
M-16: A Bureaucratic Horror Story (1981) - 80mph
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/06/m-16-a-bureaucratic-horror-story/545153/
======
azernik
A factor that the article doesn't emphasize enough is the extent to which
schedule pressure contributed to the bugginess of the released rifle.

The Kalashnikov had been designed in 1947, (hence, AK-47), but it took more
than a decade before a bug-free version (the AKM) was considered reliable
enough to make standard-issue. (When this article refers to "AK-47s", most of
the actual weapons involved were actually AKMs.)

The US, by contrast, had spent the decades since WWII resisting the assault
rifle concept, so that when Vietnam rolled around their fantastically rich and
well-funded military found its infantry outgunned by peasant militias wielding
second-hand Soviet rifles. So the rifle went from initial acceptance,
including these kinds of stupid last-minute design changes that are common in
any project, to large-scale combat deployment within a year; normally, there
would have been years of incremental usage to catch these bugs, but the rifle
was so desperately needed that it was rushed to the front.

A book I've recommended in another thread, which gives a great introduction to
the history and impact of the Kalashnikov in particular and assault rifles in
general, is C.J. Chivers's "The Gun" ([https://www.amazon.com/Gun-C-J-
Chivers/dp/0743271734](https://www.amazon.com/Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743271734)),
or this shorter-form article he wrote in response to recent msas shootings
([https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/world/ak-47-mass-
sh...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/world/ak-47-mass-
shootings.html))

~~~
tyingq
_" The US, by contrast, had spent the decades since WWII resisting the assault
rifle concept, so that when Vietnam rolled around their fantastically rich and
well-funded military found its infantry outgunned by peasant militias wielding
second-hand Soviet rifles."_

They would have had M14's in the beginning of the war, with 7.62MM rounds and
20 round magazines. The M16 was lighter, since the M14 had a wooden stock, but
the 5.56MM rounds were smaller, and the initial models also had 20 round
magazines.

So, I'm struggling with how the M16 would have been even a paper improvement
over being "outgunned". I suspect it was more about being lighter and carrying
around more rounds of the smaller lighter ammo.

~~~
azernik
The smaller bullet _is the point_. A 7.62mm bullet is overkill if you're
aiming at a person less than half a kilometer away. The essence of the assault
rifle concept is to throw away that excess individual bullet power in order to
gain _volume_ of fire.

The magazine size alone is not a good indicator of practical rate of fire;
that has more to do with recoil, which the M16 reduces by using a smaller
bullet.

For an understanding of the assault rifle concept, I recommend reading the
history of the first assault rifle, the Sturmgewehr 44
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StG_44#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StG_44#History)):

====================================================

In the late 19th century, small-arms cartridges had become able to fire
accurately at long distances. Jacketed bullets propelled by smokeless powder
were lethal out to 2,000 metres (2,200 yd). This was beyond the range a
shooter could engage a target with open sights, as at that range a man-sized
target would be completely blocked by the front sight blade. Only units of
riflemen firing by volley could hit grouped targets at those ranges. That
fighting style was taken over by the widespread introduction of machine guns,
which made use of these powerful cartridges to suppress the enemy at long
range. Rifles remained the primary infantry weapon, but in some forces were
seen as a secondary or support weapon, backing up the machine guns.

This left a large gap in performance; the rifle was not effective at the
ranges it could theoretically reach while being much larger and more powerful
than needed for close combat.

<snip>

In the spring of 1918, Hauptmann (Captain) Piderit, part of the
Gewehrprüfungskommission (Small Arms Proofing Committee) of the German General
Staff in Berlin, submitted a paper arguing for the introduction of an
intermediate round in the German Army with a suitable firearm. He pointed out
that firefights rarely took place beyond 800 metres (870 yd), about half the 2
km (1.2 mi) sight line range of the 7.92×57mm round from a Mauser Gewehr 98
rifle or less for MG 08 machine gun. A smaller, shorter, and less powerful
round would save materials, allow soldiers to carry more ammunition, and
increase firepower. Less recoil would allow semi-automatic or even fully
automatic select-fire rifles, although in his paper he called it a
Maschinenpistole (submachine gun).

~~~
jabl
> The smaller bullet is the point. A 7.62mm bullet is overkill if you're
> aiming at a person less than half a kilometer away.

Some time ago there was some drama wrt 5.56 being too ineffective, as well as
having poor ballistics at longer ranges, and there were a bunch of
intermediate calibers designed such as 6.8 SPC and 6.5 Grendel. Did anything
ever come out of this (or, was it always just an internet gun nut dream?), or
was the 855A1 improvement enough that the headache and cost of a caliber
change was discarded?

