that made firearm traditionalists cringe. Fortunately for ArmaLite, the Fairchild executives had a sales approach as novel as their weapons. Boutelle’s long-standing friendship with General Curtis LeMay of the air force gave ArmaLite unusual access to an alternative market inside the Pentagon. By 1956, the air force had taken an interest in the AR-5, a collapsible rifle that ArmaLite proposed for inclusion in survival kits for air crews. The rifle weighed two and a half pounds and could be disassembled and stored inside its own plastic stock. According to ArmaLite, it even floated. The AR-5 never entered mass production. But it made ArmaLite, a firm that emerged from almost nothing at all, a contender for contracts in a business in which new firms usually met closed doors.
Stoner kept working. By 1956, ArmaLite was showing the AR-10—an automatic rifle that fired the standard NATO cartridge but ditched traditional lines and dress. If the AK-47 was stolid and proletarian, the AR-10 had the sleek look of 1950s modernity itself. Its receiver was forged aluminum alloy. Its stock and hand guards were molded plastics. It had a large handle at the base of its barrel that let it be carried like a briefcase. And it weighed less than automatic rifles under the U.S. Army’s review. Like the AK-47, the AR-10 could be fired on automatic or on single- shot semiautomatic fire. Its self-loading features were made possible by putting to work the same excess energy harnessed in the Kalashnikov: It diverted gas from burning propellant through a port in the barrel and back toward the shooter, where its energy was used to keep the rifle moving through its firing cycle. But rather than drive a piston, the expanding gases were routed through a narrow metal tube that blasted gas directly against the housing that held the bolt. This energy was sufficient to drive the bolt carrier and bolt backward and clear the chamber of the freshly emptied cartridge case. A return spring slowed the rearward motion of the bolt, then reversed it and forced the entire assembly forward again.
A prototype AR-10 failed spectacularly when its barrel burst in army tests. The timing of ArmaLite’s offering was serendipitous nonetheless. An advanced prototype of the M-14, known as the T44, was on an inside track to become the military’s new standard rifle. But within the bureaucracy, an insurgency was afoot. Several senior officers believed that an automatic rifle based on a smaller-caliber cartridge brought more benefits than those offered by the T44. They were examining the possibility of taking the German and Soviet intermediate cartridges a step further, with an even smaller and lighter round that could be propelled at velocities previously unrealized in any standard arm. The concept was known as small-caliber, high-velocity, or SCHV. One of the idea’s supporters, General Willard G. Wyman of the Continental Army Command, observed an AR-10 demonstration. ArmaLite, if nothing else, had an innovator’s spirit. Wyman arranged a meeting with Stoner, at which he asked him to design a version of his AR-10 to handle a .22-caliber round. Stoner and ArmaLite agreed. This informal compact marked a turning point in American rifle design.
ArmaLite faced a significant technical hurdle. It was one thing to make a smaller rifle, and another to make a smaller rifle that would be accurate and deadly at great range. The United States Infantry Board, an organization responsible for testing new tactics and equipment, had initially accepted the notion that the rifle should be accurate out to three hundred yards. But the army set a more demanding standard: The miniaturized AR-10 was to be able to strike and penetrate a steel helmet at five hundred yards.12 This was an arbitrary requirement, more suited to presentations in conference rooms than related to the conditions of most warfighting. But ArmaLite had no choice. Stoner redesigned a .222 Remington round, a commercially available cartridge well suited for long- range varmint shooting. For a rifle round that would be fired at men, the .222 Remington was, in a word, tiny—at least by existing military standards in either the East or the West. It was 2.13 inches long and fired a bullet that weighed only fifty-five grains,13 roughly one-tenth of an ounce, which was less than half the mass of the Soviet bullet. Stoner altered the cartridge so it was slightly longer and could be filled with more powder. The result was a new round: the .223 (and later, the 5.56-millimeter round), the lightweight but high-powered ammunition for ArmaLite’s new project. The company dubbed its new weapon the AR-15.
