Customer Reviews

Misfire: The Story of How America's Small Arms Have Failed Our Military

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Though there are some errors in his historical procedure - Hallahan sometimes puts out info and dosen't back it up with historical data the book is excellent. If one believes that our goverment and senior leadership supplies only the best equipment to our troops read this book. If one thinks that goverment can run ANYTHING more efficiently then private industry read this book. And if one is thinking about enlisting head full of Tom Clancy's prose and recruiting commercials - well you know. I wish this book was still in print. An excellent read.

While the author presents a very interesting and enlightening view of army ordnance and small arms, the book has some holes. The most annoying with respect to the thesis is that the author consistently introduces men in the Ordnance department as new and progressive, and then two pages later they're reactionary with no explanation of the transformation.
Furthermore, as soon as he strays from strictly smallarms matters (especially in the chapters concerning the period between the World Wars), his statements vary from misleading to blatantly incorrect. Also, he describes the Dreyse needle-gun, differently, three times, and only gets it right once. This leads me to doubt the accuracy of the book with weapons I am not as familiar with. Finally, there are a surprising number of typos and grammatical errors.

I highly recommend reading it, but keep a supply of salt grains handy while you do.

Why is Hallahan's "Misfire" out of print only five years after its publication? As important as this book's message is, it's far more than the pinpointing of a disastrous military philosophy; more even than an indictment of military boneheadedness and the incredible intransigence of bumbling bureaucrats. It's also an engaging work of history with threads stretching back to the Revolutionary War, with intriguing sidelights on a number of historical figures including Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and his cabinet, almost down to the present--all written in lively prose. Very readable from beginning to end, and highly recommended.

This book shocked and angered me. 180 years of American troops armed with small arms that have been far beneath the firepower our troops could have had. Halahan shows that our troops could easily have had fast firing breechloading muskets in the War Of 1812, repeating rifles in the Civil War, machine guns by the middle of that bloody conflict and on and on and on. Why have our troops never been armed with better weapons? Because our design and procurement operations have been controlled by a consistent philosophy: if we give the troops fast firing weapons, they'll use up too much ammunition and cause supply problems. I can't remember a book that has made me so angry. Halahan should have a chapter in every high school history text. This is a horrifying history of American troops sacrified by a philosophy that I cannot accept as valid - and neither will you.

Historian Barbara Tuchman is quoted in the book Misfire on page 253 with this gem:

"[W]isdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function?"

As author Hallahan demonstrates in this book, the answer is people with no credible or proven experience in a subject too often seek to voice their opinion on it.

William H. Hallahan is an author of fiction and history books. If he has any marksmanship background neither Google nor his personal website bother to mention it. Despite authoring a telling history of US small arms procurement, his lack of experience and available information leads to several flawed conclusions.

Is there such a thing as an efficient bureaucracy, especially within the military? Finding flaws in something as large and old as the US Army Ordnance department should probably be expected, however, when the US military replaced small arms in the past there was an obvious improvement associated with the new device. The Trapdoor Springfield used breech-loaded metallic cartridges and supplanted a muzzle loader; the Krag repeater replaced single shot rifles; Springfields and Enfields were much faster to reload and fired a more powerful cartridge than the .30-40 Krag; the Garand gave us semi-auto capability and the M14 more than doubled capacity and the last change we made to the AR15/M16 increased capacity again with a serious reduction in weight. Despite flaws and mistakes made within the bureaucracies of the US military, an interesting history that Hallahan details here with perfect 20/20 hindsight, US small arms technology has mostly kept pace with the rest of the world.

The "gravel belly" shooter Hallahan ignorantly denigrates literally invented marksmanship training and kept pace with equipment developments. The National Match Course was modified to accommodate and train the capability of every new service rifle. These same shooters ushered in improvements to the AR-15/M16 making it a capable performer to 600 yards, double its intended effective range, while at the same time created practical shooting courses pressing this same platform into close range, high speed scenarios.

Good shooters realize this. Hallahan and similar low skilled, non-shooters do not, choosing to follow the mistaken belief that mere volume of fire yields greater downrange impact. Actual timed tests pitting "spray and pray" shooters with huge ammo capacity and full or semiautomatic fire against a "gravel belly" shooter consistently find the "gravel belly" winning. Increasing volume of fire is great but only an advantage if properly directed.

Surprisingly, Hallahan includes an important component of machine gun gunnery skill: Traversing the gun, sometimes referred to as the "two-inch tap."

On page 311 John Keegan, author of "The Face of Battle", records, "By constant practice the machine gunner leaned to hit the side of the breech with the palm of his hand just hard enough to move the muzzle exactly two inches against the resistance of the traversing screw. A succession of "two inch taps" first on one side of the breech until the stop was reached, then on the other, would keep the air with a stream of bullets so dense that no one could walk upright across the front of the gunners position without being hit."

