The M16 Conspiracy: Sabotage and Consequences

Did the United States sabotage their own rifles in Vietnam? Yes, 100%. Here is Congress's subcommittee outright saying that they did and referring to their behavior as quote unbelievable. And here is where they directly call out the army for criminal negligence. So, thanks for clicking on the video. The United States government knowingly set up their own rifles for failure, resulting in the deaths of countless American lives. But why? And that is what I want to talk about today. What could possibly have been worth ruining the reputation of not only the military and the lives of countless servicemen and their families, but seemingly sabotaging your own war effort? What could possibly have been worth it? In other words, hello everybody and welcome to the M16 Conspiracy. This story has been a kind of urban legend for as long as I can remember, so I decided to finally sit down and read about it and it's way worse than I ever imagined. So if I have to be filled with the terrible knowledge that the people that are supposed to protect us actually hate us, then you do too. Because if I have any psychic damage, I'm passing it on. That's how it works around here. We're going to talk about the history leading up to the conspiracy, what went wrong and why. But before we get into that, I need to do some shilling as I am once again spinning the roulette wheel of demonetization. For one, if you like guns and things being shot, then you'll probably enjoy at least a little bit the film that I made. with Stephen Hancock and Evan Royalty. That film of course, Stalker Shadow of the Zone. A lot of you probably remember back when I did the Kickstarter for Stalker on my channel and I'm happy to say that the film is now done and I'm very thankful and you all are awesome for that. Before the film releases on YouTube sometime mid to late September, we are taking the film on a limited tour. That is right, myself as well as the cast and crew of the film are going to go to New York, Tampa, LA, and Dallas in that order. So through August and the first week of September you can come meet me as well as the cast and crew of the movie, watch the film with us, ask us questions, get pictures, and all that fun stuff. I'm excited for it. I think it'll be a great time and above all else thank you guys for allowing me to pursue my silly little dream of writing film. It's pretty neat and I appreciate it. Tickets are about halfway sold out already so if you want to come to the show get in on it fast at the link in the description at x1entertainment.com slash stalker tour. And again... Thank you all for everything. Also, because I promised him I'd do this, and if I don't do what he tells me, he likes to yell at me, the podcast I have with Meat Canyon, Creepcast, has merch available right now. Look at this. 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Now, to make it clear right now, Neither of these organizations that I'm going to talk about are indicative of their modern-day counterpart. The Army Ordnance Department is now the Army Ordnance Corps and does different things, mostly with, like, bomb disposals and whatnot. And Springfield Armory isn't even the same company. It's a completely unrelated business that just has the same name. I'm talking about the versions of these entities that existed before Vietnam. Also, I'm kind of oversimplifying by just using words like the Ordinance Department, and Springfield. This extends to a ton of different leaders and branches within the military itself. It involves people in research and development teams. It involves people in the top brass of Army infrastructure. So just know when I'm talking about either entity, especially the Army Ordinance, it really means people across the Army as a whole. The Ordinance and Springfield just tends to be the most responsible or easiest to pinpoint. within this web of lies. In 1777, George Washington established the Springfield Armory, along with Harper's Ferry, as the two main armories for the Continental Army. The two of these armories would exist for nearly 100 years until during the Civil War when Harper's Ferry was destroyed, leaving Springfield Armory as the primary source for United States ordnance. This goes right in hand with the U.S. Army Ordinance. While they were officially founded as a part of the U.S. Army in 1812, their actual history goes back to like pre-American early colonial times, as there were always departments within the New World interested in procuring and retaining new kinds of weaponry. Naturally, this department goes hand-in-hand with Springfield, the location that did a lot of the physical procuring and retaining of weaponry. Typically, Springfield Armory would research and develop new weapons that the Ordnance Department would then choose to adopt for the military. And as you can imagine, considering both of these entities had been doing this side by side for decades and decades, there was a lot of cronyism built up. If there was ever a new development in firearms or weapons technology at the private business level, immediately the army would stick their noses up at it. Famously, during the Civil War, Union General James Ripley opposed Lincoln's idea of incorporating repeating rifles into the military, saying they'd be too complicated and probably unholy or something, opting instead to continue to have their soldiers using muskets where you have to physically pour the powder and the bullet down the gun itself, resistant to the change of the self-contained cartridge. That was of course until Springfield comes up with the self-contained cartridge, and then eventually when the progress becomes too much to turn a blind eye to, they have Springfield make a version of it and then it's okay to adopt. This did result in some funny moments in history, like for example, when Springfield developed the American bolt-action rifle, the 1903 Springfield, they realized that they had stolen the patent design for the bolt-action from Mauser, a German manufacturing company. So Springfield, and ergo the United States, agreed to pay out Mauser for the copyright infringement, an amount which was paid off. over the course of World War I. So as we were at war with Germany, we were paying them for the copyright infringement of their rifle design. Over the years, whenever it came time for the United States to develop a new rifle, Springfield would always be the one to find the contract. And that's not to say Springfield was completely devoid of good ideas or inventions. For example, John C. Garand, the developer of the Garand rifle, worked at Springfield and deserved the contract at the time. But it's not like the government was looking that far outside of Springfield's offerings. During World War II, Garand's design of the M1 Garand, or just M1 rifle, was the standard issue for United States forces. At the beginning of World War II, it was state of the art and far outclassed the bolt-action rifles that were standard of a lot of other armies involved in World War II. But by the end of the war, it was quickly becoming dated. However, over the course of the war, a lot of nations, especially Germany, had developed new kinds of firearms. One of the most advanced by the end of the war being Germany's StG 44, the first assault rifle. The assault rifle used a smaller round when compared to its full rifle counterparts. This round would often be called an intermediate cartridge. This new sort of middle ground ammo allowed for the soldier to carry a lot more ammunition and for the weapon itself to be a lot lighter. Gone were the days of standing several hundred yards apart in fields and shooting at each other. Now there was room-to-room fighting, building clearing, rushing through the streets. The agility and fire output of the individual soldier seemed to now be paramount and Russia took no time learning this. This one specifically is a modern version, but the AK-47 quickly became the go-to rifle of the Soviets and their allies. And needless to say, 30 rounds in a lightweight full-auto platform is a far cry from the eight single-shot rounds of the military's current issued gun. So the army needs to make a change and of course they want Springfield to do it. Now there's two main sources that I want to thank for the information from here on out. For one, Ian of Forgotten Weapons for not only supplying data for this video, but continuing to fuel my absurdly expensive hobby as a whole. And also James Fallow's 1981 article in The Atlantic for not only helping with the timeline of events, but interviewing a lot of the people who were involved in the cases I'm going to talk about, and for being angry through the whole thing, which I feel is fitting given what we know now. So the United States is looking for a new rifle. Really, all of NATO is looking for a new rifle. And one of the early agreements that NATO comes to is whatever new bullet, rifle, whatever they develop, they're all going to use the same ammo. See, World War II was often a logistical nightmare. If you had British, French, and American allies in a region, then you had to send three different nations specific ammo to each of those groups, and then within the individual squads, there would be like five different weapons platforms you have to accommodate for. So NATO agrees to standardize on one kind of ammo, and then furthermore, the United States says they want all of their individual weapons rolls from personal defense weapons to carbines to full auto support weapons to individual rifleman rifles to be the same gun. And while you might hear all of that and think it absurd, that's pretty much what the AR-15 does now, but I'm getting ahead of myself. So first of all, NATO has to decide on what this new universal bullet's going to be. The majority of the Europeans want to go with some kind of 270 cartridge. Because something that became apparent during World War II is it doesn't matter if someone gets shot with a really big bullet or a normal-sized bullet, they still got shot. And as long as someone is out of the fight, that's all that matters. Most Allied nations during the war, like America's 30-06 or Britain's 303 British round, were comparatively heavy and most of NATO was looking to downsize. That is, of course, except for the United States. The United States wanted to keep a.30 caliber bullet. just like the.30-06 that the M1 Garand used during World War II. Why did they want to do this? Because that's the way that they've done it. So because America has the most weight in the room and can kind of throw around wherever they want, NATO agrees to go along with a new.30 caliber cartridge. And the cartridge that comes out is the.308, also known as 7.62x51 NATO..308 being in reference to its imperial diameter and.308. 7.62x51 being in reference to its metric diameter. So NATO's decided on its.30 caliber standard issue round. Everyone else begrudgingly makes the weapons they were developing in some.270 caliber now into the new.308 caliber. And in the United States, who gets the offer to make a new.308 rifle other than Springfield? The designers at Springfield are told what we have right now is outdated and we need you to make a new one in.308. So the Army Ordnance Department is supposed to oversee whatever Springfield's new rifle is going to be. Or, I'm sorry, they're supposed to oversee whoever is most qualified and has the best option. It's not like there weren't any other good options available, like the G3, the FAL. The FAL, by the way, which was only converted over to.308 because we said we wanted everything to be.308. And sure, while there's benefits to adopting a rifle that that country makes, it seems that the military wasn't going to adopt anything. unless it had the word Springfield on it. So Springfield is told to replace this and they eventually do by inventing this. The M14 is effectively a kind of sort of modernized by about 10 years M1 Grand. Basically make progress but only 10% progress. When I remove the magazine from the M14 it's really easy to see. These two are like identical. Some stuff was certainly changed, like for example the gas system was adapted, and some stuff within the action itself was changed based on experimental M1 Garand designs, and of course it has a 20 round box magazine, which is a big step up from the eight round stripper clips that the Garand had. That being said, for all other intents and purposes, it's a big M1 Garand. This gun is very heavy, and also if you haven't noticed, it's made of wood. See the M14 had core design issues as well. See the wooden stock, especially in humid conditions like, I don't know, the jungle, would have a habit of swelling and cracking. And this, considering your barrel and other internal mechanisms is lying within the wood, is not good. Plus due to the rifle's construction and high caliber, on fully automatic it was near impossible to control. Not only would it beat the brakes off the guy shooting it, but after the third shot it might as well be an anti-aircraft rifle. Okay so I'm gonna say the rumors are true. This is a really a lot of a handful of gun. The M14 was a step up from the M1 gram but it was just a single step, not a leap or bound by any means. And most importantly it says made by Springfield on the back. So the U.S. Army Ordinance Department adopted it right away. The rifle was officially adopted as the primary American weapon in 1957 and went into production in 1959. And then almost immediately the M14 was having problems. See Springfield Armory was never the sole manufacturer of the weapons that the military had. Instead Springfield would have the patent and then delegate construction. The two main companies that did the physical rifle production for the military were Winchester and H&R. By 1964, those two companies, as well as Springfield, had produced over 1.3 million rifles. And while the Springfield rifles were performing okay, the others, not so much. Due to poor quality control, the rifle seemed to be jamming, it was having pieces malfunction, a lot of parts had to be replaced. And quickly, this rifle became unpopular with soldiers. Not only... because of the malfunctions mentioned earlier, but also this is really heavy. Ask anyone who's ever been in the military. You spend a lot more time carrying the gun than you do actually using it. While Springfield and the Army Ordnance Department were content to keep that rifle until they were forced into a new one, some people were looking for other options, and they would eventually come to know an engineer by the name of Eugene Stoner. Remember how earlier I said the... US