17 ms·

M-16: A Bureaucratic Horror Story (1981)

180 points by 80mph 8y ago

gumby 8y ago
Fallows references John Keegan's astounding book "The Face of Battle" which discusses Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme from the perspective of the combatants themselves, which was at the time, and to some degree still is, novel. The nature of combat and its tide is quite different from how it looks on the map, in a book, and even in the eyes of the commanders. It's a gripping read (nonfiction though) and has many lessons for the lay reader.
sandworm101 8y ago
Google "aussi pullback" (aka peelback) to understand why reliable automatic fire is often more important than range or even accuracy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_peel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_peel Practicing pullbacks on full auto was probably the most fun part of basic training. My rifle (c-7) was ancient but never jammed.
- stan_rogers 8y ago
  Ancient? That genuinely hurts. I got out just after first qualifying with the brand-spankin'-new C7. Now, the C1 was "fun".
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    The rifles at cflrs are ancient in that they are heavily used and poorly maintained by recruits. (All are upgraded to c7a2s, with the scopes.) Mine was from 1996. The newest in our platoon was 2004. I never realized how old they were until i got hold of a shiny new c8.
  - tlavoie 8y ago
    I was going to say... I was a reservist in the mid-80s, carrying FN C1s stamped 1959, or sometimes even 1958. They were heavy, but I still quite liked them otherwise.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  See also the street shootout scene in the Michael Mann bank robber film Heat, in which the bank robbers employ this tactic while trying to escape the police. (Arguably the tactical prowess displayed by the bank robbers was unrealistic, since it suggested the characters had a military background that wasn't otherwise hinted at. It's generally a great movie though, Michael Mann at his best.)
escherplex 8y ago
In discussions with older Viet Nam vets there were numerous complaints about the reliability of the earlier M16s. Seems squads would use captured AK47s when they could since they were found to be considerably more reliable in combat scenarios. Always seemed strange that the military wouldn't have adopted some re-engineered Kalashnikov design. The vets chalked that up to bureaucratic chauvinism.
- mgarfias 8y ago
  well, Stoner did design the AR-18/180 in ‘63 after the AR15 had been sold to colt and adopted as the M-16.
  - magila 8y ago
    I'm not sure what you're getting at. The AR-18 was intended as a cost-reduced substitute for the AR-15, hence the change to a stamped steel receiver instead of forged aluminum. Design wise the AR-18 is still more closely related to the AR-15 than the AK-47, although it is significantly different from both.
    - darkpuma 8y ago
      The AR-18 was in fact a technically inferior design. In an AR-15/M-16, the big deal with the "direct impingement"[0] system is that all the reciprocating mass is in line with the bore axis, which avoids imparting any angular moment into the rifle making it easier to keep on target when shooting rapidly. The AR-18 throws that away by having reciprocating mass (the short-stroke piston) above the barrel. And "shits were it eats" jokes aside, the 'DI' system of the AR-15/M-16 is very reliable. If you look at close in high speed footage of AR's and AKs being fired, you'll see that both rifle designs vent a lot of combustion gasses into the receiver when the cartridge is ejected, so the cleanliness of an AK compared to an AR is somewhat exaggerated. [0] Which is in fact a piston, with the 'piston' being the rear of the bolt, and the bolt carrier forming the cylinder; driven apart when the hot combustion gasses are piped in between them. But this is a controversial nitpick.
- int_19h 8y ago
ethbro 8y ago
I'm reading through Human Error by James Reason [1], on the basis of a HN recommendation. It's been excellent so far. As regards software error, we do so many things (standard style guides, pair programming, code reviews) to limit error, yet give so little thought to where and how errors come to be. And specifically, what methods would best combat them. This article and the procurement process it documents is a great example of "intentional but mistaken actions". Which is to say the actions taken were intentional, the actions were realized as intended, but the original formulation was flawed. Reason notes these errors tend to thrive in overly compartmentalized, deep, bureaucratic environments. Everyone is doing their job, but there's no one keeping an eye on the big picture when the train heads off the rails. The difficulty, according to him, is that higher-cognitive checks needed to short circuit these kinds of errors tend to be less effective (than lower, more primitive ones). IOW, we delude ourselves that everything is fine as often as we recognize the issue. I expect this is part of the secret effectiveness of pass/fail unit testing. It's hard to rationalize a red indicator into a green one. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Human-Error-James-Reason/dp/0521314194/ https://www.amazon.com/Human-Error-James-Reason/dp/052131419...
- ehmish 8y ago
  This one here is a slightly different case to "intentional but mistaken". It is however one I've seen in software engineering environments: Person A designs something (in this case it's a gun, in software it could be an architectural pattern), Person B then insists on adjusting it, either ignoring or misunderstanding Person A's idea, and the result is something that is quite flawed. The best solution I think for these sorts of problems is for either Person A to be in a position of authority such that Person B _can't_ modify the design, or for Person A to design it exactly how Person B expects it to be designed.
  - ethbro 8y ago
    I think the latter is the only tenable solution. The former presupposes that A is right, which is unknown a priori. It could very well be that A made a mistake, and B caught and corrected it! Or that B had a flash of genius and saw a better way that A missed. Which is how we arrived at, and still use in physical engineering, waterfall design. Its strengths were never meant to be adaptability to customer needs, but rather fully specified and communicated interfaces between components. Which is not nothing.
toomanybeersies 8y ago
The Pentagon Wars [1] is a black comedy film about the military acquisition process. It's based on the development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars
- metaphor 8y ago
  Apparently, the full movie can be found on YouTube[1]...for the time being. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU
  - smacktoward 8y ago
    As an HBO original movie, it's also available for streaming on HBO GO/HBO NOW for those who have HBO subscriptions. (I believe it can be streamed via Amazon Prime Video as well, as they have a partnership with HBO.)
- Rebelgecko 8y ago
  The "feature creep" montage is reminiscent of many software projects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA
  - jsymolon 8y ago
    When design sessions get out of hand, i usually quip, "Would you like a turret on that too?"
    - C1sc0cat 8y ago
      Why just the one :-) obvisly the T35 (soviet pre war tank that had turrets like cats have kittens) as the end game here.
      - alexhutcheson 8y ago
cco 8y ago
And yet 40 years later the AR15(M16/M4) is one of, if not the best firearm platform to have ever existed. It is really interesting to see to follow the sorted past of such a successful firearm.
- int_19h 8y ago
  It's hardly the best. It just happened to be "good enough", so we mostly stick to incremental improvements (free-floated rails etc) from here on, just as e.g. Russia does with AK - it's hard to justify redoing it from scratch, considering the relatively minor benefits of doing so. An in case of the AR family, this is further exacerbated by its modular nature, and the desire to preserve the now de facto standard interfaces between components when updating them individually (software engineers should find this part very familiar...).
  - cco 8y ago
