R20 “Rahe” – Estonia Modernizes its Infantry Rifles

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In 2017, the Estonian military began the process of replacing its infantry rifles. At that time, the primary rifle in use was the Galil, which had been purchased from Israel shortly after Russian occupation ended and Estonia regained its independence in 1992. The Galils had made sense at the time, but now something more modern was desired. Specifically, a pairing of a 5.56mm infantry rifle and 7.62mm DMR rifle which shared the same basic platform. All of the major players in the firearms market responded to the initial Estonian RFP, and from eleven initial proposals the three finalists were H&K (with the 416), Sig (with the 716), and LMT (with their piston-driven MARS).

Combining the factors of reliability & accuracy, cost, warranty, and included accessories, the LMT was the winning bid. In 2019 a contract was signed for the purchase of about 20,000 5.56mm rifles and about 1,000 7.62mm DMR rifles. These were designed the R20 “Rahe” (“Hail”), and the standard configuration had a 14.3″ barrel (a 12.5″ barreled carbine was also included in small numbers). The standard setup is a red dot sight (initially Vortex; but later and more typically Holosun 515), LMT flip-up iron sights, and Blue Force Gear V-Tac sling. Option accessories that the Estonian MoD procured include LMT 40mm underbarrel M203 type grenade launchers, Holosun 3x magnifiers, Holosun IR light/laser units, and GSL 7.62mm multi-caliber suppressors. The rifles have monolithic upper receivers and detachable barrels (though barrel swapping is considered an armorer task and not a soldier’s task).

The R20 deliveries were completed by the end of 2023, and this now represents the standard weapon for the Estonian Defense Forces. With it, they have a truly modern and capable infantry rifle capable of handling all modern missions and accessories.

Thanks to the Supply Battalion of the Estonian Defense Forces Support Command for giving me access to film the new R20 rifles as well as some of their older firearms!

17 Comments

      • Good enough, apparently. I think the Estonians looked at the costs and the replacement cycle and said “F*ck it… Buy the best rifle we can get for the money, and “good enough” for the optics…”

        LMT puts out an excellent product for the money. I honestly think that they’re on a par with HK, but with reasonable pricing.

  1. Man, you talk about champagne taste on a beer budget. I’m glad they can spot a good rifle, but a little more humble selection would’ve been a lot more responsible. But I guess gold-plated stuff is more interesting.

    • You don’t know details of the deal. Government bulk orders have different pricing structure than private consumer deals.

    • As opposed to, say… Buying HK 416?

      I think LMT makes a hell of a product; everything of theirs that I’ve handled has been top-notch, and a much better value for the money than what comes out of the other “top-tier” manufacturers, to include Colt.

      I think the Estonians have prioritized their purchases for the right criteria… Sights are currently an optoelectronic moving target, and constantly improving. You buy the latest, and two days after, then someone else releases something that is more capable and higher quality. Today’s state of the art is tomorrow’s obsolete, and if you buy it, you’re going to get hosed on costs. It’s better to put your money into the rifle, and slightly less capable/pricey optics you can just buy as commodity items.

      Frankly, I strongly suspect that we’re on the edge of a major revolution in C3I fire control. Buying upper-level “state of the art” right now is probably about as smart as what the French did with the Lebel, locking themselves into a smokeless-powder blackpowder-optimized cartridge, when they should have just waited a bit and gotten the design right. If you look at the history, the 7.5mm Swiss dates back to around the same time frame as the Lebel does, and that cartridge had a much longer and more utilitarian life than the Lebel managed.

      I think the Estonians have their prioritizations correct, here.

      Next “great leap forward” is going to have rather more to do with mesh networked observation and fire control than anything else. The present-day state of disconnected chaos is going to come to an end, and you’re going to see a lot more integration and fire control/intelligence being pushed down to the individual rifleman, starting with things like crew-served first. I don’t doubt but that the early steps are in the lab right now, and will soon be tested in action.

