I was just reading a good book about the Kalashnikov rifle.
In many ways, the AK-47 was the ideal weapon-cheap to make, rugged and easy to maintain.
In contrast, the US M-16 was a rifle that was prone to jamming-so much that American troops in Vietnam hated them-there were even cases of soldiers using captured AK-47s instead. Was this true?
Even more troubling, the US Army ordnance dept. didn’t believe there was a problem-so years went by until a fix was made. Why was this?
My understanding is that there was a problem early on with the ammunition. Specifically the powder used left behind a lot of residue which caused jamming.
This was rectified and as far as I can rememeber it was a much more reliable weapon after that. It will never be as reliable as an AK47 though and requires a lot more cleaning and general maintenance.
In my military service I had the chance to use both M-16 and the Kalashnikov-style rifle (Galil). M-16 was vastly inferior - it needed to be meticulously clean or it jammed, while Galil could be bathed in sand and would shoot every time, taking the Galil apart/putting it together for cleaning was a lot easier than the M-16 (the pins in M-16 that are so easily lost were called “pin Shabbat” in IDF - if you lost one, you’d lose your weekend at home. When I was drafted, a friend gave me a package of a dozen of those pins as a gift). M-16 non-folding-stock model is also long and unwieldy compared to AK-47 (M-16s were called “matateh” - “broom” in IDF slang).
M-16 was quite a bit lighter than AK-47, though.
As for why US Army didn’t believe there was a problem - probably a NIH (not invented here) syndrome.
There was an episode of Modern Marvels on the M16, and they mentioned the change of gunpowder as the issue. Once they had the right load, everything was fine.
So simple a child can use it!
There are stories of AKs being buried in dirt for months, dug out, dusted off and then fired.
Someone wrote of seeing Afghan rebels cleaning the barrels by simply tieing some knots in a boots lace, pouring motor oil on it and then pulling it through the barrel. Done.
I think Samuel Jackson said it best in Jackie Brown:
Accept no substitute
(NSFW - Language)
An older version of the M-16 had a problem with rounds chambering properly. That was fixed by a modification that provided a forward assist assembly on the right side of the weapon. We were taught to tap the butt of the magazine against our helmets or a boot heel to make sure the rounds seated properly. That may have been a holdover from the old days prior to the assist assembly. Also, the flash suppressor was modified from an open design to a closed design. According to military lore, this was because GIs used the open design as a can opener for C-rat cans. I have my doubts about that, since every box of C-rats came with a John Wayne. I think it was more to keep the weapon from snagging on branches when you had to didi.
My personal experience with the M-16 was problem free. In 20+ years of service, I probably put tens of thousands of rounds through them and never had a jam. Most all of those rounds were fired on dusty ranges (some in RVN), and all of the blank rounds were fired while in foxholes while on military exercises. While this was not the mud and rain situations found in a place like Vietnam, they were certainly dirty enough. The weapon required thorough cleaning, but any soldier who doesn’t clean his weapon often may be tempting fate.
As for deaths caused by a jammed weapon: sure, why not. It may be the stuff of urban legend, or there may be genuine accounts of it happening.
The M-16 and the AK-47 are two completely different weapons with completely different design philosophies.
The AK-47 is intentionally designed with “sloppier” fitting parts. This is done for two reasons. First, it allows the parts to be manufactured on cheaper equipment since high precision isn’t required. Second, it allows the weapon to fire reliably even if it has a lot of dirt and gunk in it. This makes the AK-47 more reliable when dirty than the M-16, and also makes it cheaper to produce, which is very important if you are making enough of them for, say, the entire Soviet army.
All of that comes at a cost, though. The M-16, in contrast, has much tighter design tolerances. This makes it jam more easily, but also makes it a much more accurate weapon. The recoil forces in an M-16 are balanced straight back, so that the weapon will stay on target when firing in automatic mode. The AK-47’s recoil forces are off center, which makes the weapon tend to want to creep away from the target while firing in automatic mode.
The M-16 also fires a lighter round, which was very controversial at the time. A heavier round will punch through thick underbrush and small trees, and possibly building walls (depending on the material). A lighter round won’t penetrate as well through these sorts of things, but still has plenty of force to kill someone. An individual soldier is going to prefer the heavier round, but wars aren’t won by individual soldiers. Wars are won and lost on logistics, and if your rounds are smaller and lighter, that means your soldiers can carry more of them, you need fewer supply trucks, etc. So your individual soldier feels outgunned facing down an enemy with AK-47s, but that soldier can keep firing after the enemy has run out of ammo. And, you’ve got more soldiers and less ammo truck drivers, which helps, too.