    I added "one of" to nip this sort of argument in the bud but I guess it didn't work. Let's just agree to disagree, there is no such thing as "the best" so if it wasn't clear my comment was calling out that this rifle platform has been hugely successful.
    - reitanqild 8y ago
      > I added "one of" to nip this sort of argument in the bud but I guess it didn't work. You also added > ..., if not the best Personally I don't care, I just wanted to point out why people may start arguing : )
  - electrograv 8y ago
    It depends how you define “best”; by most definitions, it very much is the best, simultaneously across a wide range of categories (I cover its one caveat below too): Modern variants of Stoner’s design happen to be the lightest weight, smoothest recoiling, most accurate (by a factor of 2-10x), most upgradeable and customizable, and arguably most ergonomic rifles in the the world right now — with no exceptions that I know of. (Incidentally, this is why the AR15 is the single most popular owned firearm in America.) Please feel free to provide any counterexamples in these categories; I don’t really know of any, and I’ve studied this quite a bit. Most of its excellent performance is due to the direct impingement operating system, which as others have described keep the recoiling mass inline with the barrel (which means the recoil is pretty much entirely linear without any torque, which is virtually impossible to achieve with durable piston designs). This unique gas operating system design also minimizes the overall weight, because the DI’s compact design eliminates the need for a separate piston / op rod assembly (which in piston operated military designs, must be fairly heavy duty, or else they will break rather rapidly from the violent forces involved). Some say it also explains the extremely high accuracy of the design, by avoiding a heavy reciprocating mass from moving alongside the barrel with each shot, as in a gas piston design. Thus, this inherently light weight design permits you to choose either (1) a lightweight barrel yielding an overall weight significantly less than any of its competitors, or (2) use heavier and longer barrel which, despite yielding an overall weight matching the “lightweight” version of competitors, far, far exceeds their accuracy capabilities. It really is a remarkably well engineered system, when you realize that most of the early reliability issues were due to feeding it the wrong ammo (which it was not designed for) and other easily avoidable embarrassing mistakes of mismanagement. The only real disadvantage again comes from the direct impingement system, which causes the operating mechanism to get dirty and fouled up with burnt powder residue really really fast, whereas gas piston designs (used by virtually all other guns) pretty much stay clean and smoothly running even if you abuse them by never cleaning or maintaining them. There is something to be said for that, especially for military purposes: that is for example one reason why the AK was so successful; it just works. You can and should maintain it, yet if you don’t, it will still work reliably. So this is just about the only area in which other guns beat out the M16/M4/AR15; while it’s reliability is pretty much on par with any competitor, this remains true only as long as it’s kept cleaned and oiled etc. fairly regularly, especially if it’s used in dirt dusty environments. That said, the difference may not be as extreme as pop culture makes it out to be: A quality built M16/M4/AR15 will keep functioning for probably at least 5k rounds without any cleaning, before it starts jamming, and some extremely high quality civilian models have been known to go far longer than this in extreme “torture tests”.
godelmachine 8y ago
Since I see many rifle aficionados here, I am going to sieze this opportunity and ask a question which has been vexing me since long. Is Kalashnikova the first open source rifle in the world? Just like we have open source software where anyone can grab the code and start further enhancements on his own, it appears AK47 and other rifles of the Kalashnikova are open sourced, with many militias around the world able to either procure them or manufacture them on their own. Am I right in my proposed theory?
- azernik 8y ago
  It was not open sourced. It was produced and stockpiled in enormous quantities by state militaries, the Soviet Union tended to license the blueprints instead of shipping examples to its satellites, and then when all the assorted states using it collapsed they lost control of their stockpiles. A good book for the history of it is The Gun (https://www.amazon.com/Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743271734 https://www.amazon.com/Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743271734). Its essential point is that weapons of war are usually very durable goods, and outlive the geopolitical purposes for which they are produced and originally distributed. Kalashnikov-family rifles happen to have arrived in particularly unstable places. EDIT: Weapons built by local forces tend to be more... idiosyncratic. Though compatibility with AK ammunition is a desirable feature. https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/taliban-gun-locker-the-frankengun-of-wardak-province/ https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/taliban-gun-locke... Also, another example of this durability is the Humvees that have ended up in Syrian government hands after going through three different owners - US, Iraq, ISIS, Syria.
  - NickNameNick 8y ago
    I highly recommend the C J Chivers book. The section near the middle that discusses the issues with early m-16 usage is particularly good, and relevant here.
    - azernik 8y ago
      Interestingly, he just wrote an article-length piece going into the same topics, but keying off of recent mass shootings instead: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/world/ak-47-mass-shootings.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/world/ak-47-mass-sh...
etatoby 8y ago
> Through every day of combat in Vietnam, American troops fired cartridges filled with the ball powder that was the legacy of the ordnance corps. And if American troops were sent into battle today, they would use the same kind of ammunition. What?
- azernik 8y ago
  The bug has been fixed by spending more on the rifle; specifically, by chroming the barrel and by lowering the cyclic fire rate. The issue was less the ammunition than it was testing for reliability, changing a part of the system, and then not retesting and tweaking the rest of the system to fit. Modern M-16s and derivatives have a pretty good reputation for reliability.
- josephcooney 8y ago
  The article was written in 1981...I assume that is the "now" they refer to.
azernik 8y ago
A factor that the article doesn't emphasize enough is the extent to which schedule pressure contributed to the bugginess of the released rifle. The Kalashnikov had been designed in 1947, (hence, AK-47), but it took more than a decade before a bug-free version (the AKM) was considered reliable enough to make standard-issue. (When this article refers to "AK-47s", most of the actual weapons involved were actually AKMs.) The US, by contrast, had spent the decades since WWII resisting the assault rifle concept, so that when Vietnam rolled around their fantastically rich and well-funded military found its infantry outgunned by peasant militias wielding second-hand Soviet rifles. So the rifle went from initial acceptance, including these kinds of stupid last-minute design changes that are common in any project, to large-scale combat deployment within a year; normally, there would have been years of incremental usage to catch these bugs, but the rifle was so desperately needed that it was rushed to the front. A book I've recommended in another thread, which gives a great introduction to the history and impact of the Kalashnikov in particular and assault rifles in general, is C.J. Chivers's "The Gun" (https://www.amazon.com/Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743271734 https://www.amazon.com/Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743271734), or this shorter-form article he wrote in response to recent msas shootings (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/world/ak-47-mass-shootings.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/world/ak-47-mass-sh...)
