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Faced with the hoary age of the
1911A1 and its inevitable retirement by
the military, Colt designers came up with
a new concept in 1969. They decided not
to merely replace the veteran pistol; they
chose to improve the capability of an al-
ready good basic design. Colt design en-
gineer Henry A. Into called his 1971 pro-
totype the “SCAMP,” for Small Caliber
Machine Pistol.
“We looked at all the mini-subma-
chine guns already out there, e.g.,
Skorpion, Mini Uzi, plus the small
Walther and Beretta designs, and, in ad-
dition our engineers tinkered with vari-
ous pistols they converted to full-auto
with large capacity magazines, like the
Browning Hi Power. Then, we did sev-
eral in-house designs, finally settling on
As the Beretta 92 replaced the venerable old Colt M1911A1 as the
US military’s sidearm in 1985, few remember that it had been less than
15 years earlier that Colt built its better mouse trap, the handgun that
almost succeeded its aging ancestor: the little-known Colt SCAMP, al-
most 40 years old now and barely known except to small arms
cognoscenti.
the SCAMP as the one that met all the According to Henry. A. Into, former
required criteria of lightweight, compact, manager of handgun engineering for Colt,
easily hand-acquired, accurate and ca- who actually designed it, the SCAMP was
pable of putting out a high rate of effec- “more than just a handgun for individual
tive suppressive fire,” said Ronald military personnel. It was a solid, light-
Stilwell, former president of Colt. weight and accurate machine pistol...truly

Lead photo: The Colt SCAMP.

Copyright © by Colt’s Manufacturing
Co., LLC. All rights reserved. Used
by permission.

Right: The Patent application illus-

tration of the SCAMP shows the op-
erational characteristics. Credit:
Colt’s Manufacturing Company,
courtesy of company archives.

26 The Small Arms Review - Vol. 7 No. 8 - May, 2004


Right: Two of the actual SCAMP centerfire rounds with a 12
gauge shotgun shell for comparison. Credit: J. David Truby
a versatile and useful offensive handgun,
just a bit bigger than our 1911A1.
“Although we developed the SCAMP
officially as a proprietary handgun for the
military’s personal defense weapons pro-
gram, what we turned out was a lot more.
We gave the individual operator a whole
lot of handheld firepower.”
Only slightly larger and heavier than
the .45ACP 1911A1 pistol it was to re-
place, the SCAMP was built around a
Colt-developed, high-velocity, centerfire
.22 round. It was also far better balanced
than the old Colt, according to Into.
“The SCAMP was a gas-operated,
locked-breech weapon with select-fire ca-
pability, including three-shot burst,” he
added.
One of the major problems faced by
any automatic weapon is the climb factor
which draws the weapon off target. Light,
miniature full autos like the SCAMP mag-
nify this tendency. Eliminating that prob-
lem was a major accomplishment of the
Colt engineering team, that sought mini-
mal group dispersion in burst mode, ac-
cording to Into, who also wrote Colt’s
official proposal for the weapon to the
military in 1971.
“Rather than build-in additional bulk
and weight to control climb and recoil,
we decided to create a compact compen-
sator and a burst control mode, both of
which would add to the inherent accuracy
of the weapon by defeating the inaccura-
cies usually found in the smaller auto-
matic weapons. The concept worked
well,” he added.
Into added, “We used the burst con-
trol method because it is far easier for op-
erators to keep their weapon under con-
trol that way, which also increases the po-
tential for better aimed shots and a higher
The Small Arms Review - Vol. 7 No. 8 - May, 2004
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hit-per-shot ratio. This
is especially true under
stress situations, which
is when this weapon
would be used.”
The Colt prototype
was 11.6 inches long,
1.4 inches wide and 6.8
inches in height. It
weighed 3.25 pounds
with a magazine capac-
ity of 27 rounds. In a fu-
turistic design, ahead of
the times, the receiver
housing was glass-rein-
forced, high impact
plastic and contained the
moving parts, all of which were made of
stainless steel. The cylic-firing rate var-
ied between 1,200 and 1,500 rpm
Another factor in the control and ac-
curacy problem was that the cartridge
originally suggested for the SCAMP was
the .223 round, far too hot for an ordi-
nary handgun, much less a machine pis-
tol.
The SCAMP’s .22-centerfire car-
tridge fired a 40-grain bullet at a muzzle
velocity of 2,100 fps. Colt officials de-
veloped the round specifically for the new
weapon. The world standard and popu-
lar 9mm round was rejected because of
its relatively heavy recoil signature. The
designers also rejected the rimfire .22
long rifle because of its inadequate bal-
listics.
Into’s later research rejected the .22
Winchester Magnum and the 5mm
Remington cartridges. The .22 Hornet
cartridge was studied for modification, as
well. However, the Remington .221 Fire-
ball cartridge was used as the starting
point for the new Colt cartridge. In
their benchmark book on submachine
guns , Nelson and Musgrave explain the
design capability of the new Colt car-
tridge, writing, “Should a substantially
different type of ammunition than ball be
desired, the general design is capable of
further modification...a multiple flechette
round, for example.”
Testing showed that the new round
shot flat and accurate out to about 125
meters, far superior to most military pis-
tols, plus it had the full-auto and burst
control capability of the SCAMP push-
ing it. By the way, this .22-centerfire Colt
round developed for the SCAMP was later
redesigned as a rimmed cartridge for re-
volvers, to be used primarily by security
forces. This effort met with about the
same level of contractual success as the
original SCAMP design.
The SCAMP’s grip design was fash-
ioned after the thumb-rest grips of target
pistols and the bore was located low to
the firer’s hand with the firing mechanism
above the bore to lower the center of grav-
ity and improve balance.
The sights were open
partridge, adjustable for
windage on the front, plus
rear sights with ear protectors
and windage adjustment.
According to Into, “We also
Left: A technical sketch
shows the relative compo-
nents of the custom
centerfire round devel-
oped for the SCAMP.
Courtesy of Tom Nelson.
27

