There's been quite a bit a news in the weapons category here recently.
I know, d'uh, there's a big war going on . . .
No, I don't mean that. I actually mean in two NATO countries, the United States and Canada.
More specifically, the United States Army, in a process stretching back to the 1980s, has finally settled on a rifle to replace the AR15 platform which, further, acknowledges the insufficiency of the 5.56 round, taking a giant step up with a new 6.8 round.
In military rifle news, this is really big news.
And secondly, Canada, which has been using the Browning Hi Power pattern sidearm since World War Two, and which chose a replacement, has put the brakes on that for the time being.
Let's discuss the Army's new rifle first. Here's what the Army Press release informs us of:
Pretty signficant news. This means, at least in some applications, the historically long reign of the AR15 is over in the Army.
And like most things here, we'll take a trip through history to get there, as it's always our position that understanding the past lets us know where we are, and how we got here.
To really grasp this topic, you need to go back before the current set of rifles and carbines. And indeed, you need to go way back. Back to the adoption of the Krag Jorgensen rifle, which was adopted in 1892.
Marines in Cuba armed with Krags, after the Marine Corps gave up on the Lee.
Okay, we're not going to deal with that in depth, but its important to this story, as the M1892 Springfield Rifle, the Krag, was the first US cartridge arm to use a modern, bottlenecked, cartridge. Before that prior US cartridge arms, which had been blackpowder arms, fired large caliber straight cased ammunition, like the long serving .45-70. Smokless powder, which generated high case pressures, allowed for the development of high speed, much smaller, projectiles such as the .30-40 used by the Krag.
How small the bullet could be was a matter of debate. At the same time that the Army went with .30, the Navy went with 6mm, not only adopting a different cartridge than the Army, and a different rifle to fire it, but a much smaller one measured, oddly, in the metric system. 6mm is .244 in terms of caliber.
The U.S. Navy wasn't the only armed service taking this route. All over the globe different militaries were trying to figure this out, with some going all the way down to 6mm, like the U.S. Navy, and others going up to 8mm (.324). Generally, most service rounds around the globe fell into the 6.5 to 7.7 (more or less .30) range, although there were exceptions on either end. A couple of major wars, moreover, failed to sort this out, although the U.S. dropped the 6mm Navy during the Spanish American War, settling first on .30-40 and then designing a new cartridge that developed into the .30-06.
U.S. troops in France during World War One with M1903 Springfield rifles.
By the Great War, most armies were fielding cartridges in the noted range, although there remained some experimentation. Prior to the war the British, for example, sought to adopt a 7mm cartridge which was more or less a "magnum" cartridge by modern definitions, seeking to push out their range further based on their experience in the Boer War. The intervention of World War One kept this from occurring.
Nobody went into WWI unhappy with their cartridge and there really weren't any that proved to be bad, but the experience of the war suggested that military rifle cartridges were too big, as in their cases were too big, containing too much powder. Ranges, which in the Boer War had been long, were shorter in the Great War, and various militaries began to conclude that future combat conditions would of course be like that of the war that they just fought. The first military to really reach this conclusion was the U.S. Army, which in the 1920s began to experiment with a .276, or more or less 6.8mm, sized cartridge with a shorter case, hoping to pair it with a semi-automatic rifle. Both worked very well, but the head of the Army, Douglas MacArthur, intervened in order to cause the rifle to be redesigned to fire .30-06, fearing that Congress would reject any moves that made large amounts of ammunition, as well as other Army weapons, accordingly obsolete.
In the early 1920s he (John Pedersen) designed a self loading rifle for the United States government.
Pederson's semi automatic rifle design.
Now, everyone who knows anything about the history of U.S. military rifles of the 20th Century knows that the first semi automatic rifle adopted by the U.S. was the M1 Garand. So this would tell us right away that Pedersen's rifle wasn't adopted. But the cartridge it fired very nearly was. But that doesn't mean it was a bad design so much as it means that John Garand's was excellent.