- dingaling 8y ago
  > The Kalashnikov had been designed in 1947 1944 actually, there were examples in trials by 1946. 1947 was the year of adoption of a developed version but it was only ever called AK in Soviet documents. Something else the article gets wrong is use of a hyphen in M14, M16 etc. A minor point but immediately shows a lack of familiarity or research with the subject. It's like reading a 2019 article that talks about the i-Phone.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    1946 was the first design that was submitted to the trials. And it was almost completely redesigned after it failed in those trials. For one example, the AK-46 prototype was short-stroke piston. Take a look: http://fb.ru/misc/i/gallery/12424/2098509.jpg http://fb.ru/misc/i/gallery/12424/2098509.jpg
godelmachine 8y ago
I am surprised to see that nothing about DARPA’s William Godel and his impeccable role in the development of M16 has not been mentioned here. Taken from Wikipedia - >>In October 1961, William Godel, a senior man at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, sent 10 AR-15s to South Vietnam. The reception was enthusiastic, and in 1962 another 1,000 AR-15s were sent.[60] United States Army Special Forces personnel filed battlefield reports lavishly praising the AR-15 and the stopping-power of the 5.56 mm cartridge, and pressed for its adoption. For those who are interested more in Mr Godel’s role, please refer to The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberger.
mnm1 8y ago
This is a great example of how design by committee can ruin a great idea. Had they just used Stoner's original design, countless lives could have been saved. Instead committee after committee imposed their ideas, ideas influenced by various vile agendas. The banality of evil indeed. It also shows the stupidity of confusing belief with fact and what allowing that can lead to: "The Army’s official reasoning on the matter was that since it did not recognize the theory that ball powder was the cause of the problems, why should it care which powder Colt used?" Gee, where have I NOT heard this type of stupid argument recently? My belief is more important than fact. Of course, these high level generals could afford such stupidity. They weren't the ones in combat, being killed by the enemy for their stupidity. Good soldiers paid with their lives for such "theories." They should have put these high level theorists on the front lines. Death would have been more than deserved for their actions. The banality of evil indeed.
- ahi 8y ago
  Countless lives would not have been saved. Just different lives.
int_19h 8y ago
The article is a lot more accurate than I would have expected from a mainstream publication like Atlantic. Unfortunately, while they got the most important things correct, like the powder issue, there are some myths in there as well. I'll try to correct them to the best of my knowledge. First of all, credit where credit is due: Eugene Stoner did not design M16. He designed Armalite AR-10, which was chambered in 7.62x51mm, same as M14, and competed directly against it. It didn't do well in trials against M14 mostly because of Armalite's president Jim Sullivan submitted experimental prototypes for army testing over Stoner's objections; when their composite steel-aluminum barrel blew up in an extended fire test, that was that. But some of the brass were impressed by other advantages of the design even so, and when the army decided to investigate a .22 caliber rifle, they went back to Armalite and asked for a derivative design. Stoner didn't like the idea of a small cartridge, so the new design was done by his chief assistant Robert Fremont, assisted by Sullivan. So Stoner gets credit for developing the distinctive AR action, but not all the fine-tuning that article describes as "several different cycles must all work in harmony" that produced M16 itself. On the effect of faster and lighter bullets: all bullets destabilize when they hit flesh. No amount of twist that can be imparted by rifling can compensate for that - bodies are just too dense, you'd have to spin the bullets so fast they would come apart at the muzzle. So going down from 1:14 barrel rifling twist to 1:12 does not affect that, and neither does velocity. Yes, I know that it quotes Stoner on this; he was wrong, simply because they didn't have enough terminal ballistics research back then to know better. In modern military rifles chambered in 5.56mm, the twist rate is usually 1:7, sometimes 1:9 - and the same ammo still produces the same terminal effect in them. What matters, rather, is how the bullet destabilizes when it hits. A heavy bullet will usually just flip over so that it's going base first, but won't deviate much if at all from its trajectory. A lighter bullet will deviate more and earlier, causing curved wound channels. But if a bullet goes fast enough, it fragments, and then each fragment goes on its own separate curved wound channel, causing those devastating internal wounds. And that's exactly what the military 5.56 ammo does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hJZdtPcVdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hJZdtPcVdE (This shows the effect in ballistic gelatin, so there's no blood or gore. But it doesn't take much imagination to paint that picture for you once you have seen the sanitized effect, so it can still be very disturbing. Proceed with caution.) This, by the way, is also partly why the original velocity spec for ammo was so high. The article implies that 3250 ft/s velocity requirement for M16 was a part of "marksman’s outlook" carried over from M14, but that's not the case, which is obvious if you look at the latter's specs - its muzzle velocity is 2800 ft/s. If you rely on fragmentation as the primary wounding mechanism, you have to drive bullets so fast that they're still fast enough to reliably fragment at the range where they hit - the lower initial velocity is, the closer your effective range. And reliable fragmentation velocity for M193 5.56mm ammo - the kind originally developed for the rifle - is around 2600 ft/s. If it starts at 3250 ft/s, that translates to about 200 yards out of a 20" barrel - a number that corresponds nicely with the engagement distances typical of modern infantry tactics. The other reason for increased velocity is because it extends the "battlesight zero" range, which is the range of distances at which you can aim at the target without accounting for bullet rise/drop, and still hit close enough that it doesn't matter. Lighter and faster bullets have flatter trajectory early on, extending that range. But at longer ranges air resistance and wind drift become a greater factor, and higher sectional density to overcome them becomes more important than raw velocity. Thus it is generally the case that marksman and sniper rifles fire slower bullets than modern assault rifles, even if they share the caliber. On manufacturing process, they say that the parts were "stamped out". That's not quite correct, except maybe when describing the process very informally. AKM receiver is stamped out of a thick metal sheet, but M16 receiver is forged out of a solid block of aluminum, and then machined to completion. Forging is more expensive than stamping, and machining afterwards makes it slower, too. But you can't make stamped guns out of aluminum - it's too weak. And aluminum means less weight for the same strength. On the subject of reliability, it should be noted that in those first glowing reviews, it was compared to M14, which was not exactly a shining example of reliability, either. Nothing to do with the caliber - design and production quality issues. More details: http://looserounds.com/2015/01/30/the-m14-not-much-for-fighting-a-case-against-the-m14-legend/ http://looserounds.com/2015/01/30/the-m14-not-much-for-fight.... With respect to the powder problems, it's broadly correct, but the technical details aren't quite right. The real problem wasn't so much fouling as corrosion - the replacement Army gunpowder left residue that was far more corrosive, especially in a highly humid environment like the jungle. Even that might have not been a problem, if Sullivan didn't decide to drop chrome plating for the chamber to further decrease costs - it was the rust in the chamber that eventually