Ares Shrike 5.56
light machine gun
The Ares Defense Shrike 5.56 is an air-cooled, dual-feed light machine gun/rifle for semi or full-auto configurations that fires the 5.56×45mm NATO cartridge. The Shrike 5.56 is sold as either as a complete weapon, or as an upper receiver "performance upgrade kit" to existing AR-15 and M16-type service rifles and carbines. The name comes from the Shrike, a carnivorous passerine bird, and was designed by Geoffrey Herring.
Overview
The Shrike 5.56 has gas-piston operation, a quick-change barrel with fixed headspace and MIL-STD-1913 rail interface for the mounting of accessories. It can utilize standard 30-round STANAG magazines, 100-round Beta C-Mag drum magazines, and M27-linked SAW ammunition from 100-round or 200-round "soft-pouches" and 200-round hard plastic SAW ammunition containers. At 7.5 lbs complete weapon weight, the Shrike 5.56 is lighter than other comparable squad automatic weapons, such as the M249 light machine gun and Heckler & Koch MG4. The design also appears to be also influenced by a multitude of weapons, including the Stoner 63. It features a short-stroke impinging gas piston system.
Variants
There exist some notable differences between the current model and the older prototypes.
EXP-1
The initial proof-of-concept prototype.
“Ares Shrike 5.56” enters the record as light machine gun. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ares, Shrike and light can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q966890. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1913.
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