IN MAY 1954, THE FRENCH army surrendered at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, ending almost eight years of fighting between France, which was trying to retain control of French Indochina, and the Viet Minh, led by Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. After fifty-six days of brutal fighting, the French defenders, low on ammunition, food, and medical supplies, gave up to the guerrillas, who had received direct military help from China and other Communist groups from Laos and Cambodia (now Kampuchea). Under an international agreement, the Viet Minh established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) north of the 17th parallel, and the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) was established in the south.
The United States had financially and politically supported the French presence (although it refused direct intervention at Dien Bien Phu) and was gearing up to support the South Vietnamese directly with money and arms to keep it from falling into Communist hands. It was believed by many in the West that if the nations of Southeast Asia turned Communist, the Soviet doctrine would spread country by country throughout the region, even to Australia and New Zealand, until the United States would be fighting Communism on its doorstep. This became known as the domino theory, posited in a 1954 press conference by President Eisenhower in which he stated, “You have a row of dominoes set up; you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is that it will go over very quickly.”
Pentagon planners knew they soon would be called on to participate in a proxy war with the Soviets. A direct confrontation between the superpowers could lead to nuclear annihilation, so the only alternative was for the two sides to fight through third-party nations. That nation would be Vietnam. The fighting would use only conventional weapons in an effort to win the hearts and minds of the population into choosing democracy over Communism. Some military historians view the cold war period as one in which warfare changed from the act of beating the enemy, grabbing territory, or taking over a government to one in which arms were employed as an instrument of ideological change. If the West could win militarily in smaller countries, like Vietnam, the populace would choose democracy over Communism once they were allowed to vote in free elections shielded from outside influences such as Communist guerrillas. Other countries would follow, and the domino theory would be reversed.
The main problem with this plan was that the United States did not have an infantry weapon that could stand up to the AK, especially in close-proximity jungle combat. During the French Indochina War (the First Indochina War in some circles), the Viet Minh fought with Soviet SKS rifles and the PPSh41 submachine gun. If they were to fight anew against the West, which now was becoming a certainty, they surely would be armed with newer AKs supplied by China and other Soviet bloc nations.
The U.S. military was stuck. The M-14 was inferior to the AK, but for all practical purposes nothing else was in the hopper—nothing except for a proposed but discredited rifle so radical and sleek in its design that it resembled a child’s shiny plastic toy gun. Military testers even called it the “Mattel toy.” Unlike the seemingly clumsily made but deadly AK or the solid, you-can-use-it-as-a-club M1 rifle, this new entry sported a 1940s art deco–like sleek profile, a science fictionesque black body, and it weighed two pounds less than the AK or M1.
Aside from its radical appearance, this new rifle was built by a firm outside the closed circle of government-connected small-arms developers—a company with no small-arms experience to boot.
The genius behind this bizarre infantry weapon was Eugene M. Stoner. He was born on November 22, 1922, in Gasport, Indiana, and, like Kalashnikov, had no formal engineering education. He never graduated college. During World War II, Stoner served as an aerial ordnance specialist with the Marine Corps, mainly in the South Pacific and northern China.
Also like Kalashnikov, Stoner had an innate sense about firearm design and mechanics and considered guns and shooting a hobby. He too was a curious tinkerer. His vocation was aircraft, however, and he had worked at several aircraft companies, including Vega Aircraft, which was later absorbed by Lockheed. In 1954, Stoner found a job at aircraft maker Fairchild, headquartered in Hagerstown, Maryland, about sixty miles north of Washington, D.C. A year earlier, the company’s president, Richard S. Boutelle, had decided that Fairchild should diversify from its core aircraft business. The 1950s were a time when many tough and lightweight materials had become newly available to the market, and he wanted to exploit them. Nonferrous materials such as aluminum were being used in aircraft because of their high strength and low weight, in addition to a new crop of plastic products and fiberglass that were also very strong for their weight. The company had gained expertise in working with these new materials and believed there was money to be made outside of aircraft fabrication.
