Military Guns Of The Century

Guns Magazine, Dec, 1999 by Charles Karwan

The modern sniper rifle is a scope sighted rifle firing a smokeless powder high velocity round. Such rifles saw their debut just before World War I and were used extensively in that war in the form of scoped bolt action military rifles.

World War II saw the introduction of semiautomatic sniper rifles. During the Vietnam war, the U.S. Army developed one of the best of the semiauto sniper rifles, the M21, an accurized M14 with a Redfield 3-9 autoranging scope sight. It was also used extensively for night sniping with an ANPVS-2 Starlight scope and a Sionics noise suppressor in place, an incredibly capable and effective combination.

During the Vietnam era the Soviets developed the Dragunov SVD sniper rifle, a 10-shot semiauto shooting the old 7.62x54Rmm Moisin round. In my experience the SVD is not in the same accuracy class with the American sniper rifles but it has the advantage of currently being issued in much larger numbers to every infantry platoon.

As this century closes a number of incredibly accurate semiauto sniper rifles have been developed such as the M14 based M25, the German H&K SG/1 and PSG1, the American Armalite AR10T and Knights Armaments SR-25. These rifles have practical accuracy approaching that of good bolt action rifles, along with the substantial advantages of semiauto operation.

Over the last century military arms saw major advancements in optical sights, night vision sights, noise suppression, ammunition performance, volume of fire and weight. At the same time, many of the current military handguns, sniper rifles, machine guns, submachine guns and shotguns are only minimally better than the best guns of the two World Wars and in some ways actually inferior. It certainly has been an interesting century.