The SA80 did see combat in Sierra Leone after eleven soldiers from The Royal Irish Regiment and their local liaison officer were taken hostage by a local militia gang – the West Side Boys – in September 2000. Negotiators were able to secure the release of six of the men before their captors’ demands became increasingly unrealistic. A rescue – Operation Barras – was mounted by the SAS, supported by a reinforced company from 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment. They conducted a helicopter assault, defeated the West Side Boys and rescued the British soldiers, along with more than 20 local civilians also held by the gang. Although the SAS troops were not armed with SA80s, the paratroopers were, and two suffered severe malfunctions with their weapons. Fortunately, neither man was injured as a result, though the incident did further harm to the SA80’s reputation when the Daily Mail newspaper ran the story on 1 August 2000 under the headline ‘Paras Face Death as Rifles Jam in Firefight with Rebels’. It emerged that the push-through safety plungers on the prototype weapons had been manufactured from solid nylon rod, before being thoroughly tested to ensure that they were not affected by heat, cold or immersion. These had been replaced on the production weapons by safety plungers manufactured from cheaper injection-moulded plastic, however, apparently without anyone realizing that the plastic swelled when wet, rendering the rifle inoperative.
By 2000, it was obvious that something had to be done, both to fix the real problems with the weapon and to build troops’ confidence in it. The MoD contracted with Heckler & Koch – then part of the British BAE Systems’ Royal Ordnance division – to have the existing stock of SA80s shipped to Germany and rebuilt in an attempt to fix the problems. Heckler & Koch used high-speed cameras to record the firing cycle of the weapon and then developed a package of modifications in six key areas:
(1) Rounds often failed to feed from both British- and US-designed magazines, as the magazine platform could cant to one side and present cartridges at erratic angles. A more robust magazine was developed with a redesigned follower which caused fewer misfeeds.
(2) Friction among the moving parts – particularly the bolt and carrier – meant that there was sometimes not enough power to cycle the action properly, especially with heavily fouled weapons. The contact areas were given a highly polished finish to reduce friction.
(3) The springs within the working parts were not strong enough and sometimes failed to return parts to their original positions. The springs were replaced with stronger equivalents.
(4) Extraction and ejection were improved by fitting a more robust extractor claw, a modified and enlarged ejection opening and a new dished ‘paddle’-shaped cocking handle that deflected spent cartridge cases away from both the weapon and the user’s face.
(5) A new barrel was developed for the LSW, using better materials and chromed internally for longer life and greater heat resistance.
(6) Finally, a number of components prone to breakage, including parts of the trigger mechanism, were modified to make them more robust.
Although these changes improved the weapon significantly, the upgrade had to work within the constraints of the existing design, which meant some problems could not be fixed. Most notably, the reciprocating cocking handle inevitably meant that the long, open slot in the side of the body it travelled in remained a potential entry point for dirt.
The upgraded weapons began troop trials in 2001, and scored much better in tests of reliability across all climates; indeed, the weapons now exceeded the original MRBF targets by a considerable margin without the figures needing to be manipulated. Stoppages also decreased markedly, though reliability scores in hot, dusty environments were still notably poorer than for other environments. The upgraded weapons became the new standard issue in 2002 as the L85A2 IW and L86A2 LSW, respectively. Initially, the Army planned to have all 300,000 weapons still in service rebuilt to the new standard, but this soon dropped to 200,000 weapons, apparently on the grounds of cost. About 20,000 of the weapons not upgraded were stripped for use as spares, while the remaining 80,000 were offered for sale to a number of foreign governments. Little overseas interest seems to have been shown, however, and it is likely that these weapons will either be upgraded at some future point or (more probably) also used for spares.
Even with only 200,000 weapons upgraded the cost still came to around £92 million, or about £460 each. The MoD justified this by arguing that it was still cheaper than the £500m that would be necessary to procure a new weapon and bring it in to service, after including procurement costs, developing new manuals and training packages and so forth on top of the cost of the weapons themselves.
The UK had little involvement in the initial overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan by the United States and its Northern Alliance allies in 2001. It did provide a limited number of troops, though, giving the new SA80A2 its first real combat test. The troops deploying were issued with hastily purchased FN Minimi 5.56mm Light Machine Guns, one per four-man infantry ‘brick’; the same ratio as with the LSW. The Minimis were officially to ‘supplement’ the LSW, which was still issued, rather than ‘replacing’ it. However, it was a clear de facto acceptance that the troops needed a better sustained-fire capability than the LSW could provide. In respect of the SA80A2 itself, 2nd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment – the first unit actually to fire the new weapon under combat conditions – gave a positive assessment. Their successors from the Royal Marines’ 45 Commando were far more critical, however, reporting significant issues with misfires and jamming.
The MoD launched an immediate investigation, led by a Royal Marines colonel. When initially tested, only two out of 12 sample weapons operated properly when used to fire a trial shoot of 150 rounds. The investigation found, however, that the Royal Marines were struggling to clean their weapons properly because of inadequate or worn-out cleaning kits, had a number of worn or damaged magazines and were not following the oiling regime in the weapon manual. A follow-up test after the weapons had been cleaned and oiled in the textbook manner found only one weapon failing out of the 24 selected. As a follow-on test, the group of 24 Royal Marines who had received coaching in the ‘textbook’ drills plus a ‘control group’ of 12 Royal Marines who had not received the coaching were run through a second trial, including multiple disembarkations from helicopters. The weapons of the men who had followed the revised cleaning regime turned in an 87 per cent reliability average, while the weapons of the control group averaged only 17 per cent. The conclusion was that the new weapon was indeed reliable in dusty conditions if (and only if) the troops were very rigorous about cleaning and oiling it to a much higher standard than other weapons might require in the same conditions. As one Royal Marines officer put it: ‘The weapon fires properly if you clean it properly – the problem is that it is very difficult to clean it when you are conducting military operations’ (quoted in Raw 2003: 296).