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PEACE DIVIDENDS

“The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own.”

—Jeff Cooper, The Art of the Rifle

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A U.S. Army M.P. inspects a Chinese AK 47

In March 1965, the first American combat troops landed in Vietnam, many of them still carrying heavy M14s. At some point the troops struggled with the powerful but ineffective fully automatic function, which became so aggravating that soldiers began jamming the select lever, making the M14 nothing more than an M1 Garand with a 20-round magazine.

To make matters even worse, at the same time American troops were encountering Vietcong equipped with a remarkably reliable and durable weapon. The Soviet AK-47, known also as the Kalashnikov, was already being used around the world. The “Avtomat Kalashnikova” went on to be one of the most produced, most durable guns in history. During the Cold War—and beyond—it would be, for practical and ideological reasons, the weapon of anti-capitalists, anti-Americans, and revolutionaries of all stripes, used by gangs, guerrilla fighters, and terrorists around the world.

Most weapons were a result of trade-offs between power and rapidity, size or range. The AK-47, as the historian Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out, managed to find the “sweet spot” between “accuracy, lethality, speed of fire, reliability, cost of production, and ease of carrying and use.” More than any foreign-made gun, it would influence American attitudes about firearms.1

The tragic figure of Mikhail Kalashnikov was born in 1919, the seventeenth of nineteen children in a family of private farm owners in eastern Siberia. By 1930 the Kalashnikov clan was denounced by the Communist Party as “kulaks” who resisted Stalin’s forced collectivization and were exiled to a penal colony. Here his father used a rifle to hunt to feed the family, and Mikhail began fiddling with it. Though he had no formal training in weapon making, Kalashnikov began an apprenticeship as a railroad engineer before being conscripted into the Red Army in 1938.

First tasked as a mechanic and then engineer, Kalashnikov rose to become a tank commander. Wounded in combat in 1941 near Moscow, the young inventor claimed to devise the idea for a durable submachine gun that would help ward off fascism while he was recovering from his wounds. “When I was lying wounded during the war, I heard the other soldiers complaining about how the German weapons were better than ours,” he later said of his hospital stay in 1942. “So I was determined to invent something for the ordinary soldier—a weapon that would be simple, tough and better than any other in the world.”2

The Russians were not new to the automatic assault rifle, producing 1,500 Fedorov Avtomats in 1915. The gun’s inventor, Vladimir Fyodorov, had visited the Western Front in 1914 and witnessed the carnage generated by static machine guns. He pondered, much like John Thompson did, whether he could meld the power of the rifle with the versatility of a light machine gun. What he came up with was a recoil-operated, locked-breech weapon with a banana magazine that held 25 rounds. The gun saw limited use in World War I, although due to a lack of weapons it was used during the Soviet-Finnish war. But the weapon was simply too intricate and expensive to mass-produce, and it overheated quickly.

Kalishnikov would solve these problems. In an ironic twist of the Cold War, Kalashnikov initially benefited more from meritocracy—perhaps because he was working within the Red Army system—than his Western competitors. This is not to say he wasn’t beset by roadblocks, but his gun found success far quicker. By 1944 he had designed a gas-operated carbine that applied Russian ideas to the M1 Garand rifle. Two years later, “Mikhtim,” his prototype entry in the Red Army’s assault rifle competition, laid the mechanical groundwork for all Russian automatic rifles moving forward.

The next year Kalashnikov designed what we now know as the AK-47. It was as the Cold War was beginning that the gun became the standard-issue assault rifle of the Soviet army. It would be mass-produced in the historic Izhevsk plant founded by Tsar Alexander I, but also in many Soviet satellite nations. There are said to be over 100 million in existence today, feeding countless revolutions in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa.

The deceptively durable AK-47 might have looked cheap and felt rickety, but it could be disassembled, cleaned, and reassembled faster than any other military-grade rifle. While the American guns would be ergonomically superior and have far better range and accuracy, the AK-47’s loose-fitting parts gave it an advantage in nearly any kind of weather or terrain. It was powerful. It seemed indestructible.

•  •  •

Eugene Stoner, Kalashnikov’s lifelong rival, was nothing more than a gun hobbyist shooting off rounds of his strange homemade rifle on a local Southern California range during the summer, when executives for the struggling Los Angeles firm ArmaLite spotted the young man.

