AN-94 Assault Rifle Higher Accuracy

The AN-94 Assault Rifle features higher accuracy, a mount for standard Pact optical equipment (with a 4x sight being standard and included in the cost of the weapon), and reduced felt recoil. The AN-94 Assault Rifle is built using advanced polymers for parts normally made of wood, making the weapon lighter than the AK series. The AN-94 Assault Rifle is capable of firing semiautomatic, 2-round burst, and on full automatic. The AN-94 Assault Rifle can be equipped with a bipod or the BG-15 grenade launcher, and the stock folds to the right for close-quarters fighting.

AN-94 Assault Rifle With GLM

The 2-round burst feature is very complicated, but it greatly reduces felt recoil and at normal combat ranges, both rounds in the burst will strike (or miss) the target before recoil from the first round is felt. The operation of the weapon is likewise complicated, using both gas and recoil operation in a process called by Nikonov “Blowback Shifted Pulse” operation. BPSS is an incredibly complicated operating system that would take a far longer explanation than I want to put down here; the net result is a mechanism which greatly reduces felt recoil and actual recoil, and this is further decreased by an effective muzzle brake.

Construction of the AN-94 Assault Rifle is largely of polymers where earlier Russian rifles used wood, an aluminum alloy receiver, cover and magazines, a chrome-lined steel barrel and chamber, and a liberal use of laser welding. This gives the AN-94 great structural strength, but at a high monetary cost.

According to Gennadiy Nikonov, the designer of the AN-94 Assault Rifle, the AK-74 was always considered an interim design between the AK-47/AKM and newer assault rifles. The AN-94 Assault Rifle had been in development for 10 years before being chosen as the new type standard in 1994. Due to budget constraints, the AN-94 Assault Rifle had not been delivered to all Russian military units by 2006; in fact, full-scale production has yet to even commence, due the poor state of the Russian economy. It is believed by Western experts that possibly as few at 3,000 AN-94s have been produced and issued to troops, even though most of the pre-production batch of 1,000 saw service in the recent campaigns in Chechnya.

AN-94 Assault Rifle

Though the Russian government maintains that the AN-94 Assault Rifle will eventually replace all of the Kalashnikov-series rifles in Russian service, this replacement will at least be very slow, and complete replacement may never actually happen. It should be noted that though in the West the AN-94 is often called the “Abakan,” the term Abakan (named for a village in Siberia where most of the testing of the candidate rifles took place) was actually the code name of the weapons development program to replace the AK-74 and not the name of the rifle itself. “ANS” was Nikonov’s developmental name for the AN-94, and it is reportedly still called by some Russian troops the ANS. Since Nikonov is not itself a manufacturing facility, the AN-94 is actually manufactured by Izhmash.

Now, all that said, the reports from Russian troops who have been able to use the AN-94 in combat are not all rosy. The complicated operating system makes the AN-94 difficult and time-consuming to field-strip and reassemble, and armorers also have found the AN-94 difficult to maintain and repair. The ergonomics are said not to be the best; the pistol grip is not well-shaped and is uncomfortable when firing, and the magazine, even though it is only slightly off the vertical axis, can easily throw off a soldier who is used to the AK-series and hasn’t had enough training or experience with the AN-94.

AN-94 Assault Rifle

The flip-type rear sight is essentially unprotected and also has too-small apertures on both settings. The AN-94 has several sharp edges which can snag and cut the user. Mounting even standard Russian underbarrel grenade launchers requires a special adapter with a large space between the handguard and the launcher (meant to allow an underbarrel grenade launcher to fire with a bayonet attached to the AN-94; this also adds more weight to the rifle than such a grenade launcher would add to an AK-series weapon.

The selector switch is easy to reach, but is also quite difficult to turn; you are supposed to be able to flip it with a thumb like on Western-type assault rifles, but most troops find this impossible. The folding stock is otherwise solid; in early production AN-94s, this made it difficult to fire the AN-94 with the stock folded. The shape of the buttstock was redesigned, but this made the stock uncomfortable when it is not folded.