Oh great. A new war in Iraq?

The news reports today the following:

Iraqi government forces have captured key installations outside the disputed city of Kirkuk from Kurdish fighters.

A military statement said units had taken control of the K1 military base, the Baba Gurgur oil and gas field, and a state-owned oil company's offices.

Baghdad said the Peshmerga had withdrawn "without fighting", but clashes were reported south of Kirkuk.

The operation was launched a month after the Kurdistan Region held a controversial independence referendum.

The Kurds are the most politically competent group in the region and also the largest stateless people on earth. They're light infantry, in terms of military force, however.

And they also ran a decades long guerilla war against the Turks.

This would not appear to bode well.

An example of what's wrong with American tort law. The Las Vegas Shooting. . .let the tort cases begin.

An email list on legal events in Texas reports that a lawsuit has already been filed stemming from the recent shooting in Las Vegas. That story reported:

The plaintiff, a California college student who was wounded in the Oct. 1 Las Vegas mass shooting, has sued the hotel, the concert promoter, a gun accessory manufacturer and the estate of the alleged shooter.

Okay, I agree that an suit exists against the estate of the shooter. That's clear.  Indeed, that suit will be completely depleted in payouts due to such suits, I'm sure.

But as to "the hotel, the concert promoter, a gun accessory manufacturer". . . . hmmmm.

I suppose, in the heated climate we're now in, a person can argue about the bump stock manufacture, but I find that a rather dubious argument.  It's like arguing that the manufacturer of a hot car used in a robbery is liable for theft.  Or should the entire alcohol industry be liable for violence in the United States in general, given as it so strongly associated with all types of it?  Maybe the American Psychiatric Association should be liable for darned near everything in the United States by excusing all known conduct of every type and categorizing everything as something that you need a fluffy bunny for.

But the hotel?

Give me a break.

And the same with the concert promoter.

Bull.

Indeed, on the latter, the story is that the promoter had pretty good security in place.  Concert attendees weren't allowed to enter with arms. That would, in some circumstances, open up the debate about concealed arms, and one of the members of one of the bands did make a rather dim comment along those lines in favor of gun control to the effect that their concealed arms back in the bus did not good (no kidding, by the same line of reasoning the New Jersey State Highway Patrol also did no good, as they weren't there).  Anyhow, you'd sometimes seen an argument here that if only the attendees had been carrying concealed arms this wouldn't have happened or wouldn't have been as bad as it was, but no concealed handgun is going to be effective from somebody so distant shooting from an elevated position, obviously.  That doesn't mean of course that more concealed arms in something like the Florida terrorist attack from awhile back, and it was a terrorist attack, wouldn't have been quite helpful.  Anyhow, the suggestion that the concert promoters are supposed to anticipate this scenario is stupid.   The fact that lawyers advance such claims is not helpful.

Nor is blaming the hotel. Granted, I earlier wondered how on earth, and I still don't have an answer, this fellow got so many arms up in a hotel room. That's weird. But is it negligent?  It''s surprising, but I don't think it's negligent in any sense.  It''ll only be actionable properly, in my view, if the shooter had an accomplice on the hotel staff, and even that wouldn't normally be actionable as that would clearly be an improper act outside of his employment.  Unless we have a development here that we don't know about yet, I don't see it.

Which doesn't mean these things don't have an impact.

This is horrible, but we shouldn't litigate ourselves into a situation in which concerts can only be held in Death Valley and viewed by an audience that's largely naked or something.  Nor should we create a situation where you have to go through a metal detector in order to enter your hotel.  For that matter, hotels shouldn't be required to disarm their guests, I've been in plenty of hotels where I wished I might have a little personal backup quite frankly and I have experienced entries into my own residences, in prior places I lived, more than twice.  Self help can be a good thing in the real world.

Recently in some depositions a break occurred in which the Plaintiff's lawyer began to wax philosophic about our occupation and muse about how much we (lawyers) operated to change things, listing some. The only one I can recall is windows in Confessionals (which is a development I detest).  He then went on to note how much our occupation had improved things, and to ask "don't you agree?".  I replied "I don't think that at all".

We have, I think.

But the profession hurts things too. Stuff like this provides an example of the mechanism by which we do that.

Lex Anteinternet: The Miracle of the Sun, October 13, 1917.

A rare Sunday Morning Rerun.

As in, I think, the first ever.  

But we just ran this on its anniversary a couple of days ago, and therefore its appropriate.

Lex Anteinternet: The Miracle of the Sun, October 13, 1917.:

Yesterday we reported on the soggy First Battle of Passchendael, an event so wet that artillery fire proved ineffective and the New Zealand army accordingly had the worst day in its history.

