The Navy SEALs' Best Rifle Uses Old Tech

Whoa, that was close. I can't see anything from here. Bro, I told you not everything, CQB. Sometimes you need a real man's rifle. Cover fire, 2 o'clock. That's the last of them. Hey, bro, how many times do I got to tell you, you just can't bring the short rifles into the mountains. These look cooler on Instagram. Damn kids. Today on American Outlaw, an amazing piece of history. History that has literally given a lot of dirt naps. Let me try to get it right for all of you. The NSW recce rifle. The NSW reconnoitering rifle. The NSW crane recce rifle. I don't know how many times we can say this, the seal recce rifle, but I do think you're gonna like this gun, so stick around for a second. All right, guys, I got to thank the biggest sponsors of the channel, the Sonoran Desert Institute. We are in the desert. They are the biggest sponsor of the channel, so do me a favor, go down, hit the link below. If you want to get your start in gunsmithing or flying a drone, give them a look. Another big sponsor that sponsors the channel is Optics Planet, guys. Use code outlaw, save 7%. Hey, listen, in today's economy, you probably need to save that 7%, and you probably need to stock up just a little bit more than you are. The seal recce rifle, the NSW reconnoitering rifle, whatever you guys want to call it. It is a amazing piece of history, so let's just kind of talk about the program overall. So it started off as a Mark 12, and it was an 18-inch barrel with a variable optic on it. What was happening was you were seeing the Navy Seals fighting in Afghanistan, and they were no longer on ships, no longer in the water, so they no longer needed that little 10 1⁄2-inch gun. They needed to get a little bit further out there, and they started using heavier ammo, the 77-grain Sierra Match King or the .262, and so they started with an 18-inch barrel because they thought they would get the most out of it. Further on into life, we know 16 is the primo number, but hey, we had to learn from somewhere. Guys, this is literally 25-year-old technology right now. A lot of painstaking work went into getting this clone correct, so let's talk about it. I have an Allen Engineering AEM-5 silencer on it. Ron Allen, he was the original guy. They went out of business. He took the patents, and so I have that original can on it. The Seals took the gun, and they went from a Douglas barrel to a Lilja barrel, and they cut it to 15.1. The reason they cut it to 15.1 is because they just wanted to get the suppressor as far down as they can on the Knight's rail. The MOD-0 and the MOD-H both had a PRI rail. The MOD-1 and now the Seal Recce Rifle or an SW Recce Rifle had the Knight's Armament Quad rail, which as we started progressing into the war, we started saying, hey, we have problems with some of these things. I think it started with Knight's Armament. Daniel Defense came in a little later, and they started with the quad rails free-floating so that they would be very accurate. And when you took the Lilja barrel, cut it 15.1 with a one-in-seven twist, you have a very accurate rifle with .262 ammunition. I had a couple of options, so right now these rails are like 3,000 bucks, but Knight's does a drop it like every other year or something like that. Cloners put in the bottom how often they do a drop where you can pick them up on Optics Planet for like 500 bucks. So that's what I did. I waited. This is like a three-year-in-the-works project to build this rifle. I have the correct Harris BRM bipod with the K&M lock, correct Knight's Armament broomstock. Now you might've seen a grip pod on here and not the bipod. Grip pod was really popular back then, especially for setting your rifle down. And a lot of times you just set your rifle down while you're taking a break, eating lunch, and having a grip pod on there was nice, but it was 50-50 whether the guys ran a bipod or not. There was multiple options for a laser, and I set mine up for a later into time, like about the end of the program on the Recce rifle. So I chose a full power PEC 15 over a PEC 2 just because for me, this is still a modern combat rifle. I would be fine to take this into combat right now. I got a really good friend of mine who's a sheriff's deputy and he's the sniper and he shoots one right now, which I think is a great option. All right, so moving back, I got the Nightforce two and a half to 10. I have the MOA version with the mil-reticle because that's what was made back then. I know everybody now is like, hey, you need to be mil-mil or MOA-MOA, but the truth is when I first started and probably when most of your shit dads at this point started, it was all mil-reticles MOA turrets. And so to be true to the rifle, that's what I have. I've got the Nightforce titanium rings. I've got the SOPMOD stock on it. And this is a property of U.S. government Colt, the recreation from Colt. And I got a Geissele SSAE in this. And then I sent it, oh, sorry, I got the PRI charging handle. No kidding, it literally took me three years to come up with all the parts for this. Then I sent it to my friend Joel at Otter Weapons Works and he put it together for me. He did a phenomenal job. We've been hitting rocks where we aim on the rocks out to 800 meters all day, like clockwork. It's beautiful. One of the things that made it so coveted was you could still do CQB with it because if you think about a 10.3 with a suppressor on it, that makes it almost a 16 inch gun. And then all you're adding is about how the suppressor slips over the barrel. You're only adding about another four inches. And so I don't have it yet because I haven't found one, but Wilcox made a mount to go on top of these. And the Wilcox mount, which was really cool to have, would make it to where you could have the aim point. I saw a lot of A-point T1s up here, a lot of doctor optics because the RMR wasn't out yet. You could see them at a 45, but I think by now we all kind of