The Gun (47 page)

General Wheeler’s larger set of worldwide tests also failed to provide a fully useful or enduring evaluation. This was in part because of the undue rush, but there were darker subcurrents, too. The study collapsed under the weight of allegations of bias and a climate of mutual recriminations between various camps. Proponents of the AR-15 accused the army and its evaluators of efforts at sabotage. The acidic climate prompted Vance to order an investigation by the army’s inspector general, which found that at least part of the testing, a tactical assessment at Fort Benning,
had been rigged against the AR-15. The results tainted the entire effort and provided the AR-15’s backers with another argument they would use well: that their weapon was never treated fairly. Absent anything definitive to say, General Wheeler chose the safest path available. On January 14, 1963, based on the results of the worldwide tests, he delivered his recommendations. The army was most clear on one point—the pitfalls of the Soviet assault rifle. In his summary, General Wheeler dismissed the value of the AK-47, calling it “optimized for the submachine gun role” and declaring its “overall inferiority” to both the M-14 and M-16. Thus ending discussion about that, the general assessed the American arms. Being politically astute, he found merits in each. Both weapons, according to the army’s assessment, had superior accuracy as well as acceptable durability, ease of maintenance, and other desirable characteristics. But the AR-15 had a consequential fault. The evaluation unequivocally rated it unsatisfactory in the important category of reliability. This was because, General Wheeler wrote, stoppages during firing were “so troublesome that soldiers might well lose confidence in the weapon.” The general added that the army was optimistic that the deficiencies “can be readily corrected,” though he was silent on what these corrections might be.
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Given the ferocity building in the argument over which rifle was best, General Wheeler was careful not to offend any camp too greatly. He seemed eager to step aside and let the defense secretary choose the next steps. The defense secretary, after all, was the one pushing the question. General Wheeler offered three recommendations: continue with the M-14 program, terminate the M-14 program and adopt the AR-15 as the new standard arm, or defer a drastic step and mollify all camps via what he called Option C. In this option, the army would buy AR-15s for helicopter-borne, airborne, and Special Forces soldiers and reduce its M-14 purchases accordingly. It would decide later which weapon would be the American shoulder-fired arm of the future: the AR-15, the M-14, or the SPIW, if the SPIW ever became feasible. Predictably, McNamara leaned toward Option C.

Now came the matter of readying the AR-15 for service. In early March, the Army Materiel Command formally opened an AR-15 development program, with an office at Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois headed by Lieutenant Colonel Harold W. Yount. This was not to be a normal program, and Colonel Yount’s managerial control was titular. A special
committee with oversight duties was formed. The committee included representatives from all the services but also put the program under the defense secretary’s control: Two of McNamara aides were given seats on it, along with veto power over all its decisions.
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This gave the AR-15 a high priority. It also left the program vulnerable to political interference on technical matters and introduced fresh tensions between the defense secretary’s office and the ordnance service. McNamara had already expressed his dissatisfaction with the army’s weapons experts, and the inspector general’s investigation of the handling of the worldwide tests only added to the feelings of distrust. The defense secretary wanted to put his stamp on the AR-15 program and place it under his protection. But the top-heavy assignment of political appointees to the committee risked alienating or even removing people with weapons expertise from participation in the AR-15’s development. McNamara’s whiz kids were smart. But they had almost no experience in either war or weaponry, and were not necessarily an able substitute for those whose careers had been a study of ordnance and guns. One of the government’s ballistic experts was appalled at their role. “Their qualifications,” he said, “consisted of, and apparently were limited to, advanced academic degrees, supreme confidence in their own intellectual superiority, virtually absolute authority as designated representatives of OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense], and a degree of arrogance such as I have never seen before or since.”
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Firearms and their ammunition form a system. While that system can seem exceedingly simple compared to a fighter jet or a tank, it often is not simple at all. Automatic firearms and cartridges work together in complex ways, and changes to either a weapon or a cartridge can create pervasive disharmonies that can be difficult to pinpoint; ghosts can readily inhabit these machines, and they do. The services and the committee, working through both the government’s arsenal and Colt’s, proceeded to make changes to the AR-15 and the .223 round—more than one hundred in all. Many changes were minor and arcane. Others, including a change to the rifling in the AR-15’s barrel and the addition of a device that could push the bolt forward manually, were significant and consumed months of infighting and interservice positioning. Throughout it all, as the members maneuvered and quarreled, the committee missed a basic step—ensuring that the rifle was resistant to corrosion. Previous generations of American military rifles had been plated with chromium within their
chambers and barrels, which protected these areas from pitting and rust. The AR-15 was not. Colt’s, and by some accounts Stoner, insisted that the barrel was made of a superior alloy, moly-vanadium, and would stand up to the elements without further protective steps. This was not the case. But the program rolled on, its momentum assured. In December 1963, the Pentagon purchased 104,000 M-16s—85,000 for the army and 19,000 for the air force, calling the procurement “a one-time buy.” The rifle was renamed the M-16. Option C had been exercised.