military held trials to see what new.308 caliber weapon would be the standard issue rifle. Well, while they of course went with Springfield, one of the weapons at that initial trial in 1957 was the AR-10. The AR-10 was developed by Eugene Stoner. Eugene Stoner worked for a company called Fairchild Aircraft. Fairchild Aircraft was, as described, a company that built planes. One of the divisions under this company was known as Armline. A division dedicated to small arms research and development, with Eugene Stoner being one of the leaders at the helm of it. Eugene Stoner and the other researchers at Armlight decided that instead of these huge metal and wood rifles, what if instead they developed something out of aluminum, similar to how one would an airplane? And what if instead of creating a lot of heavy mechanisms within the weapon to work it, why not just make it work? off of the pressure and direction of the gases naturally created when a bullet fires. So they develop a prototype using the military's new round, the 308, and as mentioned, the military looks it over. But Stoner and other engineers continue to think, what if the 308 is still the wrong direction? What if the Europeans, as well as the data we have from World War II, is correct, and a smaller bullet would be more effective? So they downsized the AR-10 into the Armalite Rifle 15 or AR-15, along with the help of designers like Jim Sullivan. Eventually Fairchild would make budget cuts and could no longer sustain the Armalite branch of research and development, so Armalite would sell the patent of their rifle to Colt under the name of AR-15. Meaning that while Colt can manufacture the rifle and name it whatever they want, or whatever the military designates it as or what have you, the designation for the rifle is still AR-15. The first models that Colt would develop would be designated the Colt 601 and look something like this. Ignore the little three-time carry handle scope. I have that up there because I think it's cool. Because of this rifle's construction, when fully loaded, again with 20 rounds, just like the M14, it weighs about half as much. That's due in large part to the construction of aluminum and plastic as opposed to the hard steel and wood of the M14. Not only that, but the AR-15 designers went even lower than the.270 caliber suggested by European nations and instead went for a.22 caliber round. Previously,.22 caliber rounds had only been used for small game or varmint hunting. But the designers realized that the lightweight round, when packed with a comparably low amount of powder, have the same velocity as their larger counterparts in a much smaller package. What that means is you could get comparable accuracy and distance while still being able to hit your target. Again, one of the primary concerns in rifle manufacturing at the time is how do we get soldiers to be able to carry more ammo? Which when we see the difference between the AR-15's round and the M14's round, it's not hard to see why soldiers preferred carrying the former. And in early trials, soldiers loved it. In 1958, the buzz around the rifle got to be so much that the U.S. Army Ordinance Department held a series of three tests for the rifle. And the findings for it were glowing across the board. The rifle was incredibly reliable, it had a good cyclic rate, soldiers enjoyed shooting it. They even found through ballistic testing that the lighter round had a tendency to cause a lot of damage to flesh because whenever it hit a material, the round would begin to tumble as opposed to the larger caliber rifles that would cut straight through. So the concerns about the round being too small to hurt anyone seemed to be negated. In the modern age, we know that the tumbling isn't so much because of the bullet's weight, but mostly because of the copper-dejacketed ammo being used, but... I digress. Everyone who reviewed this rifle said that the military should immediately think about adopting it, to which the military responded, no. Or more specifically, the Army Ordnance Department responded, no. The most they would say is, perhaps in the future, something of this kind could be considered, and that's about it. Well, that was all that was heard about the AR-15 for a couple years, until in 1962, when Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay wanted to take another look at the gun. See the Air Force doesn't need a ton of rifles, most of it's like security positions and whatnot, and as I mentioned, soldiers were tired of the M14 and LeMay had fired the AR-15 himself and loved it and decided it should be brought on as the Air Force's standard issue weapon. The Army Ordinance Department opposed saying that it was dumb for one branch to adopt a rifle that the other branches didn't, but LeMay basically gave them the middle finger and said that if they're not going to get with the times then he is. And the Air Force adopted the AR-15 as their standard issue rifle, ordering 8,500 of them and 8.5 million rounds of ammunition in 1962. The Air Force adopting their own rifle turned a lot of heads within the government. One of those heads being the Department of Defense. See, by 1962 we weren't full bore into Vietnam yet, but we were allied with the Vietnamese Republic forces, and a lot of people kind of felt that a war was coming. So the DoD wanted to begin testing these weapons. One of the ways they did that is by sending a thousand of them to our allies in Vietnam to see what they thought of them. Once again, all the reports came back glowing. Out of 1,000 rifles, some of which were fired 80,000 times, only two had to have any kind of repair. That's not even good. That's like remarkable. I mean, how many things could you just invent and then if you torture test 1,000 of them you only have two issues. By 1962 it was suggested that all of our Vietnamese allies be armed with an AR-15, but it was turned down because again they didn't want to be using different ammo in combat zones yada yada yada. But the glowing reports caused the Ordnance Department to be ordered to once again test out the AR-15. Could you imagine how angry the Ordnance Department is at this gun by this point? Like... They have their whole little thing going on where, you know, they have like a gun issue and then they play this whole charade with Springfield where they're like, hmm, which one am I going to pick? And they always pick Springfield's, right? And this is now the third time they're forced to look at one of these. So in 1962, they hold another test for the weapon and like they're running out of things bad to say about it. One of the things they listed as an issue was it had, quote, poor people. pointing and firing at night, whatever that means, and also that it did poorly at material penetration at distance compared to the M14, which, duh. Everyone understands that the round is slightly smaller. It's not supposed to be a full-length rifle round That's kind of the whole point But regardless Army Ordinance said that they are not adopting it until something better comes along Or in other words until Springfield finds a way to make one However, regardless of what Army Ordinance says everyone who picks up one of these loves it Eventually the Green Beret want to try it out. When the US Special Forces requests to have AR-15s the army ordinance immediately shuts it down. This works its way so high up on the chain of command that it gets to President Kennedy's desk. Kennedy and his secretary of defense Robert McNamara for the boys, it's the nerdy guy from Five, the two of them sign off that the Green Beret should be allowed to run the AR-15 and guess what? Just like in every other case they love it. But the gun's controllable on full auto, it's lightweight, you can maneuver it much easier. Basically once again the Chad AR-15 has blown the virgin M14 out of the water. As a matter of fact, the Green Berets love it so much that McNamara thinks to himself, hey, if every person we give this gun to says it's the best thing since sliced bread, what is with the Army ordinance saying it's bad every time they test it? So Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance, at the behest of McNamara, decides to have an investigation into why this thing was rejected. Where they find out that not only Where the people within Army Ordnance bias, they were straight up rigging the game. The M14s selected for the operations were match grade. They were carefully inspected, everything checked out to make sure they were good to go, and the AR-15s being tested were grabbed from the bottom of a box. Same goes with the ammo. The M14s ammo was carefully inspected and used, whereas the AR-15s was just grabbed out of a box. During the investigation, it was found that there were meetings of the head of Army Ordnance and other companies as to how they could rig the game. And then in their logged minutes, I don't know how people don't check this, in their logged minutes of what was said during the meeting, someone can be quoted as saying, only include the evaluations of those tests that will reflect adversely on the AR-15 rifle. This finding made everyone furious. The Pentagon, Department of Defense, McNamara, all of them. were like, okay, show's over, you had your fun, you're taking this rifle now, this is the new rifle, like it or not, grow up. It was also around this time that things in Vietnam were heating up, like mid-1963, and the Army Ordinance was made for procurement of rifles across the entire armed services. Now, out of everything I'm saying so far, that sounds like a bad idea, but like, I'm talking about one narrow view of weapons development and history at the time. There's a lot of other factors that made it a good decision, at least as McNamara viewed it, to do everything through a single source. So imagine that you are the U.S. Army Ordnance. You have had this cool thing going for a while where you kind of get to pick the rifle and people don't really tell you what to do, but now you have been told what to do and you're supposed to do this. So maybe most people would think if you can't beat them, join them, you know, get over it, accept it. But if you're the Army Ordnance Department you think if you can't beat them make sure everyone loses. And here is where we get into the sabotage and to explain it properly I have to first explain how this thing works. So bullets set at the top of the magazine inside of the chamber here. There is a bolt within the gun that picks up a round, pushes it into the chamber, and when the trigger is pulled the round goes off creating an explosion within this chamber. When an explosion goes off the bullet has nowhere else to go than out the front of the barrel. The gases are traveling in the same direction before they're caught by the gas block up here. The gas is then diverted through the gas block through the gas tube. You can see it through the hand guard it's a little silver bar in there. They come through the gas tube and then smack the top of this bolt carrier. The gases hit this little gas key on top of the carrier, grab the carrier, and cause the system to go backwards. This resets the hammer, picks up the next round, and that happens about 750 times a minute when you're holding down the trigger. It's a remarkably simple and efficient design without a lot of moving parts. It's what's known as a direct impingement system, which means the gas impinges directly on the bolt itself. Even though if we're being technical this isn't a direct impingement system because it doesn't hit the bolt, it hits the bolt carrier and the gas key, meaning this is more. of an internal piston system, but direct impingement, sure. The primary reason it's such an efficient and reliable design is because the whole weapon system is sealed. Not only can you walk around with a dust cover to prevent debris from getting inside of the action, but with a mag in the gun, unless something physically falls down the front of the barrel, there's no way for something to get inside of this and mess up the action. Now what this system also means is that it's very finely tuned. Think about it, you have a lot of pressure being created around here at the moment of an explosion. something like 50,000 psi. That pressure causes the casing of the ammo to swell up enough that it makes a seal for everything to go out, but then when the pressure goes down enough, it's just enough for the casing to decompress to be pulled back out of the gun by the extractor and allow the system to reset. That means the timing of where the gas block is on the barrel to the timing of how your spring in the stock pushes the bolt back forward, to the timing of what kind of pressure of ammo you're using, to the timing of the tube itself and everything else. There's so many different factors that go into making this a well-machined piece. I'm so excited. All of that to say, if you randomly change something on it, something bad's probably going to happen. So the army ordinance is forced to adopt this gun they don't want. to and the first thing they do is start making changes to it. The first one they makes pretty minor. The AR-15, which by the way this specific one is an SP-1. It's a model Colt made after the war to look like their early Colt 601 prototypes, which is like the earliest AR-15, at least that Colt made. So this is a pretty accurate demonstration as I explain this because this is pretty close to the model that the Ordnance Department had a ton of problems with. The first thing they did was change the twist rate of the barrel. So the way rifles work is as the bullet is traveling out of the gun, there's what's called rifling in the barrel that causes the bullet to twist. And because the bullet is now flying in a spiral, it's more accurate. The original AR-15 had a 1 in 14 inch twist, which is absurdly high compared to modern age, but this was the 60s. What 1 in 14 means is every 14 inches, the bullet has made one complete rotation. So the higher your number is, like 1 in 20, means that the bullet is spinning less, whereas a smaller number, like 1 in 5, means that the bullet is doing a full spin every 5 inches. There's a balance to be found with this because depending on how fast your bullet is going, there's only so much you can make it spin before it comes out. But according to Army Ordinance, when firing the gun in Arctic conditions, the bullet performed poorly. Which I don't know how much I trust that based on everything else they've done with the testing. But they moved it from a 1-14 inch twist to a 1-12, which isn't that big of a deal. The second change they made to it was much more severe. So