I don't know how widespread the October rains were in 1917, but I do know that it had been wet in Portugal as well, as that's well recorded in regards to the Miracle of the Sun, the final 1917 event associated with the Marian apparitions at Fatima, Portugal, that year.

 

As noted here earlier, there had been an entire series of reports of Marian Apparitions in 1917, most of which occurred at Fatima but one report of which occurred in Russia.   This event is distinctly different from the earlier events as it was widely viewed by numerous people and came on the date that had been predicted by the three peasant children who had been reporting the Portuguese apparitions.

By this point, the Fatima apparitions had been receiving press reports and accordingly it had been reported that the peasant children had related that the vision of the Lady they had been seeing had promised a miracle so that "all may believe".  Large crowed accordingly gathered on the day of the predicted miracle.  The day was rainy but the clouds broke and the sun appeared to dance in the sky, an event reported by thousands of people.  People whose clothes had been sodden found their clothes dry, and clean, immediately after the event, a phenomenon even experienced by residents of a nearby village who had not attended the gathering.  A pile of rosaries that had become entangled on the ground near where the children reported the Marian apparition had appeared earlier were picked up immediately after and were untangled.

There are of course skeptics concerning the event and while even Catholics are not obligated to believe that it occurred, it is unique due to being experienced on a very widespread basis and, further, to have included more than a visual apprehension that something was occurring and to be experienced by people nearby who were not part of the gathering and who had even been inattentive to it.  Portuguese poet Afonso Lopes Vieira reported, for example, "On that day of October 13, 1917, without remembering the predictions of the children, I was enchanted by a remarkable spectacle in the sky of a kind I had never seen before. I saw it from this veranda".  It was also unique in not being limited to merely a visual experience, but to also feature numerous and distinct physical expressions.  If it was a mass hallucination, as some have claimed, it was an odd one indeed being experienced by over 10,000 people and to include their sight, smell and their clothing.

As an aside, the location of this event, Fatima, is a town  named for Fatimah bint Muhammad, the youngest daughter of Muhammad, according to Shia Muslims.  She was the only daughter of Muhammad and Khadijah. She was, in her adult years, the oldest of Muhammed's children.

Khadijah was the only one of Muhammad's wives to which he was married monogamously.  He only took up polygamy after her death.  She was married three times and Muhammad was her last husband.  She is known to have been a Catholic, and its known that her uncle was a Gnostic Priest.  Based upon what little is known of her, her Catholic nature seems to have held sway in significant ways in the household.  It's claimed by Muslims that she was the first convert to Islam, but given what little is known about Muhammad (to include even his name), this is quite questionable and indeed the contemporary nature of Muhammad's religious mission is open to question as well.  It may in fact be the case, and indeed likely was, that their marriage was Catholic in form (which would not have required a Priest at the time) and she maintained her Faith throughout their marriage.  Indeed, there is not insignificant evidence that Muhammad picked up elements of it and Gnosticism through his marriage to her and he may in fact have really been a type of Gnostic at one time, and perhaps for the rest of his life.

Assuming, anyhow, that what we know if his family life is correct (which is open to some question) Fatima was his oldest child to survive childhood and the only child of that marriage to make it to adulthood.  Of interest, she married Ali, Muhammad's cousin, but that marriage, like that of her mother's, was monogamous during her lifetime.  She would be one of seven of Ali's wives, but all the others followed her death. This again raises strong questions on what her beliefs were, and its known that she had rejected many suitors prior to Ali.  Anyhow, there's reason to believe that she had either absorbed much of her mother's Catholic faith or that she may also have actually been Catholic, a statement which would horrify most Muslims but which explains much of what is actually known about her.

This region of Portugal was conquered by the Muslims, quite obviously, who named the town after the person.  It was in turn taken back during the Reconquista.  More than one believer who has studied the Marian Apparitions at Fatima have pondered the choice of location and wondered about it.  Muslims have a fairly strong appreciate of Mary and there's been those who wondered if the Apparitions occurrence in some ways relates to a different type of Reconquista

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.^^^

___________________________________________________________________________________
*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?

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Ernie Pyle, the great World War Two journalist,  once quoted a sergeant in Italy as saying:"son of a bitch alive. . . son of a bitch dead."

Ernie, apparently, didn't believe any more in the Latin maxim "De mortuis nihil nisi bonum" than I do.

Ba'h.

And now we have this story from the BBC:

British IS recruiter Sally-Anne Jones was reportedly killed in a US drone strike in Syria, in June.

