American Rifle - Alexander Rose [201]
As of May 8, then, Curtis LeMay was confident that, with AMC existing but not operating, if he worked fast he could forge ahead with his plan to issue AR-15s to his Strategic Air Command guards before any-one could stop him. On May 15, exactly one week after AMC’s creation, LeMay ordered 8,500 AR-15s.49 By hook or by crook, the air force was going to use ARs. But would the army?
Not if the National Rifle Association had its way. In its May 1962 issue American Rifleman carried a piece on the AR-15 by Walter Howe and Colonel Edward Harrison, a retired Ordnance officer. They had tested the AR-15 for themselves and were confident that it was unsuitable for universal army use. The reviewers, adhering to the NRA’s progressive marksmanship tradition, focused on the AR-15’s bullet, which they found, correctly, “only weakly stable, much like a top which is spun barely fast enough to keep it upright.” By suggesting that the bullet’s twist be tightened to one in twelve, the authors were diminishing its lethality—perhaps by as much as 40 percent—in favor of imparting greater spin, improved stability, and of course, better accuracy over longer distances.50 Since the aluminum gun was never designed for such ranges, however, there wasn’t much call, thought the authors, for adopting the AR-15 in the first place. Stick with the M14 was the implicit message.
McNamara’s computer like mind, which operated on a binary system of one and zero, true or false, yes or no, heartily disliked these fuzzy, interminable debates between rival factions that he and his allies in the defense secretary’s office suspected were hopelessly compromised by service turf battles and career interests. He wanted to know which rifle was definitively superior, not their pros and cons, the on-the-other-hands, and the pluses and minuses. Just give me a straight, honest, objective answer, he ordered Charles Hitch. The latter, being the Department of Defense’s comptroller, a former RAND analyst, coauthor of 1960s The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age, and once-president of the Operations Research Society of America, was the perfect man for the job.51 He, like McNamara, was predisposed to using logic to break down a problem into its constituent parts, producing a solution to each, and then adding the solutions together to arrive at a general answer.
Hitch immediately dragooned McNamara’s favored systems analysts, operations researchers, and number crunchers into the effort and called up every file, every study in the Pentagon archives, that had anything to do with previous rifle controversies going back to the 1920s. His men scoured the old Pig Board’s findings, broke down the BRL ballistics tests, parsed the ORO reports, dissected CDEC’s 1959 observations. Then they compiled tables and accumulated figures covering every aspect of rifle development, from logistics to costs to capabilities. And at the end Hitch reported to McNamara on September 27, 1962, that “in combat the AR-15 is the superior weapon” to the M14.52 Thank you, said McNamara, his own mind now made up.
Yet still no final decision was made, for the new secretary of the army, Cyrus Vance, asked his generals to come up with their own reasons to keep the M14 so that he could assert that Hitch had been biased.53 For one, they suggested obligingly, what about our NATO partners? Switching to the .223 when we had forced them to adopt the .30 would cause untold damage to the alliance. Moreover, the M14 was decidedly superior in penetrative ability and was more lethal at ranges of four hundred yards and above. Lastly, 300,000 M14s were now being produced annually, and they estimated it would take Colt twenty-seven months to get AR-15 production ramped to acceptable levels.54 (They did not, however, count on Colt’s brilliant acquisition of the former machinist-turned-chief mechanical engineer of Thompson