Stoner, an Indiana native who had grown up in Long Beach and enlisted in aviation ordnance in the U.S. Marine Corps, had just returned home after serving in the South Pacific and northern China during World War II. He would never find the fame of a Colt or a Browning, but his ideas would be implemented on a similarly grand scale. Like those gunmakers, Stoner, a tinkerer with an innate talent for mechanics, didn’t benefit from any formal engineering education, but his revolutionary gun became America’s standard military rifle and its civilian iterations would go on to be one of the most popular guns ever produced.

Stoner was something of an aviation technology expert when the men from ArmaLite first approached him in 1945. Stoner became the chief engineer of the small gun manufacturer. It made complete sense that the postwar start-up ArmaLite set up shop in the glitzy environs of Hollywood, California. The company, after all, embraced the kind of jet-age idealism that allowed it to break free of the constraints of traditional gun design. ArmaLite had shown early interest in hybridizing technological advances of World War II airplane design, of plastics and alloys, with their small arms. Although it took a long time for Stoner to get it right, and an even longer time to convince military leaders it could work, his creation dominates the rifle market to this day.

ArmaLite’s attempts to integrate lightweight plastics into arms—it was the first gun manufacturer to have a plastics specialist on staff—led to a string of prototypes over the next few years. Most would see limited success. It wasn’t until 1955, when Stoner completed the first version of his AR-10—a light, seven-pound selective-fire rifle—that the company began receiving some notice.

The gun would first be tested in trials at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in 1956. A late entry in the contest to replace the M1, the AR-10 performed admirably. It was lighter than its competition, and more accurate when fired in automatic mode. It was also perhaps a bit too jet-agey for the military brass, who chose to move forward with the M14, a gun they had already invested much time and effort in.

As we’ve seen throughout the history of American guns, men tasked with saving and taking lives were inclined to have conservative attitudes on matters of arms innovation. This is a reasonable tendency. As we’ve also seen, however, sometimes this inclination inhibited the adoption of advances that could save lives. The military’s insistence on embracing the M14 despite all its failings likely falls in the latter category.

Despite the rejection, many military leaders who witnessed the gun were impressed enough to urge the inventor to keep improving on his design. Stoner went back to work and emerged with an even sleeker prototype, the AR-15. Only the thin barrel and a few other parts on the gun were made of steel; the rest was constructed of fiberglass and aluminum. The new model weighed only slightly over five pounds and held a magazine with 25 rounds of .22-caliber bullets. The gun was air-cooled, and the gas that escaped from a fired round would be routed back through the bolt carrier.

The AR-15 prototype was entered in 1958 trials. Although penetration favored the larger M14, it still misfired 16 rounds per 1,000 shots, or three times the rate of the better-performing AR-15.3 Stoner later maintained that the gun had been sabotaged by forces within the Army who believed that larger, .30-caliber ammunition was a necessity for combat. (There is some evidence to back up his contention. In one test in the Arctic in Alaska, the AR-15 had performed dismally. When Stoner flew to Fort Greeley, Alaska, to investigate, he found his guns had been tampered with and rejiggered. Once fixed, the rifle performed as well as it had elsewhere.) In the final analysis, not only would the AR-15 outperform the M14 in a number of other important ways, it cost only around a third of the price to produce per unit. Despite the excellent results, in that same year Dr. Frederick Carten, head of the Ordnance Corps, reported that “the AR-15 had not demonstrated sufficient technical merit and should not be developed by the Army.”

At this point Fairchild, the parent corporation of ArmaLite, had endured enough red tape and intrigue and sold off the patents for the AR-15 and AR-10 to Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company for the sum of $75,000 plus 4.5 percent royalty on all further production. Colt, which had been flirting with insolvency during the postwar years, saw both the civilian and military potential of the gun. The company immediately dispatched salesmen to the Far East to broker foreign deals. The gun, as it turned out, immediately impressed the officials who witnessed testing and gained many champions but precious few sales. The problem was that most of these nations had agreements in place with the United States military that allowed them to purchase officially sanctioned weapons at far cheaper rates.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1960, when controversial Air Force general Curtis LeMay—the creator of the strategic bombing campaign in the Pacific theater during World War II and reportedly the model for General Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove—attended an Independence Day picnic sponsored by Colt, that the gun’s prospects would improve. As the tale goes, General LeMay was handed an AR-15 by Colt reps, who placed three watermelons at distances of 50, 100, and 150 yards. The general shot two of them and handed back the gun. When asked if he wanted to shoot the third, LeMay replied, “Hell, no, let’s eat it.” So impressed was LeMay after only two squeezes of the trigger, it seems, that he ordered 80,000 rifles on the spot.4

