The Gun

by C. J. Chivers

  …which appears to indicate that: 1. With the M-14 rifle in 1962, we are equipping our forces with a weapon definitely inferior in firepower and combat effectiveness to the assault rifle with which the Soviets have equipped their own and their satellite forces worldwide since 1950.

  This was a painful declaration for the United States’ most senior military official at the height of the Cold War—a frank admission that the Soviet Union had leaped ahead of the United States in an important way. McNamara left no room for the army to equivocate. He knew that the army had rejected the AR-15 in tests. He also knew that the M-14, an army darling, was vulnerable to criticism. It had been created according to old ideas, after long delays and at steep cost overruns. It was heavy and long. Its ammunition was burdensome. It was difficult to manage on automatic fire, enough so that most M-14s issued to troops were configured to fire one round at a time.[22] And tactically it felt obsolete. Tests at Fort Ord and at the Hunter Liggett Military Reservation in 1958 and 1959 had discovered that five to seven soldiers armed with AR-15s produced more firepower and were more dangerous than eleven soldiers provided with M-14s.7 Small automatic rifles with little recoil and lighter ammunition allowed soldiers to move and shoot more quickly and accurately and over a longer period of time.

  The defense secretary’s disdain for the M-14 could hardly have been more bluntly expressed. As far as he could determine, he wrote, the AR-15 appeared “markedly superior to the M-14 in every respect of importance to military operations.” McNamara’s displeasure with the M-14 was well placed. But it led to narrow thinking—the M-14 is not the best rifle, therefore the AR-15 is. A more systematic view would have recognized that the AR-15 was not necessarily the best option. It was, by any reasonable assessment, only the beginning of an American effort to design an assault rifle. Rifle manufacturers in the United States had not yet invested heavily in developing small-caliber, lightweight assault rifles, judging correctly, at least in the short term, that there was no government customer for them. The AR-15 was not the product of full competition within its class. It was almost the only rifle of its sort. The industrial base had not been tapped.

  But McNamara’s pan came with orders that pushed the Pentagon on its course. He asked the army to share with him its views on the “relative effectiveness” of three rifles: the AK-47, the AR-15, and the M-14. And if the M-14 was not the most effective of these three, he wanted to know what action the army recommended taking.8 The instructions were implicit and strong. Prove that the M-14 was superior to the AK-47 and the AR-15, or plan to make changes.

  For those trying to sell the AR-15, McNamara’s Pentagon was the break they had gambled on. The new rifle had sprung from ArmaLite, a private concern in Southern California. In business terms, ArmaLite was an infant and an upstart, a company that began as a workshop in the Hollywood garage of George Sullivan, the patent counsel for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. Sullivan was an aeronautical engineer fascinated with the possibilities of applying new materials to change the way rifles looked and felt,9 and he had collaborated with an inventor and arms salesman, Jacques Michault, to develop plans for rifles that departed sharply from existing designs in the West. In 1953, Sullivan met Paul S. Cleaveland, secretary of the Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corporation, at an aviation industry luncheon.10 The pair talked about lightweight firearms and new techniques that might be applied to manufacturing them. Cleaveland mentioned the conversation to Richard S. Boutelle, Fairchild’s president, who was an aviation-minded gun buff, too. Boutelle and Sullivan soon agreed to collaborate under Fairchild’s sponsorship, and the company was founded in 1954 as a small Fairchild division. From the beginning, ArmaLite had energy, optimism, and curious possibilities for sales. Boutelle was a glad-handing dreamer hooked up to the jet age. A former major in the Army Air Corps and a passionate big-game hunter, he carried himself as an engineering visionary and salesman, and brimmed with ideas for bold modern products that might make Fairchild a global powerhouse. Boutelle spoke of his intention to manufacture “a lightweight train, a gasoline-filled aerial tanker, even a mechanically operated wild-turkey call.” His core business was in aircraft. He hoped a Fairchild turboprop passenger plane—the F-27 Friendship—would unseat the DC-3 as the dominant civilian air frame of the time.11

