On Vietnam Veterans Day

Today is Vietnam Veterans Day.

The reason for that is that it was on this day, in 1973, that the last American combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam.

As we now know, they were withdrawn under an agreement, the Paris Peace Accords, that President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believed would fail.  That Nixon believed that was cynically assumed, and it turns out correctly assumed, by the first historians of the war, who uniformly regarded the war as an ill though out American disaster. 

Starting about a decade ago, or so, however, revisionist histories, some fairly good and not so much, took the opposite approach.  A statistical analysis of the war conducted by a Marine veteran and expatriate living in Australia fairly convincingly argued that the war had been effectively won by 1968 and that the process of Vietnamization conducted by the Nixon Administration thereafter simply reflected that.  Two books on the early portion of the war when Diem was still the living autocrat in charge in the Republic of Vietnam took charitable views towards the pre 1965 American build up and argued that the war could have been won but for mistakes in that phase.

Then came Ken Burns groundbreaking recent documentary, followed by Max Hasting's new book on the war, which I'm only now just reading. 

Both make clear what the earlier books already had suggested.  The United States failed to appreciate the real situation in Vietnam from the onset, even while the French remained there, and the following intervention was beset by mistakes from the very first.  Worse yet, in some ways, Richard Nixon basically set out to betray the South Vietnam by extracting the United States dishonestly, believing that the North would ultimately prevail.  All that was needed, in his view, was some breathing room to make the departure decent.

Unfortunately for history, Nixon's other activities removed him from the Oval Office so that he was not present to bear the brunt of the impact of his decisions, which came in 1975 with the northern invasion.  The Army of the Republic of Vietnam collapsed in the face of that offensive, but in no small part due to a lack of effective air power.  Having been trained since at least the early 1960s to rely on massive American supplied firepower, without it, it really couldn't fight, and its troops rapidly lost spirit, to the extent they ever had any, and effectively quit.  Thousand and ultimately millions paid the price.

So are the pundits right, that the United States should have never gone in, in the first place?  I'm still not sure.  I find it hard to see a way that the U.S. could have avoided Vietnam, save perhaps for having denied the French any assistance in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  That would have been the approach, to the extent that we can discern one, that Franklin Roosevelt would have taken, as he was universally opposed to colonialism and seems to have been fairly comfortable with independence movements that were heavily communist.  Of course, had Vietnam become a communist state in 1946, it's hard not to imagine that being the case all the way to at least Thailand.

Which is perhaps the point.  Earlier in this blog I posed the suggestion that the Vietnam War ought not to be looked at in a vacuum, but rather as a campaign, and not wholly successful one, in the Cold War.  And that still seems correct to me.

But one fought at great cost that the country has never really gotten over in some ways. 

Making this a good day to remember its veterans.

Surrendering in Afghanistan. Maybe the Senate has learned history even if the President has not.

Make no mistake about it, the "peace" that's being considered in Afghanistan isn't a peace.  It's a withdrawal which will be followed by the collapse of the Afghan government and a return to power of the Taliban. 

Saigon, 1975.

It's the helicopter from the Saigon Embassy roof all over again, after a fictional peace with Hanoi, except in this instance, it's worse.  Much worse.

Which is why its refreshing to see the Republican controlled Senate find its backbone, as noted here in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The Senate, in a bipartisan rebuke to President Trump’s foreign policy, voted overwhelmingly to advance legislation drafted by the majority leader to express strong opposition to the president’s withdrawal of United States military forces from Syria and Afghanistan.

The 68-to-23 vote to cut off debate ensures that the amendment, written by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and backed by virtually every Senate Republican, will be added to a broader bipartisan Middle East policy bill expected to easily pass the Senate next week.

I hope the Senate's view prevails.

It's frequently noted that the war in Afghanistan is the longest running war in American history, which it is if you don't count the Indian Wars as a single war.  If you do that, no other American war even compares as those wars started sometime in the 1600s and concluded, depending upon how you look at it, in 1890 or 1916.  They're a bit longer.

But the war in Afghanistan is pretty darned long, to be sure. 

Donald Rumsfeld, who reprising the role of Robert Strange McNamara chose to ignore the lessons of history and presume that the United States was not subject to them.

A lot of that can be laid at the feet of the second President George Bush, or perhaps more accurately at the feet of his controversial Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.  Rumsfeld took the view that all prior laws of war were no longer applicable to the United States, and therefore even though we knew that Al Queda was headquartered in Afghanistan and sheltered by the Taliban, we could commit an absolute minimum of force to the war there, fight the war with a few specialists and air power, rely on dubious native allies, while taking on a second war with Iraq for what turned out to be dubious reasons, and still win the war in Afghanistan.

Carl von Causewitz looking on with disdain at Donald Rumsfeld from history.

Carl von Clausewitz would have whacked Rumsfeld with his riding crop for thinking such a stupid thing.  

Classic military Clausewitzian thought would have held that having determined that war in Afghanistan was necessary, which it was, it was then incumbent upon the U.S. to use overwhelming force to crush the enemy immediately and leave Afghanistan basically compliant in the wake of a crushing defeat of the radical Islamists.  Instead, we chose to engage basically with special forces and air power while we built up a force to attack Iraq and left much of the ground fighting to Islamic militias of dubious dependability.  That in turn meant that we didn't get around to really committing until well after the war in Iraq, which we didn't have to engage in, in the first place, had become a second guerrilla war which in turn meant that no how badly the Taliban did in combat they'd learned that they could keep on, keeping on.

U.S. Special Forces troops with Northern Alliance troops. The Northern Alliance was a genuinely anti Taliban force, and truly useful in the field, but it wasn't the sort of force that was any more likely to result in a stable government long term than the Montagnards were in Southeast Asia.  Using them was wise and necessary.  Leaving the war nearly entirely to them was not.

Since that time we've fought a war of decreasing commitment sort of hoping against hope that the Afghan government we supported and created after the Taliban were driven out of Kabul would be able to take over, much like we hoped that successive South Vietnamese governments would be able to take over the Vietnam War after 1968.

That didn't work then and its obviously not working now.

Which has lead to the conclusion that we need to do is dress up a defeat, like we did in Vietnam, and get out.  

Of course getting out meant the ultimate fall of our ally, the Republic of Vietnam, and the installation of a brutal communist regime that still remains in power.  The analogy there probably ends, as Vietnam isn't Afghanistan and it never posed any direct threat to the United States.*  Afghanistan has been used as the headquarters for a global radical Islamic war on the world with the goal to establish a new Caliphate and subject the world to Islam.  Hanoi just wanted to subject Vietnam to communism, which it did, but which it is now loosing due to the pervasive nature of American pop and consumer culture.**

If and when we leave Afghanistan, if we haven't succeeded there, it will return to the control of the Taliban in short, probably very short, order.  Compelling the Afghan government to include the Taliban in the government will be no more successful than Hanoi's promise not to resume the war with Saigon, or the fusion of the Royal and Pathet Lao armies was.  The result is inevitable.

Of course, a person might also ask if the same results as the Vietnam War might also be inevitable.  If we haven't won after an eighteen year commitment, why would we win now?

Well, the numbers are part of the reason.

The United States has less than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.  At the absolute height of our commitment, in 2011, when we "surged", we had 110,000 men there, which we built up to rapidly after we crossed the 20,000 number in mid 05 and which then fell off rapidly, falling below 20,000 again in 2014.

10th Mountain Division troops in Afghanistan in 2005.

