The M16's procurement history is one of those things that sounds like a conspiracy theory until you actually read the congressional testimony — and then it just sounds like the government being the government.

"So now we both don't feel so good." — Eugene Stoner's response when told the Army had switched to ball powder without consulting him

That line says everything. The man designed the rifle, and they changed the ammunition — the single most consequential variable in how the whole system timed — without even a phone call until after the decision was final. Then they shipped the things to Vietnam without cleaning kits because some procurement guy decided to market them as self-cleaning. Anyone who's run an AR through a hot day at the range knows what carbon buildup looks like after a few hundred rounds with good ammo. Now imagine ball powder, jungle humidity, no rod, no brush, no CLP.

The results showed a 5-to-7-man squad armed with AR-15s was as effective as an 11-man M14 squad. The study recommended adopting a lightweight rifle like the AR-15. The Army's response was to order full M14 production.

The ammo math alone should have settled the argument. A soldier carries roughly the same weight either way — but with 5.56 he's running three times the round count. That's not a marginal advantage in a sustained firefight, that's a completely different conversation. And they buried the study and ordered more M14s.

What Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance eventually uncovered, after ordering the Army Inspector General to investigate, was that those tests had been rigged: the Army had used hand-selected, match-grade M14s against off-the-shelf AR-15s, then cherry-picked only the results that reflected poorly on the AR-15.

This is the part that should make anyone who's ever argued rifle data on a forum stop and think. Institutional actors with budget interest in a particular outcome will cook the numbers. Match-grade rifles against rack-grade rifles is not a test, it's a presentation. Every time someone cites an official military evaluation from that era, this is the asterisk hanging over it.

The twist rate change is what gets me on a personal level — 1:14 to 1:12 because of Arctic stability concerns, and in doing so they blunted the terminal ballistics that made the cartridge worth a damn in the first place. You'd have a harder time selling that tradeoff to anyone who understood what fragmentation was actually doing downrange.

What's the worst example you've personally seen — at a gun shop counter, on a range, anywhere — of someone in a position of authority making a firearms decision based on institutional habit rather than actual data?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team