Why was 223/5.56 annointed?

The Army was doing away with the M1 Carbine, which the Air Force used.
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This is interesting in and of itself and raises other questions.

  • Why get rid of the M1 carbine if it fills a niche?
  • Why not continue to issue M1 carbines if they fit new roles better than other existing weapons? I bet the Air Force wasn't alone in liking the M1 carbine in certain situations. Especially the full auto M2 carbine.
  • The AR was originally not to be used as a main battle rifle? Just a glorified pistol replacement?
  • Why couldn't the Air Force just use the existing main battle rifle?
  • Why couldn't the AR coexist with the main battle rifle like the M1 carbine did? That's sort of what happened anyway when all was said and done.
 
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Has anyone ever heard of a 223 rifle being damaged by firing a 556 cartridge? I have my Dad's 30+ year old 223 110 Savage and back then we never paid any attention to the box saying 556 or 223. I will say, we always bought domestic (Win, Rem, Fed) manufactured ammunition.
 
get this:
I went to an indoor range once, They made me buy their .223 ammo because my .223 ammo looked like some of them had Lake City headstamps.. I was like??? ok
 
Consider the US battle doctrine of the era: Infantry should control their environment to 200 meters while using the primary weapon, the radio, to call for support from artillery and/or air.

The need for a higher load-out of ammo was seen as necessary. That meant a smaller and lighter cartridge. The 5.56 was deemed adequate for the purpose, along with Stoner's concept.

Back then, the primary probable enemy was the Soviet Union, with the fighting to include action within cities and towns. Artillery and tanks, with infantry support.

There's an ancient Soldier of Fortune magazine article by Pat(?) Pate, quite extensive. He was able to interview various people who were alive and well, back then, and had been involved in both the development and the politics of the selection. Very much worthwhile, if you can find it. He's very thorough in all his journalistic efforts.
 
It was an interesting and seriously flawed time in weapons procurement, I'm sure there are whole books written on it, though I don't know them myself.

Both sides of the issue did many things in the worst possible ways.

The Army, getting its orders, selected a set of performance criteria which the .222 simply could not meet.

Was this simply an attempt to kill it criteria and performance notwithstanding?
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possibly. Also possible is that the criteria selected was to ensure a new round had to be created, rather than use an existing one. Bureaucracies are like that, sometimes...

Why get rid of the M1 carbine if it fills a niche?
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because, under the new plan, it no longer filled the niche. The Army (and eventually all the other services) were in the process of getting rid of nearly ALL their WWII era weapon designs. New guns were in the pipeline, a new rifle that would do everything (M14) and a new machinegun that would do the rest was coming along...

The notable exceptions were the 1911A1 pistol and the M2 .50 cal machinegun.

The AR was originally not to be used as a main battle rifle? Just a glorified pistol replacement?
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The first military people who seriously looked at Stoner's AR were Air Force. They were not looking for a main battle rifle.

And, I would remind you, the M1 Carbine was also, "just a glorified pistol replacement".

Why couldn't the Air Force just use the existing main battle rifle?
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I suppose they could have, but they didn't want to, and had no NEED to.
The needs of Air Force Security Police and combat infantry are NOT identical.

Why couldn't the AR coexist with the main battle rifle like the M1 carbine did?
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To answer that, you'd have to ask the MacNamara Defense Dept. or perhaps God. No one else seems to know...
 
Why should taxpayers pay the bills for maintaining M1 carbines for the Air Force when the M16 is adopted by the Army? No parts makers, factory ammo lines used up, aged weapons, during wartime. Not smart management, anyone of us would have killed it, too, had we been in authority at the time.
 
Why should taxpayers pay the bills for maintaining M1 carbines for the Air Force when the M16 is adopted by the Army? No parts makers, factory ammo lines used up, aged weapons, during wartime. Not smart management, anyone of us would have killed it, too, had we been in authority at the time.
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Huh? The Air Fore adopted it first, as a replacement for the M2 carbine in use by its base security forces. The Army later started moving toward it, initially for Air Assault, Special Forces, and Airborne troops. They were looking at high velocity small caliber stuff ~12 years prior, but requirements (arguably made to exclude it) and institutional inertia worked against it. You may want to skim the link back in post #4.
 
I can't recall where, but somewhere I read that the MacNamara defense dept took more weapons out of service than the best estimates of a Soviet nuclear first strike would have...

Much as I dislike the way the bean counters rammed it down the military's throat, worse were the deliberate attempts to discredit it by sabotaging the rifle/cartridge combination by subtle and not so subtle means.

GI's DIED as a result of that. AND, it did no good.

We still have the AR system and 5.56mm round and after half a century of tinkering with it, we got most of the bugs out of it.

One cannot help but wonder what we would have if we had chosen or stuck with something else, and given it even half the effort to make it work given to the AR and the 5.56mm....??
 
I am going to ignore the business about bribery and corruption; just a lot of anti everything BS.

The Army, anticipating a war which would begin with a Russian invasion of Europe, did not want to go to a reduced power round; they wanted a rifle that would outrange the Soviet AK-47 and its 7.62x39 cartridge. Under a lot of political pressure to match that rifle in selective fire capability, they fielded a quite good rifle, the M14. But the M14 and its 7.62 NATO round were too powerful for effective use in full automatic fire, and most M14's were issued with that capability blocked.

But that still left the U.S. with no rifle to counter the AK-47. There was a quite serious proposal to simply adopt the Russian rifle and pay royalties, but that was deemed (correctly) to be politically unacceptable. (Imagine the "discussions" in Congress!!)