Now, before we go on, something about this should be obvious.  A country which proposed to unseat its de facto, if not de jure, government of the size of Afghanistan but which didn't even get up over the division level commitment for the first three plus years of that was either acting stupidly or wasn't serious.  And a nation that would commit over 100,000 men for a very brief interval and then presume, when it was known that the war wasn't won, that everything would be fine, also wasn't acdting particularly rationally.  The U.S. should have committed that 100,000 men in the first three months of the war in which case we probably could have totally withdrawn by 2011.

Donald Rumsfeld, here's your sign.

United States Drug Enforcement personnel burning  hashish as part of an American policing operation in an ancillary quasi military operation guaranteed to make enemies of the rural populace.

The thought was, of course, or rather the naive hope was, that the Afghan army we built would take over.  Just like the ARVN. That in fact was not an irrational hope in the late 1960s, but in the case of the Afghan army, given the way we went about it, it certainly was.

Soldier of the U.S. Army (Michigan National Guard) on patrol with Afghans and, in German desert camouflage, Latvian soldier

Afghanistan has had an army since 1709, and a fairly good one in the 1950s, but that all came apart following the Communist coup that took over the country in the 1970s. The army fell apart and the country fell into civil war, from which its never emerged.  Reconstituting a real army after a twenty five year gap has proven extremely difficult and like most armies that exist in a scenario in which a foreign power is putting them together, it's been infiltrated by the enemy.  It's going to take quite a while before that army can stand on its own.  By comparison again, the French put together what would become the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in the early 1950s and it wasn't until the late 1960s that it was capable of somewhat standing on its own, although it never really achieved that status.  And like the ARVN its not only has very loyal soldiers, but it's subject to being accused of being a colonial puppet by its clearly nativist opponent.  So while it has 174,000 men, it can't field that number as an effective fighting force.

Afghan commandos waiting for airlift from Russian made helicopters.  With their western airborne transportation and American arms and equipment they bear a worrisome resemblance to crack ARVN units of the late Vietnam War.

Indeed, it's lost over half the country.

So we've lost, right?

Well, we might have, but before we give up, we better at least try to win.  And we can do that.

Indeed, there's no doubt that a second surge, like the first one, would reoccupy the country and drive the Taliban out, probably into Pakistan, in the case of the survivors.  We can debate what to do about that, but serving notice on Pakistan that its border will be regarded as fictional would be one thing to do.  Pakistan isn't going to fight the Untied States under any circumstances, and indeed India would dearly love it to even suggest that it would.  An effort of that type would reoccupy the country and, if a remaining commitment of at least 50,000 men stayed for at time, as in a decade, the country would have a chance.

A chancier, but also probably likely to work means, would be to commit a large, but lesser, force of 50,000 to 60,000 and do the same thing.  Of course, that's not a small commitment either.

The odds are better, however, that we'll simply abandon it, and our effort there, and live to regret the consequences.

________________________________________________________________________________

*See, however, Was The Domino Theory Right? and Looking at the Vietnam War differently.  Not as a war but a campaign in the Cold War.

**Whatever the results of the war have been, the inevitable trend of Vietnam is exhibited by the presence of a Victoria's Secret in Hanoi and V-pop in the country at large.  The South Vietnamese never ended up embracing Communism and the North Vietnamese are abandoning it.

The M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle used in action for the first time. September 13, 1918.

2nd Lt. Val Browning, son of John Browning, the legendary firearms designer. By the wars end three out of four of the standard small arms weapons in the infantry would be Browning designs.

On this day in 1918 the Browning M1918 Automatic rifle was first used in combat.

It certainly wouldn't be the last time.  Probably nobody knows the date that occurred, if it has, but the last time the US used it in action was probably in the 1960s, as it remained in front line service in the Marine Corps well into the Vietnam War.  National Guard units were still being issued the BAR in the mid 1970s.  Armies equipped by the United States no doubt had it that long as well, and perhaps somewhere around the world its still seeing some use today.

Which is because it was such a fantastic weapon. . . or maybe it was in spite of it being an awful one.

Saying something like that, of course, really requires an explanation.  And to explain it requires a context.

The BAR was designed to be an automatic rifle. In the photos immediately above we see it as it was designed to be, a selective fire (originally) rifle that could be used as an individual weapon to put down a barrage of walking fire.  And it was very good in that role.  The role, that is, of being an "automatic rifle".  It was so good at that role, in fact, that soldiers defeated its later role as a light machinegun by reconverting it back to its original sans bipod configuration.

And, if you've kept up on this blog, or otherwise are familiar with the US's combat experience in World War One, you can see why a weapon like that would have made a lot of sense.  The US was trying to sprint over the deadly space of "No Man's Land" and take enemy trenches, ultimately at close quarter.  An automatic rifle would be really ideal for a role like that, even if it meant, in the case of the BAR, issuing one that was extremely heavy.

US infantrymen in heavy pack.  Soldier on left carries a Chauchat, by all accounts one of the worst automatic weapons any fielded to any army.  He is also wearing his garrison cap under his helmet, which can be seen near the back of his head.  The soldier on the right carries a M1903 Springfield rifle, the barrel of which is barely visible on his right.

But that role was a short one in the U.S. military, and indeed in most militaries that had a similar weapon.  And there were other weapons in that role.  Indeed one of the worst weapons of World War One, the Chauchat, was designed for the same role.  But even at that time a competing series of weapons, light machineguns, were on the battlefield and were rapidly supplanting automatic rifles.  The British, for example, never fielded an automatic rifle but rather fielded two separate light machineguns, the Lewis and the Vickers.  The Germans fielded a "light", but not very light, version of their MG08.  Those crew served weapons were better able to lay down a barrage of sustained fire than any automatic rifle.

So after World War One the U.S. Army, pleased with the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle, had the selective fire option eliminated from production and had the weapon retrofitted with a bipod.  It was re-classed, at that time, as a light machinegun, tactics having moved in the direction of a lmg being a squad support weapon.  For cavalrymen, however, a separate version, ostensibly somewhat lighter, and featuring a bipod at the muzzle and a monpod on the butt, was introduced as a "machine rifle", with it being given the designation of the M1922.  In 1937 the gun was redesigned slightly and became the M1918A1.  Improvments continued as World War Two loomed with the eye towards making the weapon a better light machinegun and it on June 30, 1938, the M1918 A2 was introduced, with there being orders to upgrade all existing stocks of the M1918 and M1918A1 to that configuration.  The M1922 was declared obsolete before World War Two began, but none the less stocks of them remained and during the war they were issued to Merrell's Marauders as light alternatives, to the M1918A2.

Soldiers of the U.S. Army training with the M1918 A2 BAR (and without hearing protection) during World War Two.

The BAR in both versions were in service when the US entered World War Two, as noted, with the M1922 on the way out.  The M1918A2 BAR as a light machinegun remained, but quite rapidly soldiers assigned to the weapon instinctively reverted it to its original role and configuration as an automatic rifle.  Typically they removed its bipod and flash hinder as weight adding unnecessary elements.  The Marine Corps, huge fans of the BAR, began to issue it two per squad as well, anticipating the latter modern issuance of the current M249 "automatic rifle".

Heavily laden Marine with BAR during World War Two.  This is almost certainly a M1918A2 but it has had its bipod and flash hinder removed.

By World War Two it was pretty obvious that the BAR was not the best light machinegun in the world.  It was hindered in ammunition capacity from being a bottom loading weapon, unlike the top loading Brno light machinegun that is arguably the best lmg ever designed.  Like most light machineguns it also had a permanently affixed barrel which is something that designers began to reconsider in that role with the German introduction of the dual purpose MG34 and MG42 machineguns.  Nonetheless, it soldiered through the war and on into the next one, the Korean War and the service found itself ordering additional supplies of them, reflecting wartime losses and post wartime disposals of existing M1918A2s.  The Royal McBee Typewriter Company supplied the last BARs to the military during this time frame.

