Off Target (Lengthy tale about Britain's SA-80 'rifle')

British troops are poised to go to war in Iraq. But after 30 years of development, £470m of taxpayers' money and countless modifications, soldiers still don't trust their standard issue rifle - the SA80. How did the military get something so simple so spectacularly wrong? James Meek unravels a shameful saga of arrogance, incompetence and indecision

In 1985, in the United States, a firm called Microsoft came up with a gimmicky piece of software called Windows, said to be easier to use for non-specialists, as if the masses were going to start keeping computers at home. In Finland - Finland! - a former paper company, Nokia, was pursuing its insane dream of the masses buying portable personal telephony devices. Britain's 1985 design ideas were more sensible. Such as Clive Sinclair's personal transporter, the C5, a quiet, low-slung electric car, made out of white plastic - cheap, simple, modern transit for the masses. Or the Royal Ordnance Factories' personal assault rifle, the SA80, a compact, accurate gun, made out of pressed steel and green plastic - cheap, simple, modern weaponry for the masses.

On October 2, the day of the launch of the rifle, the Royal Small Arms Factory in Enfield, north London, was en fête. All the gun people were there: generals, defence correspondents and foreign military attaches. Gary Gavin, a 26-year-old sergeant in the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters, was the first to swap his old SLR rifle for the new SA80. General Colin Shortis, the army's director of infantry at the time, said: "We are delighted with the SA80 - a really good weapon."

The ceremony went well. It seemed like a good day for the army, and for Enfield's engineers and designers. British soldiers were soon to be given the world's most advanced gun, made - and designed - in Britain.

The ceremony was a facade. The gun was not ready, either to be made or used. The public never learned - and, to this day, has not learned in full - what was going on behind the scenes as the weapon came into service: how the designers at Enfield had failed to grasp the difficulties of making a cheap, mass-produced gun using new technology, how seriously the Thatcher administration's determination to privatise the Royal Ordnance threatened the ability of British soldiers to fight, and how the Ministry of Defence failed to test the production version of the weapon in realistic conditions before accepting it into service.

Today, the latest modifications to the gun may have made it an adequate rifle, but it is hard to see how soldiers' confidence in the weapon can ever recover from the blunders of the past. How those blunders came about is a story that goes back half a century. It is a story of the decline of British engineering, the sacrifice of skills for political and financial gain, a complacent cold war military bureaucracy, and Britain's role as America's subservient ally in Europe.

As originally issued, the SA80 couldn't be fired from the left shoulder (it still can't), making it dangerous to fire from corners and doorways. The firing pins broke, the magazine fell off, the bolt-release button broke, the triggers got stuck, the cleaning kit wouldn't clean, the butt plate broke, the cheek-pad fell off, the cheek-pad melted, the cartridge cases wouldn't eject properly, the bolt carrier didn't fit properly, the locking pins holding the gun together were inadequate, and the safety catch wasn't safe. "I think - had it ever gone into serious combat in the early days - it would very quickly have been abandoned and replaced with a [foreign] rifle," one senior former executive says.

Military folk expect teething troubles with new weapons. They don't expect still to be having them more than 15 years later. One officer involved in trials of the gun in the 1980s says it should never have been rushed into service in the way it was. "It takes a lot of guts for someone to stand up and put their career on the line and say: 'I'm sorry, it's not ready, I'm going to stop it.'"

In the dining room of a large house in Essex, looking out through French windows on to an immaculate lawn, a heavy-set man takes a grubby J-cloth out of a bag and unfolds it on the table. Fat brass cartridge cases of different sizes, with copper-jacketed bullets sticking out of them, roll around inside. It is live ammunition, although the man, a former military armourer, promises that he has them legally. Pointing to the rounds in turn, he delivers a 20th-century history lesson - here is the ammunition Britain used in two world wars, here is the Soviet Kalashnikov round. The most intriguing item is a small dark metal bolt. It is a locking pin to hold a Soviet machine gun together.