The M-16 was made to be lightweight so that the soldier could carry more equipment. Its use of plastic, combined with its lighter round, did not go over well at all with the soldiers, who were used to the much heavier and more rugged M-14. The M-16 quickly got a reputation as the “rifle made by Mattel”, by soldiers who considered it a cheap toy instead of a “real” rifle.
So the M-16 wasn’t received well.
On top of that, the first versions of the M-16 did have problems. There were problems with the ammo due to incorrect powder being used. They didn’t produce enough cleaning kits, so they just sent the rifle into the field without them and told the soldiers they weren’t necessary. Remember the M-16’s tighter tolerances and its need for stricter cleaning? Without cleaning kits, that was a disaster in the making. There were a few other mechanical problems with the M-16 as well, which were fixed in subsequent versions.
So yeah, the M-16 had a lot of problems in the field, and soldiers would often grab AK-47s when they could. Keep in mind though that if you grabbed an AK-47 off of the battlefield you got whatever ammo the dead enemy soldier had left and that was it. There was no supply of AK-47 ammo on the American side of the line.
The Army ordnance division did know of problems, and did react to them, though with typical Army efficiency this did take a while. And lets face it, if one of the problems is you don’t have enough cleaning kits, it just takes a long time to make enough cleaning kits and get them out to the field. It also took time to figure out that the wrong type of powder had been used in the ammunition. The Army really didn’t just ignore the problems though.
After a congressional investigation, the problems with cleaning and powder were fixed, the barrel and chamber were chromed (added expense, but the lack of chroming was causing corrosion problems), and a forward assist was added, since the jamming problems combined with a lack of a forward assist often turned the rifle into a useless club that could not be easily un-jammed in the field.
ETA:
The modern M-16 no longer suffers from those problems, but it still will jam more easily than an AK-47. The AK-47, though, because of its looser tolerances, is much more inaccurate at a distance. Need to punch through a building wall to kill an insurgent? You want an AK-47. Need to pick off an insurgent on the roof of a building half a block away? You need an M-16. Different weapons, different purposes, different designs.
Quote:
The Army ordnance division did know of problems, and did react to them, though with typical Army efficiency this did take a while. And lets face it, if one of the problems is you don’t have enough cleaning kits, it just takes a long time to make enough cleaning kits and get them out to the field. It also took time to figure out that the wrong type of powder had been used in the ammunition. The Army really didn’t just ignore the problems though.
This is what puzzles me-new weapons are subjected to very exhaustive acceptance tests, where weaknesses are exposed.
So how did the M-16 get through the trails?
The book mentioned that the USAF (then headed by Gen. Curtis LeMay) actually ordered the rifles before the Army.Gen. LeMay was a very powerful man-perhaps his influence was excessive?
The M-16 is just a military version of the AR-15 or Stoner Rifle, having an automatic/semi selector switch. The Stoner was in circulation with police departments (IIRC) before the military got hold of it. Perhaps the military thought that it had already been sufficiently field tested by the cops.
Esquire Magazine ran a very good exerpt of the book, “The Gun” by C.J. Chivers detailing the problems with the early models and the political considerations that resulted in the M-16’s adoption by the army.
You didn’t open the C-rats, you opened the case the C-rats came in with it. A case of 12 meals was bound with 2 wires. Stick the open end of the muzzle over the wire and twist and the wire would break rather easily. I did it a number of times. What it did to my accuracy probably didn’t matter much since most of the shooting was, “Spray and pray.”
When I got a chance though I went to an M-16 with the closed suppresor. It didn’t snag on brush like the open one did.
I never had any problems with my rifle but then I didn’t get to Vietnam until 1969 when they had all that sorted out. The cleaning requirements weren’t really all that much, maybe once a week.
That would be dumb. Many police officers go their entire careers without ever firing their weapons in the field.
Ah, that was it. I knew it had something to do with opening rations, but my memory failed me. I got to 'Nam in 1968 and was issued the modified M-16, which I had never seen up until that point. They had us fam-fire every other goddamn thing in the inventory back in the brief military training they gave us, other than the weapon we would actually be issued. :rolleyes:
Here’s an article part 1 part 2 (warning, pdfs) by a guy who was an officer in one of the first Marine units in Vietnam to get the M16. He was not a fan, to put it mildly:
There is truth to it, but the AK being intentionally sloppy is not the whole reason for it’s greater reliability. Beyond the looser tolerances there are two design features of the AK that makes them more reliable:
First, the AR uses the bolt as it’s gas piston, and it’s bolt carrier as the gas cylinder. This is fairly clever, creating the force in exactly the place and direction it is needed, and saves the weight of separate pieces. However it means that burned and unburned powder is directed into the close fitting action of the weapon. This is why the early powder caused so much trouble, and this is why some people claim the AR “Shits where it eats.”