That cartridge for the Pedersen rifle was the .276 Pederson, a 6.8 mm cartridge that was 51mms long. That made it .5 in shorter than the .30-06, then the military's cartridge. While there was great skepticism about the cartridge at first, that skepticism was overcome in testing and as the M1 Garand pulled ahead, it too was in .276 Pedersen. It appeared that the Army was set to adopt the rifle in that cartridge, but a late directive by Douglas MacArthur, who was at that time the Chief of Staff of the Army, caused the design to be adopted in .30-06. MacArthur feared, and probably correctly, that Congress would pull funding for the new rifle if it came in a new cartridge, which in turn would have had to have resulted in new automatic weapons of all types to replace those then chambered in .30-06.
Clip for the .276 Pedersen. The clip carried eight rounds, just like that for the M1 Garand. The Garand's clip has often been regarded as its one real oddity, and even defect, but these sorts of clips came over from some bolt action designs before it became accepted that cheap detachable magazines could really be made.
By the way, the Pederson cartridge was a 6.8x51. . . the same as for the newly adopted 6.8.
Anyhow, as noted, the .276 Pederson wasn't adopted and the .30-06 was retained.
The U.S. fought the Second World War, like most nations, with a full sized cartridge, that being the aforementioned .30-06 and the M1 Garand. Well, that last statement isn't completely true. The U.S. actually retained M1903s Springfield and M1917 Enfields in use for some things and introduced the M1 Carbine, a light semiautomatic carbine firing a small .30 round, for others. Indeed, more M1 Carbines were made in the war than M1 Garands.
During the war the US was exceedingly well armed and small arms were no exception. None other than cavalryman George S. Patton, famous for armored warfare, termed the Garand "the greatest battle implement ever devised". The M1 proved to be nearly a flawless design, with only a couple of minor reas where it could be criticized. Nonetheless, developments during the war pointed towards the next step of firearms evolution, although not clearly.
Indeed, the Germans, while they did attempt field a semiautomatic rifle during the war, essentially leaped over that stage of firearms development and went right to the next ones, introducing both the assault rifle and the battle rifle during the war.
An assault rifle is basically a rifle that can easily fill the role of submachine gun, which normally necessitates it firing a less powerful cartridge than a "full sized" rifle round. The introductory German example was the Stg 44, which fired a 7.92 sized cartridge, like the full sized German weapons such as the K98k did, but with a much shortened case. Hence, its name, the 7.92 Kurz.
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. The rifle itself proved to be enormously influential on the Soviets, although contrary to common assertion, the AK47 has no mechanical simularities with it. It was much less well known in the West, although it was known, and has started to show up as a World War Two movie item only recenlty. CC BY-SA 3.0 de File:Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1979-118-55, Infanterist mit Sturmgewehr 44.jpg Created: 31 December 1942 A battle rifle is a selective fire (usually) rifle that is capable of fully automatic fire. It too is supposed to fill both roles, but it does so less easily as it fires the full sized cartridge. In some instances, battle rifles were conceived of filling the role of rifle and light machine gun. In others, rifle, submachine gun, and light machine gun. In yet others, it was conceived of filling the same role as the assault rifle, with the emphasis on the rifle role more fully than the assault rifle. The Germans introduced the battle rifle in the form of the FG42, a battle rifle for paratroopers.
German paratrooper with FG42 in France. The FG42 was a battle rifle, not an assault rifle, and it never really reached a state of final design development. The design was somewhat influential in some ways, with the post war Swiss Stg57 perhaps being closest to it in overall design concept. Mechanically, the US M60 machinegun shares some design influence with it. Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-720-0344-11 / Vennemann, Wolfgang / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons
Both developments would be influential in post-war designs, but there was no question that the Stg44 was the more influential of the two. European designers started working on weapons influenced by it during the war itself. The Soviets introduced a new cartridge, but going to less of an extreme than the Germans had, in the form of the 7.62x39, first pairing it with a semiautomatic rifle, and then using it for a true assault rifle very much conceptually based on the Stg44, that being the AK47. The Czechs took the same route, introducing a similar cartridge and similar assault rifle independently.
Western European thought was along a similar lines, but with the thought of retaining more of a true rifle ability, with the British adopting, briefly, the radical EM-2 assault rifle that featured the 280 British cartridge. The .280 British was a 7x43 sized cartridge.
Hmmm, keep that in mind. . .
