A niche little bullet point in firearm history.
Because the rifle, famously, did not manage to replace the M4/16 in the US military, HK naturally went looking for other government buyers. Despite the design still being in its’ infancy, no doubt plenty of money had already been sunk in to developing it. Potentially they had already paid for some of the production machinery before the (very strange and fragmented) US procurement program fizzled out.
In 2007, the Malaysian military indicated they wanted to buy the guns. Then by 2010 the special forces unit within their navy, named PASKAL, began using them, at least in some capacity. They also acquired G36s and 416s seemingly at a similar time, which is a very unusual procurement decision. All very similar systems in terms of kinetic effect, but of course with separate supply chains of spare parts needed. Some sort of special deal done behind closed doors one way or the other? I doubt we’ll ever know.
As seen in the few photos that are available online, PASKAL acquired a lot of the different variants of the XM8. There’s baseline carbines, the short carbine with the 2-bar stocks and either the auto rifle or sniper/marksman rifle with 20″ barrel and a very unusual quad rail 1913 handguard (maybe from SCAR trials, based on listening to LV in an older ForgottenWeapons video) along with the 320 UGL integrated handguard.
None of these images show the Insight ISM optic from the trials program which attached with PCAP, just common-or-garden Aimpoint red dots on 1913. The vertical foregrips however are the proprietary PCAP attachment versions that would only go on the XM8. Not a lot of those floating around out there.
I didn’t stumble upon any numbers for procurement quantities for these, hard to say how much of a production line ever existed for them. Internals were all very similar to G36 but supposedly different enough to not be interchangeable; but perhaps a lot of the same machines could be switched over easily enough. Then again I almost wouldn’t be surprised if the Malaysian batch just consisted of whatever few crates HK had already made and were sat in a warehouse.
Many thanks to the big man himself, Jonathan Ferguson, for mentioning this in a comment to me a little while back over on IG. It’s a nice little internet rabbit hole to go down.
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