Desert Tactical Arms’ Second-Generation Multiple-Caliber Precision Rifle [REVIEW]

EDITOR’S NOTE: In this column, we look back at iconic guns that have either stood the test of time or vanished without a trace. In Issue 4, we covered the Desert Tech SRS, and as this is our bullpup issue, we figured it was time to blow the dust off this piece from the archives. The SRS is still going strong, having been adopted by several U.S. police departments where its compact envelope lends itself well to deployment in the urban jungle.

Desert Tactical Arms (DTA) is a relative newcomer to the tactical precision-rifle market, but in the nearly five years since Nick Young founded the company, the company has developed one of the most versatile rifle platforms on the market. 

He founded DTA with the intent of bringing to market a uniquely modular rifle capable of meeting the needs of shooters across the tactical spectrum, from civilians to law enforcement snipers and military personnel. Even to this day, there is stiff competition in that arena from legendary companies, such as Accuracy International, Barrett, and Remington. However, Utah-based DTA decided to approach the platform in a different way that would set its rifle apart from the others. The result of that effort was the debut of the Stealth Recon Scout (SRS).

The first thing one notices with the SRS is its bullpup configuration. In a traditional bolt-action rifle, the trigger assembly is directly below the action, making the system simple by placing the firing hand close to the bolt and allowing for the trigger to be tuned to perfection. 

In a bullpup configuration, however, the action is moved to the rear, behind the trigger and main grip assembly, efficiently filling the space between the firing hand and shoulder of the shooter. The primary benefit of this configuration is that it allows for a more compact overall length without reducing the length of the barrel. 

DESERT TECH SRS-M2 [FDE]

$6,299.00 $5,949.99

Guns.com $5,949.99

Prices accurate at time of publishing. Affiliate disclosure.

For example, a standard configuration .308 Win rifle, such as a Remington 700 with a 22-inch barrel, will average about 40 inches in overall length, while a bullpup SRS with a 22-inch barrel is about 32.5 inches long — nearly a foot shorter without sacrificing barrel length. However, the compact configuration of a bullpup rifle necessitates connecting the relocated trigger assembly to the action in a way that retains as much of the quality trigger feel and control found in a traditional bolt-action configuration as possible.

This writer’s experience with bullpup rifles fielded by our European allies left much to be desired in the way of trigger quality, manipulation of the bolt, and overall manual of arms. Because the trigger assembly isn’t integrated into the action, bullpup rifles require a mechanism to connect them together. Doing this effectively for a precision rifle is no small engineering feat.

The most common complaint with bullpup triggers is that they are mushy, with inconsistent creep, and are generally better suited to battle rifles rather than precision rifles. Also, for some, it feels very uncomfortable and awkward to cycle the bolt so close to the shoulder in a bullpup rifle. Lastly, changing magazines on bullpup rifles can feel awkward as you feed the magazine pretty much into the bicep of your firing arm. This often forces the user to raise the rifle upward to better expose the magazine well, which is yet another departure from a standard configuration rifle. 

On the bright side, one of the natural advantages of a bullpup rifle is the way it’s balanced with its center of gravity generally located around the firing hand. Unlike a traditional rifle where most of the mass is in front of the trigger assembly, the SRS is evenly balanced, making it very comfortable to maneuver and ultimately shoot. 

There was nothing forced or unpleasant about the ergonomics of shouldering this rifle off-hand. Getting behind it for the first time felt very natural and comfortable, which is surprising given its unconventional profile. But, even though it was well-balanced and ergonomic, the real test is the trigger — the traditional downfall of bullpup rifles. 

DTA appears to have cracked the code, so to speak, by developing a system that results in a very nice, crisp 3-pound adjustable trigger worthy of precision riflemen. It doesn’t have the long two-stage feel that you get with other rifles but adjusts for creep and weight via a 2mm Allen wrench. The trigger location can also be slid forward or back slightly for further adjustment. There are two tiny holes in the rifle’s chassis covers, or “skins” as DTA calls them, located on the sides of the rifle at the trigger guard to make these adjustments. 

The foundation of the SRS is an aircraft-grade 7075-T6 aluminum chassis with high-impact polymer skins mated with a series of bolts and nuts. Skins are available in black and Flat Dark Earth and can easily be switched out, if necessary. The currently available second-generation rifles added a slight change to the skins to support the installation of DTA’s quick-adjust monopod.

The bolt on the SRS is a unique collapsing design that aids in the overall compact nature of the rifle. The bolt handle is also bent slightly to help maintain a low profile, and we found manipulating its 60-degree lift became very natural after we practiced it a few times. While just about everything on the SRS is ambidextrous, from the magazine release to the two-position safety, the bolt manipulation is still set to the right side of the rifle. 

