American Rifle - Alexander Rose [212]
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this lifeline to Colt. For decades the Hartford, Connecticut, firm had lurched from disaster to disaster, making for an unmissable capitalistic soap opera in real time. In the late 1980s its employees went on strike for four years, and it suffered bankruptcies, buyouts, restructurings, and lawsuits galore. Owing to its troubles, the company even lost the lucrative contract to build M16s for the military to its mortal enemy, Belgium-based FN Herstal.12
An accident in 1996 helped immeasurably in revivifying the firm’s fortunes. After Colt received a modest contract to supply M4s, a navy office improperly distributed its secret blueprints to nearly two dozen competitors. Colt threatened to sue the government for up to $70 million, after which Washington agreed to make the firm the single-source supplier of the carbine to the military. (Rather enjoyably for Colt, FN Herstal challenged the arrangement but lost in federal court.)13 No one then could have realized how lucrative this otherwise minor deal would become once Pentagon spending soared after September 11, 2001.
Having seen what was happening to its brethren—Winchester and Smith & Wesson—Colt would do anything to preserve this monopoly on M4 production. At the time, New Haven–based Winchester was on the ropes, a victim to falling consumer gun sales. It would eventually shut its doors in March 2006. Roughly 150 members of the International Association of Machinists, the descendants of those can-do gunsmiths who helped create the American industrial boom of the nineteenth century by diffusing their skills and knowhow countrywide, lost their jobs.14
As for Smith & Wesson, the Springfield stalwart was dismissed as stodgy by customers and a sellout by other gun-makers. (In 2000 the company agreed to certain gun-safety measures to settle federal and state lawsuits.) It had lost its contracts with police forces and the military. Tomkins, a London-based conglomerate, having bought the company in 1987 for $112.5 million and pumping in another $60 million to update the factory, sold it for a miserly $15 million to the Saf-T-Hammer Corporation in 2001.15
The army, likewise, was keen to shield Colt’s products, and by extension its weapons policy, from adverse publicity. Intent on disproving post–An Nasiriyah criticisms of the M16, and the explosive charge that the M4’s gas-tube system was fundamentally flawed, in mid-June 2003 the army dispatched a Small Arms Weapons Assessment team to Iraq to interview more than a thousand soldiers about their guns. The subsequent report found them highly enthusiastic about their M4s (“The M4 is by far the preferred individual weapon across the theatre of operations. Units that don’t have it want it”) and slightly less so about M16s, mostly owing to their awkwardness and some problems with their magazines. A couple of warnings were quietly inserted into the text, not least of which was the necessity of cleaning and lubricating weapons daily to avoid jamming—but crucially, this stricture applied to all types of guns (from the M9 pistol to the M249 machine gun), owing to the harsh desert environment that blew sand everywhere. In short, the team recommended that in the “near term” the M4 should replace every M16 in theater, but that was only, they implied, a stopgap solution for the relatively few troops the Pentagon was then forecasting would be needed to stabilize Iraq during the brief post-invasion occupation. In the “long term” a compact rifle specifically developed for urban combat ought to be developed.16
In the summer of 2003, as things stood, that rifle would be the XM8. That November the first thirty prototypes were delivered for preliminary testing at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. Its prospects from the get-go were promising: in December, a spokesman claimed that “a retired soldier—who hadn’t picked up a weapon in six years—picked up the XM8, during the live fire, and hit the target with his first shot. In fact, he hit