The company decided to target small arms. Studying the terrain, they realized that the small-arms business in the United States was woefully behind the times. After all, the army had not introduced a new weapon since the M1 in the 1930s. Company engineer George Sullivan was convinced that space-age materials, especially plastics and fiberglass, could be incorporated into rifles instead of the traditional wood and steel, offering battlefield toughness with light weight. As he discussed this with Boutelle, they became more excited about the possibility of producing a thoroughly modern weapon using the latest materials technology. The two men were convinced they had a winning idea, and this is where Stoner came in. As chief engineer, his job was to design such a rifle under the company’s newly established division known as ArmaLite, an appropriate name considering the company’s mission.
Working in the company’s Costa Mesa, California, laboratory, Stoner produced the AR-10, a lightweight rifle that surprised yet intrigued military personnel because it was like nothing they had ever seen. It fired the 7.62 × 51mm round that the army had insisted upon, but, being outsiders, ArmaLite overall received a frosty reception by Ordnance. Their timing also was poor, as the Ordnance bureaucracy was knee-deep protecting the M-14 against the foreign-made FAL and had little time for another rifle entry, especially one with such an outlandish design. Boutelle and his team persevered, however, and resistance among a few military leaders melted as they continued to test and modify the weapon. One person in particular, General Willard G. Wyman, commander of Continental Army Command, was particularly impressed. Wyman, who had been the commanding general of IX Corps in Korea, understood the lessons of that war and knew that U.S. infantrymen needed an automatic weapon that would not kick like a mule. Clearly, he was not a fan of the Ordnance Department, the M-14, or the 7.62 × 51mm bullet. If he and Stoner worked together, they could help each other.
Wyman asked Stoner to redesign the AR-10 to accept a smaller bullet that could be shot at high velocity. Both men knew they were up against the AK, which had set the standard for assault rifles. They were also up against the Ordnance bureaucracy, which had already fought successfully against an intermediate round and would surely contest an even smaller round.
Undeterred, Wyman gave Stoner his requirements. He wanted a rifle that could fire in automatic or semiautomatic mode, a magazine that could contain twenty rounds, and a weapon that would be lightweight, about six pounds. The bullet had to maintain a flat trajectory like the .30-caliber round. The small projectile had to pierce body armor as well as both sides of a standard army helmet and a .135-inch steel plate at five hundred meters. This was a wise move by Wyman both militarily and politically. The distance requirements he set were beyond those suggested by reports out of Korea about the more compact theater of combat. In this way, he probably hoped to make the new gun more palatable to those who opposed the smaller round on the basis of range.
Stoner had his work cut out for him. Like Kalashnikov, he designed his weapon to fire a specific bullet, but unlike his Soviet counterpart, he had to build his special bullet first. A .22-caliber military round simply did not exist, so Stoner modified a commercial .222-caliber cartridge from the Remington Arms Company, which they made to order in large numbers for his experiments.
The AR-15, as the improved weapon was named, had the same space-age look of the AR-10, and with twenty-five rounds it weighed a little over six pounds. Military testers at Fort Benning, the home of the infantry, liked the AR-15’s light weight and high power. It was a truly innovative weapon, and in test firings the rate of malfunctions clocked in at 6.1 per thousand rounds, compared to 16 per thousand for the M-14. The Ordnance people, however, whose stock was getting lower by the minute among military brass, were embarrassed by the AR-15’s stellar performance. They had spent decades coming up with a new infantry rifle, and this outside group, working only a few years, offered a better weapon than the M-14 on all counts.
Stoner’s weapon had a gas tube above the barrel similar to the AK, but with a major difference. Instead of the gases pushing back a piston attached to a long rod, they traveled the length of the tube into the bolt carrier mechanism, forcing the bolt carrier to the rear, which rotated the bolt via a cam, unlocking the breech mechanism and forcing the bolt and bolt carrier back. This eliminated the gas piston, and getting rid of a part is always a plus for a weapon. However, this gas system had a major flaw. Because it blew gas back into the receiver, it was prone to fouling, a trait that would not become apparent until the Vietnam War. Fouling occurs when the sticky residue of hot gases, burned powder, and microscopic particles of cartridge cases get stuck in rifle parts, literally “gumming up the works” and jamming the weapon.
Also like Kalashnikov, Stoner took ideas from previously built guns, like the FN-FAL and even the MP44 Sturmgewehr, from which he borrowed the hinged dust cover over the cartridge ejection port.