The SA80, the armourer explains, was held together with two locking pins, which had to be removed for the gun to be dismantled and cleaned. They were designed in such a way that a soldier could easily pull them out of the gun completely, and, in trying to force them back in, puncture the thin steel the gun was made of. The gun would then have to be thrown away.

He picks up the Soviet pin. It has a groove channelled down one side and, inside the groove, two dimples to lock the pin in place. "That will just go ping, ping, ping, for ever and a day. They can make that. Why can't we? Ours is so fragile," he says, recalling how, when his unit received its first batch of SA80s in 1988, he returned half as defective.

The superiority of the Kalashnikov AK automatic over the SA80 is a recurring theme in the interviews for this article. Everyone agrees that it is less accurate - accuracy is one of the SA80's strong points - but the armourer points out that the Israelis copied the AK design and dealt with that problem. "You can bury an AK in sand, dig it up, give it a wipe through the barrel, put a magazine on it and fire it," he says.

There are anecdotal tales of soldiers in the Gulf swapping their SA80s for Kalashnikovs. After the cold war ended, Mikhail Kalashnikov visited Britain. He was taken to the Royal Ordnance factory in Nottingham, and shown the SA80. He looked at it for a while, and finally said: "You must have some very clever soldiers."

From the 18th century until a few years ago, the British Army's guns were designed and made at Enfield's rambling estate of cavernous brick workshops and firing ranges, part of the larger network of state weapons plants known as the Royal Ordnance factories. Guns were hand-machined in their millions out of solid blocks of steel and wood by men who had patiently learned their craft at the workbench.

In the late 1940s, Enfield's designers came up with a radical design for a new automatic rifle they called Experimental Model 2, or EM2. It was hoped that the weapon, and its 7mm calibre ammunition, would become the Nato standard, but the US put pressure on Nato to accept its favoured calibre, 7.62mm. The Labour government of Clement Attlee defied the US, resolving to produce the EM2 for British forces anyway. But in October 1951, with the gun not yet in production, Labour was defeated at the polls and the Conservatives, under Winston Churchill, came to power. The Korean war had just begun. Anticipating a new world war between capitalism and communism, Churchill decided Britain must yield to the US. He cancelled the EM2 and backed the licensed production by Enfield of the Belgian 7.62mm FN rifle, which became known as the SLR. It was a harsh blow to Enfield's prestige, and British pride.

Almost as soon as the SLR entered service, military planners began thinking about the weapon that would replace it. By the late 60s, Sid Hance, who had worked on the EM2, was heading a design team at Enfield producing prototypes of the weapon that would eventually become the SA80. Hance, long since retired, refused to talk to the Guardian, but from extensive interviews with other former Enfield staff and military personnel, it is clear that there were problems early on.

Hance and his team kept the unorthodox squat shape, the "bullpup" design, with the trigger in front of the magazine. This meant a complicated firing mechanism - more moving parts to go wrong - and that any soldier who tried to fire it from his left shoulder would have his face bombarded by hot cartridge cases.

Hance and his contemporaries are acknowledged to be brilliant designers, who could, perhaps, have created an effective gun. But they retired in the early 1970s, making way for a less-experienced team, just as the MoD began laying down an exacting set of criteria for the new gun that Enfield would struggle to fulfil.

Critically, Hance and his successors failed to come to terms with the realities of a new way of mass-producing guns, pioneered by the Germans during the second world war and taken up by the Americans. The precision components of the SLR and its predecessor, the Lee Enfield, were hand-machined out of solid metal, with other parts made of wood. The new method was to press thin sheet steel with powerful stamping machines, then weld the parts together. In effect, Enfield was turning from a Rolls-Royce factory into a Nissan.

"With the move from the EM2 to the SA80, they moved from a wooden stock, and machined components, to pressed steel and plastic," says Cliff Jewell, who worked as a junior designer on the project in the mid-70s. "Although the SLR had given Enfield the opportunity to make the transition from wood to plastic, I think the pressed-steel concept was a new departure and perhaps sufficient effort wasn't invested in that."

