Tailor-Made ARS

Maximizing the Military's "Recce Rifle” Concept as a Do-All Preparedness Carbine

- Tom Marshall

"Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, 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, 1 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