Description
Few weapons have been as controversial as the AR-15/M-16/M-4 rifle/carbine. Designed by Eugene Stoner in 1957, it became the U.S. Army’s issue weapon in 1967, amid great controversy over its reliability as a rifle, and the effectiveness of it’s .223 cartridge. In becoming the standard rifle of the Army, it displaced the M-14, whose design had begun near the end of WWII, and which had been adopted as standard in 1959.
What happened? How and why did the U.S. Army take 14 years to design a relatively small variant on the M-1 Garand, whose three great improvements were to be detachable box magazine, full automatic capability, and a slightly shorter cartridge? Why, having done so, did they give the whole thing up as a bad idea almost as soon as it was used in combat? And how did a private design by the then unknown Eugene Stoner become the basis for the rifle the U.S. military is still using a half-century later?
Edward Ezell details the whole pathetic story, showing how the M-14’s design process accommodated every possible goal except battlefield performance in the hands of the average soldier, and respect for the law of conservation of momentum; how a group of dissidents in the Army’s Operational Research Office came up with the idea of the small-caliber, high-velocity full-auto rifle; and how Eugene Stoner’s AR-15 design was mangled by the U.S. Army. A group of painfully sincere men, all concentrating on narrow facets of a large and complicated problem, succeeded in creating a mess that got U.S. soldiers killed on the battlefield, and resulted in a decidedly less than optimum design for a rifle and cartridge.
Approximate size of book and weight. All books with be shipped Media Mail, but
we still need to know if it is oversized or extremely heavy.
Dimension: 6” x 9 ½” x 1 ½” inches Weight: Total wt. 1.58 lbs.
