Once a year, giants of the Russian arms industry gather outside Moscow to show off their latest technology and display their vision for the future of human warfare at the Russia's Army Expo.

This year's event featured future vaporware like a giant combat walker robot and other concepts far off into the future, such as chameleon camouflage. But a more significant weapon made a much more quiet appearance: the MTs-116M suppressed sniper rifle. Designed to mask noise and muzzle flash, it’s the most advanced version yet of one of the modern battlefield’s deadliest weapons.

The MTs-116M has been around for twenty years. It is a well-proven if unexceptional bolt-action, 7.62mm weapon with an affective range of 700 meters (about 2,300 feet). The new version, unveiled at Army 2018, keeps the basic design but converts the MTs-116M into a silenced 12.7mm weapon. It’s a major and appropriately quiet feat of weapon engineering.

Why Go Quiet?

Columbia Pictures

In Hollywood, silencers reduce the sound of a shot to a mere “pfft,” making weapons nearly inaudible over nearby conversation. In real life, suppressers are far less effective, but they are becoming increasingly useful in covert operations.

Military suppressed weapons have been around a while, notably silenced 9mm pistols issued to U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam. But as Kevin Dockery notes in his book Special Warfare, Special Weapons, these pistols were nicknamed “Hush Puppies” because they were far more likely to be used on dogs—or occasionally noisy ducks—than on human targets.

Smith & Wesson MK 22 "hush puppy." U.S. Navy

Today silenced weapons are being used in combat, especially during irregular warfare like the insurgencies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. A study this July highlighted numerous occasions when both ISIS forces and their Kurdish YPG opponents have used suppressed weapons. Sometimes this is because an outpost or group of sentries needs to be tackled without alerting others, in other cases it is simply to gain the advantage of stealth.

"There are virtually no instances where an ambushed unit actually sees the enemy. Both sides shoot at flashes and sounds," says retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, a Vietnam veteran. This gives a distinct advantage to the side which is harder to locate.

The U.S. Army and Marine Corps are both looking at a new generation of suppressed weapons for battlefield use and have bought batches of suppressors for M-4 carbines, and their Russian counterparts are doing the same.

Syrian guards with MTs-116m sniper rifles, 2015. Firral Wikimedia Commons

Crazy With a Purpose

On paper, silencing such a traditionally loud weapon like the MTs-116M is a strange and challenging idea. Usually if you want a silenced weapon, you want to start with something that’s already pretty quiet, like .22 pistols. But there is a rationale to the Russian design.

To be really quiet, it is not enough to remove the noise of firing. The bullet produces a sonic boom that sounds like tearing of a bedsheet. Slowing bullets down to subsonic is easy enough, but doing so without losing accuracy and range is another matter.

Slowing bullets down to subsonic is easy enough, but doing so without losing accuracy and range is another matter.

That’s where the new 12.7mm round, better known as the .50 cal., steps in. It’s a huge bullet, associated with heavy machine guns and long-range sniper rifles. The bullet weighs about five times as much as a typical .308 bullet found in M14 rifles, and even at subsonic speed it provides plenty of momentum. The makers told Russian state newspaper TASS that the new rifle is not only lethal out to 300 meters (985 feet), but at that distance the special subsonic bullet will go through even “high-quality” body armor.

So how do you make such a monsterous weapon quiet? The answer lies with the Soviet Union.

Vitaly V. Kuzmin Wikimedia Commons

A Cold War Origin

When a gun fires, most of the sound comes from the rapid venting of gas. In that sense, a pistol and a popping champagne cork make noise in the same way. The standard way of dealing with this is to add baffles or suppressors on the end of the barrel to divert and slow down the gas. The disadvantage is that this can adversely affect accuracy, and it adds to the length of a weapon; a rifle suppressor can be more than a foot long.

But during the half-century-long geopolitical standoff between the U.S. and Soviet Union, the Kremlin wanted something more compact, so they created the captive-piston round. The PSS silent handgun first showed up in the hands of KGB and GRU (Russian military intelligence) operatives in the 1970s. At seven inches long with no external suppressor, this captive-piston design retains gas inside the cartridge case instead of pushing the bullet along with expanding gases. The gun then pushes the bullet indirectly with a captive piston.

No escaping gas means no loud noise, making a pop rather than a bang. In tests it produced one-sixteenth the noise of a 9mm Glock and one-eighth the noise of a relatively quiet .22 pistol. Although the PSS was replaced by the more advanced PSS-2 in 2011, one disadvantage remained: it needed special, ultra-expensive ammunition. Despite the pricey ammo, this technology provides the foundation for Russia’s new silent sniper.

The silenced MTs-116M may set a new benchmark in quiet sniper weapons, but it will likely be used in very small numbers by specialized units. In urban situations, the firing position is likely to be impossible to locate, and it’ll likely be lethal with just one shot. Along with Russian developments like the T-5000 extreme-range sniper rifle, snipers are creating new tactical problems, which will only get worse if the gun finds its way to the international market.

Although a lot of Russian military ideas are often overly ambitious or nonsensical, Russia is a leader when it comes to silenced weapon technology. After a secret history in the backwater of black ops, this quiet-but-major innovation is making its way to the battlefield.

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