Helmet-less U.S. Army soldier firing M1918A2 BAR in Korea.  This soldier has removed his bipod from the BAR.  He's also in distinctive Korean War era winter gear, including the L. L. Bean designed "shoe packs" that came in during World War Two.

Following the Korean War the US planned on replacing the BAR as the US went to the GPMG concept introduced by the Germans during World War Two.  The US had no plans to put the US GPMG, the M60, in the BAR's role but rather planned to place a heavy barreled M14 rifle in that role, as the M14 began to replace the M1 Garand. And in fact the Army started to do that before problems with the concept, which should have been obvious from the onset, prevented it from being completed.  That light machinegun, the M15, was practically stillborn although it was in fact adopted.

The M14 Rifle, the intended replacement for the M1 Garand which did in fact replace it in the active duty branches of the Army and Marine Corps, and the M14A1 which had already replaced the M15 and which was replacing the BAR when the Vietnam War broke out and production of M14 rifles was stopped. The M14 was an excellent rifle.  The M14A1 was a pretty bad light machinegun.

Nonetheless, when the Army deployed to Vietnam in the early 1960s it was the M14A1 that went with it, not the BAR.  BAR's, however, were supplied to the ARVN.

South Vietnamese soldiers equipped with a BAR and a M2 carbine.

And the Marines retained the BAR. They liked it so much that they kept the BAR well into the Vietnam War where it served alongside the M16A1 and the M60.  I'm not aware of whether the Marines were ever equipped with M14A1s, but if they were, they didn't use them. They liked the BAR so much they kept using it, even after the M14, which they also greatly loved, was taken from them.

In the Army, the introduction of the M60 and the M14A! did not actually mean that the BAR completely disappeared, even if the Army did not use the BAR in Vietnam (or at least not much), and instead attempted to use the M14A1 and then went to a designated M16A1 (which was particularly bad in that role).  In the Army Reserve and the National Guard the BAR continued to serve into the mid to late 1970s (it was in service at least as late as 1976 in the Guard).  This reflected the fact that small arms in the military were in a real state of flux from 1960s forward.  The M15 was never made in sufficient quantities to replace the BAR and it self was replaced by a heavy stocked version of the M14 which was never made in large quantities either.  The M14 was soon challenged in the rifle role by the M16 and the M16A1 in Vietnam, and production of the it was stopped before there were adequate numbers for the reserves. The M1 Garand therefore carried on into the early 70s when, in the Guard and Reserve, the Garand was replaced with the M16, which now existed in large quantities.  The BAR kept on until it was basically replaced, at first, with the M60 in the late 1970s.  In the early 1980s the M249 5.56 machinegun was introduced at the squad level in the Army and it ultimately supplanted the M60 in that role, making its way into the Guard in the late 1980s.

Which of course doesn't mean that the BAR disappeared everywhere overnight.  BARs were supplied to a lot of American allies and clients, and they were manufactured by other nations.  Belgium's FN, for example, introduced the last variant of it, one with a detachable barrel, some of which went to Middle Easter nations.

By that time they were well obsolete.  But maybe they were by the late 1920s for that matter. As a light machinegun, it was never ideal.  As an automatic rifle, it excelled.  Its record was quite mixed.

Phase Three of the Tet Offensive Commences. August 17, 1968

Cẩm Lệ Bridge reopened on August 24, 1968 after having been held by the Viet Cong.

The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched the third, and final, phase of the Tet Offensive, eight months after the offensive had first commenced, by launching strikes on 27 South Vietnamese cities and towns, 47 airfields and 100 outposts.  This concluding phase would last a month and a half.

The operation was similar to the earlier, better known ones, and involved mass assaults on numerous targets as well as a large number of raids.  Th e fact that this could be done after the massive losses the NVA and the VC had sustained to date was impressive but there is good evidence that by this stage in this operation the Communist forces, which had been surprised by the success of the earlier phases, simply did not know what to do.  The results were similar in that the positions were all retaken by late September and the Communist forces sustained significant losses in the effort.

July 9, 1968. North Vietnam raises its flag above Khe Sanh.

In an anticlimactic footnote to the Siege of Khe Sanh, the North Vietnamese Army raised the flag above the outpost that had been abandoned by the United States on July 5.

Khe Sanh bunkers

The entire affair became symbolic for many for the state of the Vietnam War. The US had occupied an interior position, much like the French had at Dien Bien Phu, and then held it against what turned out to be a giant feint in order not to suffer the same humiliating defeat that the French had earlier.  In the meantime, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive and the combined impact of everything made the NVA and VC look to be a much more potent force than they really were.  Having said that, the NVA assault on the Marine Corps base at Khe Sanh was an impressive feat involving moving a large number of men, including artillery, through the jungle without being detected.

The siege commenced on January 21, 1968 and ran all through the Tet Offensive and into the Spring with President Johnson ordering that the base not be allowed to fall after the base was quickly surrounded.  Air support to the surrounded base was massive.  Ground fighting on the neighboring hills was sometimes intensive. 

The 1st Cavalry advancing in Operation Pegasus.

In March of that year Operation Pegasus was commenced, over Marine Corps objection, to relieve the base, which the Marines asserted was not in need of relief.  By mid April the 1st Cavalry Division had reopened the highway and declared the base no longer surrounded.  On April 15 the Marines followed on the Army's Operation Pegasus with Operation Scotland II to clear the area around Khe Sanh. That operation continued into February 1969, but in the meantime the Marines withdrew from Khe Sanh in July, 1968.

Marine Corps memorial service for fallen American and South Vietnamese servicemen on June 19, 1968 the day the abandonment of the base commenced.

Operation Charlie, the withdrawal from the base at Khe Sanh was commenced on June 19, 1968 and was conducted at night.  Hill 689, near Khe Sanh, was occupied for a few days after Khe Sanh itself was evacuated.  On this day, the NVA occupied Khe Sanh. While the military declared the ongoing occupation of Khe Sanh pointless in the conditions that followed Tet, the Press was not kind to the US military after the occupation was learned of. Less well known is that the Khe Sanh plateau continued to be patrolled by the Marines, lending credence to the changed American view on the importance of the base, if not the overall American assessment of the strategic situation in 1967 and 1968.

Khe Sanh was actually reoccupied in 1971, a fact that's rarely noted, by the ARVN and the US in Operation Dewey Canyon II and subsequently used for a jumping off point for the ARVN in the 1971 Operation Lam Son 719 offensive.  That latter offensive turned disastrous for the ARVN in Laos and the base was abandoned for good on April 6, 1971.

March 16, 1968. The My Lai Massacre

It was fifty years ago yesterday that the most infamous, from the American prospective, incident of the Vietnam War occurred. The Massacre at My Lai.

I'm a day late in noting this event and I'm not going to dwell on it deeply due to that reason.  Suffice it to say it has gone down as the most infamous American atrocity of the Vietnam War.

The event came about in the wake of the Tet Offensive of 1968 but that huge Communist offensive cannot completely explain it.  As is simply often the case with war, as the American presence in the Vietnam War drug on an element of acclimation to violence combined with frustration began to take a toll on the American forces.  While not usually noted, for some reason, both the North and South, or more properly the North, South, and the indigenous southern Communist guerillas, fought the war in an brutal fashion and the American and other allied forces found themselves in the midst of that reality. While the movie is otherwise pretty bad, the one line from Apocalypse Now in which Colonel Kurtz notes that and decides to take the war up to the next level of violence and horror in order to win it does somewhat accurately reflect the nature of fighting as an outside western army in a third world civil war.  Added to that, the conscripted American army was beginning to suffer from moral problems, although most of that would come later, as the the war turned unpopular.  