Anyhow, while longer than the new Soviet cartridge, it was much shorter than the .303 British and the radical rifle design had other advantageous features for a weapon designed to fill an automatic and semiautomatic role. The Belgian arms manufacturer of Fabrique Nationale designed its own assault rifle to use it, anticipating its adoption.
The .280 British, except briefly, was not to be.
The goal was to adopt a cartridge for use by all of the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization members so, in the event of a war, they'd have ammunition compatibility. Indeed, the original goal was to adopt one cartridge and one longarm, but the closest the organization ever came to that was very early, when the M1 Garand nearly achieved that role. Anyhow, the US had the most say in the choice of the cartridge, and it was pretty happy with the .30-06 and saw little reason to depart from it much.
The US did see a need to replace the M1, but only barely. The defects in the design, to the extent that they were defects, were the peculiar top loading clip it used and the gas tube running in contact with the barrel. The US also agreed that the war had shown the need for a selective fire rifle, but it felt the M1 design could be adapted to that. With this in mind, it introduced a shortened .30 cartridge for competition, which kept the same performance of the common World War Two .30-06. That cartridge became the 7.62 NATO, or the 7.62x51. The new rifle was the Springfield Armory designed 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.
Various European nations in and out of NATO developed their own 7.62 NATO battle rifles, as that's what 7.62 NATO rifles are, in the 1950s. FN adapted its .280 British design to 7.62 NATO, creating the FN FAL, which was widely used all over the globe and still is to some extent. German designers, working first in Spain, and then in Germany, designed the rifles that became the CETME and the G3.
And then came the Vietnam War.
The M14 was a great battle rifle. It was accurate, for one thing, and it perfectly fit the role the US had anticipated it filling. For that matter, the FAL became a legendary battle rifle, and the G3 actually managed to fit the role of battle rifle and assault rifle amazingly well, because of its peculiar action design. But Vietnam was a dense triple canopy jungle, which made any full sized rifle bulky by default. That wasn't the rifle's fault, as the Johnson Administration ultimately failed to appreciate, so much as a lesson in terrain. In close infantry fighting, it ideally suited the AK47 and its updated variant, the AKM.
Indeed, jungle warfare had taught this lesson before. During World War Two it had caused the British to develop a "jungle carbine" variant of the Lee rifle, which didn't point towards any defects in the Lee so much as it did to the conditions. The British also had heavily favored the M1 Carbine in the jungle. The US, in contrast, which had done less jungle fighting that the Commonwealth forces hadn't really picked up the lesson.
Another lesson that they were picking up, however, is that the Vietnamese people are tiny, and the full sized weapons they were being issued were not physically suited for them. All this caused things to begin rolling in an unfortunate direction, and that direction lead to the M16.
During the 1950s the U.S. Army, which is always experimenting with something, started experimenting first with the .222 Remington, a small Remington cartridge popular with coyote and varmit hunters at the time. For nearly unintelligible reasons, this lead to the .223 Remington, a sort of product improved, but barely, .222. A number of small rifles were developed by various manufacturers as part of the test, including a Garand action rifle by Springfield Armory and a M1 Carbine actioned rifle by Winchester.
If those sound familiar in someways, think Mini14.
A third participant in the program was Colt, the famous pistol manufacturer, which entered the field with the AR 15.
The AR15 was a Colt rifle that they had on the books due to having purchased the manufacturing rights of the AR design from Armalite, an arms manufacturing branch of Fairchild, the aircraft manufacturer. After World War Two Fairchild briefly thought about trying to get into arms, and their weapons designer was Eugene Stoner. He designed the AR action and the company subsequently produced the AR10.
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. 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 Stg44 had already done that, although following the war most nations reverted back to some degree to more traditional manufacturing. Even the first AK's, for example, used machined, not stamped, receivers, and some still feature wooden stocks.
Stoner's design also omitted any sort of advance gas system, such as 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 semiautomatic rifle used by the Swedes during World War Two (in which they were neutral) also used it. Like the M16, it had performance problems, which was something that was apparently not appreciated at the time.
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, however, 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.