For left-handed shooters, this can be a distraction, to put it mildly. No doubt, it feels strange to have the bolt so close to your cheek, but as a lefty, it’s compounded by the need to move your head every time you cycle the bolt. This also means spent casings will eject right in front of a lefty’s face. Another criticism of this bolt configuration is that it can cause the shooter to lift his head between shots, which tends to go against most tactical precision training. For a lefty, the head lift is absolutely required to cycle rounds, but for right-handed shooters it is not. 

As if producing a compact and well-balanced precision rifle with a nice adjustable trigger wasn’t enough, DTA added a versatile multi-caliber capability to the SRS. Nowadays, modularity is all the rage, and we’re starting to see multi-caliber tactical precision rifles from the likes of Accuracy International, Barrett, and Remington, among others. Much of this new motivation comes from the requirements in the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) Precision Sniper Rifle (PSR) solicitation. Luckily, DTA has been ahead of the game in this area, having fielded a rifle capable of switching between calibers quickly at the operator level, requiring only a single tool. 

At the time the first-generation SRS was released in 2009, it was available in .243 Win, .308 Win, .300 Winchester Magnum, and .338 Lapua Magnum via quick-change conversion kits that include a barrel, bolt, and magazine. In the years that followed, new conversion kits became available in 7mm Winchester Short Magnum, .260 Remington, and 6.5×47 Lapua. On top of that, third-party gunsmiths are spinning custom barrels from favorite suppliers — such as Bartlein, Benchmark, and Lilja — by using SRS barrel extensions from DTA.

The caliber-conversion process is a simple one that can easily be done in the field by the operator. First, the buttplate is removed via a button in the bottom of the stock, so the bolt can be unlocked and slid out of the back of the rifle. Next, a 5mm Allen wrench is used to unlock the barrel assembly and loosen four bolts on the receiver. This allows the barrel to slide free through the forearm assembly. 

At this point, a new barrel is inserted and the corresponding bolt is inserted and locked into the barrel, setting the headspace in the process. Finally, the barrel lock is rotated and the four Allen bolts are torqued.

The barrel extension on the SRS has an indexing feature that forces the barrel to always seat true, allowing for consistent return to zero. We tested this several times and found no shift when removing and reinstalling the barrel. Switching between different calibers will have a point of impact (POI) shift, but it is a consistent and reliable shift that only requires the user to make note of it, so that scope settings can be adjusted accordingly. The first-generation SRS uses a pin-based indexing feature that guides a small notch in the barrel extension into a pin in the receiver. 

Initially, this pin was designed to be very durable but also a breakaway point that can be easily replaceable before ever damaging the receiver. However, over the years DTA came up with a better system that uses a larger cut in the barrel extension that indexes with the feed ramp of the receiver. This newer Gen 2 feature is just as reliable but much more durable and has been featured in DTA rifles since mid-2010. Another change seen in the newer DTA rifles is the round bolt-handle. The earlier model has a tapered handle similar to most tactical knobs, but we found the newer ball handle more comfortable when cycling the action with a closed-hand grip.

In 2010, DTA revealed the SRS Covert — a version of the chassis with a shortened forearm rail, reducing the rifle length, when combined with a 16-inch barrel, to an overall length of 26 inches. Any shorter and it would be in NFA territory. When the Covert model is used with a sound suppressor as it was intended, the overall length of the rifle is similar to most unsuppressed precision rifles. 

Between the Covert and the full-size SRS, all components are interchangeable, so you could theoretically have a Covert with a 16-inch .308 barrel, as well as a 26-inch .338 Lapua Magnum barrel. This added compact design along with a new craze for 16- to 18-inch-barrel precision rifles made the Covert a popular choice.

In 2011, DTA answered SRS owner requests for a kit to swap out the longer SRS forearm with the shorter Covert model. The process of doing that is a bit more involved and not something intended to be done in the field, but can still be done by anyone with a vise, an 8mm Allen wrench, and some elbow grease.

While we’ve covered many of the features of the SRS and a few of the surprises, no precision-rifle review would be complete without a discussion of accuracy. This was another surprise for us as we found the rifle to be very accurate for a factory gun. We started our initial testing by chronographing a mix of different factory .338 Lapua Magnum loads from Black Hills, Corbon, and Lapua through the rifle during the break-in process. 

