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Skiprr wrote: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.