Because Colt had acquired the Armalite design from that company, and didn't quite know what to do with it, they had done a wise thing, which was to fairly extensively develop it. As a result fo this, in the experiments of the late 1950s, it was a more complete rifle than its competitors, who had in fact not taken the project entirely seriously.
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 as a regular issue arm at any point. 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 and M1/M2 Carbines, the latter of which was a selective fire carbine the US developed at the end of the Second World War, somewhat anticipating the assault rifle, and somewhat not. It frankly, wasn't a very good weapon, as earlier noted.
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. It was, quite frankly, the only weapon made in the US in its class. 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 the US commander inVietnam, William C. Westmoreland, 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, given the tiny size of the Vietnamese solder and the fact that they were armed with legacy arms of the French in Indochina. Indeed, at that point they were fighting the war with M1 Garands and M1/M2 Carbines, the former of which was a giant weapon for them and the latter of which was lousy. The M16 seemed just the ticket.
The ARVN, however, 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. There had been teething problems with the M1903 Springfield and the M1 Garand as well when they were new, so that was to be expected. Additionally, it was just coming into production which always means that production was limited. 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 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 not receive them. But they were practically new. Nonetheless, Secretary of Defensen Robert S. 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 was fielded as the XM16E1,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.
Now, at this point, a person might reasonably ask, surely the M16 and M16 A1 weren't that bad?
Well, consider this:
Indeed, consider this, from the article:
In Vietnam, it became obvious at an early stage that the basic weapon, the M16 rifle, was a piece of junk. The infantry knew it, the field commanders knew it, and the Pentagon knew it. But only after the deaths of American troops was anything done.
The M16 replaced the M14, the most reliable and forgiving weapon yet designed. Heavy and slow in full automatic, it nevertheless kept firing when wet, muddy, or unlubricated. By contrast, the M16 was lightly built and fired a smaller round. But it jammed with the slightest amount of mud and required much more maintenance. As heat built up with repeated firings, the bolt stopped halfway through its return. The average American infantryman despised the M16. Most of it was plastic, just like a toy.
And:
Early in my tour in Vietnam, I was part of a raid into Cambodia on a huge enemy arsenal (called Rock Island East after the Illinois arsenal). Truckloads of weapons, medical supplies, and bicycles came back through Tay Ninh where I was with the South Vietnamese Army, the ARVN. There were thousands of Russian Kalishnikovs, which were quickly bought or stolen from the US trucks by ARVN troops. They left their issued M16s home for their wives to use. I was advised to get one myself, and so I did. It must have been 10 years old or more, but it was of a heavy, simple construction, brutish but reliable. Many American troops got themselves Kalishnikovs, and imagine our surprise to find out that, through American ordnance channels, the proper ammunition was readily available. At least somebody was looking out for us.
Not a cheritable view.
But we need to ask why did they keep it once we were out of Vietnam?
Well, the answer is that, at least at first, what choice did they have?
Keep in mind that Springfield Armory had been closed thanks to the McNamara and the AR15 forced adoption. The armory was closed in 1968 and its equipment sold into private hands. It's last product, the M14, had been made in large numbers, but not in sufficient numbers to equip the reserves or to even equip the Navy or the Air Force, in addition to the Army and Marines. The National Guard and Army Reserve were still equipped with M1 Garands at the war's end. Huge numbers of M16A1s had been purchased for the Army and Marines, and large numbers of M16s for the Air Force. At least, for the time being, there wasn't much of a choice.
And nobody wants to admit they made a mistake. Keeping the M16 for the time being was the only realistic option.
And in spite of its faults, it had some virtues.
One thing was that, in a jungle environment, it really was easier to carry. This didn't really translate into any other environment, but the recent experience was with a jungle war. Added to that, starting right about the time the country left Vietnam, they began to incorporate women into the services in expanded roles, and it was definitely easier for women to carry. This was so much the case that women at West Point carried it on the parade ground, rather than M14s, which remained for a time for the male cadets.
And the 5.56 round was a light recoiler, something that prior generations of soldiers would have paid little attention to, to some degree, but which was becoming a factor as the decades from World War One increased. A more rural group of recruits had not found the M1903 to be a heavy recoiler in that bolt action rifle firing the .30-06. Recruits started to complain, however, about the M1 Garand's recoil during World War Two, even though it recoils less than the M1903 due to its semiautomatic action. By the time the M14 was adopted, lots of recruits thought it was a heavy recoiler.
