Cry Havoc Tactical claims that a trained individual can install the front end of a weapon with their system and fire their first round within 60 seconds. The user does not need any special tools to put their gun together, which you can see in the video below.

Regardless of the nomenclature, this rebooted GAU-5/A appears to share very little with its predecessors. The biggest change is the addition of a special locking system from a company called Cry Havoc Tactical that holds the barrel assembly onto the rest of the gun.

Starting in the 1990s, the Air Force began converting both of these weapons into an evolving configuration that was increasingly similar to the M4, called the GUU-5/P, a story I have written about in detail in the past. It is possible that the Air Force has decided to refer to the Aircrew Self Defense Weapon as a subvariant of the GAU-5/A, but then its correct designation would be GAU-5B/A.

Gibson also said that the Air Force had officially designated the gun as the GAU-5/A, but the service already applied this designation during the Vietnam War-era to a variant of the original M16 rifle. This gun had a 10-inch barrel, which is shorter than present-day M4 with its 14.5-inch long barrel. There was also a GAU-5A/A with an 11.5-inch barrel. The Air Force primarily issued these guns to security personnel guarding planes and facilities on the ground.

The guns are “designed for all combat-coded ejection aircraft,” U.S. Air Force Major Docleia Gibson, a spokesperson for Air Combat Command, told Air Force Times in a later report. It, along with “four full magazines, 30 rounds [each], must all fit in the ejection seat survival kit,” she added.

The Air Force is making the self-defense guns in house by converting standard 5.56x45mm M4 carbines at a rate of 100 per week, according to The Firearm Blog , which was first to report the development. The gunsmiths at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas, home of the Air Force Security Forces Center, expect to turn out more than 2,100 of the rifles in total and have already delivered some to combat-coded units.

For the first time in decades, U.S. Air Force fighter jet and bomber pilots are getting a new survival rifle, the Aircrew Self Defense Weapon, a variant of the AR-15/M16 pattern design that breaks in half and fits inside a standard survival kit . These aviators would have previously had to rely on pistols or even knives to defend themselves if they ever had to eject over hostile territory.

But otherwise, the Aircrew Self Defense Weapon appears to have same basic dimensions of the M4 in its firing configuration. The gun uses the same “direct impingement” operating mechanism found on other AR-15/M16 type guns, which means that after the shooter fires a round, some gas propelling the bullet gets filtered off to cycle the action to fire again. The arrangement blows any unburnt gunpowder and other particulate matter straight into the inner workings of the gun, which can build up and cause malfunctions if the user doesn’t clean it regularly. Various elements across the U.S. military, especially the U.S. Marine Corps, have increasingly switched to derivatives of the AR-15/M16 pattern that use the gas to move a physical piston instead.

USAF US Air Force Security Forces personnel with a mix of GAU-5/As, at left, and GUU-5/Ps during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

The gun features folding front and rear “iron sights” rather than an optic of some kind, which is likely a product of the need to fit inside the 16-by-14-by-3.5-inch dimensions of the aircrew survival kit. It is possible that the Air Force could include a small, non-magnifying sighting system of some kind in the future that a pilot could attach after reassembling their gun. However, it could be difficult to ensure that the detachable sight would remain properly aligned with either the gun or the individual shooter. The weapon does have attachment points for optics and various accessories on top and on all side of the handguard. The limited sights, along with the ballistic limitations of the 5.56x45mm round when combined with a shorter barrel, something you can read about in more detail here, could reduce the ability of the gun to accurately hit targets at even moderate ranges or neutralize them if it does. The Air Force would only say the Aircrew Self Defense Weapon is effective against enemies “beyond” 650 feet away, according to Air Force Times. The Air Force has been working on this latest project since at least 2017. But the final product is much different from the concept it showed in a briefing at the National Defense Industry Association’s annual Armament Systems Forum & Firing Demonstration that year.

USAF A 2017 USAF Air Force briefing slide showing a notional "Aircraft Survival Carbine" conversion kit.

This gun featured a much shorter barrel than the standard M4 and an Sig Sauer arm brace rather than a traditional buttstock. This would have allowed the shooter to stabilize the weapon by strapping it to their forearm or use it as a regular stock if necessary. All of this would make sense given the obvious desire to keep the size and the weight of the overall weapon down. It is curious that they decided to go with a longer overall gun, especially when there are a myriad short-barrel AR-15/M16 types and derivatives – such as the Sig Sauer MCX that Jordan's King Abdullah II is wielding in the video below – readily available both as complete guns and as conversion kits.

The final design could have been based on a requirement to be able to engage targets at longer distances, but if this was the case the Air Force could have decided to use a different caliber that's more effective when combined with a short barrel. The best known is alternative would be .300 Blackout, which Advanced Armament Corporation first created in the late 2000s specifically for use in AR-15/M16 type weapons and derivatives equipped with sound suppressors. The company found that the round also worked particularly well in unsuppressed, short-barreled guns. One test demonstrated that an AR-15 with a 9-inch barrel in .300 Blackout with had the same muzzle energy as a 5.56x45mm M4 carbine with its 14.5-inch barrel.

USAF An Air Force Security Forces airman with a standard M4 carbine during a training exercise.