again, the way this gun works is you have the bolt inside and all the stuff happens with the gas to make the gun cycle, right? Well, to initially load the weapon, because there's not a bullet going off to make the bolt move around, you grab the charging handle back here and pull, and that's what causes your bolt to move. So if you're ever in a position where you need to grab a hold of the bolt, the bolt itself doesn't have anything physical you can manipulate. You can grab this charging handle and it does the same thing. Because there is a giant spring in the stock that is pushing the bolt back forward. So you always have that tension to work off of. Say for example your bolt gets stuck back here, like it's maybe it's dry and it's having trouble going back forward. Well you can just grab this, pull it back a bit more, and let go. And it... flies forward for you. The ordnance department said this was unacceptable because every other rifle they've used has a way to physically grab the bolt and ram it forward. Everyone said this was a bad idea. The air force said in all of their testing there was never an issue that would be solved by ramming the bolt forward. Eugene Stoner said it was a horrible idea and the ordnance department as you could imagine ignored everyone and told them to put something on it that lets them push a button to make the bolt go forward. As you can see on the side of this rifle this whole part over here is bare it's just like you know smooth whereas after the original model 601 every AR-15 would have this a completely useless hole in the side of it known as a forward assist. Forward assist is exactly what it looks like it is this awkward button off the right side of the gun that is made just in case your bolt get stuck somewhere you can push the button and physically press the bolt forward in like little increments Which, for one, is only viable in a very, very rare scenario. And two, and more importantly, if for some reason you can't get your bolt to go forward, you probably shouldn't try to force it to go forward. These things tend to explode, you know, that's kind of the whole point. Maybe ramming whatever is in the way into the chamber with the bullet is a bad idea. Some people have suggested the reason the Ordnance Department did this is so soldiers could have a psychological knowledge that if they need to touch the bolt they can, which what? The forward assist can never solve a problem that pulling it back and letting go couldn't also solve. I have fired over a hundred thousand rounds out of AR-15s in my life and I have never touched this button once outside of a bit. However it was the third change to the AR-15 that would prove disastrous not only to the reputation of the ordnance department and the rifle itself but to many of the soldiers who carried it. See when the AR-15 was being developed, like I said, it was very finely tuned to the amount of pressure, to the kind of ammo, etc. The kind of powder that the AR-15 was designed for was the IMR-4475. It was a pretty basic modern made powder that was designed by DuPont and then sent to Remington who made the actual ammunition. Without consulting anyone, the Army Ordnance determined that the powder be changed from IMR-4475 to the O&M. Ball powder. Ball powder is called that because quite literally when magnified the powder looks like these tiny spheres. Why did the Army Ordnance decide to change to O&M for seemingly no reason? That's right, money. O&M had been the primary contractor for the military's powder since World War II and O&M had a ton of this ball powder that was used in things like artillery during World War II. So Army Ordnance just tells them to repurpose that for the new ArmaLite rifle and what could go wrong. Well, a lot of things could go wrong. For one, the ONM powder had a much larger chamber PSI compared to the previously used IMR powder. As a matter of fact, according to Jim Sullivan, one of the guys who designed the AR-15, it was 10,000 more PSI than the rifle had been originally tested with. At the same time, the ordnance system was changing the powder. Well, they should have recognized immediately that the thing was... firing way too fast. They were getting all kinds of problems, torn rims on the cartridges. I think we should point out for people who don't recognize what that change in powder did was change the pressure curve on the gun. It increased the gas pressure at the gas point. It increased to 10,000 psi. It was a tremendous increase. And the rate of fire went from 750 up to around 900. And the gun couldn't fire to that rate. Just didn't work. This does a lot of things. For one, the explosion is much bigger than what the rifle is tuned for. This causes extra wear and damage to all of the parts the explosion encounters. On top of that, because again the explosion is greater, you're throwing the bolt back into the gun at greater speeds. This means internally everything is flying around faster and leading to more malfunctions. A common malfunction seen out of the weapon during this time is that the rim of the brass casing, the part that the extractor grabs onto to pull the old casing out of the gun, would get completely ripped off. Meaning the only way to now unjam the gun is to shove something down the barrel to knock the old casing out. Remember how I said the AR-15 would fire full auto at about 750 rounds per minute? Well with this new powder it was getting more like 900 rounds per minute with some reports saying that it reached a thousand. That's not good if your rifle is firing 25% faster than it was designed for. Something's probably going wrong. Another issue with this new powder is that it burns slower. While relative to our perception, most modern smokeless powder probably seems instantaneous, right? You pull the trigger and the whole bang goes off at once. Well keep in mind, within a fully automatic rifle, everything is happening within micro-instance of each other. So even if the powder is continuing to ignite and burn... a few thousandths of a second longer than it typically does, well that means a lot of the parts internally on the gun could be moved around and that could cause unforeseen side effects. One of those being the powder would continue to burn after the bolt had moved back from the chamber. Basically your gun is beginning to cycle as the powder is still burning, meaning your gas key, the gas tube, all this area that normally isn't exposed to burning powder is now exposed to that. Which as you can imagine causes corrosion, causes damage, causes all sorts of problems. Now, if all of these things happened in a vacuum, we could see it as just negligence, right? If the military adopted a new rifle and then wanted some changes to make it like the old ways and then used powder they had lying around, we could understand. As long as they understand the issues as they come to light, right? I mean even if you're going to use the old powder because you refuse to spend money on new powder, accommodate the rifle for that. There are two acts of deception on the Army Ordinance's part that cannot be overlooked. For one, the AR-15 spec sheet. So the Army Ordinance approves the AR-15 for early military testing, like in the field testing, under the designation of the XM16E1. The X meaning experimental, again saying it's not officially adopted yet. it's just in the early phases of experimentation. As a part of the spec sheet for the XM16E1, spec sheets are effectively like base standards for military weaponry. Like if you're going to have a different company make a gun or if there's going to be some standard the rifles have to meet, the ordnance department would set what that standard is. In the spec sheet that the army ordnance created, it says that the rifle must have a muzzle velocity of 3,000 250 feet per second and it has to have a psi of 52 000. Now earlier I said that chamber pressures within ARs are like 50 000 because that's what they are in the modern sense with some changes to ammo and stuff we'll talk about later. That was not what the AR-15 was during this stage of testing. It was more like 40 000. Plus the AR-15 never fired at 3 250 feet per second. It fired at more like 3 100. feet per second, at least in all of the early trials. So why did the Army Ordnance create this seemingly incorrect spec sheet? Well because that's how the gun performs when it's loaded with O&M powder. Like I said earlier, the O&M powder causes a higher pressure amount in the gun, again contributing to the higher fire rate and stuff like that, and it at the same time pushes out the bullet about 150 feet per second faster, which is a cool idea in isolation. but not when it causes all the malfunctions I talked about earlier. But what this meant is now, since that was the official spec sheet, no one could go back to the IMR ammo. Think about that. The gun is developed with ammo from basically your friends, or the company you've worked with a while, their competitor. So you take in that ammo, and then you take in your buddies that runs a bit hotter, and you make the baseline what your buddy's is so that the competition gets canceled out. As you can imagine they didn't tell Eugene Stoner or anyone else who helped develop the rifle about them changing the powder until it already happened. And then according to Eugene Stoner, a representative came to him and asked if they should switch the powder. And Stoner says no. And the guy's like, well we already did it. Eugene Stoner said, so why are you asking me now? And he said, I would have felt better if you had approved of the package. And Stoner said, well now we both don't feel so good. Because Stoner knows what happens when you load the wrong powder through the rifle. It's going to get people killed. And even more egregious than that is what the Army Ordnance did with Colt. In 1964, Colt was trying to produce rifles to the Army Ordnance specifications to try to make a big group order, but they were having a lot of issues. Colt said that when testing the rifles with the IMR ammo, There was a negligible amount of misfires. Pretty much never happened. Whereas with the ball powder it was a 50% chance of failure. And in direct side-by-side full-auto comparisons the ball powder had six times the failure rate as the IMR powder. At one point Colt was so desperate they just had a trial where they said okay we're gonna take a bunch of rifles and we're just gonna see if we can get them to shoot below 850 rounds per minute. and 60% failed. So they go to Army Ordinance and say this is absurd we're not hitting any reliability standards with the ammo that you want to make this feet per second happen it just can't be done. So the Army Ordinance tells Colt that they can use whatever powder they want to get the reliability data. So Colt runs the XM16 with all of this IMR powder to get its specs for how the rifle performs. and then sells it to Army Ordnance, who then promptly fills the ammo with the ball powder. 100% No way to sugarcoat it, fraud. The government is looking for evidence that the guns they're sending overseas will not get their soldiers killed. So you switch the ammo when it's convenient for you in order to turn a profit, or at least turn a profit for your friends, and then when that powder isn't working, use the one you're supposed to be using, and then switch back for the actual shipment. Now there's debate as to if Colt was culpable in this or not. Because there is a chance... That Colt was told, okay, fine, the powder's unreliable, just use the good stuff and then we'll switch over to that. So Colt runs the test at the behest of the Army because who are they to say otherwise, and all is well. I think they are because of something I'll talk about in the end, but I can tell you who 100% definitely knew better, and that's the Army Ordnance Department. To have that level of data that the guns are going to mess up, that someone is going to get hurt, and then to... smudge the numbers so that you can get this contract through is diabolical. 330,000 rifles were bought from Colt and shipped over under this pretense. And O&M was about 90% of all gunpowder that was in Vietnam during the war. So we outright have government officials turning a blind eye, doing whatever they can to turn a profit over and over again at the behest of human lives. And what happened? Well, I mean, people died. See, the average American soldier had no idea this was going on. By 1965, when the conflict really kicked up, they liked the M16s to carry around because, again, compared to the M14, it was really lightweight and you could carry a lot more ammo. But every time an XM16E1 was taken into combat, there were problems. For one, another issue that I didn't mention up until now is during World War II in the Pacific campaign, we saw that one of the biggest problems is that rifles that were just like on a soldier's shoulder or hanging out at camp or something like that would get water damage or would get like dirt or sand inside of the chamber and that would cause corrosion which would cause problems with the weapon. An easy fix for this is to chrome line the chamber. Chrome is very resistant to corrosion and it is a very slick surface for material so if you just chrome line the inside of the rifle's chamber most of that corrosion will fix itself. The army took a look at this offer and said, nah, that would cost money. And instead, knowing full well what could happen, because again, it happened before during World War II, just shipped them out to see how bad it could go. At the beginning of the war, in nearly every gunfight, there are dozens of accounts of soldiers dying due to jammed rifles. Stories of support elements arriving to see soldiers dead lying next to disassembled guns because the soldier was... desperately trying to figure out what was wrong before they were shot. When I got out to the battle forward area, there was a firefight with a VC. There were heavy concentrated fire from our side to the VC. There was 16s jamming a great deal. The men were putting up the best they could, but the 16 would keep jamming. They'd throw it down and try and grab another one. And another man would come by and pick this one up because his had also jammed. What was causing the jamming of the M16s? Do you know? It seems that the excessive firing through the M16 will cause it to jam after a certain period of time. There was one story of, in the Marines, I believe, a soldier died because he wasn't even fighting. He just had a long ramrod, basically a stick. He was running up and down the firing line, unjamming everyone's rifles for them, because he was the only