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The American military has a tradition of fine marksmanship which is all well and good. It goes directly against the stated purpose of the assault rifle. That's the problem. That's why the military was forced to adopt a second rate rifle in an intermediate cartridge by the politicos. One shot, one kill. The Germans had the best hunting rifle, the Americans the best target rifle, and the British the best battle rifle, as the saying goes. For the American military, this started with the Model 1892 Krag-Jorgensen rifle in .30-40 Krag (.30 Army) which had, and retrains, a reputation as a superbly accurate rifle for its type and one of the smoothest bolt actions to be had. The phrase "Civilize 'em with a Krag!" is no joke, the rifle showed good service in the years preceding the the Spanish-American War of 1898. The issue encountered there was the reloading time compared to the charger fed Mauser designs employed by the Spanish: The Krag uses a gate on the right side of the receiver you open and place cartridges into the magazine singly closing the gate back. The Mauser used a five round charger that simply needed the bolt opened and a quick downward shove. This might not seem like much difference but when you're fumbling for individual cartridges in combat and dumping them into a magazine, you tend to drop them whereas cartridges on a charger are much easier to handle and load.
A side corollary was the ordering of some 10,000 Winchester Model 1895 lever rifles in .30-40 Krag for the immediate use by the Army to supplement the Krags in service. This was the Browning-designed Winchester that had an integral box magazine capable of taking full rifle cartridges with spitzer (pointed) bullets and a robust locking mechanism to contain the inherent pressures and while it didn't have charger loading unlike the Russian M1895 variant, it was quicker to top off by hand in combat. Unfortunately it seems the only one to make it to Cuba before war's end was that in the personal possession of one Theodore Roosevelt.
As things went, and things progressed, the Army decided to retire the Krag to National Guard service while adopting the M1903 Springfield along with the .30-03 (later .30-06) cartridge, both of which were unsurprisingly based on Mauser designs. The M1917 Enfield came along as a substitute standard based on the P14 Enfield in .303 that was being produced for the British during WWI and meant as a replacement for the Lee-Enfield. The British found the Lee-Enfield quite adequate for their service needs and kept on with it, the Americans found the M1917 in .30-06 was a wonderfully accurate and robust design being the child of both Mauser and Lee parentage: Frontal locking lugs of a Mauser and cock-on-closing action of the Lee-Enfield making for a rifle both strong and quick to operate with the bolt handle close at hand to the rear. The M1917 armed most Americans soldiers in WWI and was well on its way to becoming the official replacement for the Springfield but production of the M1903 Springfield, at the federal armory, had caught up with demand by this point and the eventual development and adoption of the M1 Garand negated the need.
It should be noted that the Garand originally intended to be adopted in the .276 Pedersen cartridge with a detachable box magazine. The .276 Pedersen was a superb 7mm cartridge showing good stopping power and a very flat shooting profile leading to accurate shot placement with little lead at range. The box magazine has obvious advantages well proven by the Lee-Enfield's original 10 round magazine. Charger loading through the top or multiple magazines of varying sizes could be carried. Why didn't either design aspect make it? Money and logistics, pure and simple. Some historians will say that the looming war in Europe caused the Army to rethink adoption of a new cartridge but this was the early to mid-1930s when things were still relatively quiet and the Army saw no reason not to adopt a completely new rifle of a new type with requisite retraining, replacement parts manufacture for our outposts the world over, and all while keeping on the M1903 Springfield and continuing production. No, it would have simply cost too much money to tool up for a new cartridge while converting existing arms to .276 or running two different rifle cartridge lines at the same time and the logistic nightmare that could cause. A detachable magazine was discarded, again, because of money and logistics. Many militaries have rightfully had a paranoid mindset of soldiers expending ammunition from a magazine rifle at a prodigious rate in the first few moments of battle. That's why many bolt action rifles had a magazine cut off to use them as single shot rifles and why the Garand ended up with an en bloc clip. Soldiers would expend all of their cartridges and simply toss a valuable magazine away causing the Army to lose battles and the government to produce more magazines and bullets. Money and logistics. We couldn't have that! So we had a sheet metal clip that only held 8 rounds, could not be topped off, and was a PITA to load and unload.
