American Rifle - Alexander Rose [202]
An exasperated McNamara, who had naïvely thought that at last he had an open-and-shut case against the M14—how he must have rued that flip comment back in 1961, that “this is a relatively simple job, to build a rifle, compared to building a satellite or a missile system”—sent Vance a memorandum on October 12. (Two days before, reconnaissance photos had been shown to Kennedy of Soviet nuclear missile installations on Cuba.) In the memo McNamara remarked that “I have seen certain evidence which appears to indicate that . . . we are equip-ping our forces with a weapon [M14] definitely inferior in firepower and combat effectiveness to the Soviet assault rifle.”56 There was only one thing to do: send the file upstairs to the White House for the president to decide. Two weeks later, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy read the Hitch Report and thoroughly quizzed McNamara on the issue. The only thing to do, they decided, was to pit the M14 directly, exhaustively, and definitively against the AR-15.
General Earl Wheeler, the new army chief of staff, was instructed to have a final report on McNamara’s desk by the end of January 1963. As early as December, however, the tests had descended into an orgy of accusations of bias, rigging, and foul play—mostly orchestrated by Colt and its friends. Truth be told, there was bias, but it was generally inadvertent in nature, a product of the haste and poor planning that had gone into finishing the tests on time. To take one glaring example, in Georgia and Alaska the AR-15 flopped terribly. The reason was that the testers had, in the absence of any instructions from the Pentagon, used the standard 1954 performance yardsticks printed in their testing manuals, but these had been developed for the M1, not for small-caliber automatic weapons. One of them, for instance, required that rifles be tested for accuracy and penetration at 800 yards; the AR-15 had a maximum range of 500.
The fault lay not entirely on the army’s side. Quality control at Colt and Remington (which made the AR-15 ammunition) was so poor that several rifles rattled themselves almost to pieces and loose bullets slipped out of shoddy cartridges. As a result, the malfunction rate of AR-15s, once enviably low, skyrocketed to eight times that of the M14. Bobby MacDonald, the excitable arms dealer who had a lot of money riding on these tests (over five to ten years, the army was forecasted to spend a billion dollars on two million rifles along with their ammunition, spare parts, and repair tools), angrily wrote to the two companies to accuse them of “deliberately sabotaging” their own products.57
So the supposedly “conclusive” tests had done nothing but create more confusion. They were about to become more so, for just after McNamara received Wheeler’s now-useless report, the army’s Small Arms Development Staff informed him that one of their secret pro-grams was nearing completion. It was named SPIW, for Special Purpose Individual Weapon, and the small-arms people assured McNamara that, if approved, it would be ready for final testing by February 1964—by 1965, tops.58The defense secretary could not afford to ignore the SPIW. If it worked as spectacularly as Small Arms was telling him, it would outclass not only the M14 but the AR-15 and AK-47 as well. The SPIW would “leapfrog,” according to Lieutenant General Dwight Beach, the chief of research and development, over any rifle in existence and solve the “Army small-arms muddle” (as “experts,” quoted in the New York Times, put it).The SPIW certainly was radical: it would fire a cartridge crammed with inch-long .10-caliber flechettes, or nail-like darts that would disperse at immensely high speed and shred their target.
Such a revolutionary departure from a century’s worth of hard-won experience with bullet-tipped metallic cartridges would naturally require significant technological innovations. To make the flechettes sufficiently lethal, they