Another junior designer, who later rose to a senior position in the Royal Ordnance hierarchy, says he had become alarmed at early design meetings over the apparent failure by his bosses to understand that pressed steel and plastic parts couldn't be expected to fit together as well as machined parts: "People that were in charge were demanding tolerances from plastic moulding that could really only be achieved by the precision of being carved from solid steel. I'm talking microns [thousandths of a millimetre]. Plus or minus one or two microns is very tight."

The same mixture of overconfidence and lack of knowledge among the Enfield team showed up elsewhere. Many of the key parts of the SA80 were copied from the US Armalite AR18, then made in Britain under licence by the Sterling gun factory in Dagenham, using the pressed-steel technique. The former owner of the factory, James Edmiston, says that his chief designer had seen an early prototype SA80 at an arms fair, stripped it down and discovered that bolt, bolt carrier, magazine, springs and firing pin had been taken from an AR18. "Not once did Enfield ever ask Sterling for information on the AR18," he says. "I know of at least one component that they 'copied' incorrectly which could well have made a difference to reliability."

Enfield veterans protest now that they were under enormous pressure from the planning arm of the MoD to conform to the military bureaucrats' vision of what the new gun should be. It had to be cheap and light - so they went for pressed steel, just 1mm thick. And it had to be accurate. "The problem starts right at the very early stage, where there was a requirement that dwelt mainly on the accuracy of the weapon, rather than anything else, like mechanical strength or reliability," says an officer involved in trials in the 80s. "Also, there was a budget set for the weapon that was, from memory, £250 as a unit cost price, at a time when a comparable rifle was costing £500. You get what you pay for."

Over the decades the gun design was worked on, a succession of army officers rotated through the dozens of posts involved in supervising the project, and theories came and went. In the early 60s, when the first designs were being drawn up, a chilling, declassified secret document shows British defence planners obsessed with nuclear war: they expected Nato and the Warsaw Pact to acquire small nuclear weapons which would be lobbed about the battlefields of Europe like regular shells. Ten years later, Enfield was making CS gas grenade launchers and guns for firing plastic bullets for use in Northern Ireland. Ten years after that, British troops were retaking the Falkland Islands. "There were any number of damn committees," says the officer. "When you have a weapon with a procurement cycle as long as the SA80, great chunks of corporate knowledge disappear when people move on... we never fought the war we were going to fight."

To make matters worse, in 1978, the US intervened again. Having successfully badgered the rest of Nato into accepting 7.62mm ammunition, it switched to 5.56mm. At the end of the Vietnam war in 1975, with thousands of tons of 5.56mm ammunition left over, the US began to pressure other Nato countries to fall into line a second time. Enfield had designed the SA80 to take a tiny 4.85mm round. Inevitably, Nato opted for the US standard, and the British gun had to be redesigned to cope. Parts that had already been squeezed into tight spaces had to be squeezed still further.

In the early 1980s, as it geared up to make the gun, Enfield's problems deepened. It became clear that the Thatcher government intended to privatise the Royal Ordnance factories. In 1984, they were commercialised as a prelude to their sale. Even as the SA80 production lines started up, the workers at Enfield began to sense that their jobs hung by a thread. In April 1987, the newly privatised British Aerospace bought the company for £190m. Just four months later, BAe announced that it was shutting Enfield down, with the loss of 1,200 jobs, and moving production of the rifle to Nottingham.

Despite the potential for chaos that privatisation in mid-production brought, the SA80 was officially pronounced fit for active service in January 1984. It was formally accepted in 1985. British front-line units were clamouring for the new gun. Stocks of spares for the SLR were run down. But no sooner did production begin than the scale of the manufacturing problems became apparent.

The production line turned out to be hopelessly unreliable. "The automatic assembly line was absolute rubbish," a then senior manager says. "It wouldn't keep going, and it wouldn't achieve the quality standards required of it. It was a nightmare."

Thanks to privatisation, the atmosphere in the factory was a poisonous mix of bitterness, anger and apathy. Workers who thought that they had a job for life felt betrayed by a government which, many had believed, was both patriotic and pro-military. An officer who visited Enfield at the time says morale was so low in the final days that 9,000 of the last 10,000 rifles made there had their receivers, the metal core of the gun to which other parts were fitted, squeezed in a vice to make them fit. "Everybody knew they'd got the sack, and the only thing they wanted to do was get the damn thing out the door."

