Remember the US ARMY’s OICW competition back in the 90s? Well apparently South Korea has continued to develop their own version. S&T K11 DAW (Dual-barrel Air-burst Weapon) is the modern version and my friend Uk Yang test fired it.

In case you can’t see the facebook video above, here is a youtube version.

Yang was not impressed. The gun functions well but the Fire Control System (I assume he means the giant spotting scope) and the whole 20mm smart grenade concept leaves much to be desired. It is clunky and not effective at killing things.

The gun is interesting as it has a single trigger mechanism and a four way selector switch. I am curious how it can lock out the 5.56 rifle and enable the bolt action 20mm with just a simple flip of the switch.

But the size of the optic and weight of the gun makes it seem unwieldly. The OICW program is over 20 years old and I wonder if modern technology could make this system more compact and more importantly make the 20mm smart grenades feasible? Perhaps the optic could be made smaller?

Operating the bolt of the 20mm launcher seems clunky. Maybe it needs to be broken in and will smooth out?

The problem, according to Yang, is that the higher ups in Korean Military are sold on this weapon system and any failings are the result of someone else’s problem. It sounds like the K11 suffers from the same shortcomings as the original OICW program. Lack of lethality and weight are the two major draw backs to this weapon system. Hand held 20mm does not seem like an effective weapon. If it was, the US military would have adopted it. Why would Korea want to pursue this failed weapon system when the US Army gave up on it for a reason? At least we have new video of it being fired and operated and we can dream of what could have been.