caused the gun to jam in the field. Once they started chrome-plating the chambers, reliability problems mostly went away, although rust could still cause accuracy problems without frequent cleaning, because the bore was still not chromed. Modern military AR derivatives usually have the entire bore chromed, and it was already common back then - the original AK design already had it, as did M14, and Stoner's AR-10 even had a chrome-plated bolt - so this was pure penny pinching. The article kinda implies that chrome is unnecessary with clean-burning powder, but there are other good reasons to have it (or something comparable, like nitrocarburizing), which is why it's so pervasive even in cheap military guns today. It's also interesting that they talk about how "marksman’s outlook" negatively affected the original M16 design, but missed the opportunity to mention how it re-surfaced later with M16A2. Short story is that USMC took a by-then decent M16A1 that had those initial issues debugged, and went on a quest to turn it into a competition rifle they have always wanted. So they e.g. made the stock longer - which is great for that perfect bladed posture on the range, but sucks in tight spaces like vehicle compartments, or when wearing body armor, or if you're shorter than average. The best part, though, was removal of fully automatic fire in favor of a 3-round burst, on the basis that full auto is mostly a waste of ammo anyway and single aimed shots are where it's at - ironic, for a gun that was originally designed around controllable full auto fire. When Army saw the first results of that redesign, they were horrified, and wrote a scathing report on it. It's not that they didn't want a redesign in principle - there were plenty of legitimate improvements that could be made - but they didn't like the trade-offs in that particular redesign. However, USMC stood by it, A2 was already there, a hypothetical better Army redesign was not, and Congress back then would not approve a separate variant just for the Army. Most of the problems they brought up were eventually rectified later in M4 or M4A1. Makes for an interesting reading in retrospect, though. https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a168577.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a168577.pdf One of the people involved in that redesign shared some other bureaucratic horror stories online (as personal anecdotes, so take it with a grain of salt). For example, M16A2 added selector markings (safe/semi/burst) on the right side of the gun, which was weird because it didn't add the actual selector there - it remained on the left side only, as originally designed for right-handed shooters to use with their right thumb. According to the guy, it's an artifact of the managerial process that they had. At the very beginning, the officer in charge of the project asked the team to compile the list of desired improvements, sorted in descending order of importance. When they brought him a list spanning several pages, he threw out all but the first page, and said that everything that didn't fit couldn't have been important enough to bother with. The last item on that first page was ambidextrous selector markings; the first item on the following page was the ambidextrous selector itself. And so it went for 30 years, until they eventually added the missing bits in an M4A1 upgrade 5 years ago.
microcolonel 8y ago
We could've had the FAL, and some good people would probably have lived longer lives.
arethuza 8y ago
There is a also a sad story to tell about the UK's SA80 family of rifles - this link is from 2002 but does into the politics in some depth: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/oct/10/military.jamesmeek https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/oct/10/military.jamesmee... NB As far as I understand it, later models were a lot better - but did seem to take an awfully long time and a lot of money to get things right. Forgotten Weapon has a video on it, calling the L85A1 the "Perhaps the Worst Modern Military Rifle": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDCRop6CRwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDCRop6CRwY
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  If you really want to get some perspective watch Ian's videos on some 1930s and 40s semi-auto rifles. The SA80s ergonomics and build quality are what you'd expect from a decades older design.
  - arethuza 8y ago
    I'm only mildly interested in guns, but I find his videos absolutely fascinating.
    - Balgair 8y ago
      Gun-Jesus, Florida-man edition is a great channel. Some of his better videos on some strange weapons here: Khyber Pass scrap gun : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5S_qmBL_KM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5S_qmBL_KM Spanish Sunglasses Gun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHmFUT9tEdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHmFUT9tEdg Elephant Gun : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYlDgwo52tI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYlDgwo52tI The worst handgun ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9bULArrKs4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9bULArrKs4 Rocket gun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3IiWjdbUZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3IiWjdbUZg
- huffmsa 8y ago
  It was "so bad the Germans had trouble getting it to work" is the anecdote I usually hear. Which is a mixed bag, Nazis small arms were pretty bad, but the Germans have been making pretty good firearms since 1950.
huffmsa 8y ago
Interestingly, the M14 is only now finally getting entirely phased out. It found quite the niche doing exactly what it was designed for, middle to long range precision fire. Entirely tangential, but I really don't think John Browning gets enough credit for how good his designs we're. The M2 is still in regular use, and the M1911 keeps popping up despite the pentagon's best attempts to phase it out. An argument against design by committee.
- bluedino 8y ago
  What's the alternative to the M1911, the M9? Ugh. I'm sure the sidearm isn't that important in today's military, but a Glock (or similar) .40 S&W would probably be a much better tool Even if they had to stick with 9mm. I've heard the 1911 is kept around by Special Forces types who can use whatever they want for the most part. Same reason it's used by SWAT teams and such.
  - mkong1 8y ago
    My understanding is that government issue sidearms require a manual safety, immediately ruling out the Glock.
    - potta_coffee 8y ago
      This is to prevent NDs (Negligent Discharge). The ironic thing is, the SA/DA design with safety is more complicated and requires a lot more training to use properly, resulting in a higher rate of NDs (so I've heard).
  - aclsid 8y ago
    If money and logistics were not an issue, I believe the FN Five-SeveN with the specialty 5.7 cartridge would win hands down. It very much has done for the pistol what the AR-15 did for the rifle.
  - robdachshund 8y ago
    Sig p320 is the new sidearm. Officers and certain units can still get 1911s or modern variants like the m45. M9 is going bye bye due to some pretty big long term reliability issues.
Nimitz14 8y ago
Cannot believe noone was punished for this. Even if noone got payed, putting the people you're supposed to helping in harms way should be a punishable offense by itself.
swasheck 8y ago
Slightly OT: This is a timely find and post as we debate how and why Boeing got the 737MAX8 through approvals. This is such a salient quote: > Perhaps the truest explanation of why things happened as they did is the most ordinary: that human beings could not foresee the way that chance and circumstance could magnify the consequences of their acts.
cladari 8y ago
This is the straight scoop on the development of the M16. This is the channel for all things Colt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE0xcxwZg2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE0xcxwZg2M
robdachshund 8y ago
Good article but AR15 receivers aren't stamped, they are milled from a block of aluminum. That was a significant part of the design. This was in contrast to the AKM, FAL, and G3, the other popular service rifles of the era. They were all made from stamped sheet metal.