The only real difference between the Garand and Springfield, in practical terms, was the semi-automatic operation and en bloc clip loading of 8 cartridges allowing for quicker follow up shots. Regular accuracy on the battlefield remained much the same for both rifles and the tradition of marksmanship had only been developed and further instilled by this series of finely accurate rifles. Then came the M14, a modified Garand (finally) using a box magazine and a shorter cartridge allowing for a higher rate of fire at less cost to the government for ammunition production while maintaining accuracy. A higher rate of fire, though? Doesn't that go directly against the idea behind the Garand's en bloc clip system or the magazine cut off of yore? Yep! The Army wasn't entirely oblivious and realized in WWII and Korea that at ranges under 200 yards or so, a moderately trained man armed with a submachinegun or similar weapon is going to beat out a rifleman even if he is well trained. Especially in groups. Ammunition might be expensive but pistol cartridges are cheaper than men and so are SMGs like the Sten, MP 40, and M3 "Greasegun". The reason I mention this is that the M14 had, you guessed it, a fire selector to begin with. Only meant to be used in
ambush or for covering fire when a machinegun was not available the automatic mode ended up being used quite a lot of the time for the perceived effectiveness it had on the enemy. Unfortunately, the .308 cartridge's rather stout recoil meant that most shots went completely wild unless the rifleman was very well trained and he was until...
The war in Vietnam. First came the war and then came the draft. Suddenly you had kids from the big city handed the first gun in their life and it happened to be a selective fire, gas operated, air cooled, machinegun fed from a detachable "high capacity" box magazine fired from the shoulder in the standing position. It's no wonder accuracy suffered horribly and whatever made the most noise was the mode of the day. The Army persevered and was determined to provide the best training possible in the short time before draftees were shipped over to the claustrophobic jungle with their full powered rifles. By this point, it was realized automatic fire on the M14 was nigh on useless and many had their selectors removed or disabled in some fashion. So what we ended up with was the same basic rifle adopted in the 1930s only using a shortened (but unreduced power) cartridge and box magazine. What was the problem? The problem was the SKS-45 and AK-47.
The Russians had not sat idle during the second world war. Even before, they had been developing numerous weapons to increase the firepower of their soldiers in the field. the AVS-36 was a selective fire full powered battle rifle much like the later M14 but firing the rimmed 7.62x54mm cartridge. Due to a complex mechanism, the rifle was very prone to jamming and was shortly replaced with the much more reliable SVT-38 and the improved SVT-40. These, however, were late comers to the Russian smallarms arsenal: The Fedorov Avtomat, the world's first real assault rifle, had appeared in a working form as early as 1913 and was adopted in 1916 by the Russian military out of the need for a lightweight automatic weapon. The Fedorov fed from a detachable 25 round box magazine and fired the Japanese 6.5x50mm cartridge which, at the time, was an intermediate round and abundant having been bought along with Japanese rifles from Britain for war use. The only thing that stopped the wholesale adoption of the Fedorov was the ongoing war and the Russian revolution. The Fedorov continued to be produced until 1924 and examples were used by both the Red and White armies against one another and later in the Winter War with some elite Soviet units.
As stated before, the M43 7.62x39mm cartridge was developed by the Russians for adequate performance from a short barreled automatic rifle while retaining the .30 dimensions to ease production. The first rifle to employ the round was the Simonov SKS-45 which, in a prototype form, saw very limited use at the end of the war proving both cartridge and rifle. During this time the Kalashnikov was under development and soon adopted As the Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947 - AK-47. Extremely durable, reliable, and hard hitting with a high capacity and ability to fire on automatic, the AK-47 was the perfect weapon for the Red Army. Doctrine called for each rifleman to work within his squad together and using massed concentration of fire to overwhelm any enemy. Did the rifle have to be that accurate to do this? Nope. Did the ammunition have to be that high quality to do this? Nope. Did the rifle need target peep sights to do this? Nope. Did it need to keep functioning no matter what abuses it received from peasants or possible wartime production issues? Yep. And it did, in grand style if not exactly beautiful. Mass concentrated firepower was the rule and it was one hard to break.
