M110 Sniper Rifle: Knight's Armament Wins 5-Year Army Contract

The Army awarded Knight's Armament Company $49,997,842 for M110 Semi-Automatic Sniper Systems on September 10, 2026. The Department of War contract announcement lists the award to Charles Reed Knight Jr. of Titusville, Florida, the legal entity Knight's Armament contracts under, as a firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract covering the rifle itself plus variants, accessories, spare parts, special tools, and training. The estimated completion date is September 10, 2031.

Two details in the announcement matter more than the headline number. First, one bid was solicited and one was received, so this was not a competition. Second, work locations and funding are determined with each order, which is what the IDIQ structure buys: a ceiling rather than a delivery schedule. The Army has committed to a supplier and a price structure for five years, not to a rifle count. Army Contracting Command in Newark, New Jersey administers it under contract number W15QKN-26-D-A095.

The M110 is a 20-inch, 7.62x51mm NATO, direct-impingement semi-automatic rifle issued as a complete system rather than a bare gun. Knight's Armament won the XM110 Semi-Automatic Sniper Rifle competition on September 28, 2005, and the rifle reached its first combat deployment in April 2007, when Task Force Fury soldiers in Afghanistan became the first in a combat zone to receive it under its pre-adoption XM110 designation. It came in to replace the bolt-action M24 Sniper Weapon System, trading the bolt gun's simplicity for follow-up shots and a higher engagement rate against multiple targets.

The system fielded with a quick-detach suppressor, a Leupold Mark 4 LR/T 3.5-10x40mm M2 optic with an illuminated TMR reticle, a Harris bipod, and SR-25 pattern 10 and 20-round magazines. The glass has since moved on: in April 2020 the Army selected the Leupold Mark 5HD 3.6-18x44 with its patented Mil-Grid reticle and a Mark IMS mount for the M110, and the sniper team also carries the M151 Enhanced Spotting Scope. Empty weight with the optic and bipod is 13.7 pounds, muzzle velocity is 2,570 feet per second with 175-grain M118LR, and the Army rates it to 800 meters against point targets. That accessory package is a large part of why the M110 is described as a system: the suppressor and the optic are contract items, not aftermarket choices.

The design is a Knight's Armament SR-25 at heart, which is the 7.62 NATO line Eugene Stoner and Knight's developed in the 1990s off the AR-10 architecture. Knight's has since built derivatives on the same receiver set, including the M110K1 conversion kits that NSWC Crane ordered in October 2019 to move USSOCOM rifles to 6.5 Creedmoor in 14.5-inch and 22-inch barrel lengths. If you are building in the same class, our best AR-10 guide covers the 7.62 semi-autos worth buying, and the AR-10 and .308 optics guide covers glass in the Mark 4's magnification band.

The M110 is still on contract because its intended replacement was absorbed into a different job. On April 1, 2016, the Army awarded Heckler & Koch a contract with a $44.5 million ceiling for 3,643 M110A1 Compact Semi-Automatic Sniper Systems, an HK417-derived gas-piston rifle with a 16.3-inch barrel and a Schmidt & Bender 3-20x50 optic. The CSASS was expected to supplant the M110 in the sniper role.

That is not how the fielding went. Roughly 6,000 M110A1s were issued as Squad Designated Marksman Rifles with a SIG Sauer TANGO6 1-6x24 low-power variable optic, pushed down to infantry squads to cover 300 to 600 meters rather than up to sniper sections. Fielding of the SDMR configuration began in 2020, with the last of roughly 6,000 rifles due by late 2023. The result is two 7.62 semi-autos serving two different missions, and a sniper-role rifle that never got fully displaced.

A five-year IDIQ with a $50 million ceiling is not a re-adoption, it is a sustainment posture. The contract explicitly covers spare parts, special tools, and training alongside complete rifles, which is the shape of an order written to keep an existing fleet running and to backfill losses. Snipers who already have M110s keep getting barrels, bolts, and suppressor parts through 2031.

The closest rifle a civilian can buy is the Knight's Armament SR-25 A2: a 20-inch 7.62 NATO barrel with 5R cut rifling, a 1:10 twist, a dimpled profile, a listed weight of 9.42 pounds, and a 38.5 to 42.5-inch length range on the collapsible stock. It is the same barrel length and chambering as the M110 on the same receiver family. What it is not is the issued system: the suppressor, the Mark 4, and the bipod are your problem. The can is the one piece with paperwork attached, and it is legal in 42 states, with the federal transfer tax at $0 since January 1, 2026.

Knight's also sells shorter 7.62 configurations as the SR-25 K3 at 16 inches and the K5 at 14.5 inches, plus 6.5 Creedmoor A3, K6, and K7 models at 22, 16, and 14.5 inches. Every one of them sits well above the mainstream 7.62 semi-auto market on price. If the M110's mission profile is what you want rather than its badge, a .308 rifle from our ranked guide gets you there for a fraction of it, and our AR-10 upgrade guide covers the triggers, handguards, and muzzle devices that close the gap.

One mechanical note worth having: the M110 and the commercial SR-25 use SR-25 pattern magazines, the same interface Magpul PMAG 20 LR/SR Gen M3 and Lancer L7AWM magazines feed. That is the most common magazine standard in the 7.62 AR world and it is the reason SR-25 pattern mags turn up on rifles that have nothing else in common with a Knight's gun.

Army and Marine Corps snipers still run the M110, and the Army's own weapon systems handbook lists more than two dozen foreign recipients of the rifle through foreign military sales, among them Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Singapore, and Iraq. The photograph below was taken at Fort Stewart in June 2026 during 48th Infantry Brigade Combat Team annual training, which is a useful marker for how ordinary the rifle still is in a National Guard sniper section eighteen years after its first deployment.

For a rifle selected in 2005, that is a long service life, and the new contract extends it past the twenty-five year mark. The Army has now spent a decade fielding a lighter piston gun in the same caliber and still decided to keep buying the direct-impingement original.