Tailor-Made ARs: Part I
“Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere eff ort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” — Aristotle
The idea of building a single rifle that could meet all of your survival and preparedness needs is akin to pulling Excalibur from its stone pedestal. Everyone thinks they’re the one person who can do it. But the reality is a little more … well … anticlimactic, leaving many of us to rely on a safe full of guns for specific purposes like a golfer plucking clubs from his bag.
How much can we condense the capabilities of various individual rifles into a single weapon? Is there a combination of parts, accessories, and technologies that could eliminate half (or more) of our survival gun safe?
While the other authors involved in this series will take their own approaches and make their own arguments, I started by reaching back to my routes in military reconnaissance. Two decades of near-constant warfare around the globe has given a lot of military leaders a deep reservoir of experience regarding how to build, configure, and run a rifle in spartan conditions. So, before I lay out the recipe for my ideal one-gun-solution, we need to examine an obscure but relevant slice of recent military history.
The Recce Rifle
Pronounced “wreck-y” — for heaven’s sake, please don’t say “reese” — the term recce is just military slang for “reconnaissance.” It’s primarily used by our Brit and Aussie brethren since, for most American grunts, “recon” is the preferred vernacular. Regardless of how you bastardize the word, reconnaissance teams rely heavily on stealth and maintaining a low profile to execute their missions. Because of this, recon teams are typically smaller in size than their assault force counterparts. And because of that, they often use specialized equipment and leverage technological and firepower advantages to off set the risk of operating in small groups behind enemy lines.
At some point in the late ’90s or early ’00s, reconnaissance elements within the SEAL community began formulating a firepower enhancement concept that would come to be known as the Recce Rifle. The premise was to have a rifle within the recce team that could see and hit farther than a standard issue M4 or M16, without having to rely on a dedicated sniper team. The recce rifle needed to have maximum commonality with the team’s issued carbine and not require any special training. The goal wasn’t to make more snipers, but to give standard riflemen on a recon team a stopgap capability between traditional infantry engagement ranges (normally 300 yards or less) and the long-range precision shooting executed by professional snipers with specialized heavy rifles (normally 600 yards or more). Furthermore, the inclusion of a quality magnified scope could aid in direct surveillance and intelligence gathering.
Without going too far into the minutiae, a template emerged from within the SEAL teams for an enhanced/accurized M4 carbine featuring a match-grade
