Editing Objective Individual Combat Weapon (section)

{{Short description|US Army rifle development competition}}
{{no footnotes|date=February 2014}}
[[File:XM8 early 01.jpg|thumb|An early XM8 mockup after the break up; became part of OICW Increment 1]]
The '''Objective Individual Combat Weapon''' or '''OICW''' was the next-generation service [[rifle]] competition that was under development as part of the [[United States Army]] OICW program; the program was eventually discontinued without bringing the weapon out of the prototype phase. The acronym OICW is often used to refer to the entire weapons program.

It was started in the aftermath of the [[Advanced Combat Rifle]] (or ACR) during the 1980s. Like the ACR program, it has largely been a failure in terms of achieving the specific program goals (e.g., replacing the [[M16 rifle|M16]]) and has cost millions of dollars, but has resulted in many innovative weapons and weapon concepts as well as offshoot programs of its own.