The World's Most Popular

State of the Art

The World’s Most Popular Gun The Long Road to the AK-47

o firearm in history has and created a revolutionary romance enjoyed the fame or popular- that still surrounds the weapon. Nity of the assault rifle known Since gunpowder is not static in as the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. Created power in the way that human muscle by a Soviet weapons designer at the is, once fiery arms were invented in the dawn of the Cold War, it was mass- fourteenth century, they would in the- produced and distributed worldwide in ory constantly improve in a way that the millions, leading to its canonization bows, slings, and swords could not. in the revolutionary Third World of the But in reality, centuries of technologi- 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, far beyond its cal stagnation followed the invention utility, the AK-47 became a Cold War of the first gun: for example, the eigh- icon, appearing on revolutionary flags, teenth- and nineteenth-century “Brown in songs and poems, and in televised Bess” flintlock musket remained almost insurgencies as proof of communist fer- unchanged during its use by the British vor and supposed martial superiority. Empire over the course of more than a And it continues to play a major role in century. Early muskets and their pre- warfare today, most visibly in guerrilla decessors had slow rates of fire and conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. poor accuracy and reliability, and thus The AK-47 has succeeded so wildly did not always ensure battlefield supe- because it is almost an ideal realization riority over arrows, edged weapons, of the personal firearm: where most and hand-launched missiles. Benjamin weapons have had to contend with Franklin famously advocated the use of tradeoffs between accuracy, lethality, bows by the cash-strapped Continental speed of fire, reliability, cost of produc- Army, arguing that they were cheaper, tion, and ease of carrying and use, the easier to use, and could send more AK-47 managed to find a sweet spot arrows per minute than the musket maximizing these traits. In fact, the could fire balls. weapon is so reliable, effective, and The problem was that the vari- easy to use by untrained operators that ous qualities of a good handheld its advent made it widely possible for weapon were often mutually exclu- just about any group, even with little sive. Increased lethality, for instance, money, modern technology, or formal was usually attained by increasing military training, to mount significant, the weight of the firearm and bul- deadly assaults against a much larger lets, which often reduced reliability and more advanced force — a fact that and mobility, and made weapons too has transformed the face of warfare expensive to outfit an entire army. So

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Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. A Survey of Technology and Society the development of personal firearms of these machines could in theory spit was often haphazard, especially during out six hundred rounds per minute, periods of general peace. Black-powder, allowing two-man teams to lay down muzzle-loading, smoothbore (unrifled) a volume of fire greater than what firearms were the norm for centuries. was possible from a whole company Only in the mid-nineteenth century of riflemen. The new machine guns did sophisticated metallurgy and tech- proved revolutionary, especially in the niques of mass production at last begin colonial wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin to usher in rear-loading models, car- America, in which small numbers of tridge ammunition, more powerful and Westerners could trump numerically smokeless gunpowder, rifled barrels, superior foes, sending a chilling mes- and interchangeable, machined parts. sage of technological superiority. The The result was a giant leap in the venerable traditions of the mounted ability of soldiers to kill one another lancer, the cavalryman, and the skilled on a mass scale, as the ancient science swordsman slipped into decline with of effective body armor was unable to the advent of the machine gun. keep pace. By the nineteenth century, But the early machine guns, though the personal arms race was on. rapid-fire and quite lethal, were heavy The watershed years were those of and they often jammed, leaving their the American Civil War, which cre- operators defenseless. And they were ated a race for more rapidly firing costly and difficult to move and maneu- and lethal arms. The war that began ver. Nevertheless, during World War I, with the use of muskets and Minié improved mobile Maxim, Vickers, and balls ended with the Henry repeating Colt-Browning machine guns reigned rifle, which allowed a skilled single supreme across the trenches, overpow- shooter to load and fire up to twenty- ering the firing rates of bolt-action, clip- eight times per minute. The war also fed rifles. In response to the machine saw the development of the Gatling gun’s lethal tyranny on the battle- machine gun, and, somewhat later, field, early twentieth-century tacticians the Maxim, the first fully automatic began dreaming of an everyman’s mini- weapon. The more advanced models machine gun that would diffuse such

AK-47: The Weapon that The Gun The Gun that Changed Changed the Face of War By C. J. Chivers the World By Larry Kahaner Simon & Schuster ~ 2010 By Mikhail Kalashnikov Wiley ~ 2006 496 pp. ~ $28 (cloth) with Elena Joy 272 pp. ~ $25.95 (cloth) Polity ~ 2007 224 pp. ~ $19.95 (paper)