180 points by 80mph 8y ago

Fallows references John Keegan's astounding book "The Face of Battle" which discusses Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme from the perspective of the combatants themselves, which was at the time, and to some degree still is, novel. The nature of combat and its tide is quite different from how it looks on the map, in a book, and even in the eyes of the commanders. It's a gripping read (nonfiction though) and has many lessons for the lay reader.

sandworm101 8y ago

Google "aussi pullback" (aka peelback) to understand why reliable automatic fire is often more important than range or even accuracy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_peel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_peel Practicing pullbacks on full auto was probably the most fun part of basic training. My rifle (c-7) was ancient but never jammed.

stan_rogers 8y ago
Ancient? That genuinely hurts. I got out just after first qualifying with the brand-spankin'-new C7. Now, the C1 was "fun".
- sandworm101 8y ago
  The rifles at cflrs are ancient in that they are heavily used and poorly maintained by recruits. (All are upgraded to c7a2s, with the scopes.) Mine was from 1996. The newest in our platoon was 2004. I never realized how old they were until i got hold of a shiny new c8.
- tlavoie 8y ago
  I was going to say... I was a reservist in the mid-80s, carrying FN C1s stamped 1959, or sometimes even 1958. They were heavy, but I still quite liked them otherwise.
darkpuma 8y ago
See also the street shootout scene in the Michael Mann bank robber film Heat, in which the bank robbers employ this tactic while trying to escape the police. (Arguably the tactical prowess displayed by the bank robbers was unrealistic, since it suggested the characters had a military background that wasn't otherwise hinted at. It's generally a great movie though, Michael Mann at his best.)

escherplex 8y ago

In discussions with older Viet Nam vets there were numerous complaints about the reliability of the earlier M16s. Seems squads would use captured AK47s when they could since they were found to be considerably more reliable in combat scenarios. Always seemed strange that the military wouldn't have adopted some re-engineered Kalashnikov design. The vets chalked that up to bureaucratic chauvinism.

mgarfias 8y ago
well, Stoner did design the AR-18/180 in ‘63 after the AR15 had been sold to colt and adopted as the M-16.
- magila 8y ago
  I'm not sure what you're getting at. The AR-18 was intended as a cost-reduced substitute for the AR-15, hence the change to a stamped steel receiver instead of forged aluminum. Design wise the AR-18 is still more closely related to the AR-15 than the AK-47, although it is significantly different from both.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    The AR-18 was in fact a technically inferior design. In an AR-15/M-16, the big deal with the "direct impingement"[0] system is that all the reciprocating mass is in line with the bore axis, which avoids imparting any angular moment into the rifle making it easier to keep on target when shooting rapidly. The AR-18 throws that away by having reciprocating mass (the short-stroke piston) above the barrel. And "shits were it eats" jokes aside, the 'DI' system of the AR-15/M-16 is very reliable. If you look at close in high speed footage of AR's and AKs being fired, you'll see that both rifle designs vent a lot of combustion gasses into the receiver when the cartridge is ejected, so the cleanliness of an AK compared to an AR is somewhat exaggerated. [0] Which is in fact a piston, with the 'piston' being the rear of the bolt, and the bolt carrier forming the cylinder; driven apart when the hot combustion gasses are piped in between them. But this is a controversial nitpick.
int_19h 8y ago

ethbro 8y ago

I'm reading through Human Error by James Reason [1], on the basis of a HN recommendation. It's been excellent so far. As regards software error, we do so many things (standard style guides, pair programming, code reviews) to limit error, yet give so little thought to where and how errors come to be. And specifically, what methods would best combat them. This article and the procurement process it documents is a great example of "intentional but mistaken actions". Which is to say the actions taken were intentional, the actions were realized as intended, but the original formulation was flawed. Reason notes these errors tend to thrive in overly compartmentalized, deep, bureaucratic environments. Everyone is doing their job, but there's no one keeping an eye on the big picture when the train heads off the rails. The difficulty, according to him, is that higher-cognitive checks needed to short circuit these kinds of errors tend to be less effective (than lower, more primitive ones). IOW, we delude ourselves that everything is fine as often as we recognize the issue. I expect this is part of the secret effectiveness of pass/fail unit testing. It's hard to rationalize a red indicator into a green one. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Human-Error-James-Reason/dp/0521314194/ https://www.amazon.com/Human-Error-James-Reason/dp/052131419...

ehmish 8y ago
This one here is a slightly different case to "intentional but mistaken". It is however one I've seen in software engineering environments: Person A designs something (in this case it's a gun, in software it could be an architectural pattern), Person B then insists on adjusting it, either ignoring or misunderstanding Person A's idea, and the result is something that is quite flawed. The best solution I think for these sorts of problems is for either Person A to be in a position of authority such that Person B _can't_ modify the design, or for Person A to design it exactly how Person B expects it to be designed.
- ethbro 8y ago
  I think the latter is the only tenable solution. The former presupposes that A is right, which is unknown a priori. It could very well be that A made a mistake, and B caught and corrected it! Or that B had a flash of genius and saw a better way that A missed. Which is how we arrived at, and still use in physical engineering, waterfall design. Its strengths were never meant to be adaptability to customer needs, but rather fully specified and communicated interfaces between components. Which is not nothing.

toomanybeersies 8y ago

The Pentagon Wars [1] is a black comedy film about the military acquisition process. It's based on the development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars

metaphor 8y ago
Apparently, the full movie can be found on YouTube[1]...for the time being. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU
- smacktoward 8y ago
  As an HBO original movie, it's also available for streaming on HBO GO/HBO NOW for those who have HBO subscriptions. (I believe it can be streamed via Amazon Prime Video as well, as they have a partnership with HBO.)
Rebelgecko 8y ago
The "feature creep" montage is reminiscent of many software projects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA
- jsymolon 8y ago
  When design sessions get out of hand, i usually quip, "Would you like a turret on that too?"
  - C1sc0cat 8y ago
    Why just the one :-) obvisly the T35 (soviet pre war tank that had turrets like cats have kittens) as the end game here.
    - alexhutcheson 8y ago

cco 8y ago

And yet 40 years later the AR15(M16/M4) is one of, if not the best firearm platform to have ever existed. It is really interesting to see to follow the sorted past of such a successful firearm.

