Of all the methods to limit illegal trafficking in military arms, only one way is sure: destruction. Destruction can happen any number of ways. The most straightforward and effective method is to destroy excess rifles in government stockpiles, or those that are collected in conflict zones. Programs along these lines have faced obstacles of all sorts, ranging from practical to ideological. The urge to redistribute the arms often outweighs suggestions to destroy them. In this way, efforts to disarm Iraq and Afghanistan failed. Few arms were collected, and commanders who did obtain working rifles often reissued them to people considered, at least at the moment, supportive of the American military’s mission. In stockpiles, other pressures prevented destruction, and many of the nations that have the largest stocks of weapons—Ukraine, for example—have participated in destruction programs only on a small scale. No sustained will has emerged to cut up the guns, in part because guns and ammunition can still be converted to money. The United States sent mixed messages and created uncomfortable situations in the Eastern bloc. During the past decade, one arm of the United States government, the State Department, was encouraging ministries to destroy excess weapons. Another, the Department of Defense, was shopping for the same items in the same countries and often purchasing through some of the same black-market middlemen who have been accused of smuggling.[46]
Is there an end? Yes. But the end of the Kalashnikov’s role as a primary tool for killing will not result, in all likelihood, from any disarmament program or policies. The final factor will be time. Kalashnikovs are sturdy, but not indestructible. They can and do break—sometimes when backed over by an armored vehicle or car, sometimes when struck by bullets or shrapnel, occasionally when warped by fire. If left exposed and unattended long enough, they can succumb to pitting, corrosion, and rust. With the passing of many years, the combined tally of these forces will bring an end to these weapons. This will not be a short time. It will not even be decades. But in another half-century, or century, the rifles will have broken, one by one, and the chance exists that they will no longer be a significant factor in war, terror, atrocity, and crime, and they will stop being a barometer of the insecurity gripping many regions of the world. Until that time, they will remain in view and in use. Mikhail Kalashnikov was right. The AK-47 is one of the great legacies of the Soviet period. Its descendants will outlast the Soviet Union for decades more, products intended to strengthen nations that have made many nations weaker and put more people at risk.
A NOTE ABOUT THE M-16 SERIES OF RIFLES IN 2010
A chapter in this book describes problems surrounding the introduction in Vietnam of the M-16 as a standard rifle for the United States armed forces. It is not an ambition here to trace the full evolution of the M-16 series in the decades since. Nonetheless, a few words are in order to distinguish the M-16 of the 1960s from its descendants.
The M-16 series, which was hurried into production as the Pentagon’s response to the Kalashnikov, is more than fifty years old. Since the public controversy of 1967, this rifle and its offspring, including the M-4 carbine, have undergone many modifications, as has the ammunition they fire. The changes in design and in manufacturing standards have resulted in performance different from what troops experienced in Southeast Asia. The current generation of M-16s and M-4s are generally regarded by Marines and soldiers who carry them as reliable—not as reliable as the Kalashnikov, but arms that work.
The series’ reputation does remain checkered. Part of this is a lingering hangover. The stories of failures in Vietnam have never been fully shaken. Misgivings are also related to accounts of rifles overheating in intensive combat or malfunctioning in sandy environments, and to complaints about the lethality of the rifles and their ammunition against lightly clad men. (This last complaint would seem related more to bullet composition than to the rifles.) Investigating each of these complaints is essential for public trust. But discussions about the current rifles should not confuse accounts of the M-16’s failures in Vietnam with questions about performance of M-16 variants in current wars. Recent complaints are of an entirely different order.
Further to understanding the events depicted in this book, the current manufacturers of the American military’s M-4 and M-16 rifles are Colt Defense LLC and FN Herstal USA. The Colt firm, located in West Hartford, Connecticut, is a successor company of Colt’s Firearms Division of Colt Industries, which manufactured the original M-16 line for the Pentagon. Colt Industries, and its firearms division, no longer exist.
NOTES
This book’s epigraph—“Inventors seldom benefit themselves. They benefit the people.”—is from “Made the Gatling Gun: Inventor Sought to Decrease the Horrors of War. An Interview with Dr. Gatling,” published in the Washington Post on October 29, 1899.
Prologue: Stalin’s Tools of War
1. Drawn from the author’s visit in 2004 to the test site and crater where RDS-1 was detonated, and interviews with the director of the National Nuclear Center of Kazakhstan, which is located on the grounds of the former Soviet institute, and the center’s museum director and staff. Also from David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 213–20.
2. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, pp. 213–20.
3. Interview with author, 2004.
4. Gene Roberts, “Enemy’s Soviet-Designed Rifle Slows Marines’ Drive in Hue. AK-47 Makes Sniper a ‘Machine Gunner’ Who ‘Can Tie Up an Entire Company’—Cannons Used to Root Out Foe,” New York Times, February 9, 1968.
5. Interview in 2002 of Ashrat Khan by author.
6. Interview in 2010 of retired general William M. Keys, president and chief executive officer of Colt Defense LLC, the principal manufacturer of the M-16 line. Colt had manufactured roughly 7 million M-16s and seven hundred thousand M-4 carbines. The weapon and its knock-offs have also been made in smaller quantities in several other factories in Singapore, Canada, and South Korea, by a division of General Motors and elsewhere in the United States.
