Tired of G36s with zeros that wander more than Josh Duggar’s eye at a family reunion, the Bundeswehr is giving their current-issue assault rifle the heave-ho:

Germany has decided to entirely replace the recently troubled Heckler & Koch (HK) G36 as the country’s service rifle, Katrin Suder, German State Secretary for Defence Procurement, told the defence committee of the German parliament on 8 September.

Suder told the committee that the decision to fully replace the rifle was based on the fact that “the G36 was procured with a service life of 20 years in mind, which will be reached in 2016. Furthermore, the current forces’ requirements by far exceed the potential of modifications that could be made to the G36”.

IHS Jane’s understands that, with the decision to replace the G36 taken, the German Ministry of Defence (MoD) is planning to introduce a new service rifle by 2019. To this end, the Defence Procurement Office (BAAINBw) has issued a note to industry and is already evaluating and screening the assault rifle market for a replacement.

The move comes after a technical evaluation by the government-funded Fraunhofer Research Institute reported in late March that the G36 failed to meet accuracy requirements both through “self-induced” heating (for example by firing the weapon rapidly), as well as increased climate-related temperatures in simulated environments.

Since 1996 HK has delivered 178,000 G36 rifles, which fire the NATO 5.56×45 mm round, in a range of variants for the Bundeswehr.

German soldiers have long complained that the G36 suffers from wandering zero when:

• it’s hot outside
• the rifle is fired enough to get hot
• it’s a day of the week ending in “-y” in any country ending in “-stan”

HK at first denied there was a problem, and blamed the ammunition.

It appears that the German M0D is looking for an existing COTS (commercial, off the shelf) system to replace the G36 from existing assault rifles on the world market.

If you don’t “get” the headline, it comes from a snarky letter dropped on a gun forum by author and gun nerd Larry Correia.