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TexasJohnBoy wrote:Human Encyclopedia.

Not even hardly. I wrote a piece about the AR-15 a couple of years ago, but still had to go back and look up dates, names, and places. I do remember where my car keys and wallet are, so some neurons still work...

Noggin wrote:

Skiprr wrote: The Ordnance Corps had done its best to stymie the adoption of the AR-15, and the matter had to actually go before Congress for investigation of why the Ordnance Corps was black-balling the AR-15.

Were the corps doing that because they did not want "to rock the NATO boat" over 7.62mm standardisation? I know that the perception in Europe was that the US having first pushed for standardisation on the 7.62 round then almost immediately afterwards decided to do ignore the standard and go for something new anyway.

I don't want to shove this any more off-topic--but, then, I already did, didn't I?--and it's tough to speculate about the Ordnance Corps situation. But I will. NATO may have been a factor, but there's actually something of a gap in there, and I kinda don't think the Ordnance Corps felt any pressure over it.

The 7.62x51 was adopted by NATO in August 1954, based on the Franklin Industries T65E3 which was first tested in 1950 and remained unchanged through the NATO adoption. The AR-15 round didn't start out as a .223 at all. Eugene Stoner's first design in 1957 used the .222 Remington cartridge. Stoner sought the assistance of Robert Huffman to make adjustments to the round and, subsequently, Sierra Bullet Company made the 55-grain boat-tail loaded by Remington into the ".222 Special" that increased pressure, had a higher muzzle velocity and a longer range. The ".222 Special," with no further change, became the 5.56×45 Ball M193 and the .223.

The AR-15 with the new round first hit the radar of the Ordnance Corps, I believe, in Q1 1958 when General William Wyman at Ft. Benning ordered the first tests of the new rifle/round combination. It was with the large 1963 order from Colt and the appearance of the M16 that the U.S military first began any broad use of the 5.56x45mm round. It wasn't until 1977 that NATO adopted it as a standard caliber. There's admittedly a lot of lead time involved, but there was about a decade in between NATO's adoption of the 7.62x51 and the first time the 5.56 could have really come to its attention, and there was a gap of 23 years in there between 7.62 and 5.56 adoption.

If I had to guess, I'd say the crux of the resistance to the AR-15 came down to one man, Dr. Fred Carten, Colonel Rene Studler's replacement in 1953 in the Ordnance Corps as Chief of Small Arms Research and Development. Controversy followed Dr. Carten from almost his day in the new job. He's largely "credited" with having blackballed the FN-FAL in the U.S. military, championing instead the T44, essentially a modified Springfield Model 1903.

Remember testing of the AR-15 in frigid Alaska that caused Eugene Stoner to hop on a plane? The FN-FAL had bested, badly, the T44 in testing at Ft. Benning. Carten convinced the Chief of Staff that a Soviet attack, if it occurred, would happen in the dead of winter, not during a Georgia summer. He won a series of arctic tests in October 1953 in Alaska. Prior, the T44s to be tested were winterized: trigger guards enlarged to accommodate thick gloves, a pressure relief valve added, wooden stocks reinforced with steel rods, all parts lubricated with appropriate sub-zero oils. The FN-FALs were shipped straight from Ft. Benning to Alaska with no further maintenance. Guess which performed better in the ice and snow?

Sound familiar? History might have been very different had Stoner not immediately flown to Ft. Greeley, Alaska, and seen and corrected what had been done to the test AR-15s. It's fairly common opinion that Carten nixed the FN-FAL, and tried to do the same to the AR-15.

In his book American Rifle: A Biography, Alexander Rose wrote:

Within Ordnance, however, it was an open secret that the T44 victory had been fixed. Even one of its firmest proponents in Carten's office, A.C. Bonkemeyer, confidentially told Colonel Rayle (the new head of Springfield's R&D division) not to bother making too many refinements to the T44 because it was "so close to being a dead duck, you would be better off to spend the funds and effort of future weapons."

The AR-15 and 5.56 round had a number of influential proponents, including General Wyman, Bill Davis (Chief of the Small Arms Branch at Aberdeen Proving Ground), Air Force General Curtis LeMay, and even Secretary of Defense McNamara. And it didn't hurt that Stoner was so hands-on, or that Colt bought the rights to the AR-15 and AR-10 in February 1959. Otherwise America's most popular sporting rifle might never have been.

Now back to your regularly scheduled Topic...

The AR-15 first went into service, officially--and without the persistence of just a few men, it never would have--in December 1961 when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara authorized a purchase of 1,000. The rifles were called "AR-15" and had full-auto select-fire. A lot of the U.S. advisors in Vietnam were already using AR-15s purchased from Colt, and they were beginning to surface all over the place in the conflict, including with the South Vietnamese.

In May 1962 Air Force General Curtis LeMay finally got a requisition for 8,500 of the rifles approved. He'd been trying to procure them since July 1960. The Ordnance Corps had done its best to stymie the adoption of the AR-15, and the matter had to actually go before Congress for investigation of why the Ordnance Corps was black-balling the AR-15. Even after that, one test by the Corps in the arctic showed the rifles to be inaccurate and prone to malfunction. When Eugene Stoner heard this, he got on a plane bound for Alaska. What he found was that the test rifles had been tampered with: parts misaligned and damaged, and front sights removed and replaced with a tacked-on piece of welding rod. Stoner repaired the test guns, and afterward they performed as expected.

On November 4, 1963, Colt got an order for 104,000 of the rifles. It was as of this shipment that the "M16" designation was first applied. So full-auto "AR-15s" had been in military service--though not as the ordained rifle for all branches--for almost two years before the term M16 was applied. Also in that order were the first M16A1s...identical except that they had a forward assist.

The M16A1 was in use for 20 years. The M16A2, a partial redesign around the then-new SS109/XM855 cartridge and replacing full-auto mode with a three-shot burst mode, was first purchased by the Marine Corps in November 1983. The first "M4" deliveries began in August 1994. This was essentially the M16A2 with a 14.5 inch barrel and a telescoping stock. the M4A1 is identical to the M4 except that its carry handle is removeable.

Apropos of nothing, but that's the three-minute overview that reporters for the main-stream media never bother to read.

ScottDLS wrote:Isn't it an M16 or M4? Doesn't Colt have the trademark on the AR15 name and use it only for semi-autos?

Colt used to have "AR-15" and "AR 15" trademarked, but not for a decade now (text mark only, filed in 1966; the trademark for "Colt AR-15" includes both mark--image--and text, and is still active). That was decided in Colt vs. Bushmaster in 2005 (Case 2:04-cv-00240-GZS). In essence, the ruling was for Bushmaster, saying that the term had become in such common usage that it now was generic...think "escalator" or "thermos," both trademarked at some point.

The previous Colt trademark for "M4" died a different death in 2001. Here's a link to a report of Colt's trademarks, both active and deceased Trivia: until 1995, there was a trademark for "Samuel Colt" with a product line of "Meats and processed food products," including hotdogs, chili, potato chips, etc. Who knew?