  Not long after forming, the company hired a former Marine with a background in aviation ordnance, Eugene Stoner, as its senior design engineer. ArmaLite’s tastes reflected those of its parent company. Stoner worked not with traditional steels and wooden stocks, but with aircraft-grade aluminum, new alloys, and plastics—materials that made firearm traditionalists cringe. Fortunately for ArmaLite, the Fairchild executives had a sales approach as novel as their weapons. Boutelle’s long-standing friendship with General Curtis LeMay of the air force gave ArmaLite unusual access to an alternative market inside the Pentagon. By 1956, the air force had taken an interest in the AR-5, a collapsible rifle that ArmaLite proposed for inclusion in survival kits for air crews. The rifle weighed two and a half pounds and could be disassembled and stored inside its own plastic stock. According to ArmaLite, it even floated. The AR-5 never entered mass production. But it made ArmaLite, a firm that emerged from almost nothing at all, a contender for contracts in a business in which new firms usually met closed doors.

  Stoner kept working. By 1956, ArmaLite was showing the AR-10—an automatic rifle that fired the standard NATO cartridge but ditched traditional lines and dress. If the AK-47 was stolid and proletarian, the AR-10 had the sleek look of 1950s modernity itself. Its receiver was forged aluminum alloy. Its stock and hand guards were molded plastics. It had a large handle at the base of its barrel that let it be carried like a briefcase. And it weighed less than automatic rifles under the U.S. Army’s review. Like the AK-47, the AR-10 could be fired on automatic or on single-shot semiautomatic fire. Its self-loading features were made possible by putting to work the same excess energy harnessed in the Kalashnikov: It diverted gas from burning propellant through a port in the barrel and back toward the shooter, where its energy was used to keep the rifle moving through its firing cycle. But rather than drive a piston, the expanding gases were routed through a narrow metal tube that blasted gas directly against the housing that held the bolt. This energy was sufficient to drive the bolt carrier and bolt backward and clear the chamber of the freshly emptied cartridge case. A return spring slowed the rearward motion of the bolt, then reversed it and forced the entire assembly forward again.

  A prototype AR-10 failed spectacularly when its barrel burst in army tests. The timing of ArmaLite’s offering was serendipitous nonetheless. An advanced prototype of the M-14, known as the T44, was on an inside track to become the military’s new standard rifle. But within the bureaucracy, an insurgency was afoot. Several senior officers believed that an automatic rifle based on a smaller-caliber cartridge brought more benefits than those offered by the T44. They were examining the possibility of taking the German and Soviet intermediate cartridges a step further, with an even smaller and lighter round that could be propelled at velocities previously unrealized in any standard arm. The concept was known as small-caliber, high-velocity, or SCHV. One of the idea’s supporters, General Willard G. Wyman of the Continental Army Command, observed an AR-10 demonstration. ArmaLite, if nothing else, had an innovator’s spirit. Wyman arranged a meeting with Stoner, at which he asked him to design a version of his AR-10 to handle a .22-caliber round. Stoner and ArmaLite agreed. This informal compact marked a turning point in American rifle design.

  ArmaLite faced a significant technical hurdle. It was one thing to make a smaller rifle, and another to make a smaller rifle that would be accurate and deadly at great range. The United States Infantry Board, an organization responsible for testing new tactics and equipment, had initially accepted the notion that the rifle should be accurate out to three hundred yards. But the army set a more demanding standard: The miniaturized AR-10 was to be able to strike and penetrate a steel helmet at five hundred yards.12 This was
an arbitrary requirement, more suited to presentations in conference rooms than related to the conditions of most warfighting. But ArmaLite had no choice. Stoner redesigned a .222 Remington round, a commercially available cartridge well suited for long-range varmint shooting. For a rifle round that would be fired at men, the .222 Remington was, in a word, tiny—at least by existing military standards in either the East or the West. It was 2.13 inches long and fired a bullet that weighed only fifty-five grains,13 roughly one-tenth of an ounce, which was less than half the mass of the Soviet bullet. Stoner altered the cartridge so it was slightly longer and could be filled with more powder. The result was a new round: the .223 (and later, the 5.56-millimeter round), the lightweight but high-powered ammunition for ArmaLite’s new project. The company dubbed its new weapon the AR-15.

