The Gun

dogged it. As it was handed out, modified and renamed the M-16,[21] many troops were not trained on it or equipped with the necessary equipment to clean it. Its proponents in the Pentagon first believed the most optimistic forecasts about the M-16’s suitability for battle. Then they dismissed reports of problems when its performance did not match the hype. Moreover, the M-16’s ammunition was neither fully developed nor subject to strict technical standards. For all these reasons, the M-16 was not a ready equalizer. It was the accidental rifle, pushed into service by a confluence of historical forces that left the United States military in a rush and unwilling to explore a wider set of options or a more careful course. These were conditions for disaster, as the Marines of Second Battalion, Third Marines were finding out.

An account of the M-16’s ascension from California curio to the American military’s standard firearm could begin in many places, but the conditions that gave the process its velocity began with the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961. Kennedy brought with him Robert S. McNamara as secretary of defense. McNamara was a graduate of Harvard Business School, a former top executive at Ford, and a believer in an approach to decision- making called “systems analysis,” which had been conceived in the 1950s at the Rand Corporation. Systems analysis centered on intensive study of problems and options, with examinations of costs, benefits, and risks of potential decisions. Its introduction to the Pentagon, along with a cadre of McNamara’s disciples, who called themselves the whiz kids, was a frontal challenge to the military establishment. McNamara’s followers saw themselves as a rarefied pool of talent, and they merged their boss’s aggressive management style with a Kennedy mandate to look past contigencies for nuclear war and develop the doctrine, organization, and equipment for flexible responses to conflicts overseas. This meant limited war, which in the context of the Cold War further meant the ability to counter the Eastern bloc in proxy fights. Several of McNamara’s officials turned their attention to the question of the rifle.

The rifle conundrum was a significant one. America’s military machine had entered the nuclear age with an array of fearsome killing tools. The air force had supersonic jets and intercontinental missiles. The army was fielding a new line of battle tanks to enhance its armored divisions that had settled into Western Europe. The navy had launched a nuclear aircraft carrier that steamed under the power of nuclear reactors sealed within its hull. Yet when it came to the most basic tool of empire and of war—the infantry rifle—the American military had sputtered and stalled. The government had spent more than a decade bringing forward the M-14, only to discover in simulations and in Vietnam that soldiers equipped with M-14s were outmaneuvered and outshot by opponents with AK- 47s.

The early 1960s were an unsettled time in American small-arms development. A pair of discordant ideas guided the army’s plans. On one hand was the M-14, a rifle firmly rooted in past designs. But the M-14—for that matter, any rifle—was both a nod to the army’s sense of what a rifle was supposed to be and regarded as the last of its kind, the end of the line. The army was developing what it called the Special Purpose Individual Weapon, or SPIW. As conceived, SPIW was to be the automatic dart gun for the Cold War, James Bond supplants Rifleman Dodd. It would fire bursts of needlelike flechettes from one barrel and grenades out another. By the early 1960s the project had met delays, and a variety of engineering problems was giving it the feel of unattainable whimsy. Its lightweight darts seemed less than ideal for punching through helmets, windshields, and armor plates. They struggled even to resist deflection in vegetation or heavy rain. The optimists who supported SPIW said a fully functional version might be ready in the mid-1960s and would replace rifles altogether. In the interim, troops would have their new M-14s. In the matter of shoulder-fired arms, the United States Army in the early McNamara era was very strange indeed. It simultaneously upheld old ideas about rifles and hitched its future to a fantastic dream. Somehow it had missed the weapon that was both feasible and the direction in which small-arms evolution had actually headed: the assault rifle.

McNamara sensed at least this much. In October 1962, after his aides had examined the gun gap, he wrote a secret memorandum to Cyrus R. Vance, the secretary of the army. The memorandum was a marker of bureaucratic exasperation. “I have seen certain evidence,” he wrote:

…which appears to indicate that: 1. With the M-14 rifle in 1962, we are equipping our forces with a weapon definitely inferior in firepower and combat effectiveness to the assault rifle with which the Soviets have equipped their own and their satellite forces worldwide since 1950.