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Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. State of the Art killing power into the hands of millions that few submachine guns were deadly of combatants. beyond two hundred yards — a poten- The result was the generation of tially fatal limitation at the times when the so-called submachine gun, most rifle sharpshooters had clear fields prominently the German MP-18, the of fire at over a thousand yards. The Italian Villar Perosa and Beretta Model constant rapid firing, together with 1918, and the American Thompson (or the grime, heat, and filthy conditions Tommy Gun). These weapons fired of battle, made the submachine guns pistol cartridges, allowing for the jam far too frequently. And another employment of existing stocks; they problem developed during the war that were relatively light at around ten transcended the weapons’ advantage pounds; and they could in theory be of rapid firing: heavily-laden soldiers shot at astounding rates of fire of well simply could not carry enough addi- over 400 rounds per minute. Whereas tional bullets — often larger-caliber .30 World War I was defined by heavy and .45 ammunition — to take advan- machine guns battling each other in tage of their guns’ voracious appetites. antipodal fashion across clearly defined On the other hand, repeating rifles, fields of fire, battles of World War even when semi-automatic and equipped II were frequently fought in jungles, with enlarged clips and improved bar- forests, and urban streets, in which the rel and stock designs that allowed a enemy was typically near and highly good chance of hits at great distances, mobile. Submachine guns proved pop- did not allow enough shots per minute ular during this war — and spawned a for the increasingly close-order combat number of cheaper imitations — thanks in which enemy soldiers might appear to their adaptability to a situation in suddenly en masse, and in all conceiv- which constant streams of bullets were able landscapes. Their longer barrels directed at soldiers from every direc- and clumsy shoulder stocks certainly tion by constantly moving enemies, proved a hindrance during close-in and enemies were more likely to be fighting. Other tradeoffs arose as mil- stopped by sudden, rapid fire than lions of combatants joined the Allies or by precisely aimed shots from small, Axis powers in a global war, allowing longer-barrel weapons. little time to ensure traditional marks- Yet, for a variety of reasons, the manship training for men from such new submachine guns could still not widely disparate backgrounds. The entirely replace clip-fed repeating advantages that could be gained from rifles. While they delivered far more employing a more accurate, slower- bullets per minute, their short bar- firing, traditional semi-automatic rifle rels allowed only for poor accuracy were often lost by the inexperience and limited range. The less powerful of the users. There had been design pistol cartridges and greater recoil attempts during World War I to bridge from near-continuous fire also meant these differences, the most successful

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Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. A Survey of Technology and Society of which was the American Browning countries, and the Kremlin would glee- Automatic Rifle. It was almost as accu- fully reward its new friends with mass rate as a rifle, but with a weight of over deliveries of their wondrous weapon. fifteen pounds and a small magazine of The sudden ubiquity of the AK-47 just twenty rounds, riflemen often had stunned the United States and Europe, to shoot from a prone position, with and seemed to turn the so-called First a barrel tripod and plenty of available World’s advantages in marksmanship magazines nearby. and weapon craftsmanship on their heads. But in the post-World War II era, Illiterate insurgents, amply equipped a true breakthrough addressed the with cheap AK-47s — now produced apparently irreconcilable advantages of even more inexpensively by an array submachine guns and repeating, clip- of Soviet satellite countries — suddenly fed rifles. The brilliant compromise had at their disposal more firepower became known as the “assault rifle,” than American soldiers. And what did the most prominent of which was the it matter if Western riflemen were in Russian Mikhail Kalashnikov’s AK- theory better trained or shot a better 47 (for automatic Kalashnikov, model calibrated and more accurate weapon, 1947), which came into wide use in the when mere teenagers in the tens of early 1950s. Kalashnikov, who benefit- thousands could pepper Western troops ed from the designs of earlier German with bullets? and Russian prototypes, seemingly at The widespread export of the AK- last solved the six-hundred-year-long 47 marked yet another Sputnik-like dilemma of providing an accurate rifle moment in which state communism that was not only capable of firing seemed to outpace Western entrepre- hundreds of rounds per minute, but neurialism. And just as the Soviets’ was still deadly at ranges of 300-400 Sputnik success would set off the space yards and beyond. And at under ten race, and as there were other rivalries pounds, the AK-47 was easy to carry, between the Soviet T-34 tank and its simple to operate, and highly depend- American counterparts, and between able. Moreover, by using a medium- MiG-15 and F-86 jet fighters in the sized bullet (the 7.62x39mm cartridge, skies of Korea, so too was there a equivalent to about .31 caliber) rather competition in assault rifle technol- than larger .40 caliber rounds, the AK- ogy. Not until the early 1960s did the 47 achieved a deadly muzzle velocity Americans accept that their old reli- of over 2,300 feet per second. In short, able M1 and its replacement M14 were Kalashnikov seemed to have squared woefully wrong for the new non-tradi- the circle by creating a light, cheap, tional theaters of the Cold War. rapid-firing, accurate, reliable, and If a new American assault weapon lethal weapon that was neither rifle nor were to follow in the Kalashnikov submachine gun. The gun proved per- model, it would have to trump its fect for revolutionaries in Third World Russian competitor with greater