Whether LeMay was instantaneously smitten by the rifle, we will never truly know. What we do know is that, more than anyone else in government, LeMay became the champion of the AR-15. Stoner, who went on to work with Colt on the gun, needed such a sponsor, because at this point political issues, not technical ones, were holding back the gun’s success, the most concerning of which was that the inferior M14 was already in production. So, after much bureaucratic wrangling, the deputy defense secretary finally approved the production of 8,500 AR-15 rifles for the Air Force in 1961. Still, Congress would not authorize funding for the new gun. So General LeMay went to the Kennedy administration directly to make his case. It took the personal intervention of President Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, a former Ford executive whose technocratic instincts proved at times both helpful and detrimental to the AR-15, for the gun production to move forward. By 1962 the purchase was approved and plans were made for more prototypes.

At around the same time, the AR-15, through various means, had also begun showing up in the hands of American personnel in South Vietnam, where the United States now had hundreds of advisors. The reports that filtered back to military leaders and politicians extravagantly praised both the stopping power and usefulness of the guns in the jungle terrain of Southeast Asia. Finally, in 1963, McNamara was convinced that the AR-15 was superior to the M14 and met all the requirements of the universal firearm concept. After some modifications to make the rifle combat ready, production commenced, and in November of that year McNamara approved an order of 85,000 military-model AR-15s for the Army and 19,000 for the Air Force. The gun would be known as the M16.

It immediately received bad reviews. Worse, in Vietnam, serious problems emerged that threatened not only the gun’s future but the lives of those who carried it. In short, the M16 would constantly jam. According to many Marines, it was costing lives. “We left with 72 men in our platoon and came back with 19. Believe it or not, you know what killed most of us? Our own rifle,” one Marine told Time magazine in 1966.5 Another Marine wrote a letter to war critic Senator Gaylord Nelson that was reprinted in newspapers around the country: “The weapon has failed us at crucial moments when we needed fire power most. In each case, it left Marines naked against their enemy. Often, and this is no exaggeration, we take counts after each fight, as many as 50% of the rifles fail to work.”6

A subsequent investigation by a subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee found that “the failure on the part of officials with authority in the Army to cause caution to be taken to correct the deficiencies of the 5.56mm ammunition borders on criminal negligence.”7 For one thing, the M16 had been issued to troops without cleaning kits and a number of officers had declared the gun self-cleaning, which was simply untrue. The fouling was exacerbated because there had been orders from the Department of Defense to change the “stick powder” to “ball powder” in the ammunition. The ball powder allowed the weapon to fire at a much faster rate, but it also put more stress on the gun, causing jams. Another major glitch was that most of the guns did not feature chrome-plated chambers, which had long been known to slow corrosion and rusting and help cut down on jamming.

The Army quickly moved to retrofit the M16s, but great damage had already been done to the morale of those carrying the weapon and to the reputation of the gun. These doubts lingered. Although there was plenty of blame to go around—from the White House, which demanded the ammunition change, to the Army leadership, which failed to understand the proper maintenance of the gun—none of the problems were the fault of Stoner’s design. It was the government engineers who were tasked with making the gun combat ready.

Even with all these complications, the M16 performed much better than most Americans assumed, and once the mechanical and maintenance problem had been rectified, it would become more popular than Army leadership expected. A 1968 classified report on the M16’s effectiveness found that most problems with the rifle originated in the training in its use. Seventy-three percent of soldiers who were questioned had received absolutely no instruction on the gun before arriving in Vietnam. Yet, when asked, 85 percent of those soldiers still preferred the M16, or the smaller iteration of the gun, to any other rifle available.8

In a “President’s Blue Ribbon Defense Panel” regarding the M16 in March 1970, the author, Colonel Richard Hallock, laid out both the M14’s rise and the protracted history of the M16’s implementation.9 The colonel revisited all the testing and the many trials of the M16, both before and after adoption of the weapon. He noted that the M16 had been 10 percent more lethal in Vietnam than conventional wisdom assumed—and he believed even that figure underestimated the gun’s lethality. He went on to observe that 70 percent of U.S. casualties in Vietnam up until that time had been caused by small arms fire—versus the 25 to 45 percent in other American wars. Using this calculus, he concluded that the introduction of the M16 had likely saved around 20,000 American lives during the early years of the Vietnam War.

