American Rifle - Alexander Rose [178]
During and after the Korean War, BRL experts reopened the case. In Hall’s report, An Effectiveness Study of the Infantry Rifle, he determined that on the typical battlefield the range of fire infrequently rose beyond 500 yards, 120 yards being the optimum distance for a nice balance between the probability of a hit and the ability of the bullet to wound grievously. The upshot of Hall’s work was that at the shorter ranges typical of the modern battlefield, a light, small-caliber, high-velocity bullet provided an equal or better rate of lethality than the hallowed .30—but with far less recoil.28 By 1958 BRL would take this conclusion to an extreme by arguing that the best possible bullet would be a tiny .22-caliber 50-grainer zipping along at 3,500 feet per second.29
Hall’s Effectiveness Study of March 1952 was followed three months later by a report collated by another civilian, Norman Hitchman, at the new Operations Research Office (ORO) at Johns Hopkins University. Entitled Operations Requirements for an Infantry Hand Weapon, Hitch -man’s report marked an early milestone in the growing scientification and quantification of war that mirrored what was happening at the Ford Motor Company.
In the nineteenth century army officers transformed businesses into their own image; in the twentieth, businessmen were instructing army officers on how to run their “corporation” along efficient principles. During the war the young Robert McNamara, eventually the secretary of defense but then teaching at the Harvard Business School, had joined the Army Air Forces’ Office of Statistical Control, where he analyzed the efficacy of bombing. Afterward McNamara and his “Whiz Kid” colleagues joined the ailing Ford to install new management systems and implement control procedures along the most modern lines.
At this time, too—between 1945 and 1948—the air force created a “think tank” (the phrase had originated in Britain during the war) named Project RAND (Research and Development) to orchestrate the combined talents of its civilian mathematicians, engineers, aero-dynamicists, physicists, chemists, economists, and psychologists. The first great RAND report, ambitiously entitled Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship, was nothing if not an innovative solution to America’s world-circling spaceship needs. (Sputnik, the first world-circling satellite, came along only eleven years later.)30
Hoping for a sheen of high-tech glamour, the army followed suit with the ORO in September 1948. Unlike RAND, which went fully independent of the air force in 1948, ORO was the result of a compromise between civilian demands for a high-level R&D agency separate from the army and the resistance of the heads of the army’s old-established technical bureaus. (Ordnance was among ORO’s loudest denouncers.) To soothe Ordnance’s fears of a turf battle, the army directed ORO to focus only on studying tactical doctrine and new weapons while Ordnance kept its monopoly on matériel development. ORO, in other words, was pencil-and-paper Ideas; Ordnance was nuts-and-bolts Production.
Hence Studler regarded Hitchman’s report as a threatening shot across his bow. Based on the army’s own World War I and II files on some three million casualties, and supplemented by newer Korean material and interviews, the classified Operational Requirements report buttressed Donald Hall’s by determining that three hundred yards was the rifle’s effective limit and that the vast majority of kills took place under a hundred; and that small-caliber ammunition is more efficacious than larger. Other ORO researchers discovered that soldiers were aiming just one round out of their eight-shot M1 clips and believed, in true diehard fashion, that “the job of the rifleman is primarily to pour out as much lead as possible to keep the enemy’s head down.”
ORO’s biostatistical analysis accordingly revealed that bullet wounds were not concentrated on the specific parts of the body where