The second issue is far less well known and harder to explain:
In both the M16 and AK designs, the bolt rotates and locks into battery. In both designs this is accomplished by a camming surface on the bolt carrier.
In the Stoner design, the cam follower pin and gas key run in a slot in the aluminum upper receiver, and this is what keeps the bolt in the unlocked position while the action cycles. The force of the recoil spring acting against the inertia of the bolt causes the cam to push the cam follower pin against one side of the receiver slot, and the gas key against the other side. If the slot is not smooth, clean, and lubricated, this absorbs a great deal of the stored energy needed to cycle the action, and can result in a failure to fully chamber a round and lock the action. The bandaid fix for this is the forward assist plunger, which allows the soldier to manually finish what the recoil spring should have done if it were not slowed by excess friction and/or binding. Due to the soft aluminum of the receiver, it can gall or wear such that cleaning and lubing no longer restore the gun to proper operation.
In the Kalashnikov design, the cam follower projection on the bolt (not a separate pin like the M-16) rests on a step at the end of the cam surface once the action fully unlocks. This prevents the cam from creating additional friction between the bolt assembly and the receiver rails. As the bolt/carrier assembly approaches battery, a separate camming surface in the barrel extension acts on one of the bolt locking lugs and knocks the cam follower off the step on the cam surface and allows the cam to finish locking the bolt.
The step is just a sharp corner on the cam and the cam follower. They can wear out over time, and also are sometimes polished away in ham-fisted attempts to smooth the action. It will still work when cleaned and lubed, as the action rails keep the bolt and carrier aligned, but it forfeits it’s advantage over the AR. It is one of the things to check on a used AK. With the bolt and carrier assembly out of the gun, put the bolt in the unlocked position (align the rail following surfaces) and then compress the assembly with your thumb and verify that the bolt does not tend to rotate.
One company makes a roller cam-follower pin for the AR that helps, but is still not a full solution.
I’m confused by why loose tolerances on parts of the AK’s action would result in inaccuracy, which is dependent on the fit of the bullet to the barrel, along with the projectile’s aerodynamics etc. Surely the sloppy tolerances on the action don’t extend to highly variable bores!
The accuracy differences between the rifles are always hugely exaggerated by people who essentially want to create a dichotomy (sure, their rifles are more reliable, but ours are better in other ways…)
A run of the mill eastern bloc AKM will generally shoot around 3-6 minutes of angle, which translates to falling within a circle with a 3-5 inch diamater at 100 yards. (Varies somewhat by manufacturer - a military issue Bulgarian AK will do 2.5-4, for example) An AK74 will shoot a little tighter. A typical US military issue M16 will fire somewhere around 2-5 MOA.
The issue is somewhat cloudied by the fact that people buy expensive, well made AR-15 race guns, essentially rifles that have been built to competition-level tolerances, that can shoot under 2 MOA, and they compare these to military issue run of the mill AKs. If you take two rifles off the shelf of a military armory, the difference won’t be noticible to most shooters. Skilled shooters at long range will notice a difference between the gap widens considerably when you go past 300 yards. But precision 300+ yard shooting isn’t a big part of an individual soldier’s firepower.
When you compare the more modern counterparts, the M4, and the AK74, the differences almost dissapear. The M4 is nothing great in the accuracy department, and the AK74 improves upon the AKM, closing the gap. The modern M4 is pretty reliable, but not nearly as much as an AK-74.
I’ve also fired an M4, AKM, and AK-74 in full auto, and the M4 is by far the worst to control. I understand in theory about how it’s balanced better and all that, but in practice the muzzle just goes all over the damn place randomly, whereas the AK type rifles had a predictable up and to the right recoil that could be compensated for. The AK-74 with the standard military muzzle brake was by far the best to shoot - I could dump a 30 round mag into a car sized target at 75 yards in about 5 seconds and hit 25 of them.
Watch this video (at least the first 30 seconds of it). It shows the M-16 and AK-47 being fired in slow motion. You can see the end of the barrel of the AK-47 wobbling around quite a bit, which they make a point of in the video. This should make it clear what is meant by sloppy parts fitting.
I would agree with that. The ruggedness of the AK-47 is also commonly exaggerated, as is the “delicate” nature of the M-16. You can abuse an M-16 quite a bit and it will usually still fire, and AK-47’s are not super-rifles that never ever jam.
Where did you get your numbers? I was always under the impression that an AK-47 will do about a 4 to 6 inch group at 100 yards where the M-16 would do maybe a 2 inch group, which is a bit more of a difference than your numbers indicate. I don’t have a good cite for my numbers though.