Jones, from Chatham in Kent, joined so-called Islamic State after converting to Islam and travelling to Syria in 2013.

Also from the Beeb:

A British jihadist reportedly killed by a US drone strike in Syria should have faced trial, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has said.

Asked if he would have preferred Sally-Anne Jones to be prosecuted, he said: "I think that people who have committed crimes ought to be put on trial.

"That way... when you interrogate someone, you get more information."

Jones had recruited Western girls to the so-called Islamic State after travelling to Syria in 2013.

It is understood she was killed in June, close to the border between Syria and Iraq by a US Air Force strike.

Whitehall officials have declined to comment publicly on her case, but have not denied the story.

The former punk musician from Chatham, Kent, had encouraged people to carry out attacks in Britain and had offered guidance on how to build a bomb.

Well, play stupid games, win stupid prizes, as the saying goes. 

I suppose figuring you are a Holy Warrior for a true cause, no matter how deluded, is one thing, but to urge people to blow up your fellow citizens, well, that is quite another.  Not that such conduct is unanticipated.  St. John counseled that:

. . .  in fact, the hour is coming when everyone who kills you will think he is offering worship to God.

Speaking of that cause which he served, sort of, but taking instead their fellow travelers in Afghanistan, the Canadian Boyle family, after five years of captivity in the hands of the Haqqani network, which the United States funded during the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, raped his wife and killed their newly born infant daughter.  I'm not saying that this is indicative of the views of all Muslims, but I am saying that Muslims from the Islamic regions of the globe do an oddly bad job of distinguishing their beliefs from such atrocities.

The Boyles were in the region, they have claimed as they anted to help those"who live deep inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan where no NGO, no aid worker and no government has ever successfully been able to bring the necessary help."  Noble, perhaps, but stupid.  There is a certain amazing naive nature in some folks in the West about going to the rougher regions of the globe and believing your good will will protect you.

Beyond that, however, if reports are correct the Boyles were "hiking".  Hiking?  In Afghanistan?  What sort of a dullard takes his pregnant wife hiking in Afghanistan?

One who, apparently, actually refuses an airlift home, after being rescued, on an American aircraft in protest of the American role in Afghanistan.

Now, Mr. Boyles was married previously, it turns out, to a woman who as a cousin of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner and now he holds a dim view of his present wife's country.  But under this circumstance, if you are offered a lift on a Air Koryo, the flagship airlines of North Korea, out of there, you freaking take it.

Now, I've already violated the societal nicety of "de mortuis nihil nisi bonum" here, i.e, speaking ill of the dead, so I'll go one further.  Mr. Boyles is an ignoramus complicit, in my view, in the death of his baby and the rape of his wife.  No, he didn't do it directly, but he should have allowed it to occur.  Unless his pregnant wife decided to fly to Afghanistan and walk out into the wild country full of wild men on her own and with a gun at the head of her husband, he has blood on his hands.

Best Post of the Week of October 8, 2017.

Not quite as busy week, post wise, as last week, but still a fair amount of posting for this week the week of October 8, 2017.

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

Lex Anteinternet: Is it murder?. The Face of the Executioner.

Was the Domino Theory Right?

A Mid Week At Work Query: How do you organize your week (and how do you stick to it)?

The Miracle of the Sun, October 13, 1917.

Vietnam: Could we have won the war?

Vietnam and the Law of Unintended Consequences: The AR15

Blog Mirror: A Hundred Years Ago; Hundred-year-old Advice for Avoiding Diabetes

Surprising to see how, advice wise, what comes around, goes around:

Hundred-year-old Advice for Avoiding Diabetes

It’s fascinating to see what people knew a hundred years ago about the relationship between diabetes and the foods they ate. Here’s a Q&A on this topic in a 1917 magazine:

Avoiding Diabetes

Question: Can diabetes be avoided by a proper diet?

The author wasn't far off the mark on suspecting sugar.  We woudln't, however think the same about coffee or tea today.

Poster Saturday: Knowledge Wins

Vietnam: Could we have won the war?

 

This is a topic that comes up about any time a discussion on the Vietnam War comes up (along with "how did we get in that?").  Could we have won the war?

This assumes that you agree, of course, that we didn't win the war. That we didn't seems self evident to me, but there's a small group of revisionist amateurs who insist that, no, we (the United States) won it.  The Republic of Vietnam may have lost it, they'll say, but that was after we left and that was not our fault and therefore not our defeat.

Well, by any rational measure, we lost the war.

And frankly the fall was fairly spectacular.  April 1975 saw not only the final fall of the Republic of Vietnam but also the fall of Cambodia.  Laos fell in December of that year.  A pretty spectacular final fall.

