Did the U.S. Army Sabotage Its Own Rifle in Vietnam?

The M16 was supposed to give American soldiers a technological edge over the enemy.

Instead, it became one of the most controversial weapon scandals in US military history.

But here’s the thing.

The rifle that failed in Vietnam wasn’t the rifle that was designed.

Someone changed it.

And those changes cost American lives.

In 1956, a small aerospace company called Armalite hired a former marine named Eugene Stoner.

His job was to design a new kind of rifle using modern materials and manufacturing techniques.

What Stoner created was revolutionary.

The AR-15 used aircraft grade aluminum instead of wood and steel.

It fired a smaller, lighter cartridge called the 2223 Remington.

A soldier could carry nearly twice as much ammunition compared to the M14 it was meant to replace.

But the most important detail, and this is critical to understand what happened later, was that Stoner designed the rifle to work with a specific type of gunpowder.

It was called IMR or improved military rifle powder.

This was a stick powder that burned clean and consistent.

When the Air Force tested the AR-15 in 1961, it worked flawlessly.

General Curtis Lame was so impressed, he ordered 8,500 rifles for Air Force personnel.

Then came the real test.

In 1962, the Advanced Research Projects Agency sent 1,000 AR-15s to South Vietnam for combat evaluation.

The results were devastating, but in a good way against enemy forces, the rifle proved incredibly lethal and reliable.

One famous report described a South Vietnamese soldier killing five Vietkong with just eight rounds.

The rifle was accurate, light, and most importantly, it worked.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara pushed for immediate adoption.

The Army reluctantly agreed to adopt it as the M16 in 1964.

But the Army Ordinance Corps, the department responsible for weapons procurement, had other plans.

They had spent years developing the M14, and they weren’t happy about being forced to adopt an outside design.

What happened next would turn a revolutionary weapon into a death sentence for American soldiers.

When the army took control of M16 production, they made several changes to the rifle.

Some were reasonable, but others were catastrophic.

Uh this was a problem that the government the ordinance corp was aware of.

In fact, uh, Colt Colts patent fire manufacturing had told them when they received the new ammunition with ball propellant that they could not meet the cyclic rate limits that the they were it was always too too high.

So the army knew that there this was a problem.

So what they told them to do was to qualify it with the original ammunition so they could actually make the shipments.

So uh knowingly that the ammunition that they were using in Vietnam was this ball propellant and the rifle was not compatible with it, the army still made the decision to send uh to test the rifles with one type of ammunition and then feed them a different kind of ammunition in Vietnam.

The most damaging change was the ammunition.

Eugene Stoner had specifically designed the rifle to work with IMR stick powder.

The army switched to a different propellant called ball powder, designated WC846.

Why?

Ballpowder was cheaper.

It was already being produced in large quantities for other weapons.

From around 850 rounds per minute to over 100 rounds per minute, the rifle was literally cycling faster than it was designed to handle.

Even worse, bull powder left significantly more calcium carbide residue inside the chamber and gas tube.

In the humid jungles of Vietnam, this residue combined with moisture to create a paste that fouled the weapon.

And here’s where it gets truly unforgivable.

The original AR-15 had a chromeplated chamber.

Chrome plating prevents corrosion and makes the chamber easier to clean.

When the army took over production, they removed the chrome plating to cut costs.

A rifle designed for clean burning powder with a chrome lined chamber was now being issued with dirty burning powder and no chrome protection.

The rifles were touted as self-cleing rifles.

Now, it doesn’t matter what kind of a rifle or machine gun or whatever it is.

Um, everything needs maintenance.

Nothing will work forever without any kind of maintenance.

Whether it’s an AK-47 or an M16, soldiers were not receiving cleaning kits.

There was no 22 caliber cleaning kits in Vietnam.

Um, so soldiers would have their parents send them uh 22 caliber cleaning kits they would get in sporting good shops and send them over to their their guys in Vietnam.

But it gets worse.

When the M16 was first issued to troops in Vietnam, the army didn’t provide cleaning kits.

Soldiers were told the rifle was self-cleaning.

This was a lie born from marketing materials that cult had used for demonstration purposes, never intended as actual maintenance guidance.

Young soldiers, many of them just out of basic training, were sent into combat with a weapon they didn’t know how to maintain, firing ammunition it wasn’t designed for in conditions that guaranteed failure.

The nightmare was about to begin.

In the spring of 1967, Marines of the Third Marine Division launched a series of bloody assaults on enemy positions near Kesan.

These battles became known as the hill fights.

The terrain was brutal.

Dense jungle, steep hills, and an entrenched enemy.

But what made these battles a catastrophe wasn’t the North Vietnamese.

It was the M16.

Marines reported that during firefights, their rifles would jam after just a few rounds.

The most common malfunction was a failure to extract.

The spent cartridge case would stick in the chamber and the rifle would be completely disabled.

With the enemy closing in, soldiers had to stop firing and try to clear the malfunction.

They shoved cleaning rods down the barrel, trying to push out the stuck casing.

Some succeeded, many didn’t.

Letters started arriving home that painted a horrifying picture.

One Marine wrote to his family.

The situation became so dire that some American soldiers started picking up AK47s from dead enemy combatants.

The Soviet designed rifle wasn’t as accurate, but it never jammed.

It was the ultimate humiliation for American military technology.

By mid 1967, congressional offices were being flooded with letters from soldiers and their families demanding answers.

One letter read into the congressional record described a platoon that lost half its men because their rifles stopped working.

The scandal had become too big to ignore.

Congress demanded an investigation.

In May 1967, Representative Richard IIcord of Missouri convened a special subcommittee to investigate the M16 rifle program.

What they discovered was a systematic failure at every level.

The IICORD committee interviewed soldiers, engineers, and military officials.

They examined test data and maintenance records.

Their 51page report was damning.

The report concluded that the ammunition change from IMR to ballpowder was made without proper testing.

It stated clearly that army officials knew about the problems and failed to act.

The committee found that soldiers had been sent into combat with weapons that military testers knew would malfunction.

The self-cleaning claim was identified as false and misleading.

The report made immediate recommendations.

Chromelined chambers had to be reinstated.

Cleaning kits had to be issued.

Training on maintenance had to be implemented.

The army even hired legendary comic book artist Will Eisner to create an illustrated maintenance manual that soldiers would actually read.

The improved rifle, designated the M16A1, featured a chromelined chamber and bore a new buffer system to reduce the cyclic rate and a forward assist to help close the bolt.

But for thousands of American soldiers, these fixes came too late.

The M16 rifle, properly manufactured and maintained, went on to become one of the most successful military weapons in history.

Its descendants, the M4 carbine and various AR-15 variants are still used by military and law enforcement around the world today.

But the early M16 scandal remains one of the most tragic examples of how bureaucratic decisions and costcutting measures can cost lives.

The exact number of soldiers who died because of M16 malfunctions has never been officially calculated.

Some historians estimate hundreds.

Others believe it was significantly more.

What we know for certain is that soldiers died holding weapons that should have worked.

Eugene Stoner um that was not an actual manufacturer.

They were uh thought of themselves as more of a think tank uh more of a product development but not as a manufacturing uh part.

As the war started to gear up a little bit in Vietnam uh we had sent advisers over there and we had issued weapons to the our North Viet or our South Vietnamese allies.

The story of the M16 in Vietnam is a reminder that in war, the decisions made in boardrooms and committee meetings have consequences measured in blood.

The M16 scandal led to major reforms in military weapons procurement.

Today, every new weapon system undergoes extensive testing before being issued to troops.