A mid-level officer in the MoD bureaucracy at the time recalls an incredulous meeting with a senior Enfield manager when the factory was bidding for a second tranche of SA80 production. "I remember asking him: 'How are you going to be able to meet the follow-on contract if you haven't completed the first round? You're already hopelessly late.' It was a question he was unable to answer." Yet Royal Ordnance did, in the end, get the £100m contract - two months before the BAe sale was announced.

When BAe shifted production to Nottingham, they took the concept of cheap, mass-produced guns to its logical conclusion. They brought in assembly-line experts from Rover, the car company they bought in 1988. They outsourced most of the rifle's components to sub-contractors. Only 15 of the 230 parts previously made in-house by Enfield were made at the Nottingham factory. In place of the skilled craftsmen of Enfield, semi-skilled workers were employed to put the guns together. There were production problems there, too. But by this time concerns about the speed of the gun's production had been overtaken by worries about something much more fundamental - whether the gun was good enough for Britain's young soldiers to stake their lives on it in war.

In 1985, the German gunmakers Heckler & Koch, who had been asked to do some sub-contracting work on training ammunition, were sent two of the new rifles. Shortly after the consignment arrived, the officer who had sent them got a phone call. The voice at the other end said he was calling about the British rifle. He said: "You know it goes off when you drop it?" The officer admitted that he didn't. He fetched a gun from the armoury and dropped it. It went off. German experts had discovered a dangerous safety flaw in a British rifle which, after supposedly exhaustive testing and acceptance into service, the Brits themselves had failed to find.

Robin Budden, who worked as project manager on the gun in 1985 and 1986, takes up the story. "Immediately, the Infantry Trials and Development Unit (ITDU) came back to us and said: 'Why did you design a weapon with a push-button safety catch?' We told them that until seven years earlier we'd had a lever, but an earlier captain at ITDU asked us to put a push button safety catch on, because he preferred it. So that's what we did."

There was pressure to find a quick solution. The dangerous metal safety catch was replaced with a plastic one. But it, too, was defective. "The new safety would break if you pulled hard on the trigger, particularly in cold weather, which made it even more brittle," says Jan Stevenson, who became a vociferous critic of the new gun. "If it rained, the plastic would swell, jammed firmly on or off, and would not budge. It also jammed solid from sand or debris or mud. Finally, a stronger polymer was identified... production began in May of 1990, nearly half a decade after adoption."

Even as mass production of the SA80 was in crisis, disturbing reports such as these about the performance of the weapon in the field were filtering back to the MoD. The trials carried out before the weapon was accepted into service had been antiseptic: troops running across Salisbury Plain, shooting on ranges, putting the gun in climate-controlled tanks to see how it responded to extreme heat, cold and mud. As soon as the gun was given to real soldiers to use in real conditions, its weaknesses became apparent. It would jam, and bits would fall off. The army realised, too late, that there was a vast difference between the guns in the pre-acceptance trials, which had been handbuilt by technicians in the Enfield toolroom using traditional techniques, and the mass-produced ones rolling off the assembly line.

In a parliamentary inquiry into the SA80 in 1993, General Anthony Stone admitted that in the mid-80s the government did exactly the opposite of what it should have done. Instead of starting production slowly, and introducing modifications as soon as faults became apparent, the MoD made every effort to rush the weapons into service, regardless of the stream of complaints that came in. "We had the problem of the in-service date, we were slipping like mad, and there was increasing pressure from [the army] to get this weapon into service to replace the ageing SLR, so we made the error, if you like, of increasing the rate of production."

From the start, a pattern was established: soldiers would demand a change to the weapon; engineers would make the change; the change wouldn't be properly tested; the change would fail; the problem would be fixed again, properly this time, but it would take years to alter each of the more than 300,000 rifles eventually produced; the weapon's reputation among soldiers would sink lower.