7. Marius Broekmeyer, Stalin, the Russians, and Their War (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), pp. xiv–xv.
8. A useful and accurate English-language guide is Joseph Poyer, Kalashnikov Rifles and Their Variations (Tustin, Cal.: North Cape Publications, 2004), which expands upon the aggregation done by Edward Ezell’s Kalashnikov: The Arms and the Man (Cobourg, Ontario: Collector Grade Publications, 2001).
1. The Birth of Machine Guns
1. E. Frank Stephenson, Jr., Gatling: A Photographic Remembrance (Murfreesboro, North Carolina: Meherrin River Press, 1993), p. 4.
2. “Death of Dr. Gatling, Former Indianapolitan Who Achieved World-Wide Fame, Inventor of the Gatling Gun, Grain Drill and Other Devices Which Have Benefited Many,” in Gatling’s obituary on February 27, 1903, in the Indianapolis Journal, his impression from the caskets was quoted from an earlier interview. “The losses of life by disease rather than wounds caused me as a physician the idea that to shorten war would be to ameliorate it. This idea I got from looking at the boxes of dead bodies in the Indianapolis depot. I conceived a gun which should do the greatest execution in a brief space, by a revolving series of barrels loaded with a particular ammunition and shooting a double range.”
3. This letter from Gatling to Miss Lizzie Jarvis on June 15, 1877, is cited in many books, including on page 27 of Julia Keller’s Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel: The Gun that Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It (New York: Penguin, 2008).
4. Stephenson, Gatling, p. 10.
5. From a letter by Hugh O. Pentecost, Gatling’s son-in-law, to the editors of the Hartford Courant, March 2, 1903. In Stephenson, Gatling, p. 81.
6. “Made The Gatling Gun. Inventor Sought to Decrease the Horrors of War. An Interview with Dr. Gatling,” Washington Post, October 29, 1899.
7. Frink’s role has not been widely documented. He is mentioned by Dr. Charles A. Bonsett in “Medical Museum Notes,” a column in the De
cember 1988 issue of Indiana Medicine. Dr. Bonsett cited a 1914 article about Gatling that described Frink as a “mechanical genius of this city [Indianapolis].” Personal communication to author from Charles Bonsett. Charles A. Bonsett, “Medical Museum Notes,” from Indiana Medicine, December 1988, Vol. 81, No. 12. See also Fred D. Cavinder, Amazing Tales from Indiana (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 36.
8. From United States Patent No. 36,836, “Improvement in Revolving Battery Guns,” awarded to Richard J. Gatling, November 4, 1862, by the United States Patent Office, p. 1.
9. A. Bouvieron, An Historical and Biographical Sketch of Fieschi, with Anecdotes Relating to His Life (London, 1835), p. 68. The dimensions were taken from the report of M. LePage, gunsmith to the king, who examined the device.
10. A copy of the patent submission is reproduced in George M. Chinn, The Machine Gun: History, Evolution, and Development of Manual, Automatic, and Airborne Repeating Weapons, Volume I (Washington: Bureau of Ordnance, 1951), p. 18.
11. “A New System of Artillery for Projecting a Group or Cluster of Shot,” lecture presented to the Royal United Services Institute on May 9, 1862, and published in the institute’s journal the following year, p. 377.
12. Chinn, The Machine Gun, p. 36.
13. The term was used in 1914 by Dr. Charles Dennis, a medical beat writer for the Indianapolis Star, writing under the pen name Dr. Oldfish.
14. Indianapolis Daily Journal, May 30, 1862.
15. From “On Mitrailleurs, And Their Place In The Wars Of The Future,” by Major G. V. Fosbery, Her Majesty’s Bengal Staff Corps, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, 1870, p. 543.
16. Charles B. Norton, American Breech-Loading Small Arms: A Description of Late Inventions Including the Gatling Gun and a Chapter on Cartridges (New York: F. W. Christern, 1872), p. 240.
17. Lieutenant Skerrett’s letter to Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren, chief of the Navy’s ordnance bureau, is printed in full in Norton, American Breech-Loading Small Arms, p. 241.
18. From Joseph Allen Minturn, The Inventor’s Friend; or, Success With Patents: A Practical Book Telling How to Discriminate Between Valuable and Worthless Inventions; How to Avoid Mistakes and Disappointment; How to Patent and Protect Inventions, and How to Dispose of the Monopoly (Indianapolis: Meridian Co., 1893), p. 83.
19. Butler, who was nicknamed the Beast by the Confederacy, would become even more hated during Reconstruction. But long before that he was loathed. His military skills were virtually nonexistent. Volume II of History of North Carolina from the Earliest Discoveries to the Present Time, by John W. Moore, 1880, summarized his reputation on p. 261: “Such had been his conduct that the Confederate government had, by proclamation, set a price upon his head and instructed its armies to show him no quarter, but slay him like a wild beast wherever captured.”