But did it have to be?  Could we have won?

At least some historians, some revisionist and some not so much, have answered that question "yes". Are they right, and what would winning in Vietnam have taken, and was that really politically possible?

Before we go further, let's further qualify our answer by noting that we're going to toss out the "if only our hands weren't tied' line of reasoning.  This became popular at some time in the 1980s, after the cycle of contempt towards soldiers swung to a late admiration for them.  While soldiers never deserved the contempt for the war that was levied upon them, the late concept that we fought with restrictive rules of engagement and hindered strategies weighted towards the enemy is just flat out wrong.  In every war since Vietnam we've fought under much more restrictive rules (arguably too restrictive in the case of Afghanistan) and to suggest that the Vietnam War was fought with kid gloves just doesn't match the facts.

B-52 on a bomb run during the Vietnam War.

It doesn't, anyhow, if you don't mean that we should have taken the war more directly to the areas outside of North Vietnam than we did, i.e., Cambodia and Laos, or if don't mean that we should have invaded North Vietnam.  Some do mean that, and we'll address those below.

Anyhow, with those qualifications, we'll look more directly at the topic.

One thing that seems abundantly clear now, given that we have access to their audiotapes, which were played in the recent Burns and Novik documentary, nearly every American President who served during the entire length of the Vietnam War, from Eisenhower to Nixon, felt there was no realistic chance of winning it. That's shocking given the things they actually did in prosecuting the war, or even just in getting into it (which we'll look at later) but it seems to be the case. Given that, we have to seriously question those who seriously maintain we could have won the war.  The men in power, at the time, did not think that was the case almost uniformly.  So, we some say we could have won it, they have to answer those retained doubts, even if those in the White House acted contrary to their own beliefs.

Which is not to say that there have not been those who have come about and challenged those assumptions.  There are at least four serious books that have maintained the war was winnable, or even that it had all but been won, when things developed, which did not need to, which gave us the results we got.  Historians Mark Moyer, Geoffry Shaw, and Mark Woodruff, amongst others, have all maintained that in relatively recent books.  Indeed, while Moyer's book was intended to be volume one of a two volume set (the second has yet to appear and its getting to be a long time), Woodruff's book, relying very heavily on statistics, nearly serves that purpose, with both books together covering the entire war.  Added to that at least books my William C. Westmoreland and William E. Colby, both of whom had active roles in the war, the first as the principal commander for much of the American involvement in the war and the second as the CIA station chief, have maintained, but in very differently fashions, that the war was winnable.

So was it?

1954-1963 (and maybe beyond?):  Winning or losing with Ngo Dinh Diem

Moyer and Shaw take the war up to the point of Diem's assassination as a separate and distinct part of the war, and I think they're right to do so.  The war after that point was distinctly different than before it. And many of the people who lived through it, including the Vietnamese, tend to view it that way as well, so we'll do the same.

 Ngo Dinh Diem

The basic gist of this argument is that South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was a misunderstood Vietnamese nationalist who had things in hand, but for interference from his ally the United States, and that if let alone, he would have completed the victory over the Viet Cong over a period of years.  That's a summation of the argument, but it doesn't really complete it.  And surprisingly, at this point, quite a few who regard Diem poorly and who also feel that the war was a lost cause from the onset agree with many, maybe most, of the salient points that the revisionist now raise.  Not all, to be sure, but many, maybe most, of the significant ones.

So what do people now generally agree about, in regards to Diem, and where do they disagree?

An imperfect Vietnamese Nationalist. . . but the least offensive one we could find.

Over time, people have come to an odd consensus on Diem, whether they like him or not.  It's come to be recognized that he was likely the best man to lead his country, which doesn't mean that he's universally admired now or that people agree we should have supported South Vietnam. Basically, for all his defects, real or perceived, he was the best there was.

Personally, he was hard driven and a true Vietnamese nationalist.  He hadn't been a tool of the French and nobody claimed that he was.  Indeed, even the North Vietnamese Communists, who of course did not like him, knew him, as he'd been pro independence.  He remained fiercely independent of mind after South Vietnam became and independent state, but it cannot be pretended that he made any real effort to hold the vote that was supposed to occur over reunification.

He also took a fiercely independent view of the war with the Viet Cong in the South, frequently in huge disagreement with his American advisers and the United States in general once the US became involved.  One of the real subjects of his disagreement was on the topic of American arms and military advice.  He wanted US military assistance, but the level of advanced mechanized equipment he was receiving concerned him.  And he did not always agree with the suggested strategy offered by his American advisers by any means.  Over time, particularly given the results after American withdrawal from the war in 1972, his concerns over American equipment and what it meant have come to be seen as correct.  Moyer is convinced he was correct in the early 1960s and that this was already playing a role in things going wrong in the war.