So, with no other source of arms, a change in service demographics, and lots of M16s, it was going forward no matter what.
But it was never fully accepted.
From the onset of the M16 there were those in the military who were very unhappy with it and unhappy with the 5.56. The two unhappinesses are obviously related, but not identical. Nor were the efforts, sometimes open, sometimes not so much, to do something about it.
The Marine Corps, which had never liked it, was responsible for improving it such that the M16A4 and M16A5 eventually came about, which a heavier barrel and much improved sights. But not after an initial attempt to dump the rifle.
The Army, at first, seemed more or less complacent on the M16, except for those elements which we'll address below that mounted rear guard actions against it. The Marine Corps, which sometimes was able to use its small size and vaunted reputation to go outside the normal supply chain, took a different approach, both of which accepted that the 5.56 round wasn't going away.
At first, the Marines approach Sturm Ruger to see if it could equip itself with the AC556, the selective fire variant of the Mini14. The AR15 now has such cult status in the US that its fans detest the Mini14 and recoil against such suggestions, but it did occur.
Ruger had picked up on the popularity of the civilian AR15, which started to build its cult status during the Vietnam War itself. Colt, as noted earlier, hadn't' really known what to do with the AR15, but it hit the jackpot with the Army's adoption. After that it stumbled around on how to sell the civilian semiautomatic variant, at first marketing it somewhat successfully to police departments, but then marketing it to civilian shooters. The weapon more or less sold itself to some degree, because any arm used by the military tended to have some popularity with civilian shooters. Ruger, however, also noted that the AR15s image didn't appeal to a more traditional group of shooters, and they speculated that the 5.56 round may prove popular in and of itself, but offered in a rifle that looked like a throwback to the beloved M14. Hence, the Mini 14.
The Mini14 actually is sort of a mechanical mating of the Garand action, used in the M1 and the M14, and the gas system of the M1 carbine. Like the AR15 and M15 Carbine, the Mini14 lacks a gas piston, setting it much apart from the Garand family of rifles. It instead used the M1 Carbine style of action in which gas is directly vented on a block, operating the operating arm. Like the AR15, its sort of a direct impingement system, but it's one that doesn't vent into the action and is accordingly fairly clean. The bolt and action, however, were very much from the Garands. Ruger first offered it for sale in 1973.
The Mini14 proved to pretty quickly be a popular arm with some police forces, including some international ones. This included some paramilitary policing units, and the weapon saw some odd use, such as squaring off on the British side, in a police application, against the AR180 on the IRA side, in Northern Ireland. Less appreciated is that it received some paramilitary use as well, to a small degree, such as in the Philippines. And it equipped the Bermuda Regiment of the British Army.
In some military and paramilitary use it was the selective fire version of the Mini14, the AC556, that was sued. This is the case of the Bermuda Regiment as well as in French paramilitary use, where they are locally made. This was the version the Marines inquired about. They took a different direction, however, when Sturm Ruger couldn't guarantee adequate production. Chances are high that, had it been able to do so, the Mini14 would have entered US service and be the rifle that we'd be discussing being replaced today.
The Marine Corps then turned to improving the M16 itself, which lead to the M16A2. The A2 featured a heavier barrel and new, much more precise, sights, making the rifle much more accurate than it had been previously, and it had never been inaccurate. The A2 also eliminated full automatic, which was a mistake, in favor of three shot bursts.
The Army also adopted the A2, and then the Army, abandoning the nonsense introduced into it by SLAM Marshall's work of fiction, Men Under Fire, started to reemphasize marksmanship and fire control. Optical sights came in, which lead to the A4 variant, which took a Picatinny rail, which allowed for optical sights to be incorporated. Those have become standards such that iron sights on the M16 are the exception, and not the rule.