Then came along the Stoner rifle, the AR-10. It was more controllable in FA fire than the M14, but still not as good as the AK. Stoner scaled the AR-10 down, first to the .222 Magnum, then the .222 Special, which, with minor modifications, that became the .223 Remington, which was ultimately adopted as the 5.56mm NATO. The story about Curt LeMay is basically correct; the key player was Dick Boutelle, president of Fairchild, who had became a friend of LeMay through the aircraft procurement process. The SAC guards were using M1 carbines, which were about worn out and for which a support train no longer existed. LeMay was interested in the new rifle and procured some for SAC; those were the ones with stocks painted Air Force blue.

Another key player, rarely mentioned, was John Kennedy. Kennedy was a "gun guy" and very interested in small arms developments. He witnessed, as President, a Navy SEAL demonstration at Norfolk, and asked about the strange rifles they were carrying, AR-15's. He fired one and asked why it was not general issue. Told that the Army testers had problems, he "suggested" that the decision be reviewed. Needless to say, it was, and ultimately the rifle was adopted as the M16.

Basically, the Army's needs were met. The M16 is controllable in automatic fire, is adequately powerful against personnel and, after serious "teething troubles", is reasonably reliable, though still a high maintenance rifle compared to the M1 or M1 carbine.

Most of this is well covered in the Stevens/Ezell book The Black Rifle, which I recommend, though there are a few errors in details.

Jim
 
Little attention was paid to the fact that having a rifle and machine gun in different calibers complicates the supply problems. The 5.56 functions as an anti-personnel round under the military's doctrine that all you have to do is cause a casualty, against even thin skinned vehicles it fails and all attempts to use it as a machine gun round have failed. And there have been
a lot of complaints from current veterans that it is ineffective against insurgents high on drugs.
 
size and weight of the rifle and ammo didn't have anything to do with it being compared to its predecessor in whatever stage of use?


really tho I see very little diff in the ammo of 223 or 556 even as this thread has progressed. im not sure I get it yet..they still seem so close in perf that there seems like there should only be one
 
the fact that having a rifle and machine gun in different calibers complicates the supply problems.
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It is just common sense that the more items in your supply system, the more complicated it gets.

We came out of WWII with the .45acp, .30 carbine, and .30-06 are rounds for "long guns" (SMG, carbine, M1Garand, BAR, and Browning .30 MGs).

We went through Korea with the same stuff.

Viet Nam is a transition period, we essentially replaced the .30-06 with the .308, and in rifles replaced the .308 with the .223. BUT, we still had .45acp SMGs, and our ARVN allies were using .30-06s and .30 carbines that they got from us, and I don't think they were making their own ammo for them (if they did, it wasn't in quantity), so they got their ammo from us.

Which meant that ALL these rounds were in our supply system.

I've even heard (from people who were there) that some tanker units went to Desert Storm still using their WWII era M3A1 .45acp SMGs, after we had changed the .45 for the 9mm as our pistol round.

The 5.56 functions as an anti-personnel round ... all attempts to use it as a machine gun round have failed.
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If it has failed, what are all those SAW things I keep hearing about??

And there have been
a lot of complaints from current veterans that it is ineffective against insurgents high on drugs.
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I have heard this. I have also heard about every other complaint about the .22 caliber being ineffective, since it was adopted. Some of them are quite valid. Others, not so much.

One interesting comment I heard, about today's troops complaining how their rifles were "ineffective" ascribed the bulk of the complaints to the fact that the troops were having to shoot the bad guys 2 or 3 times before they went down.

And how the bulk of todays troops have little experience with real world shooting (before going into combat) and LOTS of experience with video games, where it takes ONE round to drop the bad guys.

We have a lot of troops who have "trained" since their early teen (or pre-teen) years on these "simulators" (video games), and not on real shooting and its results in the field, so they have an ingrained expectation of how things should work (the way they do in the games), and when they find out the real world is different and a bit more complex, they complain about the rifles being ineffective.

Makes sense to me.
 
44AMP said:
We have a lot of troops who have "trained" since their early teen (or pre-teen) years on these "simulators" (video games), and not on real shooting and its results in the field, so they have an ingrained expectation of how things should work (the way they do in the games), and when they find out the real world is different and a bit more complex, they complain about the rifles being ineffective.
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I've heard that the 5.56 is bad from a friend who carried a 30-06 bolt action in Vietnam. He took some shots I would consider very distant. I've shot bolt action 30-06 rifles, but rarely. I don't like recoil, and those rifles have enough of it to bother someone like me. I am not sure I could hit a man-sized target with that kind of rifle at 500m.

I can shoot an AR though; it's rather gentle. If someone complains that it takes 3 shots to put someone down at 500m that means he can shoot his rifle accurately enough to hit at 500m, three times no less. Is that a rifle to complain about?

Is a heavier bullet and cartridge going to allow an average service shooter excellent accuracy?
 
I think if a soldier had hunted before, they would have a better understanding of what happens when a mammal is shot.

I think that's where some of the myths surrounding the effectiveness of certain cartridges come from... They just don't know what happens. And it can't be predicted how long it will take to become incapacitated from wounds.
 
I remember seeing on the news the army broke out the old M14's in the middle East, didn't they upgrade them to a new designation and add some new features?
 
5.56 casualty..... Lol just kidding, I don't know what that is...

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