Jump forward twenty years and the AK-47 is going stronger than ever in more numbers than ever. Its high capacity magazine, controllable automatic, and heavy slug throwing abilities are showing themselves to be extremely useful in the close quarters jungle fighting encountered in Vietnam, especially against men who have never been to a jungle armed with insufficient training and a high powered rifle. The Americans are fighting a battle better suited to the shotguns and submachineguns in their arsenal than a rifle. What to do? A man named Eugene stoner had been hired by the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation to head their ArmaLite firearms division and produce a modern lightweight longarm for adoption by the Army using the latest materials and technologies. The result was the AR-10: A beautifully ingenious and seemingly simple design. The bolt design from the M1941 Johnson semi-automatic rifle, the direct gas system from the Swedish Ljungman AG-42 rifle, and the receiver design from the German StG 44. The direct gas system wasn't an issue since the type of powder used in 7.62x51mm was fairly clean burning and had enough oomph behind it to cycle through fouling buildup within the receiver. The AR-10 arrived too late to participate in the original trials that chose the M14 and was of too unorthodox design for the Army to rethink its decision on the M14. I have a video presenting the AR-10 by Stoner... And needless to say, it's very convincing as to the superiority of design. The year is 1957 and the AR-15/M16 is about to be born.
Based on earlier research during Project SALVO, the Department of Defense requests that ArmaLite develop a lightweight rifle firing a high velocity .22 caliber cartridge. ArmaLite in conjunction with Remington develops the .223 Remington cartridge from the slightly shorter .222 Remington varmint round using a faster burning powder charge. The AR-10 is scaled down by Stoner to take the new cartridge, and given only a few tweaks to the design, presented to the Army for testing. The results and rather poor and Fairchild, having grown disappointed with the whole AR-10/AR-15 project, sells it to Colt Manufacturing Company. Stoner soon follows after to work for Colt. A few more refinements are made to the rifle and Colt, using cunning political maneuvering, convinces the Airforce to purchase a number of the rifles for their base security guards in Vietnam who are mostly of local origin who find the M14 cumbersome and recoil too heavy for their lighter frames. Glowing reports return of standing sentry and shooting at things going bump in the night at the perimeter, no real issues turn up. The Government saw this and saw the reports of the ineffectiveness of the M14 in jungle fighting, looked at the numbers, and saw something they liked in the AR-15.
The Government adopted the AR-15, designated the M16, for the US armed forces as an interim, cheap, solution until the ongoing Special Purpose Individual Weapon program concluded and would supposedly give the US military the ultimate in smallarms development. Well, that never happened. Like many American Gee Whiz projects, it fell through and the military was stuck with the M16 and they better like it because after Vietnam, they weren't getting money thrown at them. And so they made the best of it. The rifle was light, controllable on automatic, fed from first 20 and then 30 round magazines. It was accurate and penetrated metal very well for such a light rifle.
So we come to the reason for all of this: Why is the M16 so favored by the the US military over a heavier rifle? It goes back to tradition of "one shot, one kill". With the M16, you needed to make your shots count. Shot placement counts for body count. The inherent accuracy of the cartridge, not the rifle, really shone in this aspect. Raygun accurate is one way to put it, it generally shoots where you point it without needing to correct for windage or drop over normal combat ranges. In effect, the M16 was being used more like a marksman's rifle rather than its intended role as an assault rifle, like the AK-47 and most other newer rifle designs. Unfortunately this means that if training suffers, so does your rifle's effectiveness. No peasants here, please.
The argument for a heavier rifle cartridge is the same as that for a heavier handgun round: Shot placement matters but it matters less. Thankfully, in a rifle, you can have a longer barrel and attain higher velocities with smaller rounds. .30 is small by pistol standards, after all, but heavy by rifle standards. The most recent trend has been to chop down rifle barrels to shorter and shorter lengths much to the detriment of cartridge performance. That high velocity round needs a longer barrel to fully burn otherwise you get a lower velocity, bigger muzzle blast, and loss of stopping power. The M4 Carbine sure is nifty and all but that short barrel turns it into what's essentially a .22 submachinegun which works fine at short ranges within a city. And yes, you can still hit targets at longer ranges with an M4 but the velocity imparted to the slug is less and when it hits the target, its much less likely to fragment properly and causing the much beloved wounding properties of .223/5.56x45mm
Do I think we should replace the cartridge and rifle? Yes, we really should. The M16 was only meant as an interim solution 40+ years ago and has only been kept around because of constant budget constraints. There have been multiple attempts to replace it with something more effective. Do I think the .223 is a fine civilian rifle cartridge? Sure, most civilians get more practice than military personnel and tend to care more about each shot since they're paying for it. Personally, if I were to use it, I'd buy an AR-18 any day over an AR-15 clone. In the meantime I'll stick with my AKM firing heavier slugs and my .45 putting large holes in things because I am paying for each shot and don't have a huge logistics network to resupply me. - Schofield