one who had one. Oh yeah, that's something else I forgot to mention. None of the M16s were issued with cleaning kits. Straight up, they advertise the M16 as a self-cleaning rifle. In other words, by shooting the gun, it's going to clean out everything anyway, so there's no reason for you to keep up with it. Now, this is an absurd statement. However, there is some evidence that this might have come from Colt rather than the Army Ordnance. Because of the whole, like, sealed system I mentioned earlier, there are some, like, early taglines from Colt saying that any gunk around the chamber cleans itself when you fire the gun. So maybe that's where it comes from. But... either way the concept of not issuing cleaning equipment is insane especially in the jungle like sure the system may be self-cleaning but if you drop it in like a river water will get in this actually didn't become that known to the public until for one Colt sent investigators into Vietnam to see what was wrong with all the guns and two soldiers began writing letters home to their family asking their family to send them cleaning equipment from like their old hunting equipment they had growing up, and things like gun lube. Which, of course, made the families back home upset, because why do they have to supply, you know, gun equipment that the military won't? And not to mention the number of people who it was already too late for by the time they found out what the jam was. Because if you're in the middle of a gunfight and your gun stops working, writing a letter home is not going to do a lot. Some of the investigators from Colt who went over to Vietnam to see what the problem was said that they would pick up... barrels for inspection and they couldn't see through them. They were so fouled up with gunk because what would happen is the slower burning powder would stick to the inside of like the barrel in the gas tube and then that would cause other debris to form and then all of that would cause pitting, effectively erosion inside of the chamber. Basically not a good situation to throw an explosion into to see if the gun cycles. This became such an issue back home that in 1967 the House of Representatives appointed a committee. to investigate everything I've talked about. The selected chairman of this committee was Representative Richard Eichard of Missouri. The full name of the 50-page document this subcommittee would produce is The Report of the Special Subcommittee on the M16 Rifle Program of the Committee on Armed Services House of Representatives, also known as the Eichard Report. In 1967, this investigation committee sends Earl Morgan to basically compile all the data I've mentioned up until now. Everything that was going on with the rifles, all the bias that showed up in trials. And they had a huge hearing where they had people from Army Ordinance come, they had Eugene Stoner come. Pretty much anyone who was involved with the project gave a testimony. Throughout the hearing, they questioned a lot of people from Army Ordinance who just gave circular answers to everything. When asked why they put a forward assist, they just said, because we were told to put a forward assist. and then they'd be asked, oh, who told you to? And they'd be like, we. Regarding the powder change, the quote from the committee said, the failure on the part of officials with authority in the army to cause action to be taken to correct the deficiencies of the 5.56 ammunition borders on criminal negligence, which while I appreciate their language, I would say it more than borders. I think it outright steps into. Also in this report, they specifically call out O&M saying the relationship between them and the government needs a second look. The subcommittee also calls out the gross use of military and business relationships and effectively says this is a problem that never should have happened in the first place. The committee attempted to find some individual or person who could be blamed for wrongdoing, but as I've mentioned through this video, it's such a tangled web of, you know, generals and people at companies and just an intricate series of shadow deals to make this happen, they couldn't really pin anyone down. The only person directly mentioned in the report is Nelson Lynn Jr. He was a general who approved the initial batch of XM-16s to be bought from Colt, and then shortly after his retirement, he got a high-ranking position at Colt. This is what I meant earlier by, I think Colt knew what was going on, because if The ordinance department had really betrayed them and caused so many people to get killed with their own rifles based on a lie. Why would they hire that guy to a position as soon as the job positions open? But even then, while that almost definitely tells us there was some kind of handshake that happened behind the scenes, they can't outright accuse him of just getting a job somewhere. And other than that, there were no outward public examples of people getting favors for favors. At the end of the day... Hundreds if not thousands of Americans died and there's no one to point a finger at. In the meantime designers set about making the best of what they had and redesigning the AR-15, now the XM-16, to survive in the field. The first thing they did was add the chrome chamber and chrome line barrel as mentioned, which did help a lot with the damage and fouling within the barrel. Another thing that they changed was the buffer system. They changed the weight in it. The buffers, the part in the spring... I have the gun here I can just show you. The buffer is the part back here in the stock that pushes the bolt back forward. They made it a different system so that it would more firmly clasp the bolt into place. One problem that was happening on full auto fire was something called bolt bounce where basically there's not enough pressure keeping the bolt forward so as the bolt flies forward it quickly bounces back and forward for a second. Which is fine when you're firing one at a time because you know you have time between shots for it to settle. But if you're on full automatic that is almost definitely going to cause a misfire or it's going to cause the hammer to drop and nothing to happen meaning you have to re-rack. All kinds of problems. So the buffer change and chrome lining the interior basically meant that the M16 or XM16 at the time was able to work off of the bad powder and other circumstances. There were also some other changes made when the A1 was adopted. Like for example on the original models it was completely naked down here where like the mag release and the dust cover are, meaning that you were likely to hit it on something and potentially drop your magazine. So beginning on the A1 they added these little lines around it to keep that from happening known as fencing. In February of 1967 the XM16 with these improvements was reissued back out to the military as the M16A1. And as a testament to the rifle's design, it was able to put up with the poor conditions with a few adjustments. Adjustments that should have been figured out before it was ever sent over, but it cost a lot of blood because the government wanted to go about it the way that they did. In 1968, McNamara would shut down the Army Ordnance Department, as well as the Springfield Armory. Now the actual location of the Springfield Armory is a historic site. And the Army Ordnance Department has been reformed into the Army Ordnance Corps, which like I mentioned is more bomb disposal and unrelated. And the people who did all the decision making and bad decision making for the government just kind of like faded out into other branches and bureaucracies. In 1974, a firearms manufacturer named Dennis Reese would buy the rights to the name Springfield Armory and make a new unrelated gun brand off of the name of the Springfield Armory, which is the Springfield company you know now that has zero relation to the original Springfield Armory, again besides the name. I know everything I've mentioned has been very critical of Springfield Armory in this video, like the old one, but you got to remember publicly these were the guys who designed all the rifles for the American soldier throughout all of our finest moments in history, so the name has a lot of positive association behind it. I'm just a crazy conspiracy theorist. The first rifle this new Springfield Armory would go about making is a redesign of Springfield's M14, titling it the M1A. Kind of poetic, starting where the last one left off. Eventually NATO would adopt the 223 round, renaming it to the metric version of 5.56x45 NATO. In 1970 the government's powder issue was worked out, they got better powder, and now the AR-15 design that used to look like this Now looks like this and comes in all barrel lengths or manners you could imagine and to this day is the standard rifle of our armed forces. And due to the AR-15's adaptability, the military's original dream of having the same gun be everything from a personal defense weapon to a squad support weapon had finally been realized. It's just a shame that it took so many bodies for them to figure that out. However, there are still a lot of older people you'll meet who will talk about how unreliable the M16 is, or how prone it is to jamming, or how many people it got killed. And of course, who could blame them for the experience they had? Imagine being in a gunfight and seeing the same rifle jam over and over again. But what a lot of people don't realize is several of the names we scratch into monuments are only there because of other names we put badges next to. Most would agree that we should never have been in Vietnam in the first place, and most would also agree that if we're going to go there, the least we could do is try not to die. But in a time when it seems like the American soldier was despised by both the people he was fighting and the people he was in the land of and the people back home, he probably didn't think he was being despised by the people making his rifle either. But I've got news. In the beginning, I asked the question, why? Because sure, there's money involved, but why is something like this even allowed to come about in the first place? How can there be this many fail-safes fail that allow a bad decision? to kill this many people. And the terrifying reality of all of it, of why cult would allow this to happen, why government officials would allow this to happen, why the idea would even be dreamt up in the first place, is that it's just good business. And sure, while any one individual would never make a decision as simple as make more money in trade for human lives, that kind of decision can get made when it's so disassociated from the person making it. See, one of the reasons the committee... wasn't able to find any single instance of wrongdoing, or wasn't able to prosecute anyone based on what happened, is because you just... can't. This took hundreds and hundreds of people checking boxes and signing their names on paper. It doesn't start with someone at the ordinance department saying we can make money it will just take a few bodies. It starts with someone saying well everything's been good with Springfield so far so we'll keep it how it is. And then the next guy down the line agrees and then another and then another. That by the time someone starts to recognize what's wrong they have to work their way up a ridiculously complicated chain of command. to get anything figured out. And the reason this chain of command never gets changed is because it's working. The war machine keeps chugging along and people keep cashing their checks. And it takes extreme instances like what happened here for any tables to get turned around. But again the M16 is one small corner of the totality of government affairs. How many other times do you think this sort of thing happened during the war with explosives or vehicles? How many times do you think there was some kind of bureaucracy that kept food going where it needs to, or clothes, or hygiene equipment. The M16 issue stood out because there were bodies laying next to rifles. That's easy to connect. But how many other bodies are there that we can't find the strings on? But as long as we keep winning, as long as there's more alive than dead, no one's going to see the issues enough to make change happen. So until then, like I said, it's just good business. And that's perhaps the most depressing part of all of this. There isn't one guy we can pin it on. There isn't one problem. It's a problem of the whole machine. And honestly, I don't know what to do about it. Like I said at the end of the day, the organizations are gone. There's not a lot that can be done with it now other than to just know. So hopefully it doesn't happen again. But what this really was was catharsis for me because if I had to know about that, you do too. So you're welcome. And hopefully you enjoyed this crazy conspiracy rant, whatever this was, video about the M16. And I know YouTube won't, so if you got to see this before it got taken down, congratulations. At the end of the day, I hope that maybe you learned something from this nonsense, and above all else, I just want to say thank you for watching. Thank you all so much for the support you've been showing the channel, the podcast, everything else. It means the world. I'm going to hurry up and get to editing because I'm technically late on this video. My apologies for that. But like I mentioned at the beginning of the video, if you're interested in the Stalker Tour, get tickets while you can at the link in the description. And if you're interested in the Creepcast merch, check that out in the description as well. You guys have been fantastic. Thank you so much to Factor for sponsoring this video and putting up with me. I appreciate it. And thank you all for putting up with me as well. Let me know what you thought of this video. I'm kind of doing this as a test. There's some historic videos I want to make around firearms, but I don't know if you all care about that. I obviously care about that if you can't tell at this point, but you all might not. So please be honest, be harsh. Let me know what you think. Let me know if I got anything wrong. I am willing to admit I am stupid. As a matter of fact, I'll admit right now I am stupid, but please don't hold it against me. Now, thank you all for watching this long. Thank you for the support. It means the world. So I'm going to go ahead and get to work on this, and I believe that should do it for now. But I just want to say, thank you for watching. I hope that you enjoyed, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!