So both Diem's admirers and his detractors (and he has many detractors) have come to view as being about the only leader in South Vietnam who could lead the country at the time, that assassinating him was a huge mistake that threw the country into unending turmoil until its 1975 collapse and that his concerns that the South was receiving too much in the way of mechanized American equipment and advice on how to use it was correct.  Beyond that, however, there is little in agreement.

Some claim that Diem was a despot, ruling in a Western suit with an iron hand, and a minority hand at that as he was a Catholic in a Buddhist land. Others point out that Buddhism was fading in Vietnam and Diem actually acted to revive the Buddhist monasteries.  Self immolation of monks in protest of his rule is pointed out to be proof of his unpopularity, but it has since been conceded by some in that community that Communist infiltration was influencing their actions and that the first such act may have had more to do with a personal pledge than protest.  The truth of it is now difficult to sort out and it was then as well. What can be taken for granted, however, is that he wasn't a democrat in the Western sense and that he governed as a type of strongman.

None of which answers the question we posted from the start, although it does hint at the fact that his assassination made it more difficult to win the war, contrary to what the faction in the United States government who quietly hoped for his overthrow would have supposed.

 The American Way of War. . .or a Vietnamese War with American Arms?

 Early version of the ubiquitous M113 Armored Personnel Carrier in use by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.  In some ways, the US turned a huge percentage of its own Army and the ARVN into cavalry, or at least mounted infantry, rather than infantry, in the traditional context.

As early as the French Indochinese War the French had run into problems when units equipped with American equipment and trained to expect support from the thickly supplied American logistical system was not available.  It should not be surprising, therefore, when the Army of the Republic of Vietnam ran into the same problem.

In 1963 when Diem was overthrown the situation in the countryside was not good.  Looking at it today there seems to be no real hope in the retrospective offering that things would have somehow improved. But at least Moyer has claimed things were not as grim as they might appear.  Nonetheless Moyer concedes that part of the appearance of a problem, at any rate, is that the ARVN in the early 1960s had been supplied with American armored personnel carriers to fight a jungle war that their much more poorly supplied opponents fought on foot.

Now, at first blush it would seem that the advantage should have gone to the ARVN, and indeed the American military mission to Vietnam understood it that way.  With better equipment and with equipment of all types the ARVN should have done well, right?


Well yes and no.  The war they were fighting was a bush war to start with and some American equipment was of doubtful utility except to a larger Army trained to use it.  The ARVN wasn't that army, and the mere existence of such expensive equipment in an army that was not used to it raised issues on how to use it, and whether nor not to use it at all out of fear it would be lost in battle.  It granted mobility, but the mobility in a way operated to deter the remote stationing approach that the British had used in Malaysia before the advent of such equipment.

 M41 light tank in use by the ARVN. The M41 was a truly light tank at the time of its adoption, but its armament was sufficiently heavy that it would have been a conventional medium tank in the World War Two context.  For the fighting in Vietnam, it wasn't a bad choice. The US would come to equip the ARVN with the M48 "Patton", a tank that the US used very heavily in the war itself.

Moyer argues that in fact the ARVN was doing better, in its own way, with American equipment and its tactics than American adviser credited with. And quite a few people now seem to concede that American equipment may not have been the best thing that the ARVN needed in some cases.  Moyer argues that the American press was grossly negligent in reporting what was going on and that one well known military adviser at the time was personally creepy and wrong in his advice.  All of that may or may not be correct.

What does seem to be plain, however, is no matter how you view it, the war on the ground wasn't going well and therefore just letting it progress as it was, it seems plain enough, was going to result in an ARVN defeat sooner or later.  So just doing nothing or to keep doing what we were doing wasn't going to bring a victory about. Defeat truly seems to have been on the horizon.


 A South Vietnamese Syngman Rhee?

Which doesn't mean that the assassination of Diem did any good, in any sense, at all.  Everyone now agrees that this was a huge mistake.

That the US was complicit in his death is quite clear.  No, we didn't argue for him dead but only an idiot would encourage a Southeast Asian coup and not expect the deposed leader to end up in a bloody pool.  Murder is murder, and the murder of Diem, worst of all, put a bunch of corrupt figures in uniform in charge of a revolving chair presidency in the South. That alone was going to make the war harder to win.

But what if we'd operated to keep Diem in power and intervened like we ultimately did?

