The Barrett M82 is an anti-material rifle of U.S. origin, etching its place in military history. Designed in the early 1980s by Ronnie Barrett, this rifle holds a special place as the first modern anti-material rifle to gain wide acceptance in active service. Developed initially for long-range engagements against material targets, it has turned out to be effective against personnel.
When the M82 first appeared, it broke convention from the traditional bolt-action sniper rifle appearance; it had a very futuristic look. With self-loading or semi-automatic action, the M82 is operated based on a short recoil principle. Its design conforms to a straight-line principle where the barrel and receiver, along with the shoulder stock, are aligned in a single plane. The heavy, fluted barrel is free-floating, recoiling under firing enhanced by a highly efficient multi-slotted muzzle brake. It has undergone modernization with accessory rails and several other improvements over the years.
The M82 uses the 12.7x99mm NATO round, and it has a magazine capacity of 10 rounds. Its accuracy is within the 3 MOA range. Using match-grade ammunition in this can be as low as below 1 MOA. Its maximum effective range is about 1.8 km, although the variant M107CQ reaches an effective range of approximately 600 meters.
The story surrounding the Barrett rifle is as diverse as the weapon itself. In the year 1982, a professional photographer, Ronnie Barrett, was impressed upon sighting M2 .50 caliber heavy machine guns mounted on a military patrol boat. Having never had an idea about designing firearms, Barrett scribbled a design for a .50-caliber rifle and started visiting local machinists in the development process. Having got a lot of rejections, he met a sympathetic machinist, Bob Mitchell, and partnered in the development of the prototype in four months.
In 1982 he finished the Barrett .50 BMG, a shoulder-fired, semi-automatic rifle designed around this new.50 BMG cartridge. One of the new features was its recoiling barrel; it used part of the recoil energy to cycle the action, cock the firing pin, and load a new round. This novel design reduced the felt recoil, hence permitting repeated firings with the gun. A double baffle muzzle brake was still added on to further reduce recoil.
An advertisement in The Shotgun News brought orders for Barrett’s initial production run of thirty rifles, all of which sold. The Central Intelligence Agency took quick notice of the new weapon and ordered rifles to equip the Mujahideen guerrillas fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The Barrett rifle’s ability to destroy war material from long range set the firearm as the ideal weapon for such engagements, creating a new category of weapon, the anti-materiel rifle.
The Barrett M82A1 was fifty-seven inches in length with a twenty-nine-inch barrel and weighed 28.44 pounds. This gave the sniper rifle energy and range previously unheard of. The M33 .50 BMG bullet weighed 661 grains and created a muzzle velocity of 2,750 feet per second and 11,169-foot pounds of energy. The bullet held 1,300 foot-pounds of energy all of the way out to 2,000 yards, and at 1.4 miles, it still packed 1,000 foot-pounds, more than three times the power of a 9mm pistol bullet.
The Barrett M82A1/M33 combination could reach out to very extreme ranges, well beyond the maximum effective range of the M16 series, which was only around 600 yards. With a trained shooter, the round could easily be pushed out to 2,000 yards or more; however, they had to contend with dramatic bullet drop thanks to gravity.
In 1989, the Swedish Army became the first military customer to order the Barrett Model M82A1, soon followed by the United States Marine Corps in 1990. This rifle had its uses in action with Operation Desert Storm and more recent conflicts for the neutralization of high-value targets with accuracy. By 2002, the U.S. Army had adopted the rifle as the M107.
Today, Barrett M82A1 is used by over sixty countries, with the greater portion being NATO nations and US allies in Asia and the Middle East. The world’s major military powers have developed their own indigenous 12.7mm/.50-caliber-class sniper rifles, such as Russia’s OSV-96 and China’s Zijiang M99. The Barrett M82A1, once a rifle nobody wanted to build, actually did spawn a revolution in military sniping.