It’d give you a bitch of a headache, though. 
Let’s see. A team of Rangers, with .50 cal sniper rifles. Keep the mexicans guessing at a range of half a mile. Couple of Huey gunships with those GE miniguns, and a tank or two for fun.
I’d love to see their faces when one of those came over the hill. 
Spavine - Santa Anna’a men came from four sides, right?
OK, let’s amend the OP a bit: What if there were 4 or 8 riflemen with the AKs & the 3K rounds? Would that have turned the tide in favor of the Americans?
IMHO, it seems like the Americans would have moonwalked to victory.
Applying UncleBill-style math, lets say 200 Texans vs 4000 Mexicans (to make the math easy). Assuming equal spread of defenders over Spavined Gelding’s 440 yard perimeter, that’s 50 trigger pullers per wall on a square fort, or one every seven feet or so. 50 triggers at 2 rounds per minute is 100 rounds going downrange every minute during the assault across the oh, let’s say, 1000 yards of open ground outside each wall. A battle dressed Mexican assaults at, maybe 4 mph (a quick walk), or roughly 120 yds per minute. It takes the front guy 8 minutes, 20 seconds to hit the fort wall. The Texas rifles had an effective range of anywhere from 70 yards (Brown Bess .75 cal) to 250 yards (British Baker .61 cal) (cite http://alamo-de-parras.welkin.org/history/1836/accounts/act_frame.html ), so lets call 200 yards the “whites of their eyes” range. With a constant Mexican assault speed, Texans had 1 minute, 40 seconds to effectively shoot the advancing dudes, which goes over to about 160 rounds downrange at 1000 Mexicans.
Unbeknownst to the Mexicans, enter our hero from the future armed with the Kalashnikov, “practical rate of fire” fire 40 rounds per minute, killing range of over 1000 yards (cite http://members.nbci.com/russian_arms/ak47.htm ). One man on one wall sends 332 effective bullets downrange (8.3 min X 40 rnds/min) during the assualt, or slightly over twice as many as the 50 guys who were there in case #1. This being the case, as for as effective firepower, one man with an AK equals 100 men with typical rifles as far as rounds effectively impacting bodies during the assault across open ground phase.
During the scaling of the walls (which must be true, I saw it in the movie with Fess Parker), the AK-47 would have a much greater force multiplier than just a factor of 100, seeing as effective range is no longer an issue. Full auto would come in REAL handy during that part.
With this additional firepower on one wall, men could be shifted to the other three sides, significantly increasing firepower there.
DISCLAIMER: Multiple assumptions and rounding are needed to follow this thought. These is what I call “Order of Magnitude Calculations” and is not to be nitpicked on math accuracy. Historical assumptions may be filleted, if desired.
Years and years ago, I was in a class on perimeter defense. The particular topic was the right way to disperse mines and 5 lb. cans filled with jellied gasoline. In the middle of this, a revelation came to of my classmates. He stood up and made this comment, "anything we can do to them, they can do to us, right? The response was, “Yes, next question.” Try to keep this in mind as we go through this little exercise in pure fantasy.
The Alamo compound had been under increasing artillery bombardment for 11 days. At night fall on the day before the Alamo fell, the Mexican artillery fire ceased and the night was quiet. By this time, between the need to keep a constant alert and the emotional stress of the whole thing, the garrison was pretty well exhausted. Santa Anna expected that the quiet night would induce the garrison to let down its guard. You can expect that except for a few sentries the garrison did fall asleep at its positions.
Under cover of darkness Santa Anna formed four assault columns within a couple hundred yards of the Walls. The plan was for one column to attack the north wall where a breech had been opened, one column to attack the northwest corner, one column to attack the west wall and the last to attack the south wall adjacent to the chapel. The attacks went in before light, when it was still pitch dark. In the confusion of advancing in the dark and the first burst of musketry from the defender, the west column and the north west column merged and drifted around to the north wall where the defensive fire was weakest. Here a penetration was effected. Once the compound was penetrated there was no reserve to repair it and the game was pretty well over. With the north wall cleared of defenders, the rest of the defenders were rolled up and the south column able to achieve a lodgement. With that it was just a matter of smoking the survivors out of their isolated rooms and cubby holes.
The attacks came primarily from north and west because those faces of the compound were protected by walls with some low buildings against the inside of the wall. The east face was the back of the chapel and the back of the two story convent. The south side was partially covered by another building. Part of the convent remains and is used as the museum. The monument in the street in front of the chapel marks the middle of the walled compound.
