• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2167 0

had to be armed with rifles. During the Tonkin Gulf crisis, however, the Pentagon had, to its horror, been caught short, partly because of McNamara’s option three decision. Units were armed with no fewer than three “standard” rifles: some carried M1s authorized in 1936; others had been issued M14s, which some suspected were inferior to the AK-47s carried by the North Vietnamese enemy; and elite outfits were armed with the experimental, space-age M16. Since South Vietnamese units were carrying a variety of Browning Automatic Rifles, M2 carbines, cast-off submachine guns, and .30-caliber machine guns, American logisticians were tormented by the prospect of having to sup-ply five different types of ammunition and parts across the Pacific and deep into the jungle.

It was time to reappraise the Pentagon’s chaotic arms situation and put it back on track. Among McNamara’s first decisions in this regard was to award Colt on November 3, 1964, a supplementary order of $4,305,750 for more M16s (33,500 for the air force, 240 for the navy, and 82 for the coast guard, plus $517,000 for spare parts).67 The second, which came about three weeks later, was his announcement at a press conference that the Springfield Armory would be shuttered. Its death was hardly noticed by the country at large, for the armory was just one of ninety-five bases across thirty-three states and abroad that were being closed.68

McNamara’s opponents were unwilling to allow Springfield to disappear. Instead they instigated a three-year fight to save the armory. Despite the pleas of Senator Kennedy, the Massachusetts House delegation, and Mayor Charles Ryan of Springfield, it did no good. Rock Island in Illinois took over some of the armory’s research and development functions, but most (460 out of 480) of its highly skilled gun-smiths and civilian experts departed, took early retirement, or found jobs with military contractors, thus ignominiously bringing to an end 170 years’ worth of hard-won tradition.69 In the nineteenth century former Springfield employees had gradually diffused their skills to commercial firms around the country, but now this shortsighted closure of the armory instantly drained the pool of specialized small-arms talent and left behind few who could impart their knowledge to the next generation. Springfield Armory may have been slow and sometimes surly, but nobody had ever complained about the quality and workmanship of its Model 1903s, M1s, or M14s.

In some ways the end of Springfield was fated as soon as McNamara had joined the Pentagon. Its staff had been raised in the old Armory-Ordnance system of apprenticeship, inventive trial and error, and the vocational ethos of mechanics’ school; that system was wholly at odds with the professional, rationalist, and primarily theoretical climate fostered by the defense secretary. Bill Davis, one of Ordnance’s old-style civilian employees, believed that McNamara was uninterested in correcting the faults in the existing system but instead desired “to destroy the infrastructure itself, and rebuild within the hollow shell a system more in conformity with his own ideas.” The secretary’s “contempt for the Ordnance professional was undisguised at the less sophisticated lower levels outside Washington.” His emissaries to Springfield, Rock Island, and Frankford “had no previous professional experience in the field of small arms [and] their qualifications consisted of, and apparently were limited to, advanced academic degrees, supreme confidence in their own intellectual superiority, virtually absolute authority as designated representatives of OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense], and a degree of arrogance such as I have never seen before or since.”70 The times had certainly changed since the days when Andrew Jackson accused Ordnance men of being the intellectual snobs.

In the meantime General William Westmoreland, the new commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, had been grappling with the M16 issue.71 Having served General Paul Harkins as deputy commander since 1962, Westmoreland was familiar with the