If the 1963 purchase was meant to settle questions about which troops would carry which weapon, it failed. Instead, the M-16’s anointment as an official American infantry arm made it influential in an unexpected way. The Marine Corps, long skeptical of Colt’s offering, took note of the new flexibility in American rifle selection and proposed yet another path. The Corps had never been enamored of the AR-15. It accepted the merits of the assault-rifle idea, but for logistical reasons the Marines wanted an assault rifle and a machine gun to have the same caliber. Another new weapon caught its eye. After ArmaLite had sold the rights for the AR-15, Eugene Stoner, the inventor, had moved to another firm, Cadillac Gage. There Stoner designed a modular system of barrels, sights, and trigger assemblies that could be mixed and matched around a single receiver to create either a light machine gun or an assault rifle. In 1964 General Wallace M. Greene, Jr., the Corps’ commandant, began lobbying the army to consider this new weapon, the Stoner 63. General Harold K. Johnson, who had replaced General Wheeler as army chief of staff, ordered a fresh round of tests. McNamara had opened discussions he had not anticipated. The American rifle program, once staid and organized, had become fully disordered. The army had developed one weapon, the M-14, and lobbied for its approval and survival. The air force had snubbed its sister service and adopted the AR-15, which was now called the M-16. McNamara had begun to push the M-16 into select units’ hands. And the Marine Corps was campaigning for the Stoner 63. Just about everything had happened except what should have happened: an objective and open competition for assault-rifle design, with multiple submissions and a careful evaluation, which is what the Soviet Union had organized two decades before.

It is worth a pause to consider the significance of the step not taken. After Charles Hitch endorsed the assault-rifle concept, the United States military could have decided what it wanted an assault rifle to be and to
do. This would have been a matter of conceiving and publishing proposed specifications for caliber, muzzle velocity, weight, accuracy, and any number of other characteristics. These specifications could then have been provided to both the government’s designers and private industry—to Ruger, to Colt’s, to Remington, to Winchester, to Browning, to Cadillac Gage, and to any other interested participants—with a deadline for design submission. In doing so, several things would have been achieved. McNamara’s suspicion of the ordnance corps would have been placated. The intellectual capital of the private sector would have been notified and invited to compete. And when the deadline for submissions rolled around, the Pentagon would have had a range of competing designs from which to select the basis for developing an assault rifle.

Instead, it had argument, which now took the shape of an evaluation of firearms from a tiny field: the M-14, which the Pentagon had already acknowledged was not quite right, and two weapons—the M-16 and Stoner 63—that had been designed by the same man. No matter how well this evaluation would be conducted, the United States’ rifle selection process looked less like deliberation than lunging. The new round of tests, called Small Arms Weapons Systems, or SAWS, tried to be everything that General Wheeler’s worldwide tests had failed to be: thorough, objective, methodical. It did manage to serve a useful purpose. As the evaluators bore down on the many aspects of performance for the small assortment of rifles under consideration, they found something that McNamara’s committee had missed: The M-16 was given to malfunctions.