Additionally, as any student of this topic knows, the M16 itself yielded in combat units, and unfortunately, to the M4 Carbine, a development of the carbine version first fielded as an experiment during the Vietnam War. The M4 carbine supplanting the M16 has been, quite frankly, stupid and unjustified, as the M16 is itself really only a carbine, but it came roaring in during the recent wars in the Middle East and basically its sex appeal, which was partially responsible for the original adoption of the M16, brought it in, in force.
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.
As all of this was occurring, the 5.56 became the NATO round, again due to US pressure, as had been the case with the 7.62 NATO. But there was European resistance to it. European nations would not accept the tiny 55gr bullet, and eventually a 62gr bullet was incorporated into the cartridge in a feature designed by the Belgians, but also influenced by the West Germans and the Swedes, the latter of whom are not in NATO (yet). The heavier bullet was an undoubted improvement. Since the second war with Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, even heavier bullets have been fielded by Special Forces units on a limited basis.
- Looking for a replacement, at first.
Even as all of this occurred, there were those in the Army who never gave up the hope of returning the US to a rifle firing a larger cartridge, or indeed, retuning even to the M14. They were sidelined at first, but by the early 1980s, they were resurfacing.
Starting in 1981, the U.S. Army engaged in a series of war games in Egypt. By the mid 1980s, these resulted in a series of recommendations regarding material that anticipated a large-scale US deployment in action in the Middle East. One of the recommendations was for a different rifle, one firing a cartridge that could reach out further and which didn't jam in the dust. Careful reading made it plain that the Army wanted the M14 back, at least on a theater basis. And in fact, steps were taken to make that happen.
Thousands of M14s remained in the service inventory. Indeed, at no point had the Army ever actually completely ceased using it. Special Forces units kept on using fairly extensively. And after 1981, the Army pulled enough M14s aside and reworked them such that they could be issued to what was designated the Rapid Deployment Force.
The problem proved to be, however, that when the day came to deploy to the Middle East, it was a much larger deployment than had been foreseen. Issuing a division worth's of M14s to troops who had been issued M16A2s or M16A4s would have been problematic enough, but several divisions worth was too much. When the first Gulf War came, it was too much. The M16 kept on being the longarm for most soldiers.
It was the second Gulf War, however, that really changed things. The defects of the M16A4 and M16A5 and the M4 became too much to ignore. So were the defects in the 5.56.
- Trying to fix what was wrong with the M16, the other approaches.
Setting the 5.56 aside, there were those who sought to fix what was wrong with the M16 without trying to fix what was wrong with the 5.56. This came to a head right about the same time that the problems with the M16 that lead to the resurfacing of the M14 did.
Indeed, such attempts started surprisingly early on, and in surprising quarters.
One of the first attempts to fix the M16 came in the form of the Rhino conversion, a kit which allowed the installation of a piston to the weapon. This did address what was directly wrong with the rifle, the unreliable gas system. The piston operated a rod which hit the bolt, allowing for a more reliable cycling. While the system did not see any military customers, it did form the basis for later similar systems that did.
Even before that, however, Eugene Stoner, implicitly conceding the design defects of the AR, designed a new rifle that was somewhat similar and very much not, the AR18. Also using stampings and plastic furniture, the AR18 reverted to using a piston. Started by Stoner and completed by Arthur Miller, ArmaLite hoped for military customers. Few came, however, and the rifle was for many years remembered mostly for its not very successful commercial variant, the AR180. It did see battlefield deployment of a type in Northern Ireland, where it squared off against the FAL and, ironically, the Ruger Mini14. Having said that, Japan adopted a modified variant in the form of the Howa Type 89.
Japanese soldiers with Type 89s.
After the 5.56 became the NATO cartridge work on fixing the M16, again, really commenced and H&K entered the field with a piston variant, the H&K 416. Basically a M4 variant with a piston, the H&K 416 proved highly reliable and saw widespread use with multiple nations, including the US, in 5.56 as well as 6.8 SPC. The US Army, however, put a stop to its use in spite of its success, getting ready to head in another direction.
Norwegian soldier using an H&K 416.
By the War in Afghanistan, the problem had reached a point of critical mass. A new variant of the M14 was introduced with new furniture, bringing the design up to date. While its not entirely clear, it seems likely that small numbers of M14s were actually manufactured again commercially in the new profile. M14s in new and old profiles were issued in substantial numbers, serving once again alongside M16s.