At some point in this part of the war the Americans began to utilize what amounted to a liberal use of "free fire" zones. The original idea was to declare an area that was heavily infiltrated by the Viet Cong to be off limits to everyone so that the VC could be identified, but that was an impossible thing to effect in a densely populated country like Vietnam. This too had its unintended consequences as it acclimated some American units to the concept that every Vietnamese in the countryside was the enemy.  Here the war began to take on a bit of the character of the worst elements of the Indian Wars.

So, enter Lt. William Calley and his unit on this date.

Entering My Lai with orders that were perhaps vague but a prelude to genocide Calley issued orders to gather up and kill the villages of My Lai.  Most of his troops followed the orders, but not all of them did (something that is important to note).  It's shocking to think of American troops behaving like the Germans in World War Two but by and large at My Lai they did, but some did not and aided villagers in escaping.  Ultimately two Americans from outside the unit intervened including a helicopter pilot who threatened to open up on his own side if the killing didn't stop.

The news did not break immediately, so the event had no immediate effect.  When it did, some men were tried for the incident, including Calley, but his time in prison was relatively brief and he remains out of prison today, largely silent on the event (he has spoken very occasionally).  The event, which wasn't wholly singular, tainted the image of the American soldier in some quarters, building on a trend that was already in the works due to actions such as burning the huts in villages.  Surprisingly the American population itself remained largely supportive of its soldiers and polls after the news broke even showed them supporting Calley and his men, but it became acceptable and even fashionable to condemn American troops as "baby killers".  It would take years for the reputation of the Army to recover.

As a horrific incident, and it was one, it wasn't exactly unique for the Vietnam War.  Most American combat troops in the war never participated in anything remotely similar to My Lai, but other incidents did occur and the issuing of "search and destroy" and "no prisoner" type orders were a feature of the later stages of the war.  Other allied forces committed similar acts, most notably a South Korean example, showing that a level of frustration was breaking out in atrocities.  The most brutal forces were the indigenous combatants themselves, with the Communist forces by far taking the cake for atrocities.

None of which excuses what occurred on this day in 1968.

Huế retaken. February 25, 1968

The last Communist positions in the city of Huế were retaken by Vietnamese Marines on this day in 1968.

Marines in Huế.

In the United States the battle is associated with the U.S. Marines in the same fashion that many of the worst battles of World War Two are, and for good reason. The battle was a rare, hard fought, street to street, house to house battle.  Taken by the NVA and VC in the opening days of Tet, the city was recaptured only through hard fighting efforts by the Marines, Vietnamese Marines and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the latter of which has had its role in the battle somewhat forgotten.   The battle would result in the loss of 216 U.S. Marines lives and 452 South Vietnamese combatants.  Communist losses are unknown with estimates ranging from a low of 1,000 to over 8,000 killed.  Communist forces executed 4,856 South Vietnamese while in control of the city, something that is a basic hallmark of Communist forces everywhere.

U.S. Marine with M60 machinegun in Huế.

On this day, the last position in the city, as noted, was taken by Vietnamese Marines.  Outside the city a Communist position was taken by ARVN Rangers.   Mopping up operations would continue on for some days after the recapture of the city.

Vietnam and the Law of Unintended Consequences: The AR15

I've been writing a lot, in contravention to our recent focus on 1915-17 in a distinct, sometimes daily, way, about the Vietnam War.  Indeed, it's always been an interest of mine and I have have several other threads in the hopper.

This one is one that I've hesitated to write about as I'm well aware that its really controversial.  So much so that it sparks rage in some people on both sides of a debate that rapidly become so vitriolic that they aren't part of a debate at all.

I speak of the AR15 rifle.

Long winded vitriolic introduction

 Paratrooper in Vietnam armed with M16A1 rifles.  This trooper seems to have a cleaning brush sticking through the front swivel.  That's something I've never seen a photo of before, but in some photos you can see the assembled cleaning rods, designed to be carried disassembled in the stock, sticking through the ventilation holes of the front grip to be used an emergency ramrod in case the weapon jammed.

Now, let me note right away, this isn't a debate about gun control or "gun violence" (that odd newspeak category of violence).  If you want to read my views on that you can read my several other threads that touch on it.*  No, this is about the law of unintended consequences.

Eh?

Yes, exactly.

And for that, we need a little background about the AR15 and the M16, one of Robert S. McNamara's gifts to the military that just keeps on giving.

And if a person wonders what I mean by that, I don't like the M16.  And yes, I have personal experience with the M16, or rather I should say a variety of those jamming plastic and steel direct impingement second rate assault rifles, if that's what it is, the M16A1.**

 Me, with one of the several M16A1s I carried at one time or another doing stuff similar to this. This photograph was taken in South Korea.  This M16A1 was not made by Colt.  It was made by General Motors Hydramatic Division.  It was one of the better ones I used over the years and I can't recall this one jamming.

Now,  just saying that in that fashion will send some people into cardiac arrest.  The "American Rifle", or whatever its being called today, has come to absolute dominate a large section of the rifle market.  And I think it's junk.  Well, if not junk, it has problems.

And I don't mean in a "they should be banned" sense.  I mean that in a "they don't like to work" sense.

Vietnam War Era manual for the soldier on the M16A1.  This manual was still in use in the early 80s when I was in the National Guard, but it was being phased out at that time by a less teenagerish version.  This document is interesting in that the Army thought it had to publish a cartoon book in order to get soldier to read the manual.  It's also interesting in that it was drawn by famous cartoonish Will Eisner, who had military experience, but who used the stock grizzled sergeant as a stock character. By this time during the Vietnam War a lot of Sergeant E-5s weren't much older than the privates.  The actual book itself featured a cartoon buxom female character was was drawn as if she was right out of Terry and the Pirates, which probably wasn't too relevant to a generation that thought Jane Fonda and various Playboy victims were the model of feminine beauty.

This was well known in Vietnam and it's the fault of the design, contrary to what latter day legions of apologist say about the rifle.  One of the best minor monuments of the recent Burns and Novik documentary on the war, in my view, came when Marine Corps veteran John Musgrave called it a piece of junk.  It was still well known in the 1980s when we lubricated the weapon with gallons of banana scented Break Free to make sure it'd work.  And it's been a consistent complaint about it in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It's the reason that piston variants like the HK416 show up in special use and the gas system weaknesses are why nobody else in the world attempts to field an assault rifle that features that gas system.

 Philippine Army soldiers armed with a HK416, a piston using variant of the AR that cures its feeding problems. This version was designed by the German firm of Hecklar & Koch and has been widely used around the world, including by the United States in the hands of special troops.

We ought to replace it.

But we don't.

And yes, none of that is what I'm writing about here, although its related.

Part of the reason, I suspect, that we don't replace the M16/M4 weapons is that the service buys them.

Well of course, you say, how else would they get them?

Well, prior to the M16A1 the service's standard rifles weren't purchased, as a rule, usually. They were made by the Government. And that's what the point of this post is.

And its an interesting example of the law of unintended consequences.  Maybe.

Bear with me, I'm getting there.

A civilian item has to be marketed.

The M16A4/A5 and M4 carbines the Armed Forces use today came about as developments of the earlier rifles, the most significant of which is the M16A1. The M16A1 was a Vietnam era corrective improvement of the design of the M16 most significantly featuring a big plunger that allowed a soldier to jam the bolt home when it jammed as one more shot is better than none at all.

The M16 was a military selective fire variant of the AR15, sometimes inaccurately called the "Colt AR15".  The AR15 itself was a 5.56 (or .223 if you prefer) development of the AR10, the original design.