      If you gave me a choice between a good rifle and networked fire control/intelligence vs. “the best rifle in the world” with a mediocre non-networked fire control system? I’m taking “good” over “theoretically perfect”, every time.

      I’ve been railing on this crap for years, but people still don’t get it: The most important thing out there in a firefight isn’t the weapon, it’s the target acquisition and fire control piece. The weapons ceased being the “big pole in the tent” as an issue back sometime around WWII for most countries, and Vietnam for the US. Although, with NGSW, I think we’re backsliding a bunch…

      Lay you long, long odds that were we to be able to run live-fire tactical testing, an element armed with the older small arms suite (M4/M16, M249, M240, M203) and proper C3I integrated network sighting systems would likely run circles around the guys with the current state of the NGSW systems. The weight and recoil of the full-house NGSW cartridge just precludes any other outcome… Too big, too powerful for the individual weapon role.

      • Kirk, are you saying something like a squad of riflemen with C31 integrated sighting systems would be communicating with, say, an aerial drone who can see an opposing force. The math is triangulated and the individual members of the squad all point their personal weapons to a location in their optical sight box placed there by the sighting system. They fire on command and hit the opposing force indirectly without having a visual line of sight? Sort of like an updated version of volley sights on late 19th Century Lee Enfields?

        • That’d be a feature, yes.

          I’m thinking more along the lines of leveraging every soldier’s point of view along with drones in order to synthesize an overview for the leadership to prioritize and designate targets for specific weapons.

          One of the more thought-provoking things I learned as an observer/controller at the National Training Center was just how poorly coordinated much of our lower-level units really are. Every engagement I observed, there were opportunities missed and threats improperly assessed, simply because the leadership wasn’t aware of what the troops were seeing when they were spread out, and because the leadership couldn’t coordinate and prioritize fires effectively.

          Fix that, and you’ve got the next major step in infantry combat. I believe its coming, because all the pieces are here, but the integration and the understanding of what is necessary ain’t quite.

          One of the specific advantages that the German school of machinegunnery had going for it was that the primary firepower of the unit was directly under the leadership of the squad/element: The leader could control it, and thus control the engagement. If you were able to network and control all the disparate elements of the squad, the individual guys out there creeping around in the underbrush, you’d be able to do the same thing effectively for the first time, with this idiotic “every man a rifleman” idea we have going. What we’re basically going to be doing is finally realizing the potential of that fantastical system which we began with back with the Garand.

          Or, at least, make a better stab at it. I still have my doubts about crew-served vs. individual riflemen. The fact that you’re there with someone else, watching you, and you watching them…? Puts a rather heavy brake on “combat avoidance”, just as having people networked effectively will. The networking will also help with the “loneliness of the battlefield”, where guys feel like they’re out there on their own, without support.

          Whole thing is going to end with military-grade Neuralink hardware integrated in, but I think that’s generations away from acceptance and social tolerance. It’ll end when you can “borrow” the view from your spotter’s eyes as you do things like back up a truck to a loading bay, or do earthmoving with the heavy equipment. That’s end-state; getting there is going to be a succession of gradual steps like networking the sights and so forth.

          Being able to leverage everyone’s point of view and situational awareness is the key bit that’s coming next, along with using the view from external sources like drones and strategic imagery. Eventually, you’ll get a synthetic integrated feed from real-time satellite observation, drones controlled by recon assets assigned to your higher headquarters, your own organic drones, and the observations made by your own troops as you move… You’d really be amazed at how many times someone, somewhere in the element has made an observation about enemy activity and then been unable to pass it up the chain to someone who could do something with the information. Break that limitation, you’ve got a low-level war-winner…

          • Dear Mr Kirk

            Do you know what level IV body armour imply ? At 15 M, 7.62 mm M2 amour piercing ammunition do not penetrate level IV body amour. At 300 M with 5.56 mm, the reaction will be those little mosquitoes is very pesky to day. So your strategy is to irritate them with the M4 and saturated the aria with a M240, hoping to hit him in the ass. Interesting. Why not BB guns the ammo is lighter and cheaper.