Did the United States sabotage their own rifles in Vietnam? Yes, 100%. Here is Congress's subcommittee outright saying that they did and referring to their behavior as quote unbelievable.

And here is where they directly call out the army for criminal negligence. So, thanks for clicking on the video. The United States government knowingly set up their own rifles for failure, resulting in the deaths of countless American lives.

But why? And that is what I want to talk about today. What could possibly have been worth ruining the reputation of not only the military and the lives of countless servicemen and their families, but seemingly sabotaging your own war effort? What could possibly have been worth it?

In other words, hello everybody and welcome to the M16 Conspiracy. This story has been a kind of urban legend for as long as I can remember, so I decided to finally sit down and read about it and it's way worse than I ever imagined. So if I have to be filled with the terrible knowledge that the people that are supposed to protect us actually hate us, then you do too. Because if I have any psychic damage, I'm passing it on.

That's how it works around here. We're going to talk about the history leading up to the conspiracy, what went wrong and why. But before we get into that, I need to do some shilling as I am once again spinning the roulette wheel of demonetization.

For one, if you like guns and things being shot, then you'll probably enjoy at least a little bit the film that I made. with Stephen Hancock and Evan Royalty. That film of course, Stalker Shadow of the Zone. A lot of you probably remember back when I did the Kickstarter for Stalker on my channel and I'm happy to say that the film is now done and I'm very thankful and you all are awesome for that. Before the film releases on YouTube sometime mid to late September, we are taking the film on a limited tour.

That is right, myself as well as the cast and crew of the film are going to go to New York, Tampa, LA, and Dallas in that order. So through August and the first week of September you can come meet me as well as the cast and crew of the movie, watch the film with us, ask us questions, get pictures, and all that fun stuff. I'm excited for it. I think it'll be a great time and above all else thank you guys for allowing me to pursue my silly little dream of writing film.