Well, we'll address the expanded infiltration below.  It would have, no doubt, have been a better thing to do than what we did do. But we likely never would have been able to ignore Diem to the same extent we did Syngman Rhee during the Korean War.  Rhee was a strong figure, to be sure, but the US presence in South Korea came to so completely dominate the war that we could, and basically did, ignore South Korean input after a certain point.

Diem was too strong of personality. But that likely would have been a good thing, quite frankly.  US hubris was part of the ultimate reason for the defeat.

 What about those Aussies?

 Royal Australian Rifles in Vietnam. We didn't ask them to come. ..  they asked us, as noted just the other day.

As can be seen from above, I don't think the ARVN was going to win without foreign intervention and I don't think any victory was on the horizon in the 1960-63 time frame. The South was loosing.  But what if the US hadn't chosen to be in charge of all actions everywhere?

One of the little secrets of the Cold War that occurred through successive administrations but is rarely talked about is that the US determined that, most of the time, it was better off running the show everywhere. We'd accept weak military partners if we got to call the shots, which is how the original financial and military imbalance came about in NATO. That only became really open in recent years when debates about whether to carry on with this or not broke out. Around about the time the civil war broke out in Libya we openly debated if we were better off carrying the freight and accepting the costs if we got to have the top hand on the stick for determining what occurred. We never really finished that debate.

In the early 1960s there was no debate. We just accepted that we were the Western superpower and it was up to us. We'd like help, but be sure, but if help was not in the offering we could do it alone.

Well, that probably was never the smartest policy.

It is a policy that Australia bought into as it was used to being a junior state.  Australia, as a result of World War Two, and accepted that the sun was setting on the British Empire and purposely decided to cast its lot with the United States, with Australia being the junior and the United States being the senior.  The Vietnam War soured Australia on that role and it doesn't view things that way anymore, but maybe the United States would have been much better off viewing things that way then.

Australia had a very vested interest, given its position on the map, in who won the Vietnam War.  The US could easily have urged Australia to act when Australia was threatening to go it alone.  And there's the one unexplored option that is never talked about. What if, when Australia said "if you don't go in, we will" the US had said in reply, "that's a great idea. . . we think you should do it"?

The Australians were, by that time, veterans of two jungle wars and had their own way of fighting them.  Less richly equipped than the US, they were more accustomed to fighting and staying in the bush itself and had seen how such a war could be won. They would have been unlikely to accidentally escalate the war as the US ultimately ended up doing. And they may have been willing to endure the long haul that winning a war in Vietnam would have taken, and it would have taken one.

This hypothetical has a lot of unknowns and frankly it ignores some things.  One thing that the Malayan Emergency had not featured was a border with a hostile nation, as the Republic of Vietnam had with North Vietnam.  North Vietnam was willing to match any opposing effort for as long, it seems as it might take. The Australians would still have faced that.

But they would also have faced the war differently.  There never would have been 500,000 foreign troops in Indochina. There wouldn't have been a massive bombing campaign against hte North. The war would have been more of a light infantry war in the bush, and the NVA wold likely not have been committed in the numbers which they were.  Indeed, at that point  the threat that the Australians might have to call upon the US and other Western powers might have deterred the Northern effort from getting  that large.

Or maybe it would have been an Australian failure, rather than a US one.  Even at that, however, perhaps an Australian failure would have been less of a major Western Cold War failure than the loss of the Vietnam War was for awhile.

1963-1975:  Could we have won, did we, and could we have prevented the fall?

 US Army advisers and Vietnamese Special Forces wearing the ARVN pattern "tiger stripe" camouflage uniform.  In this photograph the ARVN troops are still carrying M1 or M2 carbines while the US troops are equipped with the M16A1 rifle.

Most Americans who look at whether we could have won the Vietnam War look at the war after 1965, when we really came in, in strength.  A few a historians, like Woodruff, in fact claim that we had won the war by the late 1960s and then gave the victory away.

The conventional narrative, and the one that Burns and Novik take, is that we came in during 1965 in a series of escalating and poorly grasped steps and were matched by escalating supplies and men coming in from North Vietnam (with equipment from the Soviet Union and Red China).  By 1967 we knew that we were bogged down and couldn't figure out how to get out.  Under Nixon, a cynical deal was struck in which the US "Vietnamized" the war and negotiated a peace, knowing full well that the South had no long term chance at all.  In 1975 the North invaded and the game was up.

There's a lot to support this view, even though some historians do not accept it.  Perhaps the best evidence for it is that the Nixon White House tapes expressly had this view at the time, making it hard to contest.  Kissinger and Nixon on tape admitted that they didn't think the South was going to make it more than a couple of years.

