Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I am Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at H&K's Grey Room in Ashburn, Virginia, taking a look at a bunch of their cool interesting developmental firearms. Now, you may remember this puppy. This thing is the OICW, jointly developed by HK and Alliant Techsystems for the Objective Combat Program in the 1990s for the US military, and pretty much a flop. However, it was intended to have two parts. Your grenade launcher part, and your typical kinetic firearms part. And you could take this off and use it separately. And when the grenade launcher aspect ran into problems that is exactly what HK did. Now, in their initial development when they took that off
and ... decided to market it as a standalone firearm, one of the early bits of feedback they got from the US
military, and I think it's important to realise here that people in the military procurement
system aren't necessarily arms experts, they're people like you and I.
And they may come up with some unusual standards for things that they want
that may not have entirely reality-based origins. Well, one of the early bits of feedback
about the bottom half of the OICW was, "We want it to look a little more Starship Troopers." I'm not kidding. And this is what HK's design team came back with,
and this definitely looks more Starship Troopers. So this is a wooden mock-up of the
... second generation of this firearm, which was the first generation of the XM8.
Now, let's take a look at where this actually went. It became the XM8, which actually made
a fairly serious bid in the early 2000s for replacing the M4 and M16 as a US military rifle.
Now it didn't actually quite succeed, and if you want to know why not, I'm going to
recommend that you go take a look at a video I did with Larry Vickers about
the history of the XM8 program. He has quite a bit of experience with that program,
and I think we have a really good conversation about where it went and why. So I'll have
that linked at the very end of this video. What I want to do here is show you a couple of things
that I was unable to do in that video, namely show you not just one, but the whole family of original XM8 firearms.
And also some of their cool modular accessories. ... What this program was supposed to be,
instead of what it failed to become. So. The basic idea here is the XM8 was going
to be a very modular weapons system. More so than we see with the M16. There are a lot of things that you
can do with the M16 platform. You can replace uppers, you can put on rails,
you can put on anything you want onto those rails. And it's configurable, but it wasn't
originally designed that way. And so all of that configurability
... it's engineered back into the system. Well, what HK wanted to do with the XM8,
what they did with the XM8 successfully, was make it a very easily modular
system from the ground up. So you'll notice all of these rifles have these
little oval shaped holes on them, that is PCAPs, it's the proprietary attachment system that
HK came up with for accessories on these rifles. Now, I know a lot of people are immediately
going to disregard this as being stupid. Why would you come up with your own proprietary
system when Picatinny rails are everywhere already? Remember this is the early 2000s,
it's not hard to find a Picatinny rail. Well, there are a couple reasons. First off these don't
require covers, they're not going to cut up your hand. And the holes tend to weigh less than putting a
bunch of metal rails over every surface of the gun. Secondly, let's consider this from a military
perspective instead of the civilian one. There are not a whole lot of
different accessories that you need. And ... kind of like when you acquire a new weapon
system, you're going to get all of the accessories with it. So there's not necessarily a lot of backwards
compatibility that was necessary on this weapon. And lastly, the PCAPs system always retains zero.
... With Picatinny rail ... you have to make sure that an attachment ... (like an optic) goes
back to the bolts all being the same tightness (or whatever tightening element you're using), you have to be the same tightness, you have
to make sure it's in the exact same rail location. And even then it may or may not retain zero. With PCAPs it was designed so that it did
retain zero, and that really is an advantage. So I have a couple of accessories here that
I want to show you, and, well, let's just do that. So right off the bat the XM8 was designed to have
three different available barrel lengths, while all of them would use the same basic receiver,
bolt, action and mechanism, and stock. Just alter the barrel length for different roles.
So the one here is the compact carbine, also potentially sometimes called the Personal
Defence Weapon, or the submachine gun version. It is a 9 inch barrel, and it is too
short to include a bayonet lug. Next up was the carbine version which has
a [12.5] inch barrel, complete with bayonet lug. You can't see the lug, but there is
the hole in the handguard there for it. I'm sorry a 12.5 inch barrel on this guy. And then
you have the full-on rifle version with a 20 inch barrel. Now this particular one happens
to have the integrated bipod on it. All of these have optical sights. All of
the optical sights are interchangeable. And then there's a wide array,
or maybe not a wide array, there is an array of different modular attachments
you can put on by way of this PCAPs system. Let's say I want a vertical front grip
on my little compact carbine. Well, we've only got two slots on the bottom here. So there's
only one place for this to go, but it's easy enough to put on. The way this system works is you've got
one round peg, and one interrupted peg. And so what you do is put this one in and
rotate that one around until it locks in place. Boop. And there we go. Now you've got a vertical front grip. And if you want
to take it off, all you have to do is push the button, rotate this around, and it pops off. Slightly different attachment
system for a flashlight here, although based on the same mounting points. In this case instead of rotating one of
these around, one of them is spring-loaded. So I can take my side port here, put that one on,
we're gonna squeeze the two little buttons, and then that snaps forward and locks into place. Nice and solid on there. And now I've got a flashlight on my carbine. The optics mount on the same sort of system.
We've got a little safety button there. We'll pull that forward, and then we can open up this locking lever, and then the optic just lifts out.