~~~
PeanutNore
The US military currently has one or more requests out there for companies to
submit 6.8mm rifles for trials, so it could potentially still happen. Also,
according to Wikipedia, Serbia is adopting a rifle in 6.5 Grendel as its
primary service rifle. I don't see the US moving towards 6.5 Grendel, except
on the civilian market - I took a deer with a 6.5 Grendel last year, and my
cousin has taken several as well as a black bear.

------
toomanybeersies
The Pentagon Wars [1] is a black comedy film about the military acquisition
process. It's based on the development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars)

~~~
Rebelgecko
The "feature creep" montage is reminiscent of many software projects.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA)

~~~
jsymolon
When design sessions get out of hand, i usually quip, "Would you like a turret
on that too?"

~~~
C1sc0cat
Why just the one :-) obvisly the T35 (soviet pre war tank that had turrets
like cats have kittens) as the end game here.

~~~
alexhutcheson
Wow you weren't kidding:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-35](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-35)

------
ethbro
I'm reading through _Human Error_ by James Reason [1], on the basis of a HN
recommendation. It's been excellent so far.

As regards software error, we do so many things (standard style guides, pair
programming, code reviews) to limit error, yet give so little thought to where
and how errors come to be. And specifically, what methods would best combat
them.

This article and the procurement process it documents is a great example of
"intentional but mistaken actions". Which is to say the actions taken were
intentional, the actions were realized as intended, but the original
formulation was flawed.

Reason notes these errors tend to thrive in overly compartmentalized, deep,
bureaucratic environments. Everyone is doing their job, but there's no one
keeping an eye on the big picture when the train heads off the rails.

The difficulty, according to him, is that higher-cognitive checks needed to
short circuit these kinds of errors tend to be less effective (than lower,
more primitive ones). IOW, we delude ourselves that everything is fine as
often as we recognize the issue.

I expect this is part of the secret effectiveness of pass/fail unit testing.
It's hard to rationalize a red indicator into a green one.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Human-Error-James-
Reason/dp/052131419...](https://www.amazon.com/Human-Error-James-
Reason/dp/0521314194/)

~~~
ehmish
This one here is a slightly different case to "intentional but mistaken". It
is however one I've seen in software engineering environments: Person A
designs something (in this case it's a gun, in software it could be an
architectural pattern), Person B then insists on adjusting it, either ignoring
or misunderstanding Person A's idea, and the result is something that is quite
flawed. The best solution I think for these sorts of problems is for either
Person A to be in a position of authority such that Person B _can't_ modify
the design, or for Person A to design it exactly how Person B expects it to be
designed.

~~~
ethbro
I think the latter is the only tenable solution.

The former presupposes that A is right, which is unknown a priori. It could
very well be that A made a mistake, and B caught and corrected it! Or that B
had a flash of genius and saw a better way that A missed.

Which is how we arrived at, and still use in physical engineering, waterfall
design. Its strengths were never meant to be adaptability to customer needs,
but rather fully specified and communicated interfaces between components.
Which is not nothing.

~~~
ehmish
The former has happened a number of times, for example with Kelly Johnston and
Lockheed martin's Skunk Works, or many other institutions with charismatic
dictatatorial engineers at the helm (Tesla, Linux, Microsoft). I'm definitely
not saying that their respective leaders don't make bad decisions, but rather
that a suboptimal solution, consistently implemented results in a better
outcome than an inconsistent solution "optimised" by individuals along the
way.

------
cco
And yet 40 years later the AR15(M16/M4) is one of, if not the best firearm
platform to have ever existed. It is really interesting to see to follow the
sorted past of such a successful firearm.

