aimpoint #compm5

Although we cannot confirm the validity of the photograph, if correct it gives us the first full-scale view of Aimpoint’s “M5”. Aimpoint has another very small optical sight recently released but is being tight-lipped about this as well.