#Army

The UK have adopted the Benelli M4 shotgun, dubbed the L128A1, as their new combat shotgun. The photo below was taken at a combat display held last week.

Earlier this year I wrote about the Gardener gun. Fred emailed me some photos of the Gardener gun in use by the Dutch army at Fort aan Den Ham, one of the 45 forts that make up the Defense Line of Amsterdam, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Fred volunteers at the fort and gave me permission to use the photos on The Firearm Blog.

The US Army have awarded Beretta a contract for 450,000 Beretta Model 92FS pistols for US military customers throughout the world. If all pistols and parts are shipped, the total value of the contract will be $220 million!

The Army Times reports that the H&K developed M320 will being replacing the M203 in February next year.

Murdoc uncovered a story which mentions that the US Army still has the WWII era M3 “grease gun” submachine gun in service for select units such as vehicle crews, engineers and radio operators.

MilitaryTimes has listed the contenders for the M4 replacement. They are:

I saw this Хроники безумного Макса, the blog of Max Popenker who also runs the famous world.guns.ru.

Marine Corps Times has an interesting article on the IAR competition. It seems the Army is not interested in a lightweight automatic rifle.

Remington will be upgrading the 3000 M24 rifles during 2009 at a cost of $3 million. I was quite surprised to hear this after all the noise about bolt action rifles not being good enough and that semi-automatic was the only way to go. The M24 Sniper Weapons System (SWS) is based on the Remington 700 rifle and chambers the 7.62x51mm NATO.

The U.S. Army and Special Operations Command are stepping up efforts to procure a lighter, modernized .50-caliber machine gun more easily transported than the standard 85-pound M2.

Following the recent purchase of 10,000 M9 pistols by the US Army and Navy, Beretta has announced a new multi-year contact to supply the Army with another 25,403 M9 pistols.

According the Guns Magazine the US Army and Navy have purchased 10,576 M9 pistols (I do wonder how they come up with these exact numbers).

I have been getting quite a lot of visits from people searching google for M16 / M4 / AR-15 manuals. So I decided to post some of them.