~~~
toomanybeersies
Personally I believe that the reason that the AR15 is so popular (at least in
the civilian world) is more that it's lego for adults who like guns, and less
because of its utility as a platform.

That's not to say it's not a good rifle though, but I don't think that in a
military context it's fundamentally better or worse than any of its peers,
such as the H&K G36, the Steyr AUG, or the SA80.

~~~
qball
>Personally I believe that the reason that the AR15 is so popular (at least in
the civilian world) is more that it's lego for adults who like guns, and less
because of its utility as a platform.

At least in the US and Canada, the primary driver is cost. The AR-15 is
_extremely_ cheap to make because the receiver is not a pressure-bearing
component, and because you need very few machines to make the most important
parts (of which there are fewer than most other guns due to the design).

It doesn't help that import restrictions in the US make everything that's not
an AR artificially expensive (complying with them has parts/labor overhead if
it's even possible in the first place).

The other guns you mentioned are not only more expensive to produce, but they
also perform much worse (the SA80 had problems with literally every single
part breaking or warping, the G36 melts because its barrel is cast into
plastic, the AUG fires when it shouldn't and doesn't handle as well as an AR)
to the point where nearly every country that currently uses these weapons are
replacing them with some variety of AR15. The original design (gas piston
behind bolt = no rotational forces against the carrier = no reinforcement
needed in receiver) really is that good.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
Do you consider the M27[1] to be an AR15 variant? Apparently the US Marines
want everyone to use it? The "direct impingement gas system" has been changed
to a "short stroke piston".

At which point is one weapon merely a variant of another? Isn't this change in
the action a significant improvement?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M27_Infantry_Automatic_Rifle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M27_Infantry_Automatic_Rifle)

~~~
PeanutNore
The M27 upper is 100% compatible with a standard AR15 lower. The main
advantage to the short stroke piston is that the gas tapped off the barrel
that operates the system has less distance to travel before it hits the piston
compared with the standard system, and so it works more reliably with short
barrels than direct impingement.

The "direct impingement" system of the M16 / AR15 isn't really true direct
impingement, as the bolt itself works as a gas piston within the bolt carrier.
But the gas has to travel much further to reach it than with a conventional
piston.

~~~
potta_coffee
The reason it's more reliable, in my experience, is that direct impingement
system introduces a shit load of fouling into your chamber and all the moving
parts. After about 1k rounds, that bolt starts to move slowly from all the
fouling, then you'll start to experience inconsistent feeding / ejecting. It's
a shitty system and it's about time they've done something about it. The
traditional fix is to dump a load of CLP into the rifle...which attracts sand
and dust.

------
huffmsa
Interestingly, the M14 is only now finally getting entirely phased out. It
found quite the niche doing exactly what it was designed for, middle to long
range precision fire.

Entirely tangential, but I really don't think John Browning gets enough credit
for how good his designs we're.

The M2 is still in regular use, and the M1911 keeps popping up despite the
pentagon's best attempts to phase it out. An argument against design by
committee.

~~~
bluedino
What's the alternative to the M1911, the M9? Ugh.

I'm sure the sidearm isn't that important in today's military, but a Glock (or
similar) .40 S&W would probably be a much better tool Even if they had to
stick with 9mm.

I've heard the 1911 is kept around by Special Forces types who can use
whatever they want for the most part. Same reason it's used by SWAT teams and
such.

~~~
mkong1
My understanding is that government issue sidearms require a manual safety,
immediately ruling out the Glock.

~~~
potta_coffee
This is to prevent NDs (Negligent Discharge). The ironic thing is, the SA/DA
design with safety is more complicated and requires a lot more training to use
properly, resulting in a higher rate of NDs (so I've heard).