So how can anyone contest that view?

Well, some do, and of course one of the things about the Vietnam War is that it seems a lot of people were wrong about what was going on at any one time, and we generally were completely clueless about what was going on in the North.

We now know, and somewhat knew at the time, that the Communist forces were in fact having an increasingly difficult time contesting the American and ARVN after 1965 and by 1967 were in pretty desperate straights.  It was getting difficult to recruit in the South for the Viet Cong and the northern attrition rate was ghastly.  Only a fanatic level of dedication on the part of the North allowed the war to go on at all.  By 1967 things were so bad that northern leadership had decided to gamble,in an act of massive self delusion, on throwing in all their chips on one big offense. That offensive became the Tet offensive, which was a massive bloody North Vietnamese defeat.

That it was a defeat is well accepted by every historian.  That it was a shock to the American public is not contested.

What is less well known is that as bad as Tet was for the North, they'd attempt offensives like that, albeit in a smaller scale, at least twice more before the United States had completely withdrawn. That suggests that the common view that many historians have had that the north was finished after Tet was wrong.  We have to keep in mind that with the North the United States was dealing with an army of a Communist dictatorship.  Such nations have never had any regards whatsoever for the lives of their own troops and have always been willing to suffer attrition rates that no democratic nation could stand.

And that's the problem with the "we could have won view".

Those who argue that we could have won after the 1968 Tet Offensive usually cite to morale figures and attrition rates for the proposition that the North had to give up. But in fact the North did not give up.  Some, like Woodruff, have argued that the ARVN had improved sufficiently so that it really could go it alone and that Nixon's Vietnamization program was not a cynical cover for getting out of the war, but rather a realistic turning over of the war to the native army on the ground.  Others have argued that the war could then have been won with one big push.  Let's take a look at the various views that existed and those that exist now.

One Big Push

 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.

Little considered now and not at all public at the time, some in the government argued after Tet that Communist losses were so high that there was an opportunity to end the war the same way that the North did in 1975.  Go big and invade.


William Westmoreland argued for that in his autobiography and, at the very least, he did approach Johnson for more troops following Tet.  After the Tet Offensive he went to President Johnson and asked for a couple hundred thousand more men.  I can't recall if he then expressed the view that the time was ripe for the US and the ARVN to go into North Vietnam but he was completely frank in his biography that this was his view.  Johnson rejected him flatly. And well he should have. Everything was wrong with Westmoreland's ideas at this point.

The concept that winning the war required another couple of hundred thousand men, even if they just stayed in South Vietnam, would have meant that we were obviously loosing it.  You can't have nearly 3/4s of a million men in a country just to contain it and pretend things are going well. And the idea of actually invading North Vietnam was berserk.

Invading North Vietnam only would have worked in an Avalon Hill rule book sort of way.  Avalon Hill games, for the un-initiated, were a set of strategy games that were closely based on actual military table war gaming.  Avalon Hill still exists, but the type of games we're speaking of it no longer makes, although some other companies do.  They're highly detailed and very closely model the actual military version that military men use to game strategy.  A feature of those games are limiting and expanding scenarios.

For example, I don't know if the original Korean War was ever a subject of an Avalon Hill type game (a later hypothetical Korean War, set in the 1980s, was) but if it were, it would be typical to put in a rules scenario for the Chinese not intervening when they did.  It would be an exception to the rules.  Or you might build in a rule that has the Russians intervening.  Various games of this type that gamed hypothetical second Korean Wars or a hypothetical war with the Soviet Union had all sorts of scenarios of this type.

So, in order to imagine an invasion of North Vietnam working, you have to build in a scenario in which the Chinese do not intervene. The trouble is, in a real war, they certainly would have.  If they intervened in 1950 to save a Soviet client state on their border, why on earth would they not have done the same thing in 1968?

So that idea was nuts.

The idea of simply adding 200,000 men wasn't any better either, as it wasn't politically or militarily realistic.  This too is something that could have only existed as an Avalon Hill option. That Westmoreland asked shows how disconnected from reality he was.

Invading North Vietnam would have surely brought the Chinese in to defend North Vietnam in force, and likely with far more men than we had committed to such an invasion.  There's absolutely no reason to believe that was not the case. They'd done that in the Korean War and they would have done it in the Vietnam War which was, after all, not that many years later.

Just adding 200,000 men to South Vietnam and perhaps raiding into Laos and Cambodia  probably wouldn't have done it either.  The United States already had 400,000 men in South Vietnam.  Ramping it up to 600,000 might have added a lot more combat troops to the field but at that number the US would have had a very significant portion of its existing military in Southeast Asia; beyond that which it already did. That would have required mobilization of nearly one third of the National Guard or a huge increase in the number of draftees if the nation wasn't to strip its defenses in other areas.  And it wasn't politically realistic.  