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accuracy and lethality. This goal was of an uncomplicated assault rifle that seemingly accomplished with the M16 compensated for lost accuracy by rifle, invented in the 1950s by the leg- achieving greater reliability, simplicity endary arms designer Eugene Stoner. of use, and a larger bullet. The sleek black assault rifle employed The AK-47 further exasperated plastic and aluminum alloys to reduce Westerners by its cheap fabrication the weight to two pounds less than the from stamped metals and its brilliant rival AK-47. And it used even smaller operation with just a few working ammunition — the 5.56x45mm high- parts. By the late 1960s, soldiers were velocity bullet that was to become the taking apart, cleaning, and reassem- standard NATO round. bling the weapon in about half the time The result was that, by all accounts, required for the M16. Something that the M16 proved to be an exception- felt and looked so “cheap,” and that ally reliable and accurate assault rifle. was produced by the Communist Bloc Its smaller-caliber bullet was in some notorious for its shoddily manufac- ways as lethal as the AK-47’s larger tured products, surely, it seemed, could ammunition, as it had a muzzle veloc- not be comparable to a rifle designed ity of over 3,000 feet per second, and by the Americans, the British, or the the bullet tended to break up after pen- Germans, with their far more distin- etrating flesh. The M16 also proved guished firearms pedigree. somewhat easier to handle and had less Yet the Communist Bloc continued recoil than the AK-47. And soldiers to meet world demand with millions of could carry far more of the light- AK-47s. And when the Soviet Union er-weight ammunition. The ensuing collapsed, its former republics and cli- shoot-off between the two weapons in ents often sought to unload their stock- the Vietnam War was supposed to make piles at discounted prices. Ironically, clear the American gun’s advantages in the United States eventually became rates of fire, accuracy, and lethality. the largest purchaser of the AK-47 in But just the opposite proved to be its efforts to supply poorer allies — such true — at least in the first four years as some areas of the former-Yugoslavia, of the M16’s wide use. Jamming was post-Saddam Iraq, and Afghanistan — chronic, apparently due to initial with cheap, reliable assault rifles with- design flaws in the gun, manufactur- out its own large fingerprints on the ing problems with the gunpowder, and arm sales. The result today is that some soldiers’ frequent failure to clean the 75 million AK-47s have been produced, weapon regularly amid the humidity with most still in circulation, making it and dirt of the jungle. In contrast, the the most ubiquitous weapon in the his- AK-47 seemed nearly indestructible, tory of firearms — dwarfing the M16’s in part due to its simpler construction eight million. and greater tolerances. In Vietnam, at The debate between exponents of least, the verdict favored the notion the AK-47 and the M16 has never