------
mnm1
This is a great example of how design by committee can ruin a great idea. Had
they just used Stoner's original design, countless lives could have been
saved. Instead committee after committee imposed their ideas, ideas influenced
by various vile agendas. The banality of evil indeed. It also shows the
stupidity of confusing belief with fact and what allowing that can lead to:
"The Army’s official reasoning on the matter was that since it did not
recognize the theory that ball powder was the cause of the problems, why
should it care which powder Colt used?" Gee, where have I NOT heard this type
of stupid argument recently? My belief is more important than fact. Of course,
these high level generals could afford such stupidity. They weren't the ones
in combat, being killed by the enemy for their stupidity. Good soldiers paid
with their lives for such "theories." They should have put these high level
theorists on the front lines. Death would have been more than deserved for
their actions. The banality of evil indeed.

~~~
ahi
Countless lives would not have been saved. Just different lives.

------
escherplex
In discussions with older Viet Nam vets there were numerous complaints about
the reliability of the earlier M16s. Seems squads would use captured AK47s
when they could since they were found to be considerably more reliable in
combat scenarios. Always seemed strange that the military wouldn't have
adopted some re-engineered Kalashnikov design. The vets chalked that up to
bureaucratic chauvinism.

~~~
mgarfias
well, Stoner did design the AR-18/180 in ‘63 after the AR15 had been sold to
colt and adopted as the M-16.

~~~
magila
I'm not sure what you're getting at. The AR-18 was intended as a cost-reduced
substitute for the AR-15, hence the change to a stamped steel receiver instead
of forged aluminum. Design wise the AR-18 is still more closely related to the
AR-15 than the AK-47, although it is significantly different from both.

~~~
darkpuma
The AR-18 was in fact a technically inferior design. In an AR-15/M-16, the big
deal with the "direct impingement"[0] system is that all the reciprocating
mass is in line with the bore axis, which avoids imparting any angular moment
into the rifle making it easier to keep on target when shooting rapidly. The
AR-18 throws that away by having reciprocating mass (the short-stroke piston)
above the barrel.

And "shits were it eats" jokes aside, the 'DI' system of the AR-15/M-16 is
very reliable. If you look at close in high speed footage of AR's and AKs
being fired, you'll see that both rifle designs vent a lot of combustion
gasses into the receiver when the cartridge is ejected, so the cleanliness of
an AK compared to an AR is somewhat exaggerated.

[0] _Which is in fact a piston, with the 'piston' being the rear of the bolt,
and the bolt carrier forming the cylinder; driven apart when the hot
combustion gasses are piped in between them. But this is a controversial
nitpick._

------
arethuza
There is a also a sad story to tell about the UK's SA80 family of rifles -
this link is from 2002 but does into the politics in some depth:

[https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/oct/10/military.jamesmee...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/oct/10/military.jamesmeek)

NB As far as I understand it, later models were a lot better - but did seem to
take an awfully long time and a lot of money to get things right.

Forgotten Weapon has a video on it, calling the L85A1 the "Perhaps the Worst
Modern Military Rifle":

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDCRop6CRwY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDCRop6CRwY)

~~~
huffmsa
It was "so bad the Germans had trouble getting it to work" is the anecdote I
usually hear.

Which is a mixed bag, Nazis small arms were pretty bad, but the Germans have
been making pretty good firearms since 1950.

~~~
arethuza
Mikhail Kalashnikov's comment of "You must have some very clever soldiers"
being another.

------
sandworm101
Google "aussi pullback" (aka peelback) to understand why reliable automatic
fire is often more important than range or even accuracy.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_peel](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_peel)

Practicing pullbacks on full auto was probably the most fun part of basic
training. My rifle (c-7) was ancient but never jammed.

~~~
stan_rogers
_Ancient?_ That genuinely hurts. I got out just after first qualifying with
the brand-spankin'-new C7. Now, the C1 was "fun".

~~~
tlavoie
I was going to say... I was a reservist in the mid-80s, carrying FN C1s
stamped 1959, or sometimes even 1958. They were heavy, but I still quite liked
them otherwise.

------
int_19h
The article is a lot more accurate than I would have expected from a
mainstream publication like Atlantic. Unfortunately, while they got the most
important things correct, like the powder issue, there are some myths in there
as well. I'll try to correct them to the best of my knowledge.