The AR-15 looked like nothing else in military service anywhere. It had all of the nontraditional features of its bigger brother, the AR-10, including an aluminum receiver, hard plastic furniture, and the odd-looking carrying handle. But it was thirty-nine inches long. It weighed, when unloaded, only 6.35 pounds. Its appearance—small, dark, lean, and synthetically futuristic—stirred emotions. A rifle, after all, was supposed to look like a rifle. To its champions, the AR-15 was an embodiment of fresh thinking. Critics saw an ugly little toy. Wherever one stood, no one could deny the ballistics were intriguing. The .223’s larger load of propellant and the AR-15’s twenty-inch barrel worked together to move the tiny bullet along at ultrafast speeds—in excess of thirty-two hundred feet per second, almost three times the speed of sound. The initial AR-15 and its ammunition were in place. The first steps in an American shift in rifles for killing men had been made.
Now came the matter of selling it. But to whom? Outside of ordnance circles, several officers saw promise in the SCHV concept.14 But as a rifle that emerged from the private sector, and had such unusual characteristics, the AR-15 met predictable resistance in the army’s ordnance corps. The M-14 had been approved as the new standard rifle in 1957. The AR-15 arrived just as the army thought the conversation about rifles had closed. The idea of reconsidering the years of effort and enormous spending behind the M-14, and challenging the prevailing thinking with a high-concept minirifle, amounted to small-arms heresy. The entrenched interests offered ArmaLite little hope. The Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corporation, meanwhile, risked foundering. Its aircraft-marketing plans had not worked out. Nor had Boutelle’s other schemes. The company was starved for cash. On January 7, 1959, Fairchild transferred manufacturing rights for the AR-15 to Colt’s Firearms Division for $325,000 and a royalty-sharing guarantee with Stoner and Cooper-MacDonald, Inc., the independent arms-dealing firm that arranged the deal.15 From that point forward, the weapons were to be made in Hartford, Connecticut, by the descendant of the firm that had manufactured Gatling guns, and put the world on the path toward automatic arms.
With Colt’s, the sales push entered a new phase. Robert W. MacDonald, a principal at Cooper-MacDonald, was a graying curmudgeon given to hard-nosed deals. He had made a name for himself selling explosives in Asia.16 His firm had collected a neat $250,000 finder’s fee from the $325,000 ArmaLite-Colt’s licensing deal. But he stood to make more money—a lot more money—if Colt’s found customers for the AR-15.[23] First he faced an arms-trade policy hurdle. He could not sell the rifle to America’s potential enemies. And under mutual-aid provisions, he could sell it to Washington’s allies only if it was compatible with American arms. For the AR-15 to have international sales potential the rifle first had to be introduced, somehow, to American military use. MacDonald put his ample imagination to use, even as Colt’s pursued its own plans.
In summer 1960, Colt’s took the AR-15 on the road, including to police departments around the United States, where their sales team fired into a variety of objects (automobiles were a favorite) and engaged in almost giddy declarations of their rifle’s powers. “The penetrating effects of the .223 round are devastating from a practical standpoint,” one company summary read. “We are in a position to state that there is not a commercially manufactured automobile in this country that can withstand the penetrating effects of this weapon and cartridge.” The summary described the effects of roughly three hundred rounds fired into a 1951 Pontiac Catalina, which was shot in a demonstration for the Indiana State Police. The range was seventy-five yards.
The .223 cartridge will penetrate:
1. Bumper steel.
2. Frame steel.
3. Motor block (only enters, does not exit).
4. Both sides of car (broadside shot).
5. Trunk lid, back seat, front seat, dashboard, firewall and in some cases on into the radiator when fired from rear to front.
6. Wheel drums, coil springs and shock absorbers.
7. All glass (laminated shatterproof or tempered glass).
A few weeks later, Colt’s added a suggestive demonstration at a sales pitch to the police of Glastonbury, Connecticut. Its salesman put two large cans of water on the front seat of a 1955 Pontiac Tudor, paced off sixty yards, and opened up. The water cans were surrogates for a driver and passenger. Colt’s let everyone know just how poorly those would-be criminals in a getaway car had fared, and how well the bullets fired by the AR-15 had performed: “The bullet will still penetrate both sides of vehicle after passing through two 5 gallon cans of water placed in front seat of the automobile to simulate a body in the car. Both cans were ruptured and torn apart at the seams upon impact.” A single bullet fired by an AR-15, by the implicit wink in this kind of statement, was capable of
