The Galil assault rifle – engineered by Yisrael Galili and Yakov Lior and manufactured by IMI - Israel Military Industries ever since the mid-1970s – spawned directly from Israel's vast military experience in its short history as an independent State.

Although winning both the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Israeli troops complained about the (real or assumed) less-than-ideal reliability of the then-standard service issue FN FAL rifle, locally known as the ROMAT, in desert warfare conditions. The comparison was reportedly pitiless against both Israel's own UZI submachinegun and the enemy's ubiquitous Kalashnikov AKM rifle.

The Galil rifle was patterned after the AKM, a choice made after the Israeli forces had the chance to test the then-unprecedented reliability of the Kalashnikov platform once they captured tens of thousands of them from their Arab foes. Yisrael Galili and Yakov Lior subsequently integrated some improvements from the Valmet Rk62 – Finland's own AK – into their rifle design to ensure performance in extreme climates.

Although the Israel Defense Forces soon standardized to the M16A1 rifles and carbines – which the U.S. supplied to Israel as far back as during the October War and for decades to come – the Galil rifle was nonetheless adopted by the Israeli military and Police forces; it was also exported and adopted in about forty Countries, many of which later manufactured it locally under license.

As the decades went by, the Galil earned a well-deserved reputation as one of the best variants of Mikhail Timofe'evič Kalashnikov's baseline rifle design. While still on the frontline in many parts of the world, as the 20th Century ended and the 21st Century began the basic Galil started to feel long in the tooth.

The IWI Galil ACE line of assault rifles was first showcased in the year 2008; mechanically speaking they are more or less the sale as the baseline Galil, although they do feature some improved components. The overall design, on the other hand, was thoroughly modernized to make the new rifle more handy and versatile, ready to face the fights of the 21st Century.

Nine variants of the platform are available so far for military and law-enforcement sales: the ACE-21, ACE-22 and ACE-23 select-fire rifles are chambered for the 5.56x45mm NATO caliber and feed through proprietary 35-rounds magazines, while the ACE-N 21 e ACE-N 22 use AR-15 compatible STANAG 4179 compliant magazines; the ACE-52 and ACE-53 feed through 25-rounds magazines and fire the powerful 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge, while the ACE-31 and ACE-32 models are chambered for the popular 7.62x39mm Russian round and use AKM-type magazines.

Having now almost completely standardized to the Tavor and X95 bull-pup rifles, the Israel Defense Forces have opted not to acquire the Galil ACE; the system has however enjoyed an almost unexpected success on the export market, having been adopted in either limited or full scale by about fifteen Countries, five of whose – more specifically Chile, Colombia, Peru, Ukraine and Vietnam – have since started or completed licensing and technology transfer procedures from IWI to manufacture the Galil ACE rifles locally.

More specifically the 5.56mm versions are manufactured under license in Colombia and will soon be in Peru and Chile; Ukraine license-produces all variants, while Vietnam adopted and will soon manufacture locally the ACE-31 and ACE-32 models which allows the Vietnamese People's Army to retain the trusty 7.62x39mm AK round and the hundreds of thousands of relevant magazines in service.

The semi-automatic only, civilian-grade versions of the ACE rifles are assembled and distributed by IWI US, LLC. – north American branch of Israel Weapon Industries – ever since 2015. Short barrel (7.5" BBL) variants are available in a stockless pistol layout or with a factory-issued stabilizing brace. 5.56mm/.223, 7.62x51mm/.308 and 7.62x39mm caliber rifles are instead fitted with a 16-inch barrel.

The first Galil ACE rifles distributed to gunwriters in north America for testing and evaluation provided great results in terms of accuracy: the 7.62x39mm version we're looking at here, when fired from a bench rest, would put an entire magazine in the chest of a NRA standard B-27 target at 200 yards (182 meters).

Similarly, the prestigious American Rifleman publication would report groups ranging between 2,1 cm / 0.83" and 4,64 cm / 1.83” at 100 yards (91,44 meters) from the bench rest, depending from the ammunition. Whether premium loads or Romanian surplus, however, the Galil ACE would chew them all and keep going, with an extremely high reliability rate even for an AK platform.

Our range time with the Galil ACE has confirmed the impressions of many other testers. Precision manufacturing, high technology machineries and materials do have a positive influence over performance.

With an average price tag just over 2000 US$ in the United States and just under 3000€ in most of Europe, the IWI Galil ACE rifle is not the cheapest AK variant around.