What is “milspec?”

The TL;DR is that “milspec” is an absolutely meaningless (and extremely misleading) marketing term, often used with the intent to fool unsuspecting consumers into believing a given AR15 is built to the same standards as a military issued rifle. The truth is that no manufacturer except for Colt even has the ability to make milspec parts because the TDP (technical data package) is owned by them, and is a closely guarded trade secret. Basically, the TDP is akin to the recipe for Coca-Cola. Lots of people make cola, and some may be as good, and some may be BETTER, but only Coca-Cola has the recipe for Coca-Cola. The same is true of AR15s. Most are varying degrees of jUsT aS gUd, some are actually just as good…and a scant few are objectively better.

If you have time to nerd out with me, here’s the long version:

The AR15 was originally developed by a company called Armalite, which was a small arms manufacturer that applied new technology from the emerging aerospace industry to firearms design, and essentially functioned as a research and development company, lacking large scale manufacturing capacity. They sold the patents and copyrights for the AR15 to Colt, who supplied all of the military’s AR15s exclusively throughout the 20th century.

As the patents ran out, others entered the marketplace with reverse engineered copies under different names (Colt continues to own the Trademark to this day). While these are dimensionally accurate clones that are even fully interchangeable with, and even entirely indistinguishable from, actual AR15s, they are not the same thing, in the same sense that you can make a cola that tastes identical to Coca-Cola, but may or may not be identical in fact.

The TDP, which is Colt’s “recipe” for manufacturing AR15s, is still a closely guarded trade secret. Due to the nature of government contracts, Colt supplies the TDP to various contractors, but according to the law those contractors 1) must pay Colt a fee for using the TDP, and 2) they must guard the secrecy of the TDP by keeping the assembly lines separate, and cannot sell any of the resulting parts to anyone but the government under the terms of that contract. So in the same way that Coca-Cola might outsource production to Value-Cola, Colt outsources production to AR15s-R-Us, but this does not make AR15s-R-Us parts the same, in the same way that Value-Cola labeled colas aren’t Coca-Cola just because they make actual Coca-Cola in the same factory.

So what then does “milspec” actually mean? Well that varies, but in general it means a “milspec style” bolt, which generally denotes a bolt made from carpenter 158 steel that’s phosphate coated. Generally speaking, it also means that they’re shot peened, high pressure tested and magnetic particle inspected; but there are shades of gray, and it could just simply denote that’s it’s a standard type bolt, vs. one of the myriad “enhanced” style bolts. What milspec does not denote is quality. Milspec labeled bolts include everything from pure garbage to peak performance, and everywhere in-between (and oftentimes the difference is mere luck of the draw).

This is where we get into the games that manufacturers like to play. For example, let’s talk about high pressure testing. According to the pre-2010 milspec, every bolt was high pressure tested (HPT). That’s an old habit in the firearms industry going back to medieval times. You’ve probably seen old world guns with strange little symbols stamped on the barrels; those are proof marks from the high pressure testing that’s still legally required in most of Europe. Today, it’s actually counterproductive to high pressure test every single part. Because of greater consistency in manufacturing technologies, we no longer have to test every single one of something. High pressure testing shortens the lifespan of something, so it’s better to pull one or several randomly from a production run and test those, and then discard them. This is known as batch testing.

Well, the issue is that batch testing isn’t standardized. What defines a batch, how many per batch are tested, what collection methods are used, etc. is all left to the imagination. What it all boils down to in the end is that you have to trust the company you’re dealing with to design their own QC procedures with the intent to produce the best product possible, vs do the bare minimum to be able to stamp that HP on their bolt without potentially committing fraud, and that bar is very low. They may have tested a bolt in 1995 using a proof load with one extra grain of powder and then marked every subsequent bolt HP after that.

The same is true of magnetic particle inspection and every other aspect of the manufacturing and QC process. At the end of the day, it all boils down to trust. You simply have to deal with companies that have a long track record for making good products, and that’s where Microbest comes in. Are they milspec? No. We didn’t steal them from a government arms room, and they are therefore not milspec. BUT, we have reason to believe they are as good as (or likely better than) actual milspec bolts. Microbest is the company that other reputable companies turn to for their AR15 bolts. They are a reputable company’s reputable company, as it were, and I’m thankful to be able to supply them to my customers.