The AR-15 still needed work, especially in dealing with barrel ruptures due to water intrusion. Stoner claimed the problem was not as bad as the Ordnance people had suggested, even going so far as to imply that the tests had been rigged to eliminate the weapon. Because ArmaLite had a very small engineering staff, the weapon was at the mercy of Ordnance personnel and their technical recommendations, and they had every reason to discredit the weapon and offer Stoner bad advice.
As tensions continued to rise between Stoner and Carten, Ordnance sent three of the fifteen AR-15s they had been testing to Alaska for firing under extremely cold conditions. Without notifying Stoner, they sent rifles to Fort Greeley. This move was particularly provocative, because Stoner said he had an agreement with Ordnance that he be called on site whenever testing took place so he could answer questions and make sure that the gun was being used correctly. This was standard procedure for most new weapons, especially for a radically designed weapon like the AR-15, a gun with which shooters were not familiar.
Stoner would not have known about the Arctic tests except that he had received an unexpected request for spare parts. He flew to Alaska and was shocked by the conditions of his guns. The front sights on some had been removed and others were loosened, which prevented accurate firing. Some weapons had jerry-rigged parts welded or otherwise loosely attached to them. Stoner fixed the rifles but was furious. He believed that Ordnance was trying to discredit the AR-15 to make the M-14 look better. Many years later, he said publicly, “My opinion is that they had to get the M-14 into production to feed the Springfield Armory. They touted the M-14 as the answer to the M-1, the M-1 carbine, the grease gun [M3 submachine gun], the Browning Automatic Rifle [machine gun], but everyone in the business knew that it would only take the place of the M1.” He continued, “Hardly anyone could handle it. . . . The commanding officer [in Alaska] said to me ‘I can’t wait to get your ass off this base. Please leave.’ ”
Stoner filed a grievance demanding that his repaired rifles be retested, but no retest took place.
By this time, even some of the army brass were catching on to Ordnance’s egregious behavior, but they also were in need of an officially tested weapon, and the M-14, on the record at least, was still in the lead. Also, Ordnance still enjoyed political and bureaucratic clout and maintained a coterie of high-level military backers. Carten dug in his heels even deeper. After all, if he were to admit that the small-caliber AR-15 was superior to the M-14, not only would he be losing the rifle argument but also the large-caliber argument upon which he had based his career. In a last-ditch effort to sink the AR-15 Carten suggested that the AR-15 barrel be changed to accommodate a .258 round, reasoning that a round slightly larger than a .22 caliber might solve the rainwater problem in the barrel by giving it a greater diameter.
One problem: a .258-caliber bullet did not exist. So Stoner, naively, waited for Ordnance to ship him some prototypes so he could redesign the AR-15 for it. After several months of waiting, he traveled to Washington only to learn that Ordnance had dropped the .258-caliber program but had not told him or anyone at ArmaLite. By that time, Carten had issued contracts for M-14 production.
In 1959, full-scale production of the M-14 began, backed by the power of General Maxwell Taylor, army chief of staff, a die-hard large-caliber supporter who did not like the idea of the infantry using smaller-caliber bullets. Moreover, he, like other U.S. generals, would lose face with NATO allies if they were to switch to a smaller caliber after rejecting NATO’s smaller bullet and shoving the larger one down their throats. Stoner and ArmaLite looked beaten. Even though they had the superior weapon, they were no match for cutthroat moves by the Ordnance Corps. The company was out $1.45 million and their only hope was to find private sales for the AR-15. First, they had to stave off bankruptcy. Eventually they found an angel in Colt’s Patent Firearms Manufacturing, which agreed to buy the rights to the AR-15, with ArmaLite retaining some royalties.
COLT HAD A LARGE PROFILE in the world of small arms, with a strong global reputation. Stoner and salesperson Bobby Macdonald joined forces and took the AR-15 on the road, focusing on Southeast Asia, a territory that Macdonald knew well. They learned that the smaller-stature Asian military preferred the lighter weapon with little recoil, but sales still eluded them. It appeared to Macdonald and Stoner that the fix was in again, as foreign military leaders said they had signed agreements with the United States to buy only officially issued weapons and the AR-15 was not an acceptable purchase.