20. Lieutenant W. W. Kimball, “Machine Guns,” published in Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute, November 16, 1881, p. 407. Lt. Kimball did not cite his source for this information, and historians of the Civil War have largely concluded that the Gatling gun was not widely used in the war.
21. Paul Wahl and Don Toppel, The Gatling Gun (New York: Arco Publishing Co., 1965).
22. Louis M. Starr, Bohemian Brigade: Civil War Newsmen in Action (New York: Knopf, 1954), pp. 222–24.
23. General Ripley presents historians with a curious case. The nemesis of would-be arms dealers to the Union, he has been derided by many of Gatling’s chroniclers as a small-minded officer who missed an opportunity to field a decisive weapon against the Confederacy. Interestingly, he also resisted the introduction of repeating rifles, missing another chance to equip his army with more lethal arms. He is, in this portrait, petty, unimaginative, inclined toward bureaucracy, and unresponsive. Ripley had a singularly difficult job. He needed to sort through the issues of arming a force that swelled severalfold within months, all the while puzzling through ways to keep the weapons flowing into service compatible with one another, and managing the weapons’ disparate ammunition needs and soldiers’ training. John Ellis, in his acidic treatise, The Social History of the Machine Gun (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), called him “an inveterate standardiser.” Given the circumstances, this seems a reasonable approach, although standardization also thwarted the fielding of valuable weapons at a time when arms development was proceeding at a rapid clip. Ripley was hardly the first armorer who fought for standardization of infantry arms; the philosophy he embraced has become a foundation of modern military training and logistics. Standardization is part of the core of the Kalashnikov system, and one of the reasons for its martial success and its emergence, in the eyes of those who would more fully regulate the international small-arms trade, as a global scurge.
24. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, 1915–1916 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1933), p. 81.
25. David A. Armstrong, Bullets and Bureaucrats: The Machine Gun and the United States Army, 1861–1916 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 10.
26. W. Reid McKee and M. E. Mason, Jr., Civil War Projectiles II: Small Arms & Field Artllery, With Supplement (Orange, Va.: Moss Publications, 1980), p. 8.
27. The rumor was not substantiated and is offset by evidence otherwise. The Confederacy was no more disposed toward rapid-fire arms than the North. Whether the rumor was a product of war hysteria or a malicious plant by a competitor is unknown. But history would show that Gatling lived in the North, worked from the North, and saw himself as a man of Northern industry. No scholar of the Civil War has yet turned up evidence that he worked surreptitiously for the South, or offered his weapons for sale to the Confederacy.
28. This letter has been reproduced in several books about machine guns, gunnery, and Gatling. Chinn’s work, The Machine Gun, is most useful, as it reproduced the original handwritten note, which shows Gatling’s own underlining for emphasis.
29. William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 232.
30. McKee and Mason, Civil War Projectiles, p. 10. The data on the velocities and penetrating powers of the era’s musket balls all come from this source, including the charts and text on p. 10.
31. Frank R. Freemon, Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care During the American Civil War (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Press, 1998), p. 48.
32. Ibid.
33. From Hannah Ropes, Civil War Nurse. The Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes, John R. Brumgardt, ed., (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), p. 68.
34. Ibid., p. 88.
35. Nugent and Palmer litigated over the American patent from 1861. Ager received British patents for the gun in 1866. If the possibility of riches from future sales motivated the disputes, it was a battle over not much. There were no riches to be had. By the end of the war, in 1865, the Repeating Gun had been discredited due to its frequent jamming.
36. For many of the weapons described in these pages, a more thorough description of their design and operation can be found in Chinn, The Machine Gun, in this case, Vol. 1, pp. 37–40.
37. Robert V. Bruce, Lincoln and the Tools of War (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 119.
38. The prices were published by Lt. Col. Calvin Goddard, chief of the Historical Section of the U.S. Army’s Chief of Ordnance, in Army Ordnance: The Journal of the Army Ordnance Association, and were reprinted in The Machine Gun: The Period of Recognition, Ordnance Department, Washington, 1943.
39. In fact, neither the Ager nor the Gatling were true machine guns, but Mills was the first to succeed in closing a sale of a rapid-fire weapon, and his sale presaged the widespread distribution of weapons of this sort in Europe and beyond.
40. Kimball, “Machine Guns,” p. 406.
41. Armstrong, Bullets and Bureaucrats, pp. 18–19.
42. Test report of January 20, 1865, on file at Connecticut State Library, Record Group 103, Subgroup 12. Hereinafter referred to as
“on file at Connecticut State Library.”
2. Machine Guns in Action
1. From a letter to the Royal United Service Institute in 1875 by Captain Ebenezer Rogers.
2. Copy of contract on file at Indiana Historical Society Collection.
3. Quoted from a letter of July 14, 1866, from T. G. Baylor, captain of ordnance, to Major-General A. B. Dyer, the army’s chief of ordnance. In Norton, American Breech-Loading Small Arms, p. 243.
4. Quoted from the report of three officers to Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, May 30, 1868, in Norton, Breech-Loading Small Arms, p. 244.
5. Minturn, The Inventor’s Friend, p. 83.
6. On file at Connecticut State Library.
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