TRW Low Maintenance Rifle

Via Adam

 

As everyone is aware, the M16 suffered from maintenance and reliability problems early in its deployment to Vietnam. While working to resolve these issues, the US government wanted to find a replacement weapon that would be more suitable to guerrilla type use to supply to insurgent forces. A contract for to this end was awarded to the TRW corporation in 1971, and the result was the TRW Low Maintenance Rifle.

 Rather than judge the design by first glance, it’s worth looking at it more closely – there are a lot of different things at play in this rifle. The information I can find doesn’t discuss whether this was intended to be manufactured by foreign groups with limited resources, but that seems to have been TRW’s thought through development (or alternatively, they wanted to be serious about minimizing manufacturing costs). The rifle does use the standard M16 magazine and M193 5.56mm cartridge (although at least one of them was used experimentally with the XM216 flechette round).

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