Assuming that Johnson would have been willing to add 200,000 men to the South alone, and keep them there for a few years, perhaps that would have worked, but perhaps not.  The same thing could have probably been achieved in a less taxing and risky fashion, however, by simply keeping on keeping on.

Keeping On Keeping On

U.S. paratrooper in Vietnam, equipped with M14, during 1967's Operation Junction City.

One thing that maybe the US could have done would have been to do, well, nothing.


I don't quite mean that the way it probably sounds.  Rather, what I mean is, if we were winning the war in some fashion by 1968, maybe we should have just kept doing what we were doing.  Not increasing the number of troops, and not decreasing them either.

That might have actually worked, if we could endure it.  The question is how long it would have taken.  A decade?  Longer?  It's really hard to tell. But at least we're at an option that isn't completely unrealistic.

But it darned near is.

The trouble with it is that the US commitment to the Vietnam War was a long one at that point as it was, and the casualty rate was sufficiently high that the public was growing very weary of it.  It doesn't seem to have been politically possible to carry it on forever.  To take, that is, a couple of hundred casualties fairly regularly, to keep POWs in the north indefinitely, and keep up the expense of a major tropical war indefinitely.  In a war of attrition, we may have indeed been winning, but we were suffering a societal and economic attrition as the NVA and the VC were suffering a human one.

It's easy to forget that now that we've been in Afghanistan for so long. But the difference is that the country just isn't bleeding at Vietnam War rates, and it isn't using a conscript Army to fight in Afghanistan while its holding a DMZ in Korea and a tense peace exists in Europe.  All that, except for the DMZ in Korea, has changed.  We had huge commitments in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and keeping a large army in combat for a decade would have been extremely taxing in every sense.

But perhaps we could have done it for a few more years.  Had Johnson decided to run for reelection, maybe we would have.  And maybe that would have worked.  The cost would have been very high in very fashion, but its a possibility that can at least be contemplated. But it also wasn't a sure thing.

Not stabbing the ARVN in the back.

Maybe Victimization. . . with American air power, could have worked.

It did for awhile.

Vietnamization may or may not have been a cynical ploy by Nixon, but the fact was that by the late 1960s the ARVN was fighting quite well, to a degree.

Taht is, some South Vietnamese units were showing themselves to be quite capable fighting in the style the Americans had taugth them, as long as it was in South Vietnam.  Outside of South Vietnam, as in the large scale attempted 1972 raid into Laos, they were second best to the NVA.  Inside of Vietnam, however, they were sometimes at least equal to it. They were improving. But they required American air power and logistical support.  After all, they were equipped like US troops and trained in the American way of war in fighting on the ground. U.S. airpower speaks for itself.

With American air power, they were able to stop the 1972 conventional invasion of Vietnam by the NVA.  That was costly, but it was also impressive.  There's no reason to believe that this would have been the case later on.

Specifically, there's no reason to believe that the ARVN wasn't perfectly capable of stopping the 1975 Northern invasion of the South with the aid of American air power. That air power simply didn't come as Congress wouldn't permit it and President Ford didn't want to get involved once again. So we backed out of Nixon's promise to provide US air power and we let the South fall.

Had we provided air power in 1975 the NVA invasion would have been an enormous and cost NVA defeat.  The North would not have given up, but it would have been hugely bloodied in a way that would have been hard for it to recover quickly from.  That alone would have given the South at least until 1980.

Had that occurred, it's possible to imagine a slowly improving, militarily and politically, South.  If the South could have held the VC back until the mid 1980s, it would never have fallen.  We'd still have two Vietnam's today, but the northern part of the country would not be the equivalent of North Korea, as North Vietnam was never ruled in such a woodenheaded fashion.  The North would have had to lighten up, as it ultimately didn't after the fall of the Soviet Union, and chances are it'd be hostile, but not as aggressive, toward the South as it was from 1954 through 1975.

So, maybe it was winnable.  Not in a pretty, the war just stops, fashion.  And not without the US over a long period of time.  We probably could have done that, however.  But politically, after the long war, the revelations about the truth of what had gone on in the corridors of power, the societal destruction of the 1960s, and then Watergate, we didn't have the will to.

Sic Transit
 

Which leaves us with this.  We, that is the United States, really did loose the war. We blundered along for a really long time, and in the end, we just chose to loose it, selling the Vietnamese allied to us down the river in the end.