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...
They also issued me an M16, but it doesn't fit in the Cobra cockpit, so it stayed home everyday. Best used when the BG's were "in the wire." 
