Customer Reviews

Great Rifle Controversy

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If you are/were in the military or have ever wondered why, this is THE bible on the modern American small arms procurement process. It reads like a novel of sorts detailing things that happened to lead up to our current M-16 rifle. Be prepared, if you're not interested in the back-story on firearms, this book is not for you. If you are, there were few writers as qualified to write this story.

Few weapons have been as controversial as the AR-15/M-16/M-4 rifle/carbine. Designed by Eugene Stoner in 1957, it became the U.S. Army's issue weapon in 1967, amid great controversy over its reliability as a rifle, and the effectiveness of it's .223 cartridge. In becoming the standard rifle of the Army, it displaced the M-14, whose design had begun near the end of WWII, and which had been adopted as standard in 1959.

What happened? How and why did the U.S. Army take 14 years to design a relatively small variant on the M-1 Garand, whose three great improvements were to be detachable box magazine, full automatic capability, and a slightly shorter cartridge? Why, having done so, did they give the whole thing up as a bad idea almost as soon as it was used in combat? And how did a private design by the then unknown Eugene Stoner become the basis for the rifle the U.S. military is still using a half-century later?

Edward Ezell details the whole pathetic story, showing how the M-14's design process accomodated every possible goal except battlefield performance in the hands of the average soldier, and respect for the law of conservation of momentum; how a group of dissidents in the Army's Operational Research Office came up with the idea of the small-caliber, high-velocity full-auto rifle; and how Eugene Stoner's AR-15 design was mangled by the U.S. Army. A group of painfully sincere men, all concentrating on narrow facets of a large and complicated problem, succeeded in creating a mess that got U.S. soldiers killed on the battlefield, and resulted in a decidedly less than optimum design for a rifle and cartridge.

If you're interested in the history of the M-16, U.S. arms procurement, or the way in which interest groups can interact to produce a disaster while trying to do their best, this book is for you. But if you find this boring, fuggedaboudit.