At an early stage, for instance, Enfield engineers were forced by Whitehall to change their design of magazine to an American pattern to accommodate the new size of ammunition. To make room, they moved the magazine release catch. Unfortunately, this meant that when a heavy magazine, full of ammunition, was slotted into the gun, and the soldier was moving, his body would rub against the catch and the magazine would fall out. But this was only discovered after the weapon went into production, because in the early trials soldiers didn't put full magazines in until they reached the firing range.

The magazine itself, made at another Royal Ordnance plant called Radway Green, turned out to be a shoddy piece of equipment. It was so bad that during trials in the mid-80s the testing troops never used it, using a US-made magazine instead, because the British magazine caused the rifle to jam up to five times more often. When desk-based MoD officers on the project were told about this, to the fury of the trialling units, they refused to recall all the magazines, saying they would only replace those that fouled up on the job.

The firing pin has now been replaced three times: in 1985, because it wasn't "durable"; in 1991, because it wasn't "materially robust"; and in 2000, because it wasn't durable - again.

According to Lord Trefgarne, the junior defence minister directly responsible for the SA80 under Michael Heseltine and George Younger between 1985 and 1988, no consideration was ever given to cancelling the weapon, or slowing production. "They had some problems getting it into serial production because we were finding that some of the tolerances required were very fine. But we overcame these problems," he says.

Asked whether the imperative of privatisation was a reason for carrying on with the SA80 when it might otherwise have been dropped or delayed, he says it was not. "I went to great lengths to make sure it was working. I fired it myself."

A senior officer working in Whitehall on the programme at the time says: "I don't think at the time we were ever considering going right back to the drawing board. Yes, there were always people who carped about the fact it couldn't be used by left-handed firers. In the end the balance of advantage seemed to be to carry on."

The carping burst into the open in the wake of the Gulf war. A damning report from an army inspection team concluded that the SA80 was unreliable in the desert, jamming frequently despite valiant efforts to keep it clean. "It is... quite clear that infantrymen did not have confidence in their personal weapons. Most expected a stoppage in the first magazine fired," the report said. "Some platoon commanders considered that casualties would have occurred due to weapon stoppages if the enemy had put up any resistance..."

Those who have used it say the new version of the gun, redesigned by Heckler & Koch, is better, but complaints still came in when it was used in Afghanistan. Confidence, rather than reliability, may now be the real problem. "The slightest thing that goes wrong from now on is going to be amplified and shouted from the heavens, so even if the thing is now cured - which by all accounts it is - it's going to be a problem," says Terry Gander, of Jane's Infantry Weapons. "The lads are losing faith in it fast."

An officer who trialled the weapon throughout the 80s argues that, fundamentally, the SA80 was not a bad design, and that the SLR, too, had its faults. "Of course, the previous weapon is the best ever, and the weapon you're going to get is wonderful, and what you've got now is absolute crap. This is typical squaddie talk. Even at its worst, the SA80 was twice as good as the weapon it replaced."

Besides privatisation, the army's need for a new weapon, and the many reputations at stake, there was another reason for refusing to consider cancelling or delaying the the SA80. In December 1986, at the very time the unreliability of the weapon and production delays were creating a crisis, the Thatcher government cancelled another massive defence project - the Nimrod airborne radar system, which turned out not to work. An incredible £1bn had been poured down the drain on the Nimrod in a sequence horribly similar to that of the SA80.

At least, with the Nimrod, the government cut its losses. Incredibly, the MoD seems to have made no estimate at the start of the SA80 rollout as to how much it was going to cost over its lifetime. In 1993, that figure was reckoned to be about £360m, putting a cost to each gun of about £1,080, including spares and maintenance. The modifications up to 1993 were estimated to have added £24m to the cost; the most recent modifications, another £92m, making £116m altogether, or £350 per gun, to put right all the things that were wrong when production began. Assuming they have been put right.