  The AR-15 looked like nothing else in military service anywhere. It had all of the nontraditional features of its bigger brother, the AR-10, including an aluminum receiver, hard plastic furniture, and the odd-looking carrying handle. But it was thirty-nine inches long. It weighed, when unloaded, only 6.35 pounds. Its appearance—small, dark, lean, and synthetically futuristic—stirred emotions. A rifle, after all, was supposed to look like a rifle. To its champions, the AR-15 was an embodiment of fresh thinking. Critics saw an ugly little toy. Wherever one stood, no one could deny the ballistics were intriguing. The .223’s larger load of propellant and the AR-15’s twenty-inch barrel worked together to move the tiny bullet along at ultrafast speeds—in excess of thirty-two hundred feet per second, almost three times the speed of sound. The initial AR-15 and its ammunition were in place. The first steps in an American shift in rifles for killing men had been made.

  Now came the matter of selling it. But to whom? Outside of ordnance circles, several officers saw promise in the SCHV concept.14 But as a rifle that emerged from the private sector, and had such unusual characteristics, the AR-15 met predictable resistance in the army’s ordnance corps. The M-14 had been approved as the new standard rifle in 1957. The AR-15 arrived just as the army thought the conversation about rifles had closed. The idea of reconsidering the years of effort and enormous spending behind the M-14, and challenging the prevailing thinking with a high-concept minirifle, amounted to small-arms heresy. The entrenched interests offered ArmaLite little hope. The Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corporation, meanwhile, risked foundering. Its aircraft-marketing plans had not worked out. Nor had Boutelle’s other schemes. The company was starved for cash. On January 7, 1959, Fairchild transferred manufacturing rights for the AR-15 to Colt’s Firearms Division for $325,000 and a royalty-sharing guarantee with Stoner and Cooper-MacDonald, Inc., the independent arms-dealing firm that arranged the deal.15 From that point forward, the weapons were to be made in Hartford, Connecticut, by the descendant of the firm that had manufactured Gatling guns, and put the world on the path toward automatic arms.

  With Colt’s, the sales push entered a new phase. Robert W. MacDonald, a principal at Cooper-MacDonald, was a graying curmudgeon given to hard-nosed deals. He had made a name for himself selling explosives in Asia.16 His firm had collected a neat $250,000 finder’s fee from the $325,000 ArmaLite-Colt’s licensing deal. But he stood to make more money—a lot more money—if Colt’s found customers for the AR-15.[23] First he faced an arms-trade policy hurdle. He could not sell the rifle to America’s potential enemies. And under mutual-aid provisions, he could sell it to Washington’s allies only if it was compatible with American arms. For the AR-15 to have international sales potential the rifle first had to be introduced, somehow, to American military use. MacDonald put his ample imagination to use, even as Colt’s pursued its own plans.

  In summer 1960, Colt’s took the AR-15 on the road, including to police departments around the United States, where their sales team fired into a variety of objects (automobiles were a favorite) and engaged in almost giddy declarations of their rifle’s powers. “The penetrating effects of the .223 round are devastating from a practical standpoint,” one company summary read. “We are in a position to state that there is not a commercially manufactured automobile in this country that can withstand the penetrating effects of this weapon and cartridge.” The summary described the effects of roughly three hundred rounds fired into a 1951 Pontiac Catalina, which was shot in a demonstration for the Indiana State Police. The range was seventy-five yards.

  The .223 cartridge will penetrate:

  1. Bumper steel.

  2. Frame steel.

  3. Motor block (only enters, does not exit).

  4. Both sides of car (broadside shot).

  5. Trunk lid, back seat, front seat, dashboard, firewall and in some cases on into the radiator when fired from rear to front.

  6. Wheel drums, coil springs and shock absorbers.

  7. All glass (laminated shatterproof or tempered glass).

  A few weeks later, Colt’s added a suggestive demonstration at a sales pitch to the police of Glastonbury, Connecticut. Its salesman put two large cans of water on the front seat of a 1955 Pontiac Tudor, paced off sixty yards, and opened up. The water cans were surrogates for a driver and passenger. Colt’s let everyone know just how poorly those would-be criminals in a getaway car had fared, and how well the bullets fired by the AR-15 had performed: “The bullet will still penetrate both sides of vehicle after passing through two 5 gallon cans of water placed in front seat of the automobile to simulate a body in the car. Both cans were ruptured and torn apart at the seams upon impact.” A single bullet fired by an AR-15, by the implicit wink in this kind of statement, was capable of a bad-guy-stopping twofer—it could pass through a door, then one man, and then another man and then out another door. Bonnie and Clyde would have no chance. The summary’s conclusions almost gasped. The AR-15, it read, “can be fired full automatic off the finger tips” and “can be fired off the stomach or chin or with one hand holding only the pistol stock. The recoil is so negligible as to be insignificant.” It added, “There is not a piece of metal or steel on a commercially manufactured automobile that cannot be penetrated by the .223 cartridge,” which will also “penetrate most commercially used building materials.”17

