Please correct those that call a 20,30 or larger magazine "high capacity". That is simply a propaganda tool and I hear it even from gun owners.
I didn't post this to get into an endless and pointless argument about AR/AK those arguments are stupid and a waste of time.
There were no US soldier in Vietnam prior to March 1965?
The very purpose of reducing the cartridge size and trying to maintain some sense of performance is what that round is all about. So in that same sense it would make sense that the developers would want to have as much capacity in the number of rounds a soldier could carry and shoot as possible.
Anyone who ever thought that ANY man, no matter how big or strong, could hold an M-14 on an area target full auto, was on crack.
The 20rd mag would empty in less than two seconds leaving the shooter dazed and wondering which direction he was now looking. And whether he was still standing.
In a 3rd burst at 100 yds, each round would be separated by 20ft or more.
We did have the M1 Carbine. It was also controllable in full auto. Somehow I doubt the usefulness of full auto in rifles (or pistols).
I know the British had their FALs made in semi only.
I think the M-16 turned out to be a great rifle and glad we fielded it. I still think the M1 Carbine would have been effective against small Vietnamese in light clothing.
“...As the anti-gunners gear up again ...”
Yeah, they’ll never quit. But this time, they don’t have the same muscle with in the WH and congress.
All the same, though. Never relax, never stand down, and never back down.
Which is still a damn fine rifle. This is what is sold today as an M1A and is quite popular. If you are looking for a good 30 caliber semi-auto rifle it's hard to beat an M1A Scout. And please, I agree an AR-10 is also a fine choice. Not trying to start a debate between those two.
"Accurate" being a relative term.
Damn M-16 was a disaster. When we got it in late ‘66, it had crappy sights, a cheesy stock that shattered if you hit anyone with it, and jammed over and over. We had to carry assembled cleaning rods, like a Civil War muzzle loader, to knock the seized cartridge cases out of the chambers.
The M-16 was a least-bidder weapon designed by somebody with no combat experience at all. Otherwise Stoner wouldn’t have designed a weapon with an inaccessible chamber for warfare in a filthy tropical environment. Scores of Marines and soldiers died because that cheap piece of crap jammed solid at the worst possible time or missed when it should have hit, or when it did hit someone, they just kept going.
If we needed any evidence that our country didn’t care much about us, the M-16 was the final slap in the face.
That was an excellant artical on the M16 and its variants.When I in the AirForce in the 70’s I found the same issues with that weapon and it was all caused by the ball powder that the DOD purchased.
I don’t know if the ball powder was cheaper than the smokeless powder but it sure made a difference in the way the weapon had to be maintained.
After you fired a magazine of bullets with ball powder the rifle would be filthy with soot.Mix that soot with lubricating oil and it almost became like glue.
The Pentagon and the Department of the Army cost the lives of a lot of troops because they didn’t follow Gene Stoners Specifications.
In ‘68, we only had 20 round magazines for the M-16, and loaded only 18 rounds so it wouldn’t jam. I saw some Car-16s with 30 rounders.
The linked story makes a number of errors, the first being thinking they could improve on the story of the history of the M-16 that’s maintained at TGZ.
The chief problems with the M-16 were (as already noted) #1) the services’ screwing with Stoner’s design, and #2), failing to properly train the soldiers/Marines in its use, particularly the armorers.
The ball powder not only was dirtier than the IMR powders used to develop the rifle, it also ran at higher max pressure to produce the same target muzzle velocity. The military always has to focus on the MV because that’s what the weapon’s sight’s range calibrations are predicated on. If they’d loaded the ball powder to the same Pmax as the IMR powders, it would have had a lower MV and, at range, the sights would would have been shooting too low.
So they loaded the round hotter than Stoner intended and ignored the consequences, which included the weapons cycling ~30% too fast, which resulted in accelerated parts wear and sometimes — if the firing chamber was sufficiently fouled — causing the extractor to skip over the rim of the just-fired cartridge, or even just rip it off. In either case the spent casing was left firmly lodged in the chamber, and if you didn’t have a cleaning rod to use to dislodge it, this predicament left your BVDs swingin’ in the breeze.
The first couple of years the M-16 was employed in SEA, most of the soldiers sent there previously had been using the M-14 as a service weapon and had never so much as held an M-16 until they landed in Vietnam. In 1968, the Army published its internal review of a country-wide inspection of arms rooms, during which they found that EVERY unit in country was under- and/or improperly maintaining the weapon. The lone exceptions were two grunt units (1Bde/101st Abn and 173rd Abn Bde) and some snake eaters (5th SF), all of whom, not so coincidentally, also had been issued M-16s at their home station.
This report (Report of the M16 Review Panel, 1 June 1968) was classified until 1984, so the soldier’s stories claiming it was all Stoner’s fault already were well entrenched in our military lore before the truth of it ever saw the light of day.
FWIW, I personally knew a snake eater (now dead) who served in Vietnam in 1958. And he went there to replace some other snake eater. I don’t know that it’s recorded anywhere (in open source) just when the first American boots were on the ground, but the 10th SF was formed in ‘52, Ike was inaugurated in ‘53 and the French didn’t get run out of Indochina until ‘54. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Ike would have sent some SF over as liaisons to the cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
Uncle’s friend had a story that I didn’t understand was about this issue until years later.
So they get their shiny new rifles passed out and units start going out on patrol. Within a couple days one is entirely wiped out except for two people: one wounded sarge and this skinny stick of a teenager who dragged his ass out of the jaws of hell. Every single one of the fallen had had their rifles jam and were reduced to firing pistols or literally any other weapon they had along while the gooks let ‘em have it with AK’s on full auto.
Local CO’s kept the two of them safe and guarded so that their story got back to HQ. But when it quickly became apparent that their solution was to blame the soldiers, some quick-thinker moved every one of those shiny new rifles in a newly-made storage near the front lines and it just so happened to blow sky high the next time Charlie shelled the place.
IIRC at least one officer man caught a court martial under suspicion of treason, but he knew what would happen if his men were sent out with that misbegotten jam-machine.
I believe my uncle’s first tour in Vietnam was in the late 1950s.
Then one or two more tours, after that.
I’d use a lot of words to describe an AK, “Accurate” isn’t among them...