I recently got to witness the Smith & Wesson 5.45×39 in action a zombie shoot competition.   This upper has been on the market for a few years, but in all honesty I don’t know anyone that has actually put one to hard use.   I always thought that the direct impingement design didn’t lend itself very well to Russian ammo.  Many AR15 jam up and do not work very well with Wolf ammo and from my experience there are more FTF when mixing Russian ammo with American guns.    Not only do many of these guns fail to fire, the ammo is ditier and can cause failures to extract.  Sure you can always get around some of these issues by constantly cleaning,  but I wouldn’t expect my AR15 to be combat reliable with Russian ammo, especially when the round count gets up there.   We’ve sold a great many upper receivers in the 2010 and the Smith & Wesson 5.45×39 is the number one seller.

Smith & Wesson 556 guns were one of the best made guns in 2009 and many of my fellow firearms instructors will testify to this.   Even though there are still some issues with the DI type guns, the guns being made today are superior to the AR15 DI guns from 10yrs ago.   LWRCI has their own short stroke piston upper receivers in 5.45×39 , but from what I have seen in the firearms market, I don’t jump on the bandwagon with new guns until they’ve been out in the field for several years.   I saw changes to firearms from Rugers LCP and LCR  and even the Springfield XD guns were all slightly modified after being out for only a year.   Let the feedback from the end user determine which guns are better unless you want to be the beta tester.