American Rifle - Alexander Rose [196]
But now, with the dire arctic report already distributed to the Pentagon brass, the Californians could not help but feel as if the M14 were running with the ball. Worse, their two staunchest allies—Wyman and Nielsen—had retired in the summer and fall of 1958, leaving them no one within the system who could propel the project forward.
General Maxwell Taylor was also getting really tired of the M14– AR-15 dilemma. In his opinion, this whole problem had been dealt with back in May 1957, when Brucker announced the adoption of the M14, and now here he was nearly two years later still dealing with it. For Taylor, too, the choice between sticking with the .30 or risking the .223 was more fraught with possible repercussions than it had been for General MacArthur in the early 1930s. In laying down his ruling that the .30 was here to stay, MacArthur had merely had American standards to consider; Taylor today had to think about the European reaction. Once, securing NATO agreement on the .30 cartridge had been cheered as a triumph for American ordnance expertise, but now it was locking generals, politicians, and arms-makers alike into an M14 cage that allowed them no escape. The cartridge and caliber could not yet again be changed. In February 1959, accordingly, he made the final decision. Unsurprisingly, he plumped for the M14. The army would not order a single AR-15.27
The news dealt a heavy body blow to ArmaLite. At a single stroke Fairchild was left with a $1.5 million hole in its books. That figure was what Boutelle had spent on development costs, and now it was a total write-off. In better years the huge loss could have been swallowed, but the last few had not been kind to Fairchild. Stretch-outs in military procurement had forced the company to lay off more than five hundred employees in early 1958, and on July 18 Boutelle had announced a $5 million half-year loss (causing the stock to plummet by 10 percent and prompting the New York Stock Exchange to suspend trading).28 At the end of that benighted year, Fairchild declared a staggering net loss of $17,435,761 (against a $503,331 profit for 1957).29 This red ink, coming on the heels of the canceled Goose missile program (and a few months before the shuttering of Fairchild’s engine division), rendered Boutelle’s position untenable, and in December 1958 he yielded his presidency and moved up to the post of vice chairman—essentially a short-time placeholding gig for him to save face before spending more time with his family.30
Taylor (and Boutelle, for that matter) had jumped the gun, so to speak. In May 1959 a delayed report from the respected Combat Developments Experimentation Center (CDEC) at California’s Fort Ord landed on Pentagon desks. CDEC had been tasked with applying new technologies to combat conditions and had, as part of its rubric, put the AR-15 through a series of tough simulated battlefield trials between November 1958 and February 1959. Its report was better than even the AR-15’s staunchest advocates could have predicted or believed. A “five-to-seven-man squad equipped with [AR-15s] would have a greater target hit potential than an eleven-man squad armed with the M-14 rifle,” it concluded before proposing the “early replacement of current rifles” with AR-15s. But this report came in three months after Taylor’s decision. It was dead on arrival.31
By that time the embattled Fairchild had long since quit trying to sell the AR-15 to the army and just wanted to be rid of it. In what seems to have been Boutelle’s final act as Fairchild’s vice chairman, in January 1959 he oversaw the sale of the rifle’s exclusive manufacturing