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Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. A Survey of Technology and Society been resolved, in part because both might rejoin that the fault is not in our guns continued to evolve with subse- stars, but in our selves. quent improved models and have now Larry Kahaner’s book AK-47: The both been superseded by more recent Weapon that Changed the Face of War is a designs; in part because ideology and lighter but nevertheless engaging story national chauvinism were inseparable of the contemporary AK-47 as a cultur- from dispassionate analysis; and in part al phenomenon. He too reminds us that because the relative value of accuracy many of the terrorist movements and versus reliability is so subjective. In insurgencies in Asia, Latin America, any case, NATO troops in general felt and especially Africa would have been that their improved models of M16s by impossible without the widespread dis- the 1980s had proved superior, even as persion of the AK-47, the ideal weap- some of the old problems of jamming on for impoverished, poorly trained and insufficient stopping power some- mercenaries. He points out that the times reappeared during the harsh acrimonious controversy between the conditions of sand and heat during the AK-47 and the M16 resurfaced again most recent Iraq War. forty years after Vietnam during the The story of the AK-47, amid the post-Saddam Hussein insurgency, when ongoing saga of rifle evolution, has in improved versions of both assault rifles recent years spawned a number of pop- collided in the streets of urban Iraq. ular books. The best is C.J. Chivers’s And the verdict was again ambiguous, scholarly The Gun. Chivers takes a as U.S. troops still largely preferred properly skeptical view of many of the their own weapons but developed a claims by Mikhail Kalashnikov sur- grudging respect for the insurgents’ rounding the birth of AK-47, and offers “bullet hoses,” which shot streams of a sober and fair account of the acrimo- deadly large-caliber bullets at close nious rivalry between the M16 and AK- ranges and seemed impervious to the 47. In dispassionate fashion, Chivers sand and heat of the Iraqi landscape. concludes that few inventions of the Then there is the book by Mikhail twentieth century have done so much Kalashnikov himself. Now a nonage- to kill so many through “war, terror, narian, Kalashnikov was presented in atrocity, and crime.” But after such a 2009 with the title Hero of the Russian clear-headed analysis of the AK-47, he Federation, the country’s highest surprisingly offers the emotional hope honor. With the help of his daughter that eventually the seasons, aging, and Elena Joly, Kalashnikov wrote an auto- wear and tear will finally rid the world biography, first published in French in of this nearly indestructible menace — 2003 and available in a 2006 English and with it the bestowing into the translation. Kalashnikov fought dur- hands of untrained near-children the ing the worst months of the German world over the power to kill indiscrimi- invasion of Russia; in 1941, in a failed nately and en masse. To this hope, one counter-offensive, he was almost killed

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Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. State of the Art when his Red Army tank regiment was did not profit, at least in Western style, cut off and overwhelmed. from the sales of some 100 million During a long subsequent illness weapons that bear his name (includ- and recovery, Kalashnikov’s innate ing variants on the AK-47). And yet gun-making talents were noticed. And Kalashnikov seems almost longingly to so, despite his lack of formal design note the millions of dollars in profits training, he was soon promoted to that came to Eugene Stoner from his work with a team of Soviet engineers, M16, even as he ostensibly prefers quickly emerged as a senior designer, the public acclaim in Russia that was and was mostly responsible for the never accorded to Stoner in the United AK-47. The most fascinating chapters States. That same paradox characterizes in Kalashnikov’s story are about the Kalashnikov’s occasional regret that his nightmare of life in Stalin’s Soviet invention became the signature weapon Union, in which any achievement, com- among terrorists and bandits — many mercial or intellectual, earned envy of them now deadly enemies of Russia that in turn might translate into accu- itself — juxtaposed with his pride in sations of being a counter-revolution- the astounding success of a supposedly ary, would-be elite, often with deadly defensive AK-47. Speaking at a ceremo- repercussions. ny honoring the sixtieth anniversary of As Chivers and Kahaner point out, the weapon, he claimed, “I sleep well. and as is discernible in Kalashnikov’s It’s the politicians who are to blame for memoir, his relationship with his own failing to come to an agreement and deadly invention over the last two- resorting to violence.” thirds of a century has proved erratic. So what in the end are we to make of Kalashnikov is proud of his promo- the AK-47, given that people ultimate- tion to the rank of lieutenant general ly kill one another and design weap- in the Armed Forces of the Russian ons that do it so effectively? A perfect Federation, and under Communist rule storm of events explains the gun’s he was twice honored as a Hero of lethal role in eroding civilization over Socialist Labor. Yet even as Kalashnikov the last six decades. The impoverished details the horrors of Stalinist Russia post-colonial world was eager for that resulted in his own family’s brutal the sort of advanced weapons that exile, he concludes, “I consider Stalin had characterized a near-century of as one of the great national leaders of endemic warfare in the more advanced the twentieth century, and as a great West, and the Soviet Union was eager army leader.” to fan liberationist movements against Kalashnikov takes great trouble to the West. It took the postwar glam- note that the AK-47 grew out of an our of international communism, the effort to protect his homeland from a industrial muscle of the Soviet Union, repeat of the sort of barbaric invasion and a Russian genius with no higher that Hitler unleashed, adding that he education but great practical savvy

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Copyright 2011. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. A Survey of Technology and Society to at last provide millions with such — Victor Davis Hanson is a senior parity, meeting the requirements of a fellow in classics and military history at new arms lethality at very little cost. the Hoover Institution, and is the author, The result was the tragedy of a global most recently, of The Father of Us All: assault rifle that has been crucial to War and History, Ancient and Modern self-described liberationists in further- (Bloomsbury, 2010) and the novel The ing so often the cause of tyranny. End of Sparta (Bloomsbury, 2011).

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