Both the Kalashnikov and the M16, two guns that epitomized the great upheavals of the second half of the twentieth century, would evolve over the decades, although the foundational ideas would remain the same. The Soviet gun was soon turned on the Russians as well, as its durability made it the gun of choice for militants of all denominations. The lives of the two inventors, on the other hand, could not have gone much differently. Stoner became a wealthy man, starting up his own company and living his final days in Florida. Kalashnikov, who claimed that he never made a penny from his famous invention, lived in a two-room apartment in Moscow on a pension, just like his neighbors. “Stoner has his own aircraft,” said Kalashnikov, who was unlucky enough to be born in a communist state. “I can’t even afford my own plane ticket.”10

The professional rivalry between the guns and the men outlived the Cold War, though on a personal level on much friendlier terms. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the affable Kalashnikov was allowed to travel and talk about the gun that bore his name. He first met Eugene Stoner in 1990 at Dulles International Airport, near Washington, DC, where both participated in a documentary filmed by the Smithsonian Institution. The duo, both self-taught gunmakers whose designs had come to define small arms in the late twentieth century, spent ten days discussing their inventions, the bureaucratic roadblocks they encountered, and the technical evolution of their ideas.

•  •  •

In 2006, as Americans struggled against Iraq War insurgents armed with his AK-47, the eighty-six-year-old Kalashnikov noted that “even after lying in a swamp you can pick up this rifle, aim it and shoot. That’s the best job description there is for a gun. Real soldiers know that and understand it.

“In Vietnam,” he continued, “American soldiers threw away their M-16 rifles and used AK-47s from dead Vietnamese soldiers, with bullets they captured. That was because the climate is different to America, where M-16s may work properly.”11

On Kalashnikov’s ninetieth birthday, the Kremlin ceremony was televised live as then-president Dmitry Medvedev decorated him with the Hero of Russia, the highest award in that nation. In 2004 he would license his name to vodka and umbrella brands in Europe.

Kalashnikov, who died at the age of ninety-four in 2013—President Vladimir Putin attended the extravagant funeral—is said to have regretted what happened to his invention. The gun designer had converted to the Russian Orthodox Church and was baptized at the age of ninety-one. The year before his death, he wrote a letter to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow expressing deep regret over the success of his rifle.

My spiritual pain is unbearable.

I keep having the same unsolved question: if my rifle claimed people’s lives, then can it be that I . . . a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?

The longer I live, the more this question drills itself into my brain and the more I wonder why the Lord allowed man to have the devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression.12

Kalashnikov’s daughter, Elena, told journalists that she believed a priest had helped her elderly father pen the letter. The spokesman for the Russian patriarch, Cyril Alexander Volkov, told the paper the religious leader had received Kalashnikov’s letter and replied that “when weapons serve to protect the Fatherland,” as the AK-47 had, “the Church supports both its creators and the soldiers” who use it for that purpose. “He designed this rifle to defend his country, not so terrorists could use it in Saudi Arabia.”13

It would have been impossible for either man to know that their guns would be used by evil when they first came to their ideas. Both men were, almost surely, patriots, who fought for their countries and were driven by a desire to see less suffering, not more. A number of the most famous weapon makers—Colt, Gatling, Browning, to name just a few—believed that superior weapons made war less likely. Stoner and Kalashnikov were men of their time, and reacted accordingly. Or as the Russian inventor remarked, “Blame the Nazi Germans for making me become a gun designer . . .”14

In 1997, Stoner died in his garage while tinkering with guns at the age of seventy-four, a wealthy and content man. The gun he invented would not bear his name, nor would most Americans even know who he was. His AR-15 would be manufactured by dozens of American companies, including major gunmakers like Bushmaster, Remington Arms, and Smith & Wesson. The civilian AR-15, which had a military appearance if not military power, would become increasingly controversial because mass murderers would often use them. Stoner’s family has claimed that the inventor never intended for his famous gun—one of the most popular in America—to fall into civilian hands. This seems unlikely, considering that both ArmaLite and Colt sold the gun directly to the civilian marketplace before they ever agreed on large military contracts. Never once during the many years the gun was sold to Americans is there any evidence that Stoner was troubled by the civilian sales—or his profession, for that matter. Perhaps the inventor had a change of heart. Whatever the case, the inventor of the AR-15 had been pulled into one of the most heated debates in American history.