          • Is there any objective evidence from an actual current battlefield where the soldiers are reporting “issues” with the current suite of calibers they have?

            Neither the Ukrainians or the Russians are reporting problems with their weapons failing to “put down” their opponents. They’re not crying out for a heavier-caliber individual weapon, either… So, do you suppose this is because they’re too stupid to do that, or what?

            The reality is that the whole premise of the NGSW is flawed; body armor is not always-effective proposition everyone assumes that it is: If you’re wearing Level IV armor and hit, even by little old 5.56mm, you’re not coming through the experience without issue. The guys I know who took rifle-caliber hits to their plates and armor in Iraq weren’t exactly popping up off the ground and getting back into the fight; they mostly got MEDEVAC’d and sent out of action for a couple of days. The only reason they survived the experience was because there were people on their left and right to deal with the enemy, and get them out of the situation.

            I think you’ve got a really unrealistic view on this, and believe that Level IV means “Immune”, when all it really means is that most strikes to the torso/head are survivable. Extremities where there are hits to the arterial areas? Still not survivable, and still not something you can effectively armor.

            I honestly don’t think that the math works out on these things, and likely won’t work out in favor of heavier individual weapons for quite some time… And, even then, only for use on things like ground-based drones. At that point, you’d better be planning on having a nice, heavy anti-material rifle along with your team, in order to penetrate actual, y’know… Armor.

            People are still remarkably fragile. Even Level IV body armor isn’t magic; you’re still going to have some level of damage transmitted through it to the flesh underneath, and that damage is often enough to put someone out of action long enough to be militarily effective in terms of taking them out of the fight.

            It’s all a trade-off, and so far? I’m not seeing the numbers coming out in favor of going to an 80-round basic combat load for the individual weapon. I suspect that whatever gains you’re making in terms of each round being more lethal are going to be lost in the fact that you can no longer carry and shoot enough back during a firefight to suppress the enemy.

            You have to remember that it’s not “one shot; one kill”. It’s a lot more like “50,000 shots; one kill”, and the side that can get more of those shots into the fight in the shortest amount of time has an advantage. The Marines up on the DMZ in Vietnam learned that the hard way, taking the M14 up against the NVA main force units armed with AK47 rifles and the RPD.

  2. I had took look at the title twice to be sure it didn’t say “Elbonia Modernizes its Infantry Rifles.”

    • Pesky mosquitoes is an exaggeration. Nobody want to be shoot at, even with BB gun. Nobody cry foul when the Abram tank was upgrade from 105mm to 120 mm because you can carry more 105 mm ammunition. The compromise is between more ammunition and increase lethality. There is also the question of current threat and future threat. What can the enemy field in the future ? The fact is the current 5.56 mm can not cope with body amour. When you fire at some one you want him dead or in hospital for a long time. You don’t want to send him for a few days R&R.

      Ammunition is a compromise. Lets look at the 7.62 NATO round. The total weight is 375 grain of with 150 grain is for the bullet and 48 grain for the powder. You can load it with a 123 grain bullet and 33 grain of powder for velocity of approx. 2500 fps. This give you total weight of 333 grains which is 80 grains more than Soviet 7.62 M43. If your enemy can carry 200 rounds of ammunition you will carry 48 rounds less for the same weight. Thus you have two type’s of ammunition. One for you machine gun (150 gr) and one for your rifle (123 gr). The compromise is that your rifle cartridge weight more than a M43 and you need to train you troop to put the gas setting to this for the blue tip round and to this for red tip round. But you don’t need to fit 7.62 mm in a 5.56 mm. Was 5.56 mm a good compromise for Vietnam ? Maybe ? For Afghanistan, no. A 5.56mm bullet with a better ballistic coefficient for Afghanistan ? Maybe ?