First of all, credit where credit is due: Eugene Stoner did not design M16. He
designed Armalite AR-10, which was chambered in 7.62x51mm, same as M14, and
competed directly against it. It didn't do well in trials against M14 mostly
because of Armalite's president Jim Sullivan submitted experimental prototypes
for army testing over Stoner's objections; when their composite steel-aluminum
barrel blew up in an extended fire test, that was that. But some of the brass
were impressed by other advantages of the design even so, and when the army
decided to investigate a .22 caliber rifle, they went back to Armalite and
asked for a derivative design. Stoner didn't like the idea of a small
cartridge, so the new design was done by his chief assistant Robert Fremont,
assisted by Sullivan. So Stoner gets credit for developing the distinctive AR
action, but not all the fine-tuning that article describes as "several
different cycles must all work in harmony" that produced M16 itself.

On the effect of faster and lighter bullets: _all_ bullets destabilize when
they hit flesh. No amount of twist that can be imparted by rifling can
compensate for that - bodies are just too dense, you'd have to spin the
bullets so fast they would come apart at the muzzle. So going down from 1:14
barrel rifling twist to 1:12 does not affect that, and neither does velocity.
Yes, I know that it quotes Stoner on this; he was wrong, simply because they
didn't have enough terminal ballistics research back then to know better. In
modern military rifles chambered in 5.56mm, the twist rate is usually 1:7,
sometimes 1:9 - and the same ammo still produces the same terminal effect in
them.

What matters, rather, is _how_ the bullet destabilizes when it hits. A heavy
bullet will usually just flip over so that it's going base first, but won't
deviate much if at all from its trajectory. A lighter bullet will deviate more
and earlier, causing curved wound channels. But if a bullet goes fast enough,
it fragments, and then _each fragment_ goes on its own separate curved wound
channel, causing those devastating internal wounds. And that's exactly what
the military 5.56 ammo does:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hJZdtPcVdE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hJZdtPcVdE)

(This shows the effect in ballistic gelatin, so there's no blood or gore. But
it doesn't take much imagination to paint that picture for you once you have
seen the sanitized effect, so it can still be very disturbing. Proceed with
caution.)

This, by the way, is also partly why the original velocity spec for ammo was
so high. The article implies that 3250 ft/s velocity requirement for M16 was a
part of "marksman’s outlook" carried over from M14, but that's not the case,
which is obvious if you look at the latter's specs - its muzzle velocity is
2800 ft/s. If you rely on fragmentation as the primary wounding mechanism, you
have to drive bullets so fast that they're still fast enough to reliably
fragment at the range where they hit - the lower initial velocity is, the
closer your effective range. And reliable fragmentation velocity for M193
5.56mm ammo - the kind originally developed for the rifle - is around 2600
ft/s. If it starts at 3250 ft/s, that translates to about 200 yards out of a
20" barrel - a number that corresponds nicely with the engagement distances
typical of modern infantry tactics.

The other reason for increased velocity is because it extends the "battlesight
zero" range, which is the range of distances at which you can aim at the
target without accounting for bullet rise/drop, and still hit close enough
that it doesn't matter. Lighter and faster bullets have flatter trajectory
early on, extending that range. But at longer ranges air resistance and wind
drift become a greater factor, and higher sectional density to overcome them
becomes more important than raw velocity. Thus it is generally the case that
marksman and sniper rifles fire _slower_ bullets than modern assault rifles,
even if they share the caliber.

On manufacturing process, they say that the parts were "stamped out". That's
not quite correct, except maybe when describing the process very informally.
AKM receiver is stamped out of a thick metal sheet, but M16 receiver is forged
out of a solid block of aluminum, and then machined to completion. Forging is
more expensive than stamping, and machining afterwards makes it slower, too.
But you can't make stamped guns out of aluminum - it's too weak. And aluminum
means less weight for the same strength.