So you can see here again we have this rotating block right there. It'll lock into our two PCAPs on the top. So for example, this is our standard
carbine optic. It's a non-magnifying red dot. If we look at it up close here, it's got a
whole bunch of different options on it. Basically you have the visible red dot,
which is just a red dot. And then you also have both visible and an
infrared laser as well as an infrared illuminator. And you have a series of settings on the back
here that allow you to have the illuminator ... on either with or without the laser and
vice versa, and different intensities of the two. The dot can be adjusted
for brightness there as well. So a lot of different things going on here,
maybe too much, maybe not. These optics were designed actually in
the US, not by HK, these were done by L3. Our full-length rifle has a bigger version,
this one is actually a magnified optic. And attaches again the exact
same way. So I can pull this off, see how much bigger that is. If I just
want the plain red dot on my carbine here, oop, there we go. Now I've just got a plain red dot. In addition to that sort of accessory
modularity, there was also a lot of modularity involved in the actual frame of the gun. So in
typical HK fashion we have two push pins here, pull that one out, and that one out.
The standard buttstock (with recoil spring) is adjustable for length.
Just push this over and you can lengthen or shorten it. We could, for example, replace this with a folding stock simply by ... there we go, dropping that on. This folding stock's kind of old and worn. Drop on the folding stock. And that can go on to any length, so the carbine here.
You could also put it on your compact carbine, or your full-length rifle if you had
a particular need to do that. Or we can change out the front end of
the rifle. So I've already pulled that pin, handguard comes right off. This by the way also allows you to do any
maintenance that you need on the gas system. This is a very simple AR-180 style gas system there. Let's say you want to have an HK 320 single-shot
underbarrel grenade launcher on the side here. Well, we can pop that up, there you go. That seems like a cool
accessory, what do I have to do to mount this thing? Well, this requires a different front handguard because
it's got a bunch of metal bracing and infrastructure there. But once I've got this assembly, I can just take it and as long as I can figure out
how to fit it there, there we go, pop that through, pin it in place, and presto. Now I've got a
grenade launcher mounted to the front of my rifle. Can go ahead and put on any of the
available optics, and you're good to go. You'll note that some of these are black,
and some of them are a desert sand colour, ... a lot of the prototypes of these,
or the early ones, were made in desert sand because ... we were heavily at war in
Iraq when these were being developed. And it was anticipated that they would be used in
a desert environment, so both colours were made. This was going to be the issued colour,
but it of course never quite got that far. Of course it wouldn't be an infantry weapon
if it didn't have a bayonet, so HK did indeed make a bayonet for it. And
you can see underneath here we have a cutout in the front of the
handguard to give access to a bayonet lug. Slide that guy on there, there you go. Of course, it can't just be a bayonet. So
it's got a little sharpening stone built into it. And of course you need a wire cutter,
so if we open that up we can ... there's the release button right there. It's got a wire cutter built right into the sheath. Now a few things to take a look at on the
construction of the standard firearm, the base action. These all have three position
selector switches, safe, semi and auto. The XM8 did not incorporate a burst mechanism. The magazine release is a paddle here
at the bottom, as well as having a pair of matching paddles below the trigger guard. So you can
easily pop the magazine out with a trigger finger like that, or grab it with your thumb to remove. These use G36 magazines which snap together, like so, stack mags together. As you saw earlier, disassembly involves one pin to pull the stock off. Note that
the stock has the recoil spring built into it as well as a little end of travel buffer right there. And of course all the stocks are adjustable in length. The front end is also one pin, pop that off, pull the handguard. The bolt handle is ambidextrous,
can swap out to either side. The controls are ambidextrous there,
the mag release is ambidextrous. The ejection port is not, it's always going
to eject out the right, but that's not a big deal. It's got a nice ejection buffer there just to prevent any
chance of cases coming back to hit a left-handed shooter. Once the back is off, we can just use the handle
there and pull the bolt and bolt carrier out. This is, of course, derived from the AR-18 or AR-180. This is very similar to the G36. I don't
believe the parts are actually interchangeable between a true factory XM8 and a G36, but
the design is for all practical purposes identical. The gas system is also basically
identical to that of the AR-18, which of course traces its lineage
back to the G43 and the Soviet Tokarev. It's a short-stroke piston, gas taps off here. And you can see the piston head right there,
that's going to come back when you fire. That impinges on that little spot right there.
You can see the wear mark from it hitting. And then lastly we can take the lower assembly, rotate it all the way forward and it pops off. So we've got our fire control bits here. This is completely interchangeable
across all of the sizes of gun. The upper receiver here is all polymer
with a metal trunnion moulded into it. That would come back to be an issue with
the G36, but that's a topic for another video. Of course steel barrel, steel gas system, but
quite an extensive use of polymers on the XM8. Like the Steyr AUG and some other guns, this also
has primarily polymer fire control parts, although you can see that they have put a metal
insert in the face of the hammer there just to give it a little bit
more wear resistance over time. And there you go. There is the whole
cool sort of junk on the bunk style accessory options and modularity options for the XM8. There you have a look at really the
whole potential of the XM8 family. Now of course ultimately this didn't make it
through US military testing for a variety of reasons, there was politics involved, there
were also technical issues involved. We would see some of those technical issues come back
to bite HK with the G36 debacle with the German military. But even then there's really argument about
how legitimate those technical issues really are. At any rate, because this didn't get through US
procurement we still have the M4 and the M16. But it certainly is interesting to take
a look at what could have been. ... I think this really kind of is the pinnacle of what you could
do for modularity with a new system built from the ground up. So it's an interesting view of what could have been.
A big thanks to HK for allowing me to come in and splay all of their XM8 stuff over the table here. And I think we are now going to head out
to the range and do some shooting with it. So stick around tomorrow to see
some shooting with the XM8, and thank you very much for watching. [ revised sk cn2 ]
Praise Gun Jesus
I mean, the XM8 existed before Bad Company but I appreciate the enthusiasm nonetheless--
The XM8 was originally supposed to phase out the M16 as a modular design but due to time and monetary constraints the project was cancelled hence its inclusion in many late two thousands films and movies as it was exoected to be adopted by the U.S.