The SPIW The Deadliest Weapon that Never Was
Collector Grade Publications | 1985 | ISBN: 0889350388 | English | 139 Pages | PDF |15 MB





Let’s step back to 1964 for a few minutes, into the midst of the SPIW development program. This was the US military’s attempt to increase hit probability from infantry rifles by, basically, changing focus from marksmanship to statistical probability. Studies had shown that hit rates in combat were pretty low, and the main driving theory was that you could get better results overall by using a weapon that fired multiple projectiles simultaneously. In a nutshell:

This theory found a number of different incarnations over many years of development, including 5.56 and 7.62mm cartridges with 2 or 3 stacked bullets per cartridge, flechette cartridges, multiple-flechette cartridges, multi-barrel guns, and super-fast burst firing (the H&K G11 is one descendent of these programs). Well, in the early 1960s this type of weapon was slated to replace the M14 – the M16 had been adopted just as a temporary place-holder until the SPIW (Special Purpose Infantry Weapon) was fully developed. The program requirements were pretty ambitious, though, and the companies working on it were having trouble meeting them. There are far too many different experimental guns that came out of the SPIW, SAVLO, and SAWS programs to cover in a single post (the best resource on the whole series of programs is Stevens’ and Ezell’s SPIW: The Deadliest Weapon That Never Was), and so today we’re just going to look at the 1964 bullpup design by Springfield Arsenal.