 The original variant of the AR10 with wrapped fiberglass stock and realty weird flash hinder.  The AR10 has seen a revival after having truly been dead in that it has come back into the service as a designated marksman rifle.  While I do not like the ARs, this makes a lot of sense as its very similar to the rifle otherwise in service and it is quite accurate.  "Joe Loong - originally posted to Flickr as DSCF1108 CC BY-SA 2.0 File:AR-10 in the National Firearms Museum.jpg."

The AR10 was the brainchild of Fairchild engineer Eugene Stoner.  Stoner was out to design an assault rifle that could be manufactured cheaply using the newest in World War Two technology and Fairchild was looking for ways to exploit that technology.

Yes, its' that old.

 Stg44 (or in this case a MP 43/1) using optical sight, which most did not, and featuring stamped receiver and in some instances a plastic butt stock.  Almost everything about this World War Two era German assault rifle was every bit as modern as the features of the AR15/M16.  CC BY-SA 3.0 de File:Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1979-118-55, Infanterist mit Sturmgewehr 44.jpg Created: 31 December 1942

Anyhow, Stoner's idea was to make a cheap assault rifle out of stamped steel and plastic.  It these regards it wasn't really revolutionary as the world's first assault rifle, accepted as such, ultimately came to do that as well.  Stoner's design also omitted any sort of advance gas system, such a a piston or block, and simply blew tapped gas back on a cup machined on top of a bolt carrier and then vented into the action.  In this fashion it wasn't revolutionary either, as a semi automatic rifle used by the Swedes during World War Two (in which they were neutral) also used it.  Like the M16, it had performance problems.

If you think, gee, that's going to get things pretty dirty, you'd be right.

Anyhow, at some point this branch of Fairchild, Armalite, separated from Faichild and the company went about trying to market the AR10 with limited success after entering the competition for a new battle rifle for the United States and not prevailing in it.***  Some were in fact purchased and even used in combat in distant regions of the globe, with the example of Portuguese paratroopers in Angola perhaps being the most significant.  It might be noted that the Portuguese have always shown an affinity for eclectic weapons choices and, at the same time, their officers were carrying Luger's in combat, which would make most people knowledgeable about modern weapons gasp.

Anyhow, also in the 1950s the United States was also experimenter with .22 caliber rifles, which things chambered in .222 and .223 are.  Not .22 LR, of course, which is the most common little tiny cartridge on earth, but centerfire .22 caliber weapons.  

It was an experiment.

At the time the US had just adopted the M14 rifle, which it made.

And that gets to one of our first really big salient points.

The government had designed and made the M14.

 Paratrooper in Vietnam with M14 rifle.  While its seemingly been forgotten, the US Army was equipped with the M14 at the start of the Vietnam War, as were the Marines.  The Air Force was still equipped with the M1 Garand, as was the Navy.  The Guard and Reserve was completely equipped with M1 Garands.

We're in the late 1950s at this point.  But let's explore that, as that's a hugely significant point in our essay of today. The government had made and designed the M14.

Indeed, the U.S. Government had made every principal standard longarm it had equipped its military with since the foundation of the country.  That was the system.  Longarms, such as rifles and muskets, were made in government arsenals.  They were usually, indeed almost always, designed by government employees.  In the rare instances in which they were not designed by government employees, such as with the Krag series of rifles and carbines, the U.S. Government bought a license to produce them and then made them, itself, under license.

The only exceptions to this in any form came normally during big wars, or with small purchases.  So, for example, prior to the Civil War you will find that the Army bought small lots of Sharps carbines.  Small lots.  During the Civil War the Army bought everything going, but the Civil War was a really big war.  During the Indian Wars the Army bought small lots of experimental weapons, but didn't adopt them, and then the Navy and Marine Corps bought relatively small lots of Remington made Lees at various points up to and during the Spanish American War (the United States, not the United Kingdom, was the first nation on earth to equip itself in any fashion with a Lee rifle. . . take that SMLE fans).  During World War One the Government contracted for huge lots of M1917 Enfields and bought small lots of Mosin Nagants (that had been rejected by the Imperial Russian inspectors, who must have been delusional given the circumstances their nation was under).  

And so on.

But for long arms, the big story was Springfield Armory. To a lesser extent, and at different times, the story was also Rock Island Arsenal and Harpers Ferry Arsenal.

Now, if this is a bit shocking in our super glory of the free market era, we should note that this wasn't unusual at all and wasn't limited to longarms.  The government also manufactured artillery (it isn't like there's a big civilian market for it, after all).  It made saddles by the thousands as well, for which there was a big civilian market, and all sorts of tack.  Prisoners in Ft. Leavenworth made bad footwear for the Army for many years.  At one point between World War One and World War Two the government manufactured 6x6 trucks. . . nobody else was making them and the artillery branch needed them.

 Cavalrymen at Ft. Riley Kansas, 1940.  The pack and riding saddle that are in this photo were both types manufactured by the government itself.

It's also worth noting that there were certain things the government didn't make, and some of them were surprising.  The government quit making handguns sometime prior to the Civil War.  The introduction of Colt revolvers seems to have caused that to come about. Whatever it was, they had made them, and they just quit.  And the U.S. military actually uses a surprising number of handguns.  The U.S. military also never made very many machineguns, which is odd.  It did try to come up with one during World War Two but a production goof made that example lousy, and it had made a few prior to World War One.. The one and only machinegun it ever tried to field that was its own design was the M15/M14E1, a light machinegun variant of the the M14, and it wasn't very good.  The M14 was excellent, but the M14E1 wasn't.

During this entire time the US never made a really bad longarm.  It made some that didn't quite pan out, such as the Krag, and some that were so so, like the trapdoor Springfield's, but it never made a really awful longarm, which is remarkable.  And when things didn't quite pan out, because they made them, they usually reacted pretty quickly as a rule, although the long history of the trapdoor runs contrary to that. 

And then came the AR15 and Robert McNamara.

 Robert S. McNamara.

When the US entered the Vietnam War, it sent its troops in with M14s, which were just coming into service. They were so new, and there were so few, that the National Guard never received them.  And they worked fine.  

We were, as another thread explores here in depth, also supplying our ally, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, with weapons.  The ARVN didn't get M14s, they got, and had been getting for some time, M1 Garands (another great U.S. arsenal design) and M1/M2 Carbines (a World War Two design by Winchester that was in fact acquired by contract from civilian manufacturers and which was, in fact, not a very good military weapon).

And then came in the USAF.

From 1948 when it was created up until, well, forever, the USAF has had sort of weird price of place in military acquisitions.  The Air Force generally, but not always, gets what it wants.  And it decided that airmen would have been way too burdened to guard air bases in Vietnam equipped with M1 Garands (which is what they would have had, M14s wouldn't have caught up with the Air Force yet) and therefore it would buy the new, super sexy, AR15 in a selective fire form.

 

World War Two vintage poster depicting tough combat infantryman with an M1 Garand.  The Air Force didn't want the M1 to do its talking in Vietnam.

Which takes us back to the AR10 and the .223. 

The experiment I noted above resulted in various entities, and Springfield Armory, coming up with .223 designs to be tested. Winchester made a rifle that was based on the M1 Carbine, which is a fairly lousy military weapon but which does function fine.  Its product was a lot like the later Ruger Mini14.  Springfield Armory again adapted, albeit half halfheartedly, the Garand action that was used for the M1 Garand and the M14 to the .223 and also came up with a weapon that bears a strong resemblance to the later Ruger Mini14.  Armalite adapted the AR10. As Winchester later lamented, the AR15 looked "sexy".