Right: Edward Zalewa of Colt’s engineering department
holds the rare SCAMP prototype, which nearly revolu-
tionized military handguns more than 3 decades ago.
Copyright © by Colt’s Manufacturing Co., LLC. All rights
reserved. Used by permission.
designed a quick-point aiming rib into the
housing design for combat shooting, plus
the weapon was balanced for natural
pointing characteristic along the shooter’s
forearm.”
Fieldstripping was simple and re-
quired no tools. A major part of Into’s
design requirement was “for simple main-
tenance and a high degree of insensitiv-
ity to environmental harshness,” he ex-
plained.
The SCAMP was designed for per-
formance under poor environmental con-
ditions and with ease in maintenance. Into
noted, “Face it, we do not fight wars in
hospitable locales and you want a survival
weapon that’s going to work each time
and every time, no matter the field condi-
tions.”
Thus, all metal parts were built of
stainless steel, while the housing was fab-
ricated from fiberglass-reinforced plastic.
The front sight was anodized aluminum.
Field stripping was designed to be easy
and is component based so as not to lose
small parts in the field. Colt also pro-
posed several ways of storing and carry-
ing the weapon; including two new hol-
ster designs and a Velcro-based hook and
loop fastener for wear on the uniform.
This design was offered for aircrew use.
Although only one prototype
SCAMP was built, it was tested both by
Colt and military officials. According to
Into, “We were highly pleased with the
operation and performance of the
weapon...it was all we had hoped it would
be.”
The Army said it had evaluated the
28
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weapon only on an
unofficial basis and
one ordnance NCO
with whom I spoke
said he shot it at the
factory. Retired M/
Sgt Fred White had
been at the Army’s
Rock Island Arsenal
facility after two
tours in Vietnam and
was at Colt to do
some work on what
eventually became
the M16A2.
“They asked me
to try this experimen-
tal pistol back in
1974, said it was one
of a kind,” M/Sgt White explained. “I
recognized it was bigger than the old Colt
auto, but the old one didn’t have three-
round burst or the flat accuracy this gun
had. I liked it a lot. Show me any other
solid, working machine pistol that was
smaller than 12 inches and weighed 3
pounds. That one was it, too bad it didn’t
cut the grade.”
Of course, part of the original de-
sign thought for the SCAMP was as a
survival gun for the Air Force.
According to Robert Ormann, who
was with the USAF developmental com-
mand at the time, one of the Air Com-
mando people had seen the SCAMP at the
Colt plant and tried to interest his service
in a modified version of it. Ormann says,
“We were looking for a personal defense
weapon that was fast, accurate and small
enough to stow in the tight confines of
our aircraft. We looked at the Colt de-
sign, but, only unofficially; there were no
trials or other tests that I know of.
“As I recall, it looked somewhat like
that later Steyr TMP with that grip maga-
zine and the low-mount compensated bar-
rel. The one we had had an 18-round
magazine and fired a bottlenecked .22-
centerfire cartridge. It was a fairly high
velocity round, compared to the .38, 9mm
and .45 pistols our people had in those
days.”
The Small Arms Review - Vol. 7 No. 8 - May, 2004
He says the SCAMP shown to the
air force personnel was in competition
with the design known as the Davis Gun,
after Dale M. Davis of the USAF Arma-
ment Laboratory at Eglin AFB. The Davis
Gun, which rested along the firer’s arm,
rather than a traditional stock, later
evolved into the Bushmaster design,
which was subsequently developed into
a series of military and civilian firearms.
Ironically, too, Colt’s designers devel-
oped their own version of an arm gun
known as the Lightweight Rifle/Subma-
chine Gun, known as the IMP because it
used the .221 IMP cartridge.
Unhappily, though, for Colt, M/Sgt
White, and the USAF, the official mili-
tary line was that the SCAMP was not the
answer to that better “man trap” handgun
they had been trying to build since 1911.
Thus, the SCAMP project did not evolve
beyond the original prototype, so that no
cost estimates were even generated.
Happily for ordnance historians,
though, veteran Colt engineer, Ed Zalewa
kept track of that SCAMP prototype,
insuring its safekeeping in the company’s
archive vault. He told me, “the firearms
industry is not real good about retaining
historical records and valuable proto-
types. We are in our department, and that
is why you can see this one-of-its-kind
SCAMP today.”