This was a painful declaration for the United States’ most senior military official at the height of the Cold War—a frank admission that the Soviet Union had leaped ahead of the United States in an important way. McNamara left no room for the army to equivocate. He knew that the army had rejected the AR-15 in tests. He also knew that the M-14, an army darling, was vulnerable to criticism. It had been created according to old ideas, after long delays and at steep cost overruns. It was heavy and long. Its ammunition was burdensome. It was difficult to manage on automatic fire, enough so that most M-14s issued to troops were configured to fire one round at a time.[22] And tactically it felt obsolete. Tests at Fort Ord and at the Hunter Liggett Military Reservation in 1958 and 1959 had discovered that five to seven soldiers armed with AR-15s produced more firepower and were more dangerous than eleven soldiers provided with M-14s.⁷ Small automatic rifles with little recoil and lighter ammunition allowed soldiers to move and shoot more quickly and accurately and over a longer period of time.

The defense secretary’s disdain for the M-14 could hardly have been more bluntly expressed. As far as he could determine, he wrote, the AR-15 appeared “markedly superior to the M-14 in every respect of importance to military operations.” McNamara’s displeasure with the M-14 was well placed. But it led to narrow thinking— the M-14 is not the best rifle, therefore the AR-15 is. A more systematic view would have recognized that the AR-15 was not necessarily the best option. It was, by any reasonable assessment, only the beginning of an American effort to design an assault rifle. Rifle manufacturers in the United States had not yet invested heavily in developing small-caliber, lightweight assault rifles, judging correctly, at least in the short term, that there was no government customer for them. The AR-15 was not the product of full competition within its class. It was almost the only rifle of its sort. The industrial base had not been tapped.

But McNamara’s pan came with orders that pushed the Pentagon on its course. He asked the army to share with him its views on the “relative effectiveness” of three rifles: the AK-47, the AR-15, and the M-14. And if the M- 14 was not the most effective of these three, he wanted to know what action the army recommended taking.⁸ The instructions were implicit and strong. Prove that the M-14 was superior to the AK-47 and the AR-15, or plan to make changes.

For those trying to sell the AR-15, McNamara’s Pentagon was the break they had gambled on. The new rifle had sprung from ArmaLite, a private concern in Southern California. In business terms, ArmaLite was an infant and an upstart, a company that began as a workshop in the Hollywood garage of George Sullivan, the patent counsel for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. Sullivan was an aeronautical engineer fascinated with the possibilities of applying new materials to change the way rifles looked and felt,⁹ and he had collaborated with an inventor and arms salesman, Jacques Michault, to develop plans for rifles that departed sharply from existing designs in the West. In 1953, Sullivan met Paul S. Cleaveland, secretary of the Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corporation, at an aviation industry luncheon.¹⁰ The pair talked about lightweight firearms and new techniques that might be applied to manufacturing them. Cleaveland mentioned the conversation to Richard S. Boutelle, Fairchild’s president, who was an aviation-minded gun buff, too. Boutelle and Sullivan soon agreed to collaborate under Fairchild’s sponsorship, and the company was founded in 1954 as a small Fairchild division. From the beginning, ArmaLite had energy, optimism, and curious possibilities for sales. Boutelle was a glad-handing dreamer hooked up to the jet age. A former major in the Army Air Corps and a passionate big-game hunter, he carried himself as an engineering visionary and salesman, and brimmed with ideas for bold modern products that might make Fairchild a global powerhouse. Boutelle spoke of his intention to manufacture “a lightweight train, a gasoline-filled aerial tanker, even a mechanically operated wild-turkey call.” His core business was in aircraft. He hoped a Fairchild turboprop passenger plane—the F-27 Friendship—would unseat the DC-3 as the dominant civilian air frame of the time.¹¹

Not long after forming, the company hired a former Marine with a background in aviation ordnance, Eugene Stoner, as its senior design engineer. ArmaLite’s tastes reflected those of its parent company. Stoner worked not with traditional steels and wooden stocks, but with aircraft-grade aluminum, new alloys, and plastics—materials