agree that 12 o'clock is better than 45, especially because you got a laser and things on there. Another thing that you guys are going to ask is like, hey man, why is it that you have your peck up here, but you don't have a pressure pad on it? That's a good question. I'm deciding where I want it. If you look at the team guys, a lot of them had it up here and a lot of them had it back here. Remember they were fighting a group of people that did not have night vision. It wasn't near pier. And so they did a lot of their fighting in the day in the mountains, which is why they chose something like this with an optic so that they can be like, oh, hey, there's the goat herder, whatever you want to call him. And he's not a bad guy, so let's not shoot him. But there's the flip flop where that is a bad guy. Let's go ahead and clean his clock, ring his bell, whatever you want to call it, tick the time clock. I don't know what words you guys use today. I also have an old school PBS 22, which is pretty cool because this is, it went really well with my M40A5, which is coming up. And it also goes really good with this. There's actually a pretty famous picture with a guy that I consider a true hero is a Matt Axelson running this. And so if you have your PEC 15 and you're running PBS 22 night vision, and you're looking for people and you turn the flood on with the PEC 15, which would mean back then their laser discipline was more along the lines of turn it on and flood everything and look, oh, bad guy peak, bad guy peak, good guy don't, know what I mean? So it's kind of up to you where you would run it. It's not like today. I totally understand today that you don't want to turn your laser on because you're probably gonna get a T-72 with an arty round back at your face. Like I get it, I totally get it. But back then this is how they worked it, how they had it. And it also was set up to where if you had to do CQB, you could absolutely turn the gun sideways, go into the house, do your work, come out and you're fine. Most of the time, these guys didn't do that. The CQB that they would do is on their way up to a roof. And then after they got to a vantage point, they would provide cover and then come back down. But they could still clear a house with this and take targets to about 800 meters with this, an extremely effective weapon system. Hey guys, so before you go into what you would consider a conflict, always remember to come back down on your turrets after you get done shooting. Light, sights, chamber. When you're done, rifle reset. Reset your optic, make sure that it's reset to zero, zero, zero, so that, and turned all the way down in power so that if you got up from here and there was somebody down the road, you would have two and a half power. You'd have a better chance of seeing him and engaging him safely. Now, a lot of you keep saying in the comments, I don't understand the difference in mil-mil and mil-MOA. I understand because it's actually been a long time. I remember when I first started shooting long range in the early 2000s and everything was mil, a mil reticle. And so you could mil your targets. And then we had quarter MOA turrets and then Leupold had quarter MOA. Then they did half MOA and then they did one MOA. And then they realized one MOA didn't work. They went back to half and that kind of worked for a while. And then they went back to quarter. We learned that it was faster if you were measuring in meters to do mil-mil rather than mil-MOA. And so competition guys started doing that and first focal plane. So these old scopes are second focal plane. Now that does not mean contrary to popular belief that if you turn it from two and a half to 10 and a half, you're going to shoot over their head. That's not what it means at all. It just means your holdovers change. You know what? I'm going to do a video on that for you guys. I'm going to give you an in-depth video if that's what you want to see. If you want to see an in-depth video on the difference in mil-mil, MOA-MOA and mil-MOA, I want you to put comments down in the bottom. And if I get 100 comments that that's what you would like to see, I will do a video on it for Outlaw Nation. All right, guys. So we all know that money comes and goes, but clones, they last forever. This to me is the best clone that I could possibly come up with. I have a lot of clones. I love clones and clones bug me to the point where if I have the wrong gas block, I can't sleep at night. Like I lose sleep over a gas tube or a bolt carrier group. This one literally is as close as I could possibly make it. And I will try to update it through the years to try to find better used or whatever stuff. But I'm moving on because my goal is to get all four of the Mark 12 program rifles. The Leupold 3-9 scope is super hard to find. So if you guys know where any is, hit me up on IG. Also guys, do you guys subscribe? There's like 70% of you that are watching right now that aren't subscribing. It's like almost 4 million of you that are watching and you're not subscribing. Dude, do me a favor and subscribe. The reason I chose the SEAL Recce rifle is because to me, every piece on this rifle right now is currently not out of date. Arguably it's more in date than most rifles because we kind of stopped war in 2016 and this baby was still going to pound town. And so everything now that you're seeing now is a good theory and a lot of great thoughts, but it's not combat proven. Every single thing on this rifle right here is combat proven. It did a decade of incredibly hard combat. Some of the hardest combat that this country's ever seen in the hardest conditions this country's ever seen. So like if you need a SHTF rifle or a go-to-war rifle, as far as clones go, this baby right here, it does it all. And I can't find a single fault in it. Take some 77 grains, pull off some Call of Duty sweet headshots or whatever it is you guys do, and you have like the dream rifle. I'm good.