It's pretty neat and I appreciate it. Tickets are about halfway sold out already so if you want to come to the show get in on it fast at the link in the description at x1entertainment.com slash stalker tour. And again... Thank you all for everything.

Also, because I promised him I'd do this, and if I don't do what he tells me, he likes to yell at me, the podcast I have with Meat Canyon, Creepcast, has merch available right now. Look at this. It's like our faces melting into each other with, like, a spider web around it and a spider, like, going down the back of the shirt.

How cool is that? And also this neat hat that's, like, broken up and busted on the sides to make it look old and weathered. This is pretty neat.

And if you think it's pretty neat, then it's available for the next couple weeks at the link in the description, creepcast.store. So check out the merch and or the stalker tour if you're interested. Get those while you can.

And again, I know I say it a lot, but as a college dropout who just makes YouTube videos for fun and has found way more success in it than he deserves, thank you all for the support you've shown me on the podcast, on the film, on the channel, on everything. I can't say it enough. Thank you.

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It really does mean the most. Hope you all check them out. Link is in the description, and we are back to the video. We are going to go ahead and get into it, but as always, thank you for watching. So why did the United States government sabotage their own rifles?

Well, to understand that, we need to learn some history. And to start, we need to talk about the U.S. Army Ordnance Department and Springfield Armory.

Now, to make it clear right now, Neither of these organizations that I'm going to talk about are indicative of their modern-day counterpart. The Army Ordnance Department is now the Army Ordnance Corps and does different things, mostly with, like, bomb disposals and whatnot. And Springfield Armory isn't even the same company. It's a completely unrelated business that just has the same name.

I'm talking about the versions of these entities that existed before Vietnam. Also, I'm kind of oversimplifying by just using words like the Ordinance Department, and Springfield. This extends to a ton of different leaders and branches within the military itself.

It involves people in research and development teams. It involves people in the top brass of Army infrastructure. So just know when I'm talking about either entity, especially the Army Ordinance, it really means people across the Army as a whole.

The Ordinance and Springfield just tends to be the most responsible or easiest to pinpoint. within this web of lies. In 1777, George Washington established the Springfield Armory, along with Harper's Ferry, as the two main armories for the Continental Army.

The two of these armories would exist for nearly 100 years until during the Civil War when Harper's Ferry was destroyed, leaving Springfield Armory as the primary source for United States ordnance. This goes right in hand with the U.S. Army Ordinance.

While they were officially founded as a part of the U.S. Army in 1812, their actual history goes back to like pre-American early colonial times, as there were always departments within the New World interested in procuring and retaining new kinds of weaponry. Naturally, this department goes hand-in-hand with Springfield, the location that did a lot of the physical procuring and retaining of weaponry. Typically, Springfield Armory would research and develop new weapons that the Ordnance Department would then choose to adopt for the military. And as you can imagine, considering both of these entities had been doing this side by side for decades and decades, there was a lot of cronyism built up.

If there was ever a new development in firearms or weapons technology at the private business level, immediately the army would stick their noses up at it. Famously, during the Civil War, Union General James Ripley opposed Lincoln's idea of incorporating repeating rifles into the military, saying they'd be too complicated and probably unholy or something, opting instead to continue to have their soldiers using muskets where you have to physically pour the powder and the bullet down the gun itself, resistant to the change of the self-contained cartridge. That was of course until Springfield comes up with the self-contained cartridge, and then eventually when the progress becomes too much to turn a blind eye to, they have Springfield make a version of it and then it's okay to adopt.

This did result in some funny moments in history, like for example, when Springfield developed the American bolt-action rifle, the 1903 Springfield, they realized that they had stolen the patent design for the bolt-action from Mauser, a German manufacturing company. So Springfield, and ergo the United States, agreed to pay out Mauser for the copyright infringement, an amount which was paid off. over the course of World War I. So as we were at war with Germany, we were paying them for the copyright infringement of their rifle design.

Over the years, whenever it came time for the United States to develop a new rifle, Springfield would always be the one to find the contract. And that's not to say Springfield was completely devoid of good ideas or inventions. For example, John C. Garand, the developer of the Garand rifle, worked at Springfield and deserved the contract at the time. But it's not like the government was looking that far outside of Springfield's offerings. During World War II, Garand's design of the M1 Garand, or just M1 rifle, was the standard issue for United States forces.

At the beginning of World War II, it was state of the art and far outclassed the bolt-action rifles that were standard of a lot of other armies involved in World War II. But by the end of the war, it was quickly becoming dated. However, over the course of the war, a lot of nations, especially Germany, had developed new kinds of firearms. One of the most advanced by the end of the war being Germany's StG 44, the first assault rifle.

The assault rifle used a smaller round when compared to its full rifle counterparts. This round would often be called an intermediate cartridge. This new sort of middle ground ammo allowed for the soldier to carry a lot more ammunition and for the weapon itself to be a lot lighter. Gone were the days of standing several hundred yards apart in fields and shooting at each other. Now there was room-to-room fighting, building clearing, rushing through the streets.

The agility and fire output of the individual soldier seemed to now be paramount and Russia took no time learning this. This one specifically is a modern version, but the AK-47 quickly became the go-to rifle of the Soviets and their allies. And needless to say, 30 rounds in a lightweight full-auto platform is a far cry from the eight single-shot rounds of the military's current issued gun.

So the army needs to make a change and of course they want Springfield to do it. Now there's two main sources that I want to thank for the information from here on out. For one, Ian of Forgotten Weapons for not only supplying data for this video, but continuing to fuel my absurdly expensive hobby as a whole.

And also James Fallow's 1981 article in The Atlantic for not only helping with the timeline of events, but interviewing a lot of the people who were involved in the cases I'm going to talk about, and for being angry through the whole thing, which I feel is fitting given what we know now. So the United States is looking for a new rifle. Really, all of NATO is looking for a new rifle. And one of the early agreements that NATO comes to is whatever new bullet, rifle, whatever they develop, they're all going to use the same ammo. See, World War II was often a logistical nightmare.

If you had British, French, and American allies in a region, then you had to send three different nations specific ammo to each of those groups, and then within the individual squads, there would be like five different weapons platforms you have to accommodate for. So NATO agrees to standardize on one kind of ammo, and then furthermore, the United States says they want all of their individual weapons rolls from personal defense weapons to carbines to full auto support weapons to individual rifleman rifles to be the same gun. And while you might hear all of that and think it absurd, that's pretty much what the AR-15 does now, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

So first of all, NATO has to decide on what this new universal bullet's going to be. The majority of the Europeans want to go with some kind of 270 cartridge. Because something that became apparent during World War II is it doesn't matter if someone gets shot with a really big bullet or a normal-sized bullet, they still got shot. And as long as someone is out of the fight, that's all that matters. Most Allied nations during the war, like America's 30-06 or Britain's 303 British round, were comparatively heavy and most of NATO was looking to downsize.

That is, of course, except for the United States. The United States wanted to keep a.30 caliber bullet. just like the.30-06 that the M1 Garand used during World War II. Why did they want to do this?

Because that's the way that they've done it. So because America has the most weight in the room and can kind of throw around wherever they want, NATO agrees to go along with a new.30 caliber cartridge. And the cartridge that comes out is the.308, also known as 7.62x51 NATO..308 being in reference to its imperial diameter and.308.

7.62x51 being in reference to its metric diameter. So NATO's decided on its.30 caliber standard issue round. Everyone else begrudgingly makes the weapons they were developing in some.270 caliber now into the new.308 caliber. And in the United States, who gets the offer to make a new.308 rifle other than Springfield?

The designers at Springfield are told what we have right now is outdated and we need you to make a new one in.308. So the Army Ordnance Department is supposed to oversee whatever Springfield's new rifle is going to be. Or, I'm sorry, they're supposed to oversee whoever is most qualified and has the best option. It's not like there weren't any other good options available, like the G3, the FAL.

The FAL, by the way, which was only converted over to.308 because we said we wanted everything to be.308. And sure, while there's benefits to adopting a rifle that that country makes, it seems that the military wasn't going to adopt anything. unless it had the word Springfield on it.

So Springfield is told to replace this and they eventually do by inventing this. The M14 is effectively a kind of sort of modernized by about 10 years M1 Grand. Basically make progress but only 10% progress. When I remove the magazine from the M14 it's really easy to see. These two are like identical.

Some stuff was certainly changed, like for example the gas system was adapted, and some stuff within the action itself was changed based on experimental M1 Garand designs, and of course it has a 20 round box magazine, which is a big step up from the eight round stripper clips that the Garand had. That being said, for all other intents and purposes, it's a big M1 Garand. This gun is very heavy, and also if you haven't noticed, it's made of wood. See the M14 had core design issues as well. See the wooden stock, especially in humid conditions like, I don't know, the jungle, would have a habit of swelling and cracking.

And this, considering your barrel and other internal mechanisms is lying within the wood, is not good. Plus due to the rifle's construction and high caliber, on fully automatic it was near impossible to control. Not only would it beat the brakes off the guy shooting it, but after the third shot it might as well be an anti-aircraft rifle.

Okay so I'm gonna say the rumors are true. This is a really a lot of a handful of gun. The M14 was a step up from the M1 gram but it was just a single step, not a leap or bound by any means.