  Such sales copy was straight from the days of the Auto-Ordnance Corporation and the Thompson gun, though it was targeted against law enforcement officers and not yet the general public. As this cocksure sense of the AR-15’s formidability was being assembled, the most successful demonstration of all was held. In mid-1960, while automobiles were being pierced, punctured, and shredded by Colt’s sales team, MacDonald arranged for General LeMay, then the air force’s vice chief of staff, to be invited to Boutelle’s sixtieth birthday party at Boutelle’s gentleman’s farm in Maryland. Much of the farm had been converted into recreational shooting ranges. General LeMay, like Boutelle, was a gun buff. The invitation was crafted to appeal. A sample AR-15, the new miracle gun, would be on hand for the general to fire. The party was held over the Fourth of July. The hosts set up three watermelons at ranges of 50 and 150 yards and invited the general to try his hand at shooting them. What followed was one of the odder moments in American arms-procurement history. Watermelons were bright and fleshy in ways that water cans were not, and when struck by the little rifle’s ultrafast bullets, the first two fruits exploded in vivid red splashes. General LeMay was so impressed that he spared the third melon; the party decided to eat it. No doubt this was great fun for the arms salesmen. It was also nonsense. But salesmanship was salesmanship. MacDonald understood that the air force had its own small-arms needs and wanted its own automatic rifle for defending air bases and strategic-missile sites. He also knew that General LeMay was unimpressed with the M-14. Colt’s, for the price of three watermelons and Independence Day cocktails, had a high-level convert.

  MacDonald had cultivated the right man. The air force began putting the rifle to tests. In 1961, General LeMay became air force chief of staff. In May 1962, the air force entered a contract with Colt’s to buy eighty-five hundred rifles. This was a small order. But just like
that, the AR-15 formally entered the American military arms system, via a side door. Colt’s automatic rifle was now a viable product for foreign and domestic sales.

  McNamara did not share with Vance what had convinced him of the M-14’s definite inferiority to the AK-47 and AR-15. But the evidence circulating in the Pentagon in late 1962 was both theoretical and empirical. The theoretical side was strong. Charles J. Hitch, a former Rhodes scholar serving as comptroller for the Department of Defense, had recently completed an analysis of the American military’s rifle programs. In it, Hitch endorsed the idea of the lighter-weight automatic rifle with smaller ammunition. The study marked a provocative tweak of the old guard. It suggested that systems analysts might, after all, be able to see things the traditional military could not. With it, the Pentagon had at last formally seconded ideas accepted by the Wehrmacht and the Red Army during World War II. The United States military was catching up. The empirical side was weaker. Hitch was more than attuned to the assault-rifle concept. He was smitten by a product: the AR-15. Classified reports from Vietnam, where hundreds of these new rifles had undergone combat trials, were giving the AR-15 high marks and providing a surprise. Reports from the field claimed that when a bullet fired from the AR-15 struck a man, it inflicted devastating injuries.

  The causes were apparently twofold. First, the metal jacket of early AR-15 bullets tended to shatter on impact, sending fragmentation slicing through victims.18 (In the army, this was variously seen as attractive and worrisome. In classified correspondence, some officers were thrilled by the perceived wounding characteristics, which one prominent army doctor described as “explosive effects.” Others wondered whether the .223 round might be illegal under international convention.)19 Second, the bullets often turned sideways inside a victim, a phenomenon known as yaw. In one respect, the effects of yaw somewhat resembled what could be seen on the surface of a lake when a speedboat turned sharply. In this case, the energy delivery manifested itself as a shock wave within a human body, which could create stretching or rupturing injury to tissue not directly in a bullet’s path. By turning, the bullet also crushed and cut more tissue as it passed through a victim, creating a larger wound channel.