Most of the Enfield engineers are dead, retired or scattered now in Britain's still sprawling defence contracting business. I meet Budden, one of the few associated with the SA80 who is prepared to be quoted by name, in a pub not far from the old factory site. Like many of the old Enfield crowd I speak to, his talk is suffused with elegies for Britain's lost engineering skills. Yet the elegies have been sounding for generations now, and in his time there, the skill pool of Enfield, perhaps, was already being made shallower by the the unusual disdain the people of this country have acquired for the skill of designing and making things.

"I go back and forward between: was it a fundamentally good design or not?" he says. "What we were doing was something that hadn't been done before, so where do you get that experience from? You're pushing the frontiers of manufacturing that type of product outside your knowledge.

"We don't pay engineers enough, we don't treat them with enough respect. Just down the road, on the A40, you used to have all these light-engineering companies whose names you've never heard of now, but who used to be household names in the Lea Valley. They all disappeared. Now where they stood you've got B&Q and Homebase."

We have to keep in mind that this is The Guardian. The writer seems to be obsessed with the idea that all the problems were caused by Margaret Thatcher and "privatisation." To the contrary, I would imagine that the problems were caused by government and military bureaucratic stupidity and inexperience among the new generation of engineers who consented too easily to faulty specifications and unrealistic schedules.

I don't doubt that the weapon has problems, but I doubt whether this is a fair analysis of what actually caused them. Keep in mind that since 1985 when this business began, Britain has been mostly under a Labour government, which is never mentioned as bearing any part of the blame for this long-running disaster. Has Tony Blair done everything he can to straighten it out? Or has he merely cut military R&D funding like his pal clinton?

"It would jam, and bits would fall off."

Reminds me of my college days Austin bugeye Sprite. Got oh, say, about 20 miles per quart of oil. Electrics by the Prince of Darkness - Lucas. The hood had the endearing trait of sliding right off the car if you came to too sudden a stop. This provided endless entertainment at busy intersections.

Sounds very similar to the AR15/M16 introduction. The M16 was summarily dismissed by most of the brass (despite its huge approval in ops field tests) and forced to undergo many changes that actually decreased reliability and increased productions costs. It took years of refinements to overcome many of the initial problems.

Military weapon acquisitions, logistics and development are always a labyrinth of Machiavellian politics. The truly amazing thing is that anything every gets out alive.

Ex had a TR-6 and earlier model TR-3? Anyway, oil filter had to be placed inside a can, rubber seal/gasket placed on opening then one had to shove this contraption down through a tiny space, being careful not to misalign gasket while threading in place. If not done exactly ride? Oil would pour out.

Perhaps the same idiot that designed this went to work for firearms industry after TR went out?

The British have not excelled at designing small arms since the muzzle-loading era, and most of their small arms over the last 150 years have been foreign designs which they somewhat modify and then slap a British name on. The Snider was an American design, the Martini-Henry Swiss-American, the Lee-Enfield was American, the SLR was Belgian, the BREN was Czech, the original British machine gun was the American designed Maxim, which was later somewhat modified and renamed the All-British Vickers, British aircraft of WW2 used the Browning (which the British assure us was so redesigned as to be really a British gun, Old Chap) and later they adopted the Belgian MAG-58. These were all good choices. The real problem here, however, is not American interference, privatisation, of lack of engineering skill, it is a disconnect between the designers and manufacturers on one hand, and the users on the other. The modern peacetime British army leadership has lost the gun knowledge the old-timers had, both military and hunting. The makers and army bureacrats simply didn't know enough about modern small arms to know what was desirable and what was wrong, and didn't care to find out (if they did they never would have used the AR-18 as a starting point). Small arms are simple machines and it doesn't take much engineering skill to design one. They will probably adopt the unproven HK G-36 now, since H+K is now British owned and this will no doubt be an improvement over the SA-80. I would suggest they replace the SA-85 with the 5.56 version of the South African SS-77 machine gun. In fact the U.S. should take a strong look at both the 7.62 and the 5.56 versions of the SS-77.

The modern peacetime British army leadership has lost the gun knowledge the old-timers had, both military and hunting.

That is the crux of it, IMO.

It takes a certain degree of expertise to successfully contract out a project. If you don't have it, the project will fail, no matter how good the people you contract.

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