The Army yawned and the halfhearted effort of Springfield Armory showed that it never thought the .223 was going to go anywhere anyway, but the Air Force said "Golly Gee Bob!.  Look at that nifty thing". and adopted it.  As Armalite's production capacity was nonexistent Colt, taking a gamble as it was really a pistol manufacture, bought the rights to Stoners design.  So Colt fell into a military contract in 1963 when the U.S. Air Force, not the U.S. Army, bought AR15s to equip its men in Vietnam with.****  Right around the same time the Secret Service also bought AR15s.  Indeed, if you look closely at the famous video footage of John F. Kennedy's assassination, you can see that a Secret Serviceman in the car behind Kennedy's is carrying an AR15.

Now, the real irony of this is that the Air Force is the service that's least qualified to decide anything about small arms and in truth perimeter security in Vietnam would have been just as readily served by men carrying M1 Garands.  Heck, it would have been better served. The Air Force didn't need M16s and it shouldn't have received them.  It was patently absurd.  Compounding the problem, however, the Army's Special Forces took some M16s and heaped lavish praise on them, the recipients of the praise forgetting that special troops are notoriously able to make use of weapons that regular soldiers cannot.

This combined result then operated to convince William C. Westmoreland, whom we've recently otherwise read about, to urge the ordering of what had then been adopted as a limited standard as the M16 by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.  There was some logic to his decision.  For one thing, the ARVN soldiers were tiny.  The M1 Garand which they were supplied with by the United States was huge and the alternative M1/M2 Carbine was ineffective.  The M16 seemed just the ticket.

The ARVN was not impressed.  While Americans have heaped condemnation on the ARVN for decades many ARVN troops saw years and years of combat and they weren't actually asking for new small arms.  When they received the M16 they were amongst the first to discovery that it jammed, and jammed badly. They were convinced that the Americans were giving them junk that the Americans themselves weren't using. That was soon to change.

 ARVN Rangers during the Tet Offensive.  Some ARVN units fought well throughout the Vietnam War including special units such as this.  By Tet, the ARVN on the whole was fighting well and most of its troops were equipped with M16A1s, although you still find examples of them carrying M1 Carbines right to the end of the war.

Coincident with the first ordering of the M16 there were teething problems with the production of M14s.  In retrospect they weren't all that bad and even recent US military history at the time should have revealed that.  There had been teething problems with the M1903 Springfield and the M1 Garand as well.  Production capacity limits meant that the M1903 never was fully replaced during World War Two in spite of a massive effort to manufacture M1 Garands.  During World War One production limits had lead to the as many M1917s being made as M1903s. So this wasn't really new.  More than enough M14s existed to equip the active duty Army and Marine Corps, even if the reserves did nto receive them. But they were practically new.  Nonetheless McNamara had the production of M14s stopped.

This was a monumentally boneheaded move and this alone deserves to rate Robert Strange McNamara as a Department of Defense disaster.  Springfield Armory dated back to the early history of the country, and now it was idled and no M14s were being made.  M16s, on the other hand, were coming in from Colt and would soon be licensed by Colt to other companies as production for the Vietnam War heated up.  It was soon decided to equip US soldiers in Vietnam with the rifle.

Problems rapidly developed, although they were problems the ARVN was already aware of.  The gun jammed and people were getting killed.  The immediate solution was to come out with the A1 variant of the rifle, the M16A1, which featured a large plunger that struck the bolt to close it in an emergency.  This didn't solve the problem but it did mean that there was at least the hope of not getting killed if the rifle jammed up in combat.^

 Paratrooper cleaning an M16 in 1966, at which time it was still an experimental arm.

The M16A1 was not well received.  Marine Corps units avoided using it as long as possible  by shifting M14s to units in the field and M16s back to the rear. This went on until the M14s had been withdrawn and they just couldn't get away with it any longer. The Army, being larger, never had that opportunity and so it went right into front line units  The initial results were disastrous as the new weapon locked up like a drum in combat.  People with long memories recalled after the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division ran into trouble with the weapon at Ia Drang in 1966 that the same regiment had experienced fatal weapons jams nearly a century earlier at Little Big Horn due to the copper cartridges used by the Army in the action sticky trapdoor Springfield at that time.

New orders requiring "Tiger" to prodigiously clean the weapon constantly, prodigious lubrication and a switch in powder for ammunition partially alleviated the problem but it's never gone away.  Oddly, the current M4 Carbine is reported to jam more than the M16A5, showing that they both jam, but the carbine inexplicably jams more.  But the M16 has kept on keeping on.

That was in part because in 1968 the Secretary of Defense had Springfield Armory closed for good.

Springfield Armory had been mounting a rear guard action against the M16 ever since it had been introduced.   The M16A1 was standardized in 1967 and the M16 had been ordered to replace the M14 by McNamara at least two years earlier.  So the United States lost a manufacturing capacity for small arms, by the military itself, that it had since 1777.

A private industrial concern

The closing of Springfield Armory, the replacement of the M14 by the M16, and the utilization of a private contractor for the first time in the nation's history to supply all of the nation's small arms need created a situation that was unprecedented.


Prior to the M16, the US had never had to rely solely upon private industry for the supply of muskets or rifles.  Privately produced longarms had existed before, of course, but never without the Government itself making the established standard longarm.  Privately produced longarms were the exception to the rule, sometimes a huge exception to the rule, but an exception.  As noted, this wasn't the case for handguns and that would soon prove to be the model for what would next occur.

Just as it had never been the case that the nation had been without a longarm manufacturing arsenal, it had also not been the case for years that a major private manufacturing plant was left making a military model of weapon with only one customer, the military end user.  It had happened before during wartime of course.  Various companies had made M1903s, M1s and M1 Carbines, amongst other weapons, for the U.S. Government during wartime.  But the last instance of this happening had been during the Korean War when contracts for M1 Garands had been put out. Granted, that had not been a long time prior.

Colt, for its part, had a spotty history with longarms and was really a handgun manufacturer.  It had tried to introduce longarms from time to time but rarely with any kind of success.  Suddenly, however, in the early 1960s it found itself owning a longarms that was in sudden demand by the US. Soon thereafter, it owned the rights to what was now the standard US rifle, the first time in history that a private company had been in that position, although it must not have been a sole manufacturing right given the later history of what occurred.  The M16 would prove to be an economic boon to Colt.

Colt had always had the policy of selling the same models of pistols it manufactured for the Service to civilians. This had long been its custom. And indeed, it was often the case that a newly adopted military model was available to civilians slightly before it was delivered to the military.  With that being the history, it's no surprise what happened next.  In 1964 Colt started manufacturing the rifle for civilian sales as the AR15 Sporter.

That shows how vast the production capacity of Colt really was at the time.  Colt was fulfilling military orders for the M16 and yet was still able to manufacture AR15s for civilian sales.  Having said that, the AR15 received a bit of a mixed civilian reception at the time.

It had been a very long time since a major American firearms manufacture had offered the pure military version, nearly, of a military longarm for civilian purchase and it had never been the case that an American manufacture had offered what was the primary military longarm for civilians sales. That's a bit nuanced, however, as Springfield Armory had been the manufacture of that weapon since 1777 and it had done that on a periodic basis.  Springfield Armory offered a customized sporting version of the Trapdoor Springfield rifle to soldiers (officers were the primary customers) in the 19th Century and it had sold M1903s to civilians in various versions from 1903 until 1939.  Target variants of the full military M1903 were the most common to be sold by Springfield Armory to civilian customers but actions were also commonly sold for sporting rifles.  This, we should note, mirrored the sales of DWM in Germany which sold full military G98s, as well as a lot of sporting variants, to target shooters throughout the long history of the production of that rifle.  Following World War Two, when the M1 Garand became required for National Match shooting, it sold accuraized M1 Garands, as well as conventional used Garands (and other older rifles) to civilian customers.  When the M14 was introduced it sold a very few National Match M14s to civilian customers.

