American Rifle - Alexander Rose [191]
John Garand working at one of his beloved machines at Springfield. As a government employee, he earned almost nothing from his creation, one of the most successful weapons of all time.
The impressive results of a 1930 test in which .276 caliber bullets were fired into a half-inch-thick steel plate. At the time, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, experts believed that small-caliber bullets were not sufficiently lethal for military use.
The T44 prototype, son of the M1 and father to the ill-fated M14. The debacle over the latter’s introduction ended with the ignominious closure of Springfield Armory.
The M16, the deadly space-age weapon which initially suffered from production problems that led to jamming in battle.
The futuristic XM8 during testing. The kneeling soldier is using the version equipped with a grenade launcher, and the other, with the sharpshooter’s model.
A soldier firing the M4, de facto successor to the M16 in Iraq.
The “light” version of the SCAR (SOF Combat Assault Rifle) now being deployed by U.S. Special Operations Command.
The M16
Chapter 11
GUNS OF THE
SPACE AGE
Soon after World War Two an aeronautical engineer, salesman, and self-described “gun nut” named George Sullivan had a genuinely brilliant idea.1 When a Brussels-based arms dealer named Jacques Michault had told him about the Germans’ wartime proficiency in assembling light rifles from stamped metal parts, Sullivan mentioned that the aviation industry was adopting a host of innovative materials that were also intended to reduce weight.
Michault later claimed that “together” the two men then “conceived the idea of an aluminum rifle using a stock of fiberglass.”2 At some point, a little later, Sullivan seems to have edged Michault out of the picture—the arms dealer returned to Europe and would later become a sales agent for the “aluminum rifle”—but Sullivan’s contribution was always the greater of the two. It was he who realized that despite their technical improvements, from a design and materials perspective guns were stuck in the nineteenth century, what with their heavy wooden stocks, blocky steel receivers, and preindustrial aesthetics. By integrating mid-twentieth-century materials, Sullivan believed one could considerably lighten a standard rifle (aluminum, for instance, weighs less than one-third an equal volume of steel) and give it an extreme makeover (its anodized alloy parts and plastic furniture could be sold in any color combination, perfect for the burgeoning consumer market).
By the early 1950s and now in his late forties, Sullivan was chief patent counsel for the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. In 1953, while attending a trade conference, he met Paul Cleaveland, the corporate secretary of the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation, and by the by disclosed his idea about an aluminum rifle. Knowing that his boss, Fairchild president Richard Boutelle, was a gun enthusiast whose office did double duty as a trophy cabinet for his big-game kills, Cleaveland raised the concept with him. Branching out into small arms, they thought, might provide a profitable income stream for Fairchild should the airplane business falter.3
Boutelle asked Sullivan to come and see him. Together they decided to reconnaissance the arms industry by setting up a small unit—snappily called ArmaLite—in Hollywood, California. The firm was located in a building dubbed “George’s Backyard Garage,” and the original aim was to act not as a manufacturer but as a think tank—only with a profit incentive. Sullivan would use his aircraft-industry knowledge to create lightweight prototypes that would be licensed to makers. From the beginning ArmaLite’s purpose was to focus on high-concept, radical design, and in keeping with that spirit Sullivan’s first effort was dubbed the “Parasniper” (Sullivan seems to have had a genius for catchy names), an otherwise conventional-looking .308 bolt-action sporting rifle that, uniquely, used foam-filled fiberglass