Afterward, we shot for accuracy and found the 1⁄2 minute of angle (MOA) guarantee on the rifle to be true. We then started working up our own loads and found our best performer was using Lapua brass, Federal 215M primers, and Reloader-25 powder to push a 250-grain Scenar bullet to 2,950 feet per second (fps). This author has taken that load past a mile with excellent results.

In 2011, DTA started releasing its own brand of ammunition as Desert Tactical Munitions (DTM), with initial offerings in .308 Win and .338 Lapua Magnum. In doing so, loaded ammo is now available that is tailored to its rifles. 

In fact, the box of .338 ammo we tested included a drop chart for the 26-inch SRS on the box. This particular batch used the heavier 300-grain Scenar bullet and top-of-the-line Lapua brass, producing an average muzzle velocity of a little more than 2,700 fps. The Extreme Spread (ES) on this load was 21 fps, making it very consistent and capable of the guaranteed 1/2 MOA.

The 16-inch .308 Win barrel for the Covert conversion kit uses a 1:8-inch twist, which is quite a bit faster than the more common 1:10 or 1:12 twist you find in standard .308 Win rifles. This faster twist is better suited to the heavier bullets found in subsonic loads. 

The barrel comes standard with DTA’s quick-detach muzzle brake, which is exposed just beyond the shorter Covert handguard. This .308 Win brake uses a single-port design, while the larger Magnum versions use a dual-port, both of which are a simpler and more efficient design than the first-generation brakes. Because of the length of the barrel being so short with this brake, this configuration produces a fireball noticeable in daytime.

Testing the 16-inch barrel with different factory and custom loads, we found that the heavier 175-grain bullets outperformed well-proven 155- and 168-grain bullets. Hornady 168-grain TAP averaged a reduced muzzle velocity of 2,558 fps in a 1-inch group. Black Hills 168-grain HPBT performed similarly with an average velocity of 2,593 fps. Federal Gold Medal Match 175 Match King, to many the standard in match ammo, showed increased accuracy of ½-inch with an average muzzle velocity of 2,448 fps. Performance with the heavier 175 SMK was confirmed while testing our custom loads that have proven to shoot well in other personally owned .308 Win rifles. A standard 175 SMK load using Varget averaged 2,517 fps and 1/2 MOA, while 150 FMJ and 155 Scenar loads performed rather poorly, grouping closer to 1½ MOA.

While working the rifle in .338 Lapua Magnum configuration, we never ran into any feeding or ejection problems. The .308 Win conversion on the other hand has been known to have some issues. Scaling down to a short action requires a bolt stop to be installed, preventing the bolt from traveling too far to the rear during cycling. 

The magazines are also made to the same dimensions to be interchangeable in the chassis, with the smaller .308 Win magazines having a similar stop built in them for the cartridges to maintain the proper distance when feeding. Reports of failures to feed and eject seem to center around how much effort and follow-through is used when cycling the short-action bolts. In testing this, we were able to replicate the problem by babying the bolt like we would the Magnum cartridges. But, if we more aggressively cycled the action, the .308 Win conversion fed and ejected flawlessly. 

The magazines have very nice features. For example, they’re long enough that you can actually use loads with long-seated bullets and a shoulder stop prevents them from drifting back and forth in the magazine during recoil. Always looking to improve its product, DTA overcame durability issues it had with early versions of its magazines by improving the current generation of magazines, which now promise to be rock solid in the longevity department. Still, as single-stack magazines that hold six .308 Wins, they are limited in their capacity, compared to the popular double-stack AI .308 Win magazines that can hold 10 rounds.

At this point in development, the SRS and the Covert have become somewhat interchangeable, and DTA is now making available 18-inch .300 Win Mag and .338 Lapua Magnum conversions. 

The PSR solicitation has caused a further SRS development branch that appears to include an adjustable cheek piece and a dust cover, as well as a modified buttplate and more tactical shaping of the rear portion of the skins behind the magazine. Some of these items are also featured in the scaled-up version of the chassis, known as the Hard Target Interdiction (HTI). Two years in development, the HTI rifle handles the larger .375 Cheytac and .50 BMG cartridges.

DESERT TECH SRS-M2

$5,949.00 $5,200.99

Guns.com $5,200.99

Prices accurate at time of publishing. Affiliate disclosure.

No doubt much is riding on the USSOCOM PSR solicitation, which will take some time to complete, as it would be a high-profile military fielding for DTA. But, for the civilian shooter, the good news is that there is no need to wait. The SRS is currently available along with a plethora of caliber-conversion kits and chassis options. 

With its astonishingly short overall length, caliber flexibility, and impressive long-range accuracy, the SRS platform continues to be a versatile choice for shooters wanting a “many rifles in one” solution.

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