The history of the AR-15/M16 is closely linked to that of the M14, since the ArmaLite arms factory that originally ran the project first appeared on the scene as a rival to the not-so-famous M14 manufacturer Springfield.
A Little History: From the AR-10 to the M16
The ArmaLite was founded in the 1950s as a subsidiary of the Fairchild aircraft engine manufacturing company. The tiny company was created to develop various weapon concepts, due to its small size, there was absolutely no opportunity for serial productionas.
After some little-known concepts, the company’s first breakthrough came when the US armed forces issued a tender for a new assault rifle to replace the M1 Garand self-loading rifle (and many other weapons). ArmaLite is designed for its own 7.62 NATO caliber, He entered the competition with his AR-10 developed by Eugene Stoner.
Although the AR-10 received positive reviews, it was not able to fight its way through the bureaucracy of the United States: it was defeated in the competition together with the excellent Belgian FN FAL assault rifle, the winner of which was the M14, which later gained a bad reputation, to put it mildly. The AR-10 was produced in small numbers, with only a few countries buying it.
Experience on the battlefield quickly made it clear that the American armed forces had gone badly wrong with the M14, so the search for a successor began at a rapid pace.
In the case of the new weapon, the decision-makers wanted a smaller caliber, so Stoner recalibrated the AR-10 assault rifle for 5.56 NATO ammunition, and AR-15 sent to the armed forces for testing under the name
At this point, the army’s arms procurement department stuck its head in the sand and did everything to avoid having to regularize the all-plastic “toy rifle”:
tests comparing the capabilities of the AR-15 and the M14, for example, deliberately pitted the best M14s against AR-15s fresh out of the crates.
Around the same time, ArmaLite started to run out of money: despite the fact that its weapon performed well in the tests, serious orders did not arrive, so In 1959, the concept was sold to Colt, which had much more capital and greater production capacitywith the condition that they retain the ArmaLite AR-15 designation.
Colt made several changes to the concept: the cocking lever was moved from under the carry handle to the back of the gun’s holsterand the components were redesigned in a manner suitable for mass production.
However, the weapon remained in development hell even after that: during the tests, the air force, special forces, and South Vietnamese soldiers sang odes about the weapon, but the army tried with all its might to keep the M14. The stalemate was finally broken by Secretary of State Robert McNamara: In 1961, he stated that the AR-15 was a better weapon than the M14, but allowed the military to make modifications to their own variants. As a result, the Air Force standardized the weapon as the M16 and the Army as the XM16E1.
Disaster strikes
As soon as the massive use of weapons in Vietnam began in 1965, problems hit hard.
The training of the soldiers was the first problem: soldiers fighting in Vietnam were not given normal cleaning equipment,
moreover, because of Colt’s advertising, they were led to believe that the guns were “self-cleaning.”
To add to the problems, weapons were often cleaned with materials that corroded either metal (such as water) or plastic (such as mosquito repellents). A separate problem was that, contrary to the preliminary plans the internal parts of the weapon did not receive a chrome finishso they began to corrode in the warm humid jungle.
The biggest problem, however, was that the 5.56 ammunition used by the M16s was not supplied to the fighting formations with the powder charge they were originally tested with (they could not produce enough of it). Inferior quality gunpowder left much more dirt in the gunand the higher pressure often expanded the ammunition cases so much that they got stuck in the cartridge chamber with noble simplicity.
The army was prescient in some respects: its Their XM16E1s were equipped with a lock reset button, so the soldiers were able to prevent at least a small part of the mistakes.
By the way, the mentioned lock resetter has also received a separate legend: many people believe that if a gun has to be equipped with a “troubleshooting” button, then it can only be a low-quality device. The truth is that with perfect maintenance (as Stoner naively believed) the function would not be absolutely necessary, but at the same time apart from the M16s, essentially all weapons of the time offered the option, although not with a separate button, but by pushing the cocking lever forward.
The error is resolved, the reputation remains
In two years, by 1967, the American military managed to remedy the sea-sized problem: in all branches of the armed forces, the XM16E1 with chromed parts and a bolt slide was standardized as the M16A1put the correct gunpowder charge in the ammunition, started adding regular cleaning kits to the weapons, and even took the time to teach the soldiers the proper way to clean them.
After the above changes, the M16A1 was no longer an unreliable weapon at all.
It is worth noting that the original M16s and the earlier XM16E1s were liked by the more highly trained special forces who knew better how to maintain their own equipment, so in the right hands the original concept was also reliable. At the same time, it is a fact that the regular and conscripts in particular were less expected to take such care in maintaining their equipment under combat conditions.
The AR-15/M16 series then had a serious career: the original, The name AR-15 slowly began to denote semi-automatic weapons designed for the civilian market, but based on Stoner’s designand the M16, and the shorter M4 made from it, became the star weapon of the armed forces, similar to the Kalashnikovs.
Cover image source: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Source: www.portfolio.hu