Their luck turned, however, during an Independence Day picnic at Boutelle’s farm outside Hagerstown. He invited an old friend, General Curtis LeMay, air force chief of staff, who was widely known and revered as the father of the Strategic Air Command. He had also taken charge of the Berlin Airlift after the Soviet Union had isolated the city, a move that signaled the beginning of the cold war. Known for his extreme right-wing political views, “Bombs Away” LeMay, as he was dubbed, made no secret of his desire to drop atomic bombs anywhere to achieve a political goal. Years later, during a 1968 press conference, while running for vice president along with self-proclaimed segregationist former Alabama governor George Wallace, he stated to the shock and horror of many around the world, “We seem to have a phobia about nuclear weapons. . . . If I found it necessary, I would use anything we could dream up—anything that we could dream up—including nuclear weapons, if it was necessary.” So excessive was his warmongering persona that filmmaker Stanley Kubrick satirized him in the 1964 hit film Dr. Strangelove as General Buck Turgidson (played by George C. Scott), the trigger-happy, nuclear bomb-loving top gun who nonchalantly advocated blowing the Soviet Union to smithereens despite the human cost.
It was this outrageous figure who would grab the AR-15 from the scrap heap to become the army’s legendary M-16, the AK’s main rival in the Vietnam War.
Boutelle’s farm was a shooter’s paradise, with skeet and trap fields, pistol ranges, and archery lanes. He had set up three watermelons at 50, 100, and 150 yards and gave LeMay an AR-15. LeMay hit the melons at 50 and 150 yards, and they exploded as if someone had inserted cherry bombs. (He and the others ate the third watermelon.) The AR-15’s performance so impressed LeMay that he invited Colt officials to the Air Force Academy to discuss buying the rifles, and he ordered them to replace the M1 carbine for use by base security personnel. LeMay had cleverly circumvented the sys
tem by replacing not the M-14 but a different rifle, and Ordnance could not do a thing about it. At the same time, Colt executives were raising awareness on Capitol Hill about how poorly Ordnance had treated their weapon during testing and what a mess they had made with the M-14. Newspapers were beginning to publish stories about the debacle.
Now, for the first time, Ordnance’s activities were out in the open, and further test firing of the AR-15 took place, with high-ranking brass, including the cigar-chomping LeMay, observing. The AR-15 put in a superb performance against the M-14, including shots fired during rain and extreme cold, which had sunk it two years earlier. Because the results were so much better, allegations of previous test-firing shenanigans had legs.
Colt was still in trouble, however. LeMay’s order was personally turned down by newly elected president John F. Kennedy, who had fired the gun during a military demonstration. It wasn’t that Kennedy disliked the weapon; the president and his military advisors were troubled by the notion of different branches of the military using different rifles. With the United States becoming increasingly involved in the Vietnam conflict, the compatibility issue came to the forefront.
While older military leaders focused on the compatibility issue, they still missed the big picture. Warfare had changed, and U.S. forces still did not have the right weapon. Despite the lessons of Korea, entrenched military brass were still thinking in terms of World War II infantry weapons.
The person most disturbed by the potential inefficiency of having several different rifles was Robert S. McNamara, the new secretary of defense and former president of Ford Motor Company, the first person outside of the Henry Ford family to achieve that post. McNamara had assembled a team, commonly known as the Whiz Kids, who wanted to run government by the numbers as was done at Ford. Now that computers were becoming a part of American industry, this group scrutinized every military expenditure and asked probing questions about how materials were purchased. The M-14/AR-15 conflict fell within their sights when they saw LeMay’s purchase of 8,500 AR-15 rifles, making it the standard arm for air force personnel. Although LeMay was often thought of as a loose cannon, McNamara and his team respected his military expertise and hard-line approach against Communism. In fact, although McNamara had been a captain in the army, he had served under LeMay and taught air force officers analytical approaches used in business. In particular, he had offered methods to analyze the efficiency of using bombers to kill the enemy. One of McNamara’s present goals was to fix the bureaucracy, which had dithered for more than a decade producing a rifle, the M-14, that nobody seemed to want except those in Ordnance.
AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War Page 5