And most importantly it says made by Springfield on the back. So the U.S. Army Ordinance Department adopted it right away. The rifle was officially adopted as the primary American weapon in 1957 and went into production in 1959. And then almost immediately the M14 was having problems.

See Springfield Armory was never the sole manufacturer of the weapons that the military had. Instead Springfield would have the patent and then delegate construction. The two main companies that did the physical rifle production for the military were Winchester and H&R.

By 1964, those two companies, as well as Springfield, had produced over 1.3 million rifles. And while the Springfield rifles were performing okay, the others, not so much. Due to poor quality control, the rifle seemed to be jamming, it was having pieces malfunction, a lot of parts had to be replaced. And quickly, this rifle became unpopular with soldiers.

Not only... because of the malfunctions mentioned earlier, but also this is really heavy. Ask anyone who's ever been in the military. You spend a lot more time carrying the gun than you do actually using it. While Springfield and the Army Ordnance Department were content to keep that rifle until they were forced into a new one, some people were looking for other options, and they would eventually come to know an engineer by the name of Eugene Stoner.

Remember how earlier I said the... US military held trials to see what new.308 caliber weapon would be the standard issue rifle. Well, while they of course went with Springfield, one of the weapons at that initial trial in 1957 was the AR-10.

The AR-10 was developed by Eugene Stoner. Eugene Stoner worked for a company called Fairchild Aircraft. Fairchild Aircraft was, as described, a company that built planes. One of the divisions under this company was known as Armline.

A division dedicated to small arms research and development, with Eugene Stoner being one of the leaders at the helm of it. Eugene Stoner and the other researchers at Armlight decided that instead of these huge metal and wood rifles, what if instead they developed something out of aluminum, similar to how one would an airplane? And what if instead of creating a lot of heavy mechanisms within the weapon to work it, why not just make it work?

off of the pressure and direction of the gases naturally created when a bullet fires. So they develop a prototype using the military's new round, the 308, and as mentioned, the military looks it over. But Stoner and other engineers continue to think, what if the 308 is still the wrong direction?

What if the Europeans, as well as the data we have from World War II, is correct, and a smaller bullet would be more effective? So they downsized the AR-10 into the Armalite Rifle 15 or AR-15, along with the help of designers like Jim Sullivan. Eventually Fairchild would make budget cuts and could no longer sustain the Armalite branch of research and development, so Armalite would sell the patent of their rifle to Colt under the name of AR-15.

Meaning that while Colt can manufacture the rifle and name it whatever they want, or whatever the military designates it as or what have you, the designation for the rifle is still AR-15. The first models that Colt would develop would be designated the Colt 601 and look something like this. Ignore the little three-time carry handle scope. I have that up there because I think it's cool.

Because of this rifle's construction, when fully loaded, again with 20 rounds, just like the M14, it weighs about half as much. That's due in large part to the construction of aluminum and plastic as opposed to the hard steel and wood of the M14. Not only that, but the AR-15 designers went even lower than the.270 caliber suggested by European nations and instead went for a.22 caliber round.

Previously,.22 caliber rounds had only been used for small game or varmint hunting. But the designers realized that the lightweight round, when packed with a comparably low amount of powder, have the same velocity as their larger counterparts in a much smaller package. What that means is you could get comparable accuracy and distance while still being able to hit your target.

Again, one of the primary concerns in rifle manufacturing at the time is how do we get soldiers to be able to carry more ammo? Which when we see the difference between the AR-15's round and the M14's round, it's not hard to see why soldiers preferred carrying the former. And in early trials, soldiers loved it. In 1958, the buzz around the rifle got to be so much that the U.S.

Army Ordinance Department held a series of three tests for the rifle. And the findings for it were glowing across the board. The rifle was incredibly reliable, it had a good cyclic rate, soldiers enjoyed shooting it.

They even found through ballistic testing that the lighter round had a tendency to cause a lot of damage to flesh because whenever it hit a material, the round would begin to tumble as opposed to the larger caliber rifles that would cut straight through. So the concerns about the round being too small to hurt anyone seemed to be negated. In the modern age, we know that the tumbling isn't so much because of the bullet's weight, but mostly because of the copper-dejacketed ammo being used, but...

I digress. Everyone who reviewed this rifle said that the military should immediately think about adopting it, to which the military responded, no. Or more specifically, the Army Ordnance Department responded, no.

The most they would say is, perhaps in the future, something of this kind could be considered, and that's about it. Well, that was all that was heard about the AR-15 for a couple years, until in 1962, when Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay wanted to take another look at the gun. See the Air Force doesn't need a ton of rifles, most of it's like security positions and whatnot, and as I mentioned, soldiers were tired of the M14 and LeMay had fired the AR-15 himself and loved it and decided it should be brought on as the Air Force's standard issue weapon. The Army Ordinance Department opposed saying that it was dumb for one branch to adopt a rifle that the other branches didn't, but LeMay basically gave them the middle finger and said that if they're not going to get with the times then he is. And the Air Force adopted the AR-15 as their standard issue rifle, ordering 8,500 of them and 8.5 million rounds of ammunition in 1962. The Air Force adopting their own rifle turned a lot of heads within the government.

One of those heads being the Department of Defense. See, by 1962 we weren't full bore into Vietnam yet, but we were allied with the Vietnamese Republic forces, and a lot of people kind of felt that a war was coming. So the DoD wanted to begin testing these weapons.

One of the ways they did that is by sending a thousand of them to our allies in Vietnam to see what they thought of them. Once again, all the reports came back glowing. Out of 1,000 rifles, some of which were fired 80,000 times, only two had to have any kind of repair.

That's not even good. That's like remarkable. I mean, how many things could you just invent and then if you torture test 1,000 of them you only have two issues. By 1962 it was suggested that all of our Vietnamese allies be armed with an AR-15, but it was turned down because again they didn't want to be using different ammo in combat zones yada yada yada.

But the glowing reports caused the Ordnance Department to be ordered to once again test out the AR-15. Could you imagine how angry the Ordnance Department is at this gun by this point? Like...

They have their whole little thing going on where, you know, they have like a gun issue and then they play this whole charade with Springfield where they're like, hmm, which one am I going to pick? And they always pick Springfield's, right? And this is now the third time they're forced to look at one of these. So in 1962, they hold another test for the weapon and like they're running out of things bad to say about it. One of the things they listed as an issue was it had, quote, poor people.

pointing and firing at night, whatever that means, and also that it did poorly at material penetration at distance compared to the M14, which, duh. Everyone understands that the round is slightly smaller. It's not supposed to be a full-length rifle round That's kind of the whole point But regardless Army Ordinance said that they are not adopting it until something better comes along Or in other words until Springfield finds a way to make one However, regardless of what Army Ordinance says everyone who picks up one of these loves it Eventually the Green Beret want to try it out. When the US Special Forces requests to have AR-15s the army ordinance immediately shuts it down.

This works its way so high up on the chain of command that it gets to President Kennedy's desk. Kennedy and his secretary of defense Robert McNamara for the boys, it's the nerdy guy from Five, the two of them sign off that the Green Beret should be allowed to run the AR-15 and guess what? Just like in every other case they love it. But the gun's controllable on full auto, it's lightweight, you can maneuver it much easier.

Basically once again the Chad AR-15 has blown the virgin M14 out of the water. As a matter of fact, the Green Berets love it so much that McNamara thinks to himself, hey, if every person we give this gun to says it's the best thing since sliced bread, what is with the Army ordinance saying it's bad every time they test it? So Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance, at the behest of McNamara, decides to have an investigation into why this thing was rejected.

Where they find out that not only Where the people within Army Ordnance bias, they were straight up rigging the game. The M14s selected for the operations were match grade. They were carefully inspected, everything checked out to make sure they were good to go, and the AR-15s being tested were grabbed from the bottom of a box. Same goes with the ammo.

The M14s ammo was carefully inspected and used, whereas the AR-15s was just grabbed out of a box. During the investigation, it was found that there were meetings of the head of Army Ordnance and other companies as to how they could rig the game. And then in their logged minutes, I don't know how people don't check this, in their logged minutes of what was said during the meeting, someone can be quoted as saying, only include the evaluations of those tests that will reflect adversely on the AR-15 rifle.

This finding made everyone furious. The Pentagon, Department of Defense, McNamara, all of them. were like, okay, show's over, you had your fun, you're taking this rifle now, this is the new rifle, like it or not, grow up. It was also around this time that things in Vietnam were heating up, like mid-1963, and the Army Ordinance was made for procurement of rifles across the entire armed services.

Now, out of everything I'm saying so far, that sounds like a bad idea, but like, I'm talking about one narrow view of weapons development and history at the time. There's a lot of other factors that made it a good decision, at least as McNamara viewed it, to do everything through a single source. So imagine that you are the U.S. Army Ordnance.

You have had this cool thing going for a while where you kind of get to pick the rifle and people don't really tell you what to do, but now you have been told what to do and you're supposed to do this. So maybe most people would think if you can't beat them, join them, you know, get over it, accept it. But if you're the Army Ordnance Department you think if you can't beat them make sure everyone loses. And here is where we get into the sabotage and to explain it properly I have to first explain how this thing works.