int_19h 8y ago
It's hardly the best. It just happened to be "good enough", so we mostly stick to incremental improvements (free-floated rails etc) from here on, just as e.g. Russia does with AK - it's hard to justify redoing it from scratch, considering the relatively minor benefits of doing so. An in case of the AR family, this is further exacerbated by its modular nature, and the desire to preserve the now de facto standard interfaces between components when updating them individually (software engineers should find this part very familiar...).
- cco 8y ago
  I added "one of" to nip this sort of argument in the bud but I guess it didn't work. Let's just agree to disagree, there is no such thing as "the best" so if it wasn't clear my comment was calling out that this rifle platform has been hugely successful.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    > I added "one of" to nip this sort of argument in the bud but I guess it didn't work. You also added > ..., if not the best Personally I don't care, I just wanted to point out why people may start arguing : )
- electrograv 8y ago
  It depends how you define “best”; by most definitions, it very much is the best, simultaneously across a wide range of categories (I cover its one caveat below too): Modern variants of Stoner’s design happen to be the lightest weight, smoothest recoiling, most accurate (by a factor of 2-10x), most upgradeable and customizable, and arguably most ergonomic rifles in the the world right now — with no exceptions that I know of. (Incidentally, this is why the AR15 is the single most popular owned firearm in America.) Please feel free to provide any counterexamples in these categories; I don’t really know of any, and I’ve studied this quite a bit. Most of its excellent performance is due to the direct impingement operating system, which as others have described keep the recoiling mass inline with the barrel (which means the recoil is pretty much entirely linear without any torque, which is virtually impossible to achieve with durable piston designs). This unique gas operating system design also minimizes the overall weight, because the DI’s compact design eliminates the need for a separate piston / op rod assembly (which in piston operated military designs, must be fairly heavy duty, or else they will break rather rapidly from the violent forces involved). Some say it also explains the extremely high accuracy of the design, by avoiding a heavy reciprocating mass from moving alongside the barrel with each shot, as in a gas piston design. Thus, this inherently light weight design permits you to choose either (1) a lightweight barrel yielding an overall weight significantly less than any of its competitors, or (2) use heavier and longer barrel which, despite yielding an overall weight matching the “lightweight” version of competitors, far, far exceeds their accuracy capabilities. It really is a remarkably well engineered system, when you realize that most of the early reliability issues were due to feeding it the wrong ammo (which it was not designed for) and other easily avoidable embarrassing mistakes of mismanagement. The only real disadvantage again comes from the direct impingement system, which causes the operating mechanism to get dirty and fouled up with burnt powder residue really really fast, whereas gas piston designs (used by virtually all other guns) pretty much stay clean and smoothly running even if you abuse them by never cleaning or maintaining them. There is something to be said for that, especially for military purposes: that is for example one reason why the AK was so successful; it just works. You can and should maintain it, yet if you don’t, it will still work reliably. So this is just about the only area in which other guns beat out the M16/M4/AR15; while it’s reliability is pretty much on par with any competitor, this remains true only as long as it’s kept cleaned and oiled etc. fairly regularly, especially if it’s used in dirt dusty environments. That said, the difference may not be as extreme as pop culture makes it out to be: A quality built M16/M4/AR15 will keep functioning for probably at least 5k rounds without any cleaning, before it starts jamming, and some extremely high quality civilian models have been known to go far longer than this in extreme “torture tests”.

godelmachine 8y ago

Since I see many rifle aficionados here, I am going to sieze this opportunity and ask a question which has been vexing me since long. Is Kalashnikova the first open source rifle in the world? Just like we have open source software where anyone can grab the code and start further enhancements on his own, it appears AK47 and other rifles of the Kalashnikova are open sourced, with many militias around the world able to either procure them or manufacture them on their own. Am I right in my proposed theory?

azernik 8y ago
It was not open sourced. It was produced and stockpiled in enormous quantities by state militaries, the Soviet Union tended to license the blueprints instead of shipping examples to its satellites, and then when all the assorted states using it collapsed they lost control of their stockpiles. A good book for the history of it is The Gun (https://www.amazon.com/Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743271734 https://www.amazon.com/Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743271734). Its essential point is that weapons of war are usually very durable goods, and outlive the geopolitical purposes for which they are produced and originally distributed. Kalashnikov-family rifles happen to have arrived in particularly unstable places. EDIT: Weapons built by local forces tend to be more... idiosyncratic. Though compatibility with AK ammunition is a desirable feature. https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/taliban-gun-locker-the-frankengun-of-wardak-province/ https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/taliban-gun-locke... Also, another example of this durability is the Humvees that have ended up in Syrian government hands after going through three different owners - US, Iraq, ISIS, Syria.
- NickNameNick 8y ago
  I highly recommend the C J Chivers book. The section near the middle that discusses the issues with early m-16 usage is particularly good, and relevant here.
  - azernik 8y ago
    Interestingly, he just wrote an article-length piece going into the same topics, but keying off of recent mass shootings instead: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/world/ak-47-mass-shootings.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/world/ak-47-mass-sh...

etatoby 8y ago

> Through every day of combat in Vietnam, American troops fired cartridges filled with the ball powder that was the legacy of the ordnance corps. And if American troops were sent into battle today, they would use the same kind of ammunition. What?

azernik 8y ago
The bug has been fixed by spending more on the rifle; specifically, by chroming the barrel and by lowering the cyclic fire rate. The issue was less the ammunition than it was testing for reliability, changing a part of the system, and then not retesting and tweaking the rest of the system to fit. Modern M-16s and derivatives have a pretty good reputation for reliability.
josephcooney 8y ago
The article was written in 1981...I assume that is the "now" they refer to.

azernik 8y ago

A factor that the article doesn't emphasize enough is the extent to which schedule pressure contributed to the bugginess of the released rifle. The Kalashnikov had been designed in 1947, (hence, AK-47), but it took more than a decade before a bug-free version (the AKM) was considered reliable enough to make standard-issue. (When this article refers to "AK-47s", most of the actual weapons involved were actually AKMs.) The US, by contrast, had spent the decades since WWII resisting the assault rifle concept, so that when Vietnam rolled around their fantastically rich and well-funded military found its infantry outgunned by peasant militias wielding second-hand Soviet rifles. So the rifle went from initial acceptance, including these kinds of stupid last-minute design changes that are common in any project, to large-scale combat deployment within a year; normally, there would have been years of incremental usage to catch these bugs, but the rifle was so desperately needed that it was rushed to the front. A book I've recommended in another thread, which gives a great introduction to the history and impact of the Kalashnikov in particular and assault rifles in general, is C.J. Chivers's "The Gun" (https://www.amazon.com/Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743271734 https://www.amazon.com/Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743271734), or this shorter-form article he wrote in response to recent msas shootings (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/world/ak-47-mass-shootings.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/world/ak-47-mass-sh...)