In training today it is the "gravel belly" shooters that espouse this gunnery technique and low skilled shooters would abandon the tripod and T&E that make such a procedure possible, preferring to always "walk in" unaimed fire.

By actual test, "gravel belly" riflemen beat machine gunners of the Hallahan school. The instructor cadre I worked for staged numerous demonstrations pitting a Camp Perry-type "gravel belly" armed with and M16A4 with a 30 round magazine against a Hallahan-type believing volume of fire always wins armed with a belt fed machine gun, bipod or tripod mounted (gunner's choice) and 154 rounds. Shooting on an Army machine gun qualification range the "gravel belly" rifleman either wins or ties, usually with ammo to spare.

This does NOT mean machine guns are ineffective! The problem is Hallahan-types refuse to learn from "gravel belly" shooters, zero ineffectively, fail to understand gunnery or marksmanship and are hampered by the myth that volume of fire will make up for skill deficiencies. It can not and won't. If Hallahan had ever been on a range with skilled shooters, including some "gravel belly" types, he would realize this.

Hallahan's book is the startling story of the inadequate arming of America's infantry by the Army Ordinance Corps. Through nearly 2 centuries of failure (the only exception being the choice of the M-1 in WWII), this organization continues with its business ostensibly answering to no one.

This is an important book with respect to the history of technology as well as in the book's demonstration of the government's failure in making rational decisions with regard to technology.

At least in terms of the eras with which I am familiar (post-War Between the States to the book's present), it's an interesting read with some serious flaws. The book is riddled with factual and technical errors, going beyond simple typos - of which there are a disconcerting number considering it's from a major publishing house - to actually bring Hallahan's theses into doubt. It's fairly clear he has no practical experience with some of the weapons he's writing about (e.g. the Lewis gun, the Benet-Mercie/Hotchkiss Portable, the Vickers MMG) and either praising or damning, as well as facts regarding the design, testing, and production of various rifles (e.g. the M1917 Enfield), or the field use of such arms. While I don't hold the author completely responsible for these issues, as some of them arise from more recent scholarship, it's still troubling to find multiple errors on a page with regularity.

Get the book because it's an interesting story based on real events, but don't regard it as a documentary or serious scholarly work. The earlier review that said to keep some salt handy while reading is spot-on.

decison-making on small arms selections that often cost American lives. The most revealing is the botching of the M16 introduction by changing the powder used in the early cartridges causing jams which sent young Americans into battle with rifles that wouldn't shoot facing down Viet Cong with the more reliable AK-47.

The Army Ordinance Corps simply has let the criterion of long-range accuracy dominate their rifle selections when history has shown that most encounters occur at closer range. This guiding principle was in play back when Custer's men entered the valley of the Little Big Horn with their single-shot trap door Springfields with superior range and accuracy to the Indian's files. Custer's were outgunned by Indians carrying shorter range repeating rifles - the famous massacre followed because of inadequate firepower from the cavalry.

This book depicts a bureaucracy in action which , for over a century, made decisons based on long-range rifle accuracy regardless of previous results. As such, it a fascinating book on organizational failure based on a self-perpetuating myth: long-range shooting wins the day in infantry battles.

Hallahan reveals a horrifying picture in this book: how bureaucracy and politics made the US troops be equiped with inadequate small arms for 180 years. Although he puts the main blame on the Army Ordance Corps, he is actually accusing the whole U.S. military system. His book shows how a "concept" can dominate the military thinking for so long and deep in such a way that the whole military system allows some incompetent military administrators' worries about shuffling extra paperworks to overrule its responsibilites to win wars quickly and save soliders' lives.

This is an excellent book showing how an unrestricted techno-bureaucracy can easily fail the people's trust. We have seen it happened in the ex-USSR, and now we have another example right in our court yard.

After 17 years and counting of Army service, some of which was spent as an enlisted infantryman, and others as an Ordnance officer, I agree with Hallahan's premise that bureaucracy and personal agendas have often hampered the selection and implementation of effective small arms. I also agree with his assessment that the "gravel belly" concept is largely outdated. His synopsis of the histories of our different small arms over the years is very telling in that regard.

Like other reviewers, however, I am a bit dismayed at the number of typographical errors in the book, especially since the publisher is a major (and respected) one. In addition, Hallahan seems to be unfamiliar with some basic firearms terminology, often using "clip" and "magazine" interchangeably -- which they are NOT.

Overall, I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in firearms or military history, but as others have said, keep your salt nearby.