In order for your fantasy to come close to being possible, you need not only a modern assault rifle and ammunition, you also need flood lights. A single weapon can not provide an area defense in final defensive fire, especially in the dark and giving plunging rather than grazing fire. Remember that even the British, who made their reputation beating up on tribal hordes, were relying on the fire of more than one modern weapon. If there is a real example of the sort of thing you are projecting, it is Rourke’s Drift during the Zulu War in 1879, when maybe 125 soldiers under professional leadership and equipt with breech loading rifles and defending a much smaller position, fought off a much larger tribal force armed for the most part with stabing spears.
Flood lights…hmmm. How about night vision? It’s just a fantasy anyway.
And let’s say that our 8 night-vision-equipped gunners teleport to the Alamo, fully rested, 20 minutes before Santa Anna’s charge…
Billy Jean’s
Not my lover…
(whoo!)
Well, heck, let’s just get Lieutenant Dan to radio in a couple of fast movers and napalm their asses. (Unless the Mexicans were already too close to the walls–barbecueing the defenders at the same time would kind of defeat the purpose of the exercise.)
Yes, but is the napalm necessary? Another way to look at it is this: What is the bare minimum of modern military technology (with any necessary personnel) that would be needed to have the Americans in the Alamo hold off Santa Anna’s army?
Wildest Bill started with the lone gunner & an AK47. Spavined & others showed it wouldn’t be enough. Then I posited multiple gunners (up to 8). Spavined pointed out the cover-of-darkness factor & suggested flooodlights.
Since floodlights benefits both sides, I offered up night vision for our 8 AK47 gunners - two one each wall, firing their weapons on semi-automatic. At that point, I’m confident that would be enough to have the Americans hold fort.
BTW, I’m kind of counting on 2000-2500 of Santa Anna’s men to high-tail it once they start dropping like flies - so they really wouldn’t have 4000 troops.
Bare minimum? My WAG is: a densely-packed minefield. Assuming that the Mexicans didn’t know what this new technology was, the sight of their comrades being randomly blown up as they advanced would probably put their whole force in disarray.
Hell, the Aussie’s are working on a machine gun (wish I could remember the address of the site that had pictures of it) that can throw out something like 10,000+ rounds a minute! One of those, a few million rounds of ammunition, and you could pulp everyone of Santa Anna’s troops (and everything else) in about 5 minutes! With one of those suckers and enough ammo, they coulda marched all the way to Mexico City!
Aware of historical American perfidy in it’s dealings with Mexico a distant descendant of Santa Ana(and distant cousin of Carlos) has come across this thread. He has acquired his own time machine. He will soon arrive(adjustments needed for daylight savings time)in San Antonio with several British L16 81mm medium mortars and plenty of fragmentation and white phosphorous rounds.
With a range of over 5000m it has completely nullified Wildest Bill’s AK-47 defensive fantasies.
Lo siento gringo!
Isn’t this getting impossibly silly? IMHO.
I would go with sniper rifles. First you kill generals and then work your way down among the ranks. Massive confusion, and probably a seriously messed up attack or a rout. People with AK 47s would have probably died the moment they showed themselves since it would be so attention getting.
There’s also the distinct possibility that while Bill is hunkered behind the wall spraying Mexican troops with machine gun fire, one of them gets the idea that maybe that’s a good place to fire a cannon.
Never can tell, WildBill. Might have made a difference, might not. Would be fun though to find out:)
As far as the Predator gun, it was a 5.56 minigun, the M214, that is generally vehicle mounted but can be easily “man-packed”. It shoots 4000 spm, and the total weight of the gun, battery pack and two 500 round cassettes is roughly 105 pounds.
Quoth Tuckerfan:
The Americans already have one of them, but the military’s having a hard time figuring out what to do with it. The problem is that it can’t sustain that rate for more than a second or so. If you don’t have time to strafe, then it rather defeats the purpose of having rapid-fire in the first place.
I have right here, in my hot little hand, a novel called Remeber the Alamo by Kevin Randle and Robert Cornett. The plot is as follows. A Texas oil company, after the discovery of a huge oil field in Mexico, sends a band of about 30 mercinaries, armed with modern weapons, back to the Alamo using a newly discovered time travel device,to ensure that it dosen’t fall. Not a great book, but not a bad read either. It was published by Charter books, copyright 1986. Those interested may want to check it out. Here’s a link to a copy for sale from Amazon. It’s out of print. There is a fairly good tactical review of how the battle went as part of the plot.