But there had never been a time when the primary military longarm was solely being manufactured by a private concern and that private concern offered the rifle, almost, for civilian sales. That was new. The closest thing that had occurred prior to that was military versions of longarms made by private manufacturers that were not official US weapons, such as musket versions of the Sharps .45-70 rifle, but which were sometimes adopted by states for their National Guard (New York in that case) or, more recently, private manufacture of M1 Carbine versions after World War Two (and up to the present day) by small manufacturers.

When Colt introduced the AR15 Sporter, as noted, civilian shooters were mixed in their opinions about it, and this continued for an extremely long time. There was no obvious use for it other than it being a giant plinker, which is the primary use it received.  At the time, the .223/5.56 cartridge was not legal for big game in very many places and the AR15 did not have a reputation for accuracy or reliability.  One of its primary drawing points, frankly, was that it was a military weapon and it appealed to individuals (and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this) who liked military style weapons.  Even at that, however, quite a few true rifleman shunned the weapon and associated it with poor design and questioned whether a weapon that was a semi automatic variant of an assault rifle was really a rifle.

It dominated the .223 field however until Ruger introduced the Mini14 in 1973.  Even that event, however said a lot about how the AR15 was viewed, as Ruger chose to  introduce a rifle that looked, and was named, a lot like a miniature version of the beloved M14 rather than one that looked like the Stg44.  The Mini14 nearly supplanted the M16 in the Marine Corps, however, as the Marines, which never liked the M16, took a serious look at replacing the M16 with it.*****  As a commercial offering Ruger, however, reflecting the views of its owner, refused to offer the firearms with more than a five round magazine, in spite of losing sales on larger magazines to after market manufacturers^^

The M16 wasn't replaced, of course, and is with us still.  Accuracy of the rifle improved enormously with later variants and it isn't the rifle it was during the Vietnam War in a lot of ways.  And the AR15 is still with us as well.

At some point, the M16 went from being the only thing in its niche to absolutely dominant in the American firearms world.  How it happened isn't really clear, but it's happened.  Even though the rifle has never been reliable it's now enormously common and it virtually sucks the air out of the room to a certain degree.  Whereas in the 1970s a firearms store that sold Colt handguns would have one AR15 in the rack, now nearly any sporting goods stores selling firearms has rows of AR15 type rifles, although they aren't Colts.  Colt has been troubled for years and it no longer offers civilian AR15s for sale on a exclusive basis. There are leagues of other manufacturers and Colts are by far not the most common.  The rifle not surprisingly entered the target world when it was finally required to be used for standard National Match over the M14, it no longer being possible to pretend the M14 was the service rifle, but it has also entered the game fields in large numbers.  The process is mysterious, but very real. A person can't pick up any of the gun magazines without having to thumb through pages of M4/M16 knock offs in the advertisements and articles.

Now, saying anything bad about the AR is dangerous.  One writer lost his employment when he criticized the AR in 2007, stating the following:

I must be living in a vacuum. The guides on our hunt tell me that the use of AR and AK rifles have a rapidly growing following among hunters, especially prairie dog hunters. I had no clue. Only once in my life have I ever seen anyone using one of these firearms.

I call them "assault" rifles, which may upset some people. Excuse me, maybe I'm a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. I'll go so far as to call them "terrorist" rifles. They tell me that some companies are producing assault rifles that are "tackdrivers."

Sorry, folks, in my humble opinion, these things have no place in hunting. We don't need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them, which is an obvious concern. I've always been comfortable with the statement that hunters don't use assault rifles. We've always been proud of our "sporting firearms."

This really has me concerned. As hunters, we don't need the image of walking around the woods carrying one of these weapons. To most of the public, an assault rifle is a terrifying thing. Let's divorce ourselves from them. I say game departments should ban them from the praries [sic] and woods.

Now that writer probably hadn't thought out what he was writing at the time (and note, I'm not endorsing it) but his opinion was a lot more widespread than people might believe.  Back in the 1970s, before AKs (other than Vietnam War prize rifles, which did in fact exist at first) were around, older riflemen expressed similar views.  My own father was of the opinion that the AR15 was for one thing and one thing only, "killing people" and disdained them.  A career Army man who in retirement worked as a highly knowledgeable gun salesman locally openly disdained the AR15 and discouraged people from buying the one his store was required to carry in a the rack, a view that was followed by everyone else in the store including the owner.  Something really changed in regards to the AR following the 1980s, and I'm not sure what it was.

 U.S. Marines training in Iraq in 2004. This Marine is armed with the M16A2, a version of the M16 that was designed by the Marine Corps itself and then adopted by the Army.  The rear sight is completely different from that of the old M16 and M16A1 and the forearm is much stiffer. The barrel is also much heavier.  The M16A2 came about after the Marine Corps determined that Ruger could not supply it with adequate numbers of Mini14s and that it was stuck with the AR.  It is a hugely improved version of the M16 and is really the rifle people think of today when they think of the M16.

Other than that with the M16A2, a Marine Corp designed version, the rifle actually became truly accurate.  Indeed, for the type of rifle it is, its highly accurate.  Nearly all of the AR fans who decry other .223 semi automatic rifles for being inaccurate only have experience with the M16A2 and later versions, rather than the M16A1 which had lackluster accuracy and was flimsy. The M16A2 was a huge improvement and the manufacturers of AR type rifles followed suit.  That surely explains some of it.

Beyond that, however, it must be the old Winchester noted "sex appeal" of the rifle that drives at least a fair amount of sales and its unacknowledged but clear status as the king of the range plinkers.  M4 carbine variants are all over the place even though the military problems with the M4 are legion.  Indeed, the service has been struggling with how to replace the M4 with a larger caliber rifle for years, and its only a matter of time before it occurs.

No matter the problems, there are seemingly endless varieties of M16 and M4 knockoffs now.  Even Ruger, Bill Ruger now long gone, offers a M4 type rifle along with its Minis.  Every gun magazine features page after page of AR type rifles now chambered in big game cartridges in what is sort of the return and revenge of the AR10, even though going afield with a rifle as cumbersome, complicated and bulky as that when after a  member of the Cervinae genus is really not the best choice.  And even now and then some kid shows up with a AR look alike for a 4H .22 shooting practice until the awkwardness of the design for that replaces it with something more conventional.

So, after all of this, am I endorsing the view of the writer above and demanding that sportsmen turn in their ARs?  No, I"m not.  Indeed, National Match shooters can't, even as they find themselves repeating history by shooting a target variants of a rifle that' no longer the combat standard, as the M4 is (and can't be made into a target rifle).

 U.S. Army soldier armed with the M4 Carbine, which has replaced the M16A5 as the frontline longarm.  It's still an AR, even tall tricked out with optical sights and doodads.  Oddly, the M4 jams more frequently than the M16A4/A4 although nobody has ever been able to determine why.  It's also less effective with its shorter barrel.  The adoption of it as the standard combat longarm is due to pure fadism in the service and nothing else.

But I am noting a few ironies, and do have a bit of a plea that will be like casting dust to the wind.