      Why 7mm or 6.8mm or 6.5 mm ? For 140 grain bullet you have better ballistic coefficient than 150 grain 7.62 bullet. You need to go to 180 grain to gain the same ballistic coefficient for 7.62mm. This is for a conventional lead core bullet. For the same amount of power you can fire a light bullet to a higher velocity. You got a flatter trajectory with less wind drift and more energy on distance by simple changing calibre. The 6.8 mm NGSW is ballistic a near equivalent to 270 Winchester. Even if you don’t load a 7 to 6.5 mm cartridge to as high pressure as the NGSW round, it is still superior to 7.62 NATO. If only we adopted the Pedersen in ….

      Nobody is going to tell a soldier that the enemy has super zoom-zoom body armour. That you only hope is that you can shoot him in the face, but because you are so useless shot, the chance is zilch. If you plant a feather there may grow a chicken. This is engaging in wish full thinking:

      “Neither the Ukrainians or the Russians are reporting problems with their weapons failing to “put down” their opponents. They’re not crying out for a heavier-caliber individual weapon, either… So, do you suppose this is because they’re too stupid to do that, or what? “

      The Russians are not stupid, but the Americans definitely are. At least nobody can accuse you of ethnocentrism. Neither you or I have the answer to that question. I tried to gauge from picture of the war, what type of body armour they are wearing. I my opinion it maybe level III for the Russian and no body amour for the Ukrainians. It maybe that specific unit received Level IV body armour like Wagner which may explain there effectiveness. It maybe solder do the normal solder thing and leave the heavy stuff, like tripods, at home. Level IV body amour is tested with steel core AP bullets. Maybe by simply using tungsten core bullets you can penetrate level IV body amour. But by using tungsten you are putting your balls in Chinese vic grip, because China is largess producer of tungsten. If you tell in Russia, AK is useless, you will get a long jail sentence. In Ukraine you be shot in back of the head. This is all speculation. This is a fact: 5.56mm steel core ammo can not penetrate level IV body amour.

      What you miss is, that in a GPMG centered infantry system some one should still carry that ammunition. The good stuff. The battle breaking, brick wall chewing , amour piercing, awe inspiring , at range killing, me-piss-in-panties stufff. In short the good stuff. In case of 105 mm to 120 mm you gain lethality for less ammo. More for less. In the case of 6.8 NGSW the ammo weight 12% less. Increase lethality for lighter ammunition. MORE FOR MORE.

      • Lallie, your delusion is the same one as held by the majority of the idiots running the US small arms program down through history since WWI.

        You’ve got empirical evidence out there, right now, that tells us that the current set of intermediate cartridges is doing just fine in Ukraine. They were doing just fine in Afghanistan, but because the idiots misidentified the actual problem they were facing, they decided to leverage an entirely new cartridge and weapon system that effectively recapitulates the failure of the 7.62X51 NATO development process.

        Raw fact is, that the “overmatch” issue in Afghanistan stemmed from piss-poor MG training and doctrine. They were trying to answer PK fires with M240 MG teams firing off their bipods, which effectively reduced their effective fires range to 800m. The lack of a tripod and effective sighting/fire control hardware on general issue was the biggest part of the problem there, and if they’d have addressed that, they could have done it for a lot less money and trouble.

        End of the day, the NGSW “solution” isn’t a solution to anything; it’s more of a “create another set of problems by way of “solving” the initial one” situation.

        You’ll note that there is no improved tripod coming in with the M240 “replacement”. No real sighting solution, either… The idiots still have the gunners doing a cheek weld above the line of sight, because the new sights are not periscopic, and are mounted above the bore. So, that solves nothing… Plus, the heavy version of the cartridge is going to erode the barrels exponentially faster, and we’re going to add that to the failure equation.

        Additionally, because the idjits are wedded to this insane idea of “one cartridge to do it all”, the basic cartridge is too light to really be an effective MG support cartridge; this is the same compromise that left the 7.62X51 NATO as a de-nutted MG round, because it also had to function in the individual weapon.

        There is no getting around the two-caliber solution. That’s been the “desire path” discovered by everyone since WWII, and it’ll be the same until the basic technological conditions change to somehow allow that circle to be squared. Until then, trying to do two widely disparate jobs with the same cartridge just isn’t happening.