On the subject of reliability, it should be noted that in those first glowing
reviews, it was compared to M14, which was not exactly a shining example of
reliability, either. Nothing to do with the caliber - design and production
quality issues. More details: [http://looserounds.com/2015/01/30/the-m14-not-
much-for-fight...](http://looserounds.com/2015/01/30/the-m14-not-much-for-
fighting-a-case-against-the-m14-legend/).

With respect to the powder problems, it's broadly correct, but the technical
details aren't quite right. The real problem wasn't so much fouling as
corrosion - the replacement Army gunpowder left residue that was far more
corrosive, especially in a highly humid environment like the jungle. Even that
might have not been a problem, if Sullivan didn't decide to drop chrome
plating for the chamber to further decrease costs - it was the rust in the
chamber that eventually caused the gun to jam in the field. Once they started
chrome-plating the chambers, reliability problems mostly went away, although
rust could still cause accuracy problems without frequent cleaning, because
the bore was still not chromed. Modern military AR derivatives usually have
the entire bore chromed, and it was already common back then - the original AK
design already had it, as did M14, and Stoner's AR-10 even had a chrome-plated
bolt - so this was pure penny pinching. The article kinda implies that chrome
is unnecessary with clean-burning powder, but there are other good reasons to
have it (or something comparable, like nitrocarburizing), which is why it's so
pervasive even in cheap military guns today.

It's also interesting that they talk about how "marksman’s outlook" negatively
affected the original M16 design, but missed the opportunity to mention how it
re-surfaced later with M16A2. Short story is that USMC took a by-then decent
M16A1 that had those initial issues debugged, and went on a quest to turn it
into a competition rifle they have always wanted. So they e.g. made the stock
longer - which is great for that perfect bladed posture on the range, but
sucks in tight spaces like vehicle compartments, or when wearing body armor,
or if you're shorter than average. The best part, though, was removal of fully
automatic fire in favor of a 3-round burst, on the basis that full auto is
mostly a waste of ammo anyway and single aimed shots are where it's at -
ironic, for a gun that was originally designed around controllable full auto
fire.

When Army saw the first results of that redesign, they were horrified, and
wrote a scathing report on it. It's not that they didn't want a redesign in
principle - there were plenty of legitimate improvements that could be made -
but they didn't like the trade-offs in that particular redesign. However, USMC
stood by it, A2 was already there, a hypothetical better Army redesign was
not, and Congress back then would not approve a separate variant just for the
Army. Most of the problems they brought up were eventually rectified later in
M4 or M4A1. Makes for an interesting reading in retrospect, though.

[https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a168577.pdf](https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a168577.pdf)

One of the people involved in that redesign shared some other bureaucratic
horror stories online (as personal anecdotes, so take it with a grain of
salt). For example, M16A2 added selector markings (safe/semi/burst) on the
right side of the gun, which was weird because it didn't add the actual
selector there - it remained on the left side only, as originally designed for
right-handed shooters to use with their right thumb. According to the guy,
it's an artifact of the managerial process that they had. At the very
beginning, the officer in charge of the project asked the team to compile the
list of desired improvements, sorted in descending order of importance. When
they brought him a list spanning several pages, he threw out all but the first
page, and said that everything that didn't fit couldn't have been important
enough to bother with. The last item on that first page was ambidextrous
selector markings; the first item on the following page was the ambidextrous
selector itself. And so it went for 30 years, until they eventually added the
missing bits in an M4A1 upgrade 5 years ago.

~~~
MrZongle2
_" The article is a lot more accurate than I would have expected from a
mainstream publication like Atlantic."_

Well, I would hasten to point out that the article was written in 1981 (which
might not have been appended to the HN title when you wrote your comment).

But yes, were this written in the last decade I would have been shocked (in a
good way) at the quality of the article.