The irony is that the M16 as originally introduced was junk, and now its much improved junk.  It only became what it was as a Secretary of Defense who was wrong about nearly everything gutted the Army's ability to produce rifles for itself, and when that occurred it left manufacturing of the new service rifle with Colt, which had always had a business model of also offering for civilian sales whatever it was making for the service.  If the traditional model had been followed, the service would have acquired full rights to the M16 (and it must have acquired some) assuming we adopted it, and Springfield Armory would have been making them by 1968, along with supplemental civilian purchases.  It's somewhat doubtful that, if that occurred, any civilian manufacturer would have been allowed to introduce the AR15 or anything like it.  Indeed, I highly doubt it.  And given as it took years and years for the AR to take on the dominant status it now occupies, that may very well have never have happened.  Indeed, I doubt it would have. Today Springfield Armory would stil have been making M16s in something like the M16A5 variant, I doubt the M4 would ever have occurred, and maybe the Government would have licensed somebody to make a National Match variant, or maybe not.

So, in a weird way, the Vietnam War created the current situation in which a substitute for Air Force perimeter guards in a rainy Asian land became "America's Rifle" and the subject of some raging debate.

And my plea, or comment I guess, is that frankly, the ARs, to include the M16 and the M4, just aren't all that.  They're a problem weapons that has managed to really stick around, just like the the Trapdoor system of the late 19th Century but more so.  Running down Rugers or the like really doesn't cut it.  It is accurate, to be sure, but it isn't the end all and be all of anything, let alone the various .223s out there.  Plenty of bolt action .223s beat the AR in the game fields any day.  The old Minis plink just as plinkish as the ARs do, and work every time.  On the target range for its class, however, the AR is very good.

And beyond that, and here's the part that people causes debates and for which even somebody whose views on gun control hardly match the banners, are sort of shunned for saying, there's a real shift that's occurred over time reflected by the ARs.  Racks of tacticool ARs are at every gun store but why?  That wasn't the case some 30 years ago or so.  What's that mean?

It may mean nothing more than they are fun and easy to shoot, and on the range the functioning problems aren't much of a problem.  Or it may mean that a fascination with combat weapons, or at least that particular combat weapon, has spread from a niche category of shooting fans who were nearly like engineers in their view of that category of weapons, fascinated by mechanics, to some other sort of less technical fascination.  Certainly there's something to that as its not hard to find gun magazines that feature monthly articles on tactical shooting, even though that's something that has to be trained into proficiency, not read into efficiency.  As I noted much earlier on this blog, the United States, recent horrific events aside, is at an all time low in regard to violence and the chances of any one person needing to engage in tactical shooting with a carbine here is really low.  Maybe that's part of it.  Men, and it's mostly men, crave manly things, and the era when a huge percentage of men had military experience is over.

Not that I'm arguing that they should be banned, or any such thing.  Truth be know, the AR isn't much more advanced than the Remington 08, the Remington semi automatic rifle that was introduced by Remington in 1908 and which only came in a carbine form.  And like the AR, its virtues (and it had plenty) were a bit oversold too.

At the end of the day here, this post is about letting a little air in the room.  The current focus on the AR is just as overblown as Remington's suggestion that that hunter is going to survive his encounter with that bear.  Indeed, that poster is the subject of an amusing parody in which you see his hat flying off the cliff, he's gone, and the bear is going around the corner.^^^

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*They include:

Lex Anteinternet: The problems with every debate on gun control are....

Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.

Packing Heat

Lex Anteinternet: Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities. Looking Again.

**The M16, in its selective fire military form, is probably an assault rifle, although early on it was sometimes referred to as an automatic rifle, which isn't quite the same thing.  Defining the term has always been extraordinarily difficult, but generally it means a selective fire rifle, fulfilling the role of rifle and machinegun, which fires an intermediate sized cartridge.  The Stg44 was the world's first assault rifle, coming out in the early 1940s in German production and made in creasing numbers until the end of World War Two.

***A battle rifle differs from an assault rifle in that it fires a full sized cartridge and may be semi automatic or selective fire, at least by some definitions.  The Belgian FAL is perhaps the most famous example of a battle rifle, with others being the M14 and the German G3.  The AR10 may have been a battle rifle or perhaps an assault rifle, depending upon how a person views it.

****This was actually the second military contract for the AR15.  Malaysia had contracted to purchase them in 1961.

^One of the designers who apparently came to the conclusion that the AR had real problems was its own designer, Eugene Stoner, who went on to design a new rifle featuring many of the AR's better features but abandoning its problematic gas system.  That rifle became the AR18.  Armalite introduced the gun to the market in 1969 but it never had the manufacturing capacity to really effectively market it and it was already competing against Stoner's own earlier invention, the AR15.

The AR18 has usually been passed off as a project to market an assault rifle to poorer nations, but that has to be baloney.  It was not any more mechanically simple, and therefore should not have been any more expensive to manufacture, than the AR15.  It was considerably more conventional in design, however, and completely abandoned the AR's direct impingement gas system in favor of a piston.  It also abandoned the AR's high line of sight which had come about due to the feeling that this would reduce recoil in the larger caliber AR10. That has always been a problem with the ARs and has only bee addressed very recently as the M4 went to optical sights and the upper carrying  handle, which is the support for the rear sight, has become detachable.

The AR18 failed to secure any major military contracts although there were small military sales to some nations and police forces.  The US Army actually evaluated it but didn't want to buy yet another 5.56 rifle, which would seem to have been obvious.  The weapon obtained some infamy, however, as it was popular (along with AR15s) with the Irish Republican Army which liked it enough to give it the nickname "the Widowmaker".  A civilian version was offered in the form of the AR180 but it received little interest.

*****The Mini14, in spite of being constantly slammed by the fans of the AR15 actually came close to supplanting it, although the details are hard to come by.  My information from it comes from a fellow who was involved in Marine Corps procurement at the time, although you can pick up bits and pieces of the story elsewhere.

That the Marines never liked the M16 is well known.  They approached Ruger directly about acquiring Mini14s to replace the rifle and the only thing which kept it from occurring is that Ruger was engaged in a major overseas contract at the time and lacked the production capacity to fulfill a Marine Corps order.  So the Marines gave up and went on to design the M16A2 to fix the accuracy problems of the M16A1. The M16A2 went on to replace the M16A1 in the Army and Marines and the M16 in the Air Force.

Minis actually have a notable military record, but AR fans hate to admit it as it means that a rifle that looks so much more, well, World War Two, competed and still does with the AR.  It equipped the Bermuda Regiment, in a selective fire variant, of the British Army and selective fire variants are used by Philippine paramilitary police.  British police also have used it in the past and the French produce their own selective fire variant for their police.  Various orders are believed to have gone here and there in shipments that the US doesn't really want to track back to the US military.  It was widely used by US law enforcement personnel at one time, but that has very much declined in favor of the AR in recent years.

^^Bill Ruger was castigated by some in the firearms community for that view at the time.  Now there'd be absolute riots on this statement. His view wasn't uncommon at the time.  Just as there are those who regard any such statement as traitorous to firearms users today, at the time there were a fair number of people who believed that firearms manufacturers, like Colt, who offered weapons that were so clearly military were undermining support for civilian firearms owners.

^^^After all of this I'll confess that a couple of years ago I was walking through a sporting goods store and came upon an AR in the M16A1 configuration made by somebody other than Colt.  I was surprised but actually looked at it, and found myself being nostalgic about it.  No, I didn't buy it and I'm not going to buy the Colt "retro" AR15 made in the M16A1 configuration either.

Anyhow, I never liked the M16A1 when I was a Guardsmen and hardly any of the guys I served with did either. The Vietnam veterans in our ranks, and there were a lot of them, openly disdained the rife.  It's a powerful demonstrator of the nature of nostalgia that a guy like me, who had no love for any AR, would actually stop and admire an old M16A1 type one.  The power of the longing for lost youth I suppose.  A lot of people must feel that way, as why else would Colt be offering one in the M16A1 configuration?