Description
The Galil assault rifle, the Galil AR, was designed by Israeli Galili together with Uziel Gal designer of the famous Uzi submachine gun. The Galil was designed in response to three major reasons: First – the poor reliability of the FN FAL which was in use in the 1950’s to the early 1970’s by the Israeli military, especially in dusty and sandy areas of combat. It was long and bulky and malfunctioned easily. Second – The French who were the main weapons supplier of Israel during the 50’s and 60’s have began to shift their interests due to Arab pressures and the US became the main supplier ever since. The 7.62X32 mm Soviet ammunition that was used by the FAL could not be supplied by the Americans and thus the 5.56X45 mm had to be used. Third – during the 1967 Six Day War thousands of AK47’s were captured from Soviet equipped Arab forces and the weapon was evaluated and deemed highly reliable, but since the Soviets did not supply Israel, a local weapon had to be developed using the same mechanism and principles of working in all conditions. Israel Galil based his rifle on the AK47 and the Finnish RK62 made by Valmet. The Galil AR was issued to mainly infantry, mechanized and armored units. During the mid 1970’s and 80’s the Galil was replaced by the M16 since it was cheaper to purchase US military surplus firearms that were in massive amounts after the Vietnam war than to produce new Galils. In 2006 the Tavor rifle started replacing the M16 models especially in infantry units.
