Although this is what I saw in the Australian Army when they replaced our L1A1 SLRs with the F88 Austeyr, I could see a similar occurrence in the British Army.
Here, the F88 was accepted for service in 1988 with most of the early issue going to Regular Army Infantry regiments. Non-Infantry units and some Reserve units only started to receive the F88 in the early 1990s with widespread distribution being achieved by the mid-1990s.
In this case, the obsolete rifle took about 6 years to be completely replaced in service and keep in mind the Australian Army was small, around the 40,000 mark for total personnel (both Regular and Reserve).
The British Army appears to have taken about 8 years to effect their changeover because even though their priority would have been much higher due to NATO commitments, they had about 6-8 times the number of battalions that the Aussie Army had.
So with that said, even if the last batch of SLRs were phased out of British service in 1994, they would still be in the system for some time due to two reasons in particular: -
1. it takes some time to dispose of tens of thousands of items particularly when it comes to military weapons!
2. a decent stockpile would have been held as war reserves for several years
So if the Twilight War starts up in the mid-90s, I can image the SLR would be available to the British military in substantial numbers.
|