dingaling 8y ago
> The Kalashnikov had been designed in 1947 1944 actually, there were examples in trials by 1946. 1947 was the year of adoption of a developed version but it was only ever called AK in Soviet documents. Something else the article gets wrong is use of a hyphen in M14, M16 etc. A minor point but immediately shows a lack of familiarity or research with the subject. It's like reading a 2019 article that talks about the i-Phone.
- int_19h 8y ago
  1946 was the first design that was submitted to the trials. And it was almost completely redesigned after it failed in those trials. For one example, the AK-46 prototype was short-stroke piston. Take a look: http://fb.ru/misc/i/gallery/12424/2098509.jpg http://fb.ru/misc/i/gallery/12424/2098509.jpg

godelmachine 8y ago

I am surprised to see that nothing about DARPA’s William Godel and his impeccable role in the development of M16 has not been mentioned here. Taken from Wikipedia - >>In October 1961, William Godel, a senior man at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, sent 10 AR-15s to South Vietnam. The reception was enthusiastic, and in 1962 another 1,000 AR-15s were sent.[60] United States Army Special Forces personnel filed battlefield reports lavishly praising the AR-15 and the stopping-power of the 5.56 mm cartridge, and pressed for its adoption. For those who are interested more in Mr Godel’s role, please refer to The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberger.

mnm1 8y ago

This is a great example of how design by committee can ruin a great idea. Had they just used Stoner's original design, countless lives could have been saved. Instead committee after committee imposed their ideas, ideas influenced by various vile agendas. The banality of evil indeed. It also shows the stupidity of confusing belief with fact and what allowing that can lead to: "The Army’s official reasoning on the matter was that since it did not recognize the theory that ball powder was the cause of the problems, why should it care which powder Colt used?" Gee, where have I NOT heard this type of stupid argument recently? My belief is more important than fact. Of course, these high level generals could afford such stupidity. They weren't the ones in combat, being killed by the enemy for their stupidity. Good soldiers paid with their lives for such "theories." They should have put these high level theorists on the front lines. Death would have been more than deserved for their actions. The banality of evil indeed.

ahi 8y ago
Countless lives would not have been saved. Just different lives.

int_19h 8y ago

The article is a lot more accurate than I would have expected from a mainstream publication like Atlantic. Unfortunately, while they got the most important things correct, like the powder issue, there are some myths in there as well. I'll try to correct them to the best of my knowledge. First of all, credit where credit is due: Eugene Stoner did not design M16. He designed Armalite AR-10, which was chambered in 7.62x51mm, same as M14, and competed directly against it. It didn't do well in trials against M14 mostly because of Armalite's president Jim Sullivan submitted experimental prototypes for army testing over Stoner's objections; when their composite steel-aluminum barrel blew up in an extended fire test, that was that. But some of the brass were impressed by other advantages of the design even so, and when the army decided to investigate a .22 caliber rifle, they went back to Armalite and asked for a derivative design. Stoner didn't like the idea of a small cartridge, so the new design was done by his chief assistant Robert Fremont, assisted by Sullivan. So Stoner gets credit for developing the distinctive AR action, but not all the fine-tuning that article describes as "several different cycles must all work in harmony" that produced M16 itself. On the effect of faster and lighter bullets: all bullets destabilize when they hit flesh. No amount of twist that can be imparted by rifling can compensate for that - bodies are just too dense, you'd have to spin the bullets so fast they would come apart at the muzzle. So going down from 1:14 barrel rifling twist to 1:12 does not affect that, and neither does velocity. Yes, I know that it quotes Stoner on this; he was wrong, simply because they didn't have enough terminal ballistics research back then to know better. In modern military rifles chambered in 5.56mm, the twist rate is usually 1:7, sometimes 1:9 - and the same ammo still produces the same terminal effect in them. What matters, rather, is how the bullet destabilizes when it hits. A heavy bullet will usually just flip over so that it's going base first, but won't deviate much if at all from its trajectory. A lighter bullet will deviate more and earlier, causing curved wound channels. But if a bullet goes fast enough, it fragments, and then each fragment goes on its own separate curved wound channel, causing those devastating internal wounds. And that's exactly what the military 5.56 ammo does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hJZdtPcVdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hJZdtPcVdE (This shows the effect in ballistic gelatin, so there's no blood or gore. But it doesn't take much imagination to paint that picture for you once you have seen the sanitized effect, so it can still be very disturbing. Proceed with caution.) This, by the way, is also partly why the original velocity spec for ammo was so high. The article implies that 3250 ft/s velocity requirement for M16 was a part of "marksman’s outlook" carried over from M14, but that's not the case, which is obvious if you look at the latter's specs - its muzzle velocity is 2800 ft/s. If you rely on fragmentation as the primary wounding mechanism, you have to drive bullets so fast that they're still fast enough to reliably fragment at the range where they hit - the lower initial velocity is, the closer your effective range. And reliable fragmentation velocity for M193 5.56mm ammo - the kind originally developed for the rifle - is around 2600 ft/s. If it starts at 3250 ft/s, that translates to about 200 yards out of a 20" barrel - a number that corresponds nicely with the engagement distances typical of modern infantry tactics. The other reason for increased velocity is because it extends the "battlesight zero" range, which is the range of distances at which you can aim at the target without accounting for bullet rise/drop, and still hit close enough that it doesn't matter. Lighter and faster bullets have flatter trajectory early on, extending that range. But at longer ranges air resistance and wind drift become a greater factor, and higher sectional density to overcome them becomes more important than raw velocity. Thus it is generally the case that marksman and sniper rifles fire slower bullets than modern assault rifles, even if they share the caliber. On manufacturing process, they say that the parts were "stamped out". That's not quite correct, except maybe when describing the process very informally. AKM receiver is stamped out of a thick metal sheet, but M16 receiver is forged out of a solid block of aluminum, and then machined to completion. Forging is more expensive than stamping, and machining afterwards makes it slower, too. But you can't make stamped guns out of aluminum - it's too weak. And aluminum means less weight for the same strength. On the subject of reliability, it should be noted that in those first glowing reviews, it was compared to M14, which was not exactly a shining example of reliability, either. Nothing to do with the caliber - design and production quality issues. More details: http://looserounds.com/2015/01/30/the-m14-not-much-for-fighting-a-case-against-the-m14-legend/ http://looserounds.com/2015/01/30/the-m14-not-much-for-fight.... With respect to the powder problems, it's broadly correct, but the technical details aren't quite right. The real problem wasn't so much fouling as corrosion - the replacement Army gunpowder left residue that was far more corrosive, especially in a highly humid environment like the jungle. Even that might have not been a problem, if Sullivan didn't decide to drop chrome plating for the chamber to further decrease costs - it was the rust in the chamber that eventually caused the gun to jam in the field. Once they started chrome-plating the chambers, reliability problems mostly went away, although rust could still cause accuracy problems without frequent cleaning, because the bore was still not chromed. Modern military AR derivatives usually have the entire bore chromed, and it was already common back then - the original AK design already had it, as did M14, and Stoner's AR-10 even had a chrome-plated bolt - so this was pure penny pinching. The article kinda implies that chrome is unnecessary with clean-burning powder, but there are other good reasons to have it (or something comparable, like nitrocarburizing), which is why it's so pervasive even in cheap military guns today. It's also interesting that they talk about how "marksman’s outlook" negatively affected the original M16 design, but missed the opportunity to mention how it re-surfaced later with M16A2. Short story is that USMC took a by-then decent M16A1 that had those initial issues debugged, and went on a quest to turn it into a competition rifle they have always wanted. So they e.g. made the stock longer - which is great for that perfect bladed posture on the range, but sucks in tight spaces like vehicle compartments, or when wearing body armor, or if you're shorter than average. The best part, though, was removal of fully automatic fire in favor of a 3-round burst, on the basis that full auto is mostly a waste of ammo anyway and single aimed shots are where it's at - ironic, for a gun that was originally designed around controllable full auto fire. When Army saw the first results of that redesign, they were horrified, and wrote a scathing report on it. It's not that they didn't want a redesign in principle - there were plenty of legitimate improvements that could be made - but they didn't like the trade-offs in that particular redesign. However, USMC stood by it, A2 was already there, a hypothetical better Army redesign was not, and Congress back then would not approve a separate variant just for the Army. Most of the problems they brought up were eventually rectified later in M4 or M4A1. Makes for an interesting reading in retrospect, though. https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a168577.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a168577.pdf One of the people involved in that redesign shared some other bureaucratic horror stories online (as personal anecdotes, so take it with a grain of salt). For example, M16A2 added selector markings (safe/semi/burst) on the right side of the gun, which was weird because it didn't add the actual selector there - it remained on the left side only, as originally designed for right-handed shooters to use with their right thumb. According to the guy, it's an artifact of the managerial process that they had. At the very beginning, the officer in charge of the project asked the team to compile the list of desired improvements, sorted in descending order of importance. When they brought him a list spanning several pages, he threw out all but the first page, and said that everything that didn't fit couldn't have been important enough to bother with. The last item on that first page was ambidextrous selector markings; the first item on the following page was the ambidextrous selector itself. And so it went for 30 years, until they eventually added the missing bits in an M4A1 upgrade 5 years ago.