One decision can affect another in unforeseen ways, and as the evaluators worked they came to realize that a decision made arbitrarily several years before—to have the rifle be accurate and powerful out to five hundred yards—was producing troubling side effects. Achieving that kind of ballistic performance required the bullet to travel at a very high velocity. But how much velocity was enough? Stoner’s early AR-15 had fired a round with a propellant powder known as IMR 4475. In late 1963, the army allowed a different powder, WC 846, to be used. This powder, known as ball powder because of the shape of its propellant’s pellets, appeared to offer advantages. It lowered the pressure in the chamber and it increased the bullet’s muzzle velocity. But it came with worrisome traits. It burned dirtier than the IMR powder, and it increased the rate at which the rifle fired. Both of these side effects were potentially harmful. Unlike
what happened in the AK-47, in the M-16 the gas of the burning propellant did not push a piston. It vented into the bolt carrier, part of the operating system of the rifle. This exposed the important moving parts of the rifle to more heat and fouling. And dirtier powder meant more fouling still. Moreover, the increase in the cyclic rate increased the rate of jamming and the wear on the weapons’ parts—two consequences that could make the rifle both less reliable and less durable than it otherwise might be. This is exactly what the SAWS test uncovered. By 1965 some of the classified results of the SAWS test were circulating through the army’s upper reaches, and the evaluators had concluded that with ammunition packed with ball propellant, the rifle had become six times more likely to misfeed, and was prone as well to more fouling.
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Perhaps it was time to tap the brakes. But the war would not allow that. The American involvement in Vietnam was accelerating. In February 1965, the Viet Cong had attacked the Pleiku air base, killing eight American soldiers. President Lyndon B. Johnson escalated, authorizing the bombing of North Vietnam. The war was gathering momentum. New weapons were wanted. Slowing the M-16’s manufacture and distribution—no matter the unsettling results percolating from the tests—was not considered. In the rush, those who could have exercised prudence had become impervious to the signs.

In 1965, while the SAWS test was still under way, the M-16 received its decisive boost. One of the American helicopter-borne units that had received M-16s, the First Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry, was placed by helicopters into the path of three NVA regiments that were trying to drive from the Cambodian border and split Vietnam in two. For six days, the outnumbered American soldiers faced communist forces in what General William C. Westmoreland, the commander of American forces in Vietnam, described as “fighting as fierce as any ever experienced by American troops.” After the battle, General Westmoreland attended a briefing by the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Harold G. Moore, Jr., who, according to Westmoreland, lifted an M-16 rifle and said, “Brave soldiers and the M-16 brought this victory.” General Westmoreland had worried through much of 1965 over the small-arms advantage enjoyed by communist fighters with AK-47s. General Wheeler’s insistence on the Soviet assault rifle’s “overall inferiority” was not quite true after all. The view might have looked that way from Washington when the army’s design
corps was under criticism, but the American commander on the ground was feeling outgunned. The M-16, it seemed to him, promised to be the equalizer.

Moore and many of his soldiers told me that the M-16 was the best individual weapon ever made, clearly the American answer to the enemy’s AK-47. Most American units at the time were equipped with the older M-14 rifle, which was semiautomatic and too heavy for the jungle. Convinced that Moore and his men knew what they were talking about, I asked Secretary McNamara as a matter of urgency to equip all American forces with the M-16 and then also to equip the ARVN
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with it.…

. . . The ARVN thus long fought at a serious disadvantage against the enemy’s automatic AK-47, armed as they were with World War II’s semiautomatic M-1, whose kick when firing appeared to rock the small Vietnamese soldiers back on their heels. Armed with a light carbine, little more than a pea shooter when compared with the AK-47, the South Vietnamese militia were at an even worse disadvantage.
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General Westmoreland’s passion for Colt’s automatic rifle would remain publicly unshaken throughout his life. But his description of the battle obscured a fuller view of what Colonel Moore’s soldiers had experienced. Moore’s own book, published years later, described several instances of M-16s jamming and failing in the fight. General Westmoreland also skipped details of the means by which the M-16 unseated the M-14 and finally became the American military’s primary arm. James B. Hall, a sales manager at Colt’s, described a more cunning process. By late 1965, Colt’s had almost filled the 1963 order for 104,000 rifles and had no other significant contracts on its books. General Westmoreland wanted more M-16s but was getting little support from the Pentagon. McNamara and General Johnson had already exercised Option C. Their keenness for the M-16 did not yet extend to making it the standard American arm, especially with the prospects for SPIW unresolved, and because introducing
the M-16 to general issue would disrupt the hard-won small-arms standardization within NATO. Officials from Colt’s, meanwhile, were working their contacts on Capitol Hill, trying to enlist congressional help.