M14 EBR R1 in Iraq.
As H&K416s were pulled, FN SCARs appeared. The FN SCAR basically achieved what fans of the FAL had dreamed of, a rifle with a near FAL profile being introduced in 7.62 NATO as well as 5.56. Numbers of them were issued in the larger cartridge and remain in service as genuine battle rifles, while M14s and AR10s have gone on to the role of designated marksman's rifles.
Air Force forward control officer with a 5.56 FN SCAR.
The FN SCAR was a direct acknowledgment of the M16s and M4s problems. The 5.56 version served no other purpose whatsoever other than to be a reliable 5.56 weapon. The 7.62 NATO version served no other purpose other than being a battle rifle in a competent cartridge.
Navy SEAL with 7.62 NATO SCAR
So why not just issues the SCAR?
Why indeed.
Well, the Army decided fixing both problems with something new. A new rifle and a new cartridge.
It was a stumbling process, in part because of the legacy of the AR15 action and in part because of the thought that perhaps a giant leap in cartridges could be obtained. The latter proved impossible, but something new was created, the 6.8x51 cartridge and the XM5 rifle, or, rather, carbine.
Neither is really particularly radical.
The 6.8x51 cartridge is an intermediate size cartridge of about .270 caliber which, due a steel base, can develop fairly high pressure, about 20,000 psi over the norm. FWIW, this cartridge, in terms of its bullet size and case length, it is almost identical to the .276 Pedersen. It obviously has much higher chamber pressure and would not therefore have identical performance. I only note that as in some odd way, we’re back to the 1920s, sort of, in a fashion. And of course there’s the .280 British round of the late 40s and early 50s, which was a bit larger in terms of bullets. Anyhow, I only note that as those forks in the road would seemingly have put us in a much different place now. The concept here is to stuff a compressed load into a shorter cartridge in order to give it the performance of a longer one. In other words, the concept is, basically, to match the performance out of the 7.62 NATO when fired out of a battle rifle length barrel (about 24”) from a 16” barrel. This will likely do it. That also explains the hybrid case.
As the laws of physics cannot be repealed, the problem then is what to do with the recoil. That explains the rifle using short and long recoil in its design, which is usually limited to older semiautomatic weapons like the Browning Auto 5 shotgun and the Remington Model 1908 rifle (both John Browning designs). That does nothing other than eat up recoil, although I frankly think that this may prove to be a functioning problem. Be that as it may, it’s interesting also as the old German G3 ate up quite a bit of recoil because of its peculiar action, and the Germans were reluctant to go to the 5.56 in the first place.
So here we are. Everything old, is new again, sort of.
But, we should note, there is something here that is radically different than what's come before, and that's the optical sight.
As noted in the article:
The XM5 and XM250 will be paired with the XM157 Fire Control, a ruggedized advanced fire control system that increases accuracy and lethality for the close combat force. The XM157 integrates a number of advanced technologies, including a variable magnification optic (1X8), backup etched reticle, laser rangefinder, ballistic calculator, atmospheric sensor suite, compass, Intra-Soldier Wireless, visible and infrared aiming lasers, and a digital display overlay. It is produced by Sheltered Wings Inc. d/b/a Vortex Optics, Barneveld, Wisconsin.
What's that?
It's the fire control optical system that integrates a variable magnification optic, backup etched reticle, laser rangefinder, ballistic calculator, atmospheric sensor suite, compass, Intra-Soldier Wireless, visible and infrared aiming lasers, and a digital display overlay. Reportedly, it calculates distance to a target and compensates for wind, instantly.
It also costs over $10,000 a piece.
For old soldiers there's something sad and disturbing in all of this, but it make sense. . . maybe. The issue is the price. That price alone, even if it comes in at half the initial costs, is huge. And that should give reason to pause. The rifle may not, I suspect, end up equipped with this. And if it does, at some point the rifle will spread to men other than infantrymen, but with cheaper optical sights.
Right now, I'd note, it's not going to spread to the Marine Corps. They are taking the XM8. They've adopted the H&K 416, in the form of the M27, and supposedly will stick with it, and the 5.56.
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