~~~
int_19h
Ah, that would explain why it doesn't cover M16A2. :)

------
etatoby
> _Through every day of combat in Vietnam, American troops fired cartridges
> filled with the ball powder that was the legacy of the ordnance corps. And
> if American troops were sent into battle today, they would use the same kind
> of ammunition._

What?

~~~
azernik
The bug has been fixed by spending more on the rifle; specifically, by
chroming the barrel and by lowering the cyclic fire rate. The issue was less
the ammunition than it was testing for reliability, changing a part of the
system, and then not retesting and tweaking the rest of the system to fit.
Modern M-16s and derivatives have a pretty good reputation for reliability.

------
godelmachine
I am surprised to see that nothing about DARPA’s William Godel and his
impeccable role in the development of M16 has not been mentioned here.

Taken from Wikipedia -

>> _In October 1961, William Godel, a senior man at the Advanced Research
Projects Agency, sent 10 AR-15s to South Vietnam. The reception was
enthusiastic, and in 1962 another 1,000 AR-15s were sent.[60] United States
Army Special Forces personnel filed battlefield reports lavishly praising the
AR-15 and the stopping-power of the 5.56 mm cartridge, and pressed for its
adoption._

For those who are interested more in Mr Godel’s role, please refer to _The
Imagineers of War_ by Sharon Weinberger.

------
gumby
Fallows references John Keegan's astounding book "The Face of Battle" which
discusses Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme _from the perspective of the
combatants themselves_ , which was at the time, and to some degree still is,
novel. The nature of combat and its tide is quite different from how it looks
on the map, in a book, and even in the eyes of the commanders. It's a gripping
read (nonfiction though) and has many lessons for the lay reader.

------
godelmachine
Since I see many rifle aficionados here, I am going to sieze this opportunity
and ask a question which has been vexing me since long.

Is Kalashnikova the first open source rifle in the world?

Just like we have open source software where anyone can grab the code and
start further enhancements on his own, it appears AK47 and other rifles of the
Kalashnikova are open sourced, with many militias around the world able to
either procure them or manufacture them on their own.

Am I right in my proposed theory?

~~~
azernik
It was not open sourced. It was produced and stockpiled in enormous quantities
by state militaries, the Soviet Union tended to license the blueprints instead
of shipping examples to its satellites, and then when all the assorted states
using it collapsed they lost control of their stockpiles.

A good book for the history of it is The Gun ([https://www.amazon.com/Gun-C-J-
Chivers/dp/0743271734](https://www.amazon.com/Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743271734)).
Its essential point is that weapons of war are usually very durable goods, and
outlive the geopolitical purposes for which they are produced and originally
distributed. Kalashnikov-family rifles happen to have arrived in particularly
unstable places.

EDIT: Weapons built by local forces tend to be more... idiosyncratic. Though
compatibility with AK ammunition is a desirable feature.
[https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/taliban-gun-
locke...](https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/taliban-gun-locker-the-
frankengun-of-wardak-province/)

Also, another example of this durability is the Humvees that have ended up in
Syrian government hands after going through three different owners - US, Iraq,
ISIS, Syria.

~~~
openasocket
It is kind of crazy how weapons can long outlive the war they were made for,
and sometimes even outlive the country that created them. My favorite example
of this is that Syria was fighting Israel in the 1950s and 1960s with Panzer
IV tanks and StuG III assault guns. And Israel at the time was using some
(heavily modified) M4 Sherman tanks. It's a rather odd image, Shermans and
Panzers still dueling on the battlefield 20 years after WWII.

~~~
azernik
Even crazier? The prevalence of British Lee-Enfields from the 30s and 40s in
Taliban hands: [https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/a-firsthand-
look-...](https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/a-firsthand-look-at-
firefights-in-marja/)

And Syrian rebels found and used a cache of mint-condition StG 44 rifles in
2012.

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swasheck
Slightly OT: This is a timely find and post as we debate how and why Boeing
got the 737MAX8 through approvals. This is such a salient quote:

> Perhaps the truest explanation of why things happened as they did is the
> most ordinary: that human beings could not foresee the way that chance and
> circumstance could magnify the consequences of their acts.

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cladari
This is the straight scoop on the development of the M16. This is the channel
for all things Colt.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE0xcxwZg2M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE0xcxwZg2M)

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microcolonel
We could've had the FAL, and some good people would probably have lived longer
lives.

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Nimitz14
Cannot believe noone was punished for this. Even if noone got payed, putting
the people you're supposed to helping in harms way should be a punishable
offense by itself.