microcolonel 8y ago

We could've had the FAL, and some good people would probably have lived longer lives.

arethuza 8y ago

There is a also a sad story to tell about the UK's SA80 family of rifles - this link is from 2002 but does into the politics in some depth: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/oct/10/military.jamesmeek https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/oct/10/military.jamesmee... NB As far as I understand it, later models were a lot better - but did seem to take an awfully long time and a lot of money to get things right. Forgotten Weapon has a video on it, calling the L85A1 the "Perhaps the Worst Modern Military Rifle": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDCRop6CRwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDCRop6CRwY

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
If you really want to get some perspective watch Ian's videos on some 1930s and 40s semi-auto rifles. The SA80s ergonomics and build quality are what you'd expect from a decades older design.
- arethuza 8y ago
  I'm only mildly interested in guns, but I find his videos absolutely fascinating.
  - Balgair 8y ago
    Gun-Jesus, Florida-man edition is a great channel. Some of his better videos on some strange weapons here: Khyber Pass scrap gun : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5S_qmBL_KM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5S_qmBL_KM Spanish Sunglasses Gun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHmFUT9tEdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHmFUT9tEdg Elephant Gun : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYlDgwo52tI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYlDgwo52tI The worst handgun ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9bULArrKs4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9bULArrKs4 Rocket gun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3IiWjdbUZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3IiWjdbUZg
huffmsa 8y ago
It was "so bad the Germans had trouble getting it to work" is the anecdote I usually hear. Which is a mixed bag, Nazis small arms were pretty bad, but the Germans have been making pretty good firearms since 1950.

huffmsa 8y ago

Interestingly, the M14 is only now finally getting entirely phased out. It found quite the niche doing exactly what it was designed for, middle to long range precision fire. Entirely tangential, but I really don't think John Browning gets enough credit for how good his designs we're. The M2 is still in regular use, and the M1911 keeps popping up despite the pentagon's best attempts to phase it out. An argument against design by committee.

bluedino 8y ago
What's the alternative to the M1911, the M9? Ugh. I'm sure the sidearm isn't that important in today's military, but a Glock (or similar) .40 S&W would probably be a much better tool Even if they had to stick with 9mm. I've heard the 1911 is kept around by Special Forces types who can use whatever they want for the most part. Same reason it's used by SWAT teams and such.
- mkong1 8y ago
  My understanding is that government issue sidearms require a manual safety, immediately ruling out the Glock.
  - potta_coffee 8y ago
    This is to prevent NDs (Negligent Discharge). The ironic thing is, the SA/DA design with safety is more complicated and requires a lot more training to use properly, resulting in a higher rate of NDs (so I've heard).
- aclsid 8y ago
  If money and logistics were not an issue, I believe the FN Five-SeveN with the specialty 5.7 cartridge would win hands down. It very much has done for the pistol what the AR-15 did for the rifle.
- robdachshund 8y ago
  Sig p320 is the new sidearm. Officers and certain units can still get 1911s or modern variants like the m45. M9 is going bye bye due to some pretty big long term reliability issues.

Nimitz14 8y ago

Cannot believe noone was punished for this. Even if noone got payed, putting the people you're supposed to helping in harms way should be a punishable offense by itself.

swasheck 8y ago

Slightly OT: This is a timely find and post as we debate how and why Boeing got the 737MAX8 through approvals. This is such a salient quote: > Perhaps the truest explanation of why things happened as they did is the most ordinary: that human beings could not foresee the way that chance and circumstance could magnify the consequences of their acts.

cladari 8y ago

This is the straight scoop on the development of the M16. This is the channel for all things Colt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE0xcxwZg2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE0xcxwZg2M

robdachshund 8y ago

Good article but AR15 receivers aren't stamped, they are milled from a block of aluminum. That was a significant part of the design. This was in contrast to the AKM, FAL, and G3, the other popular service rifles of the era. They were all made from stamped sheet metal.