20mm Anti-Material(Anti-Materiel) Rifles. Wave of the Future.

by David Crane

There is growing interest by the military in the 20mm cannon round for anti-material use, since it’s capability in this area significantly exceeds that of the .50 BMG. Special Operations units are particularly interested in the development of sniper/anti-material rifles chambered for a cannon round, since they offer significantly increased performance to even the Nammo/Raufoss Mk211 Multipurpose .50BMG round against lightly armored targets.

In the future, DefRev will be publishing an article on…

one of these new anti-material rifles currently being developed by a premier .50 BMG sniper rifle manufacturer–and it’s not Barrett.

In the meantime, click on this link to read about the NTW-20. The NTW-20, or NTW20/14.5 rifle is built around two specific cartridges: the 20×83.5 mm and the Russian API or API-T 14.5×114 mm, and was designed by Tony Neophytou out of South Africa. It is marketed by Mechem, which is a division of Denel (Pty) LTD, also in South Africa.

The NTW-20 anti-material rifle is a bolt action, and it utilizes a 3-round side-mounted box magazine. Now, while you may be thinking that a 20mm bolt action would have too much recoil to fire comfortably, in this case, you would be wrong. The NTW-20 incorporates a hydrolic double-acting damper(a hydrolic buffer, if you will), and combines this with an efficient double baffle muzzle brake that takes care of the rest. Valery Shilin’s excellent page on the NTW-20 anti-material rifle provides more detailed information about this.

If you remember, DefRev published an article on the Barrett 25mm Payload Rifle awhile back. That rifle fires a simplified version of the 25mm Objective Crew-Served Weapon (OCSW) round. I only mention that offering as further evidence of the overall movement towards anti-material rifles that fire explosive munitions with much larger payloads than the aforementioned Nammo/Raufoss Mk211 .50BMG can provide.

Stay tuned. We should be able to let the cat out of the bag on that 20mm anti-material rifle soon.