        The individual weapon NGSW is going to suffer the exact same fate that the M16A2 suffered: The Infantry units are going to strip the M4 carbines off of the support units, and leave them carrying the overly heavy and exquisitely expensive POS.

        The raw fact is, the M4/5.56mm combination is a better tool than what the idjit class has saddled the Infantry with, and we know that because that’s what the Infantry has chosen, every time. You have to have a weapon that is easily carried, can be fired easily and which has sufficient ammo on each individual. Probably 99% of rounds fired are not “one hit; one kill”, and that’s the rub that the fantasists like yourself refuse to face. Volume of fire matters, and if you can’t generate it with your rifles, you’re going to lose the engagement. We learned that the hard way in Vietnam with the M14, and I’ll wager we’ll learn it again wherever the idjits decide they’re going to give the NGSW its baptism of fire. Which I can about guarantee will be immediately followed by “Yeah, gimme all your M4 carbines…” to every support unit out there.

        You have to observe reality around you with clear eyes, not live in a fantastic dream world of imagination and supposition. Reality tells us that the current suite of small arms is just fine, and that nobody in any conflict anywhere on earth is saying “Yeah, we need something we can’t carry and fight with, ‘cos “non-existent body armor”.

        I guarantee you that the biggest thing killing American soldiers in the next war is going to be the fact that the idjits still haven’t digested what the proliferation of drones means, and that there’s really no point at all to weighing the troops down with exponentially heavier weapons and rounds. The sad fact is, they’d have been able to better answer the “overmatch” issue by expending a little bit of thought and employing the commercial drones that were available nearly from the beginning of the so-called “Global War on Terror”. Hell, I saw the implications of those nasty little things the very first time I saw one of my friends give a couple to his kids on Christmas morning circa 2002 or 2003. The US Army, in all of its infinite wisdom, did not. Still doesn’t, and that’s going to get a lot of people killed dead, along with the stress/heat casualties almost certainly coming from the increased ammo loads required by NGSW, the weight of which is totally unnecessary.

        I strongly suspect that body armor is going to be going by the wayside, anyway… You can’t armor effectively against the typical warhead carried by a FPV drone, and so long as those dominate the battlefield? Infantry combat as we know it ain’t happening. NGSW is almost certainly going to be one of Ian’s “Forgotten Weapons” in a generation, a vestigial appendix of idiocy that will peter out under the weight of its own contradictions in a few years. I’d almost lay money on it being the very first thing cut from the budget, once everyone outside of the development circus sees what it is and what the implications are for it logistically and tactically. All it is would actually be a 21st Century version of the M14/7.62 fiasco, all over again. I’m sure that the requisite post-military jobs will be there to be handed out to the generals, though, and that the real issues we need addressing will continue to be ignored. Like as not, they’ll still be issuing the M122 tripod and no periscopic sight on into the infinite future. Fully expect to see our first laser- or particle beam-based weapon slapped on top of the M122, because that’s what these morons do.

        • Drones – yes, but even what is commonly accepted as ‘drones’ now (meaning areal) is nearly on the cusp of being obsolete in the next few years. Just one look at what DARPA, Boston Dynamics, Qinetiq, Unitree and other factions of the Chinese have been working on will be more discreet, more covert, more lethal, disguised better, and more agile/useful than what the current rendition of flying ‘bugs’ do.

          You won’t even know it has run up on you at only a foot high off the ground, or silently walked up on you like a cat, or swam up on you being no bigger than a fish – and will look like one.

          Now add smart, decision-making swarm technology to all of these squadrons of robotics, and its as if you are trying to fight off a cloud of angry football sized beings, all thinking and communicating as one, using A/i to adjust their approach based on mathematical game-theory strategies, attacking from land, air, and sea simultaneously.

          The dogs of Fahrenheit 451 come to mind, let alone ‘Terminator’. To think that what Ray Bradbury contemplated such things some 71 years ago, that can now be seen, in action, exactly as he described them in 1953 is astounding.

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