So bullets set at the top of the magazine inside of the chamber here. There is a bolt within the gun that picks up a round, pushes it into the chamber, and when the trigger is pulled the round goes off creating an explosion within this chamber. When an explosion goes off the bullet has nowhere else to go than out the front of the barrel.

The gases are traveling in the same direction before they're caught by the gas block up here. The gas is then diverted through the gas block through the gas tube. You can see it through the hand guard it's a little silver bar in there.

They come through the gas tube and then smack the top of this bolt carrier. The gases hit this little gas key on top of the carrier, grab the carrier, and cause the system to go backwards. This resets the hammer, picks up the next round, and that happens about 750 times a minute when you're holding down the trigger.

It's a remarkably simple and efficient design without a lot of moving parts. It's what's known as a direct impingement system, which means the gas impinges directly on the bolt itself. Even though if we're being technical this isn't a direct impingement system because it doesn't hit the bolt, it hits the bolt carrier and the gas key, meaning this is more. of an internal piston system, but direct impingement, sure. The primary reason it's such an efficient and reliable design is because the whole weapon system is sealed.

Not only can you walk around with a dust cover to prevent debris from getting inside of the action, but with a mag in the gun, unless something physically falls down the front of the barrel, there's no way for something to get inside of this and mess up the action. Now what this system also means is that it's very finely tuned. Think about it, you have a lot of pressure being created around here at the moment of an explosion.

something like 50,000 psi. That pressure causes the casing of the ammo to swell up enough that it makes a seal for everything to go out, but then when the pressure goes down enough, it's just enough for the casing to decompress to be pulled back out of the gun by the extractor and allow the system to reset. That means the timing of where the gas block is on the barrel to the timing of how your spring in the stock pushes the bolt back forward, to the timing of what kind of pressure of ammo you're using, to the timing of the tube itself and everything else.

There's so many different factors that go into making this a well-machined piece. I'm so excited. All of that to say, if you randomly change something on it, something bad's probably going to happen. So the army ordinance is forced to adopt this gun they don't want.

to and the first thing they do is start making changes to it. The first one they makes pretty minor. The AR-15, which by the way this specific one is an SP-1. It's a model Colt made after the war to look like their early Colt 601 prototypes, which is like the earliest AR-15, at least that Colt made.

So this is a pretty accurate demonstration as I explain this because this is pretty close to the model that the Ordnance Department had a ton of problems with. The first thing they did was change the twist rate of the barrel. So the way rifles work is as the bullet is traveling out of the gun, there's what's called rifling in the barrel that causes the bullet to twist.

And because the bullet is now flying in a spiral, it's more accurate. The original AR-15 had a 1 in 14 inch twist, which is absurdly high compared to modern age, but this was the 60s. What 1 in 14 means is every 14 inches, the bullet has made one complete rotation.

So the higher your number is, like 1 in 20, means that the bullet is spinning less, whereas a smaller number, like 1 in 5, means that the bullet is doing a full spin every 5 inches. There's a balance to be found with this because depending on how fast your bullet is going, there's only so much you can make it spin before it comes out. But according to Army Ordinance, when firing the gun in Arctic conditions, the bullet performed poorly. Which I don't know how much I trust that based on everything else they've done with the testing. But they moved it from a 1-14 inch twist to a 1-12, which isn't that big of a deal.

The second change they made to it was much more severe. So again, the way this gun works is you have the bolt inside and all the stuff happens with the gas to make the gun cycle, right? Well, to initially load the weapon, because there's not a bullet going off to make the bolt move around, you grab the charging handle back here and pull, and that's what causes your bolt to move. So if you're ever in a position where you need to grab a hold of the bolt, the bolt itself doesn't have anything physical you can manipulate. You can grab this charging handle and it does the same thing.

Because there is a giant spring in the stock that is pushing the bolt back forward. So you always have that tension to work off of. Say for example your bolt gets stuck back here, like it's maybe it's dry and it's having trouble going back forward.

Well you can just grab this, pull it back a bit more, and let go. And it... flies forward for you. The ordnance department said this was unacceptable because every other rifle they've used has a way to physically grab the bolt and ram it forward.

Everyone said this was a bad idea. The air force said in all of their testing there was never an issue that would be solved by ramming the bolt forward. Eugene Stoner said it was a horrible idea and the ordnance department as you could imagine ignored everyone and told them to put something on it that lets them push a button to make the bolt go forward.

As you can see on the side of this rifle this whole part over here is bare it's just like you know smooth whereas after the original model 601 every AR-15 would have this a completely useless hole in the side of it known as a forward assist. Forward assist is exactly what it looks like it is this awkward button off the right side of the gun that is made just in case your bolt get stuck somewhere you can push the button and physically press the bolt forward in like little increments Which, for one, is only viable in a very, very rare scenario. And two, and more importantly, if for some reason you can't get your bolt to go forward, you probably shouldn't try to force it to go forward.

These things tend to explode, you know, that's kind of the whole point. Maybe ramming whatever is in the way into the chamber with the bullet is a bad idea. Some people have suggested the reason the Ordnance Department did this is so soldiers could have a psychological knowledge that if they need to touch the bolt they can, which what?

The forward assist can never solve a problem that pulling it back and letting go couldn't also solve. I have fired over a hundred thousand rounds out of AR-15s in my life and I have never touched this button once outside of a bit. However it was the third change to the AR-15 that would prove disastrous not only to the reputation of the ordnance department and the rifle itself but to many of the soldiers who carried it.

See when the AR-15 was being developed, like I said, it was very finely tuned to the amount of pressure, to the kind of ammo, etc. The kind of powder that the AR-15 was designed for was the IMR-4475. It was a pretty basic modern made powder that was designed by DuPont and then sent to Remington who made the actual ammunition.

Without consulting anyone, the Army Ordnance determined that the powder be changed from IMR-4475 to the O&M. Ball powder. Ball powder is called that because quite literally when magnified the powder looks like these tiny spheres. Why did the Army Ordnance decide to change to O&M for seemingly no reason?

That's right, money. O&M had been the primary contractor for the military's powder since World War II and O&M had a ton of this ball powder that was used in things like artillery during World War II. So Army Ordnance just tells them to repurpose that for the new ArmaLite rifle and what could go wrong. Well, a lot of things could go wrong.

For one, the ONM powder had a much larger chamber PSI compared to the previously used IMR powder. As a matter of fact, according to Jim Sullivan, one of the guys who designed the AR-15, it was 10,000 more PSI than the rifle had been originally tested with. At the same time, the ordnance system was changing the powder.

Well, they should have recognized immediately that the thing was... firing way too fast. They were getting all kinds of problems, torn rims on the cartridges.

I think we should point out for people who don't recognize what that change in powder did was change the pressure curve on the gun. It increased the gas pressure at the gas point. It increased to 10,000 psi. It was a tremendous increase.

And the rate of fire went from 750 up to around 900. And the gun couldn't fire to that rate. Just didn't work. This does a lot of things.

For one, the explosion is much bigger than what the rifle is tuned for. This causes extra wear and damage to all of the parts the explosion encounters. On top of that, because again the explosion is greater, you're throwing the bolt back into the gun at greater speeds. This means internally everything is flying around faster and leading to more malfunctions. A common malfunction seen out of the weapon during this time is that the rim of the brass casing, the part that the extractor grabs onto to pull the old casing out of the gun, would get completely ripped off.

Meaning the only way to now unjam the gun is to shove something down the barrel to knock the old casing out. Remember how I said the AR-15 would fire full auto at about 750 rounds per minute? Well with this new powder it was getting more like 900 rounds per minute with some reports saying that it reached a thousand. That's not good if your rifle is firing 25% faster than it was designed for. Something's probably going wrong.

Another issue with this new powder is that it burns slower. While relative to our perception, most modern smokeless powder probably seems instantaneous, right? You pull the trigger and the whole bang goes off at once. Well keep in mind, within a fully automatic rifle, everything is happening within micro-instance of each other.

So even if the powder is continuing to ignite and burn... a few thousandths of a second longer than it typically does, well that means a lot of the parts internally on the gun could be moved around and that could cause unforeseen side effects. One of those being the powder would continue to burn after the bolt had moved back from the chamber. Basically your gun is beginning to cycle as the powder is still burning, meaning your gas key, the gas tube, all this area that normally isn't exposed to burning powder is now exposed to that. Which as you can imagine causes corrosion, causes damage, causes all sorts of problems.

Now, if all of these things happened in a vacuum, we could see it as just negligence, right? If the military adopted a new rifle and then wanted some changes to make it like the old ways and then used powder they had lying around, we could understand. As long as they understand the issues as they come to light, right?

I mean even if you're going to use the old powder because you refuse to spend money on new powder, accommodate the rifle for that. There are two acts of deception on the Army Ordinance's part that cannot be overlooked. For one, the AR-15 spec sheet.

So the Army Ordinance approves the AR-15 for early military testing, like in the field testing, under the designation of the XM16E1. The X meaning experimental, again saying it's not officially adopted yet. it's just in the early phases of experimentation. As a part of the spec sheet for the XM16E1, spec sheets are effectively like base standards for military weaponry.

Like if you're going to have a different company make a gun or if there's going to be some standard the rifles have to meet, the ordnance department would set what that standard is. In the spec sheet that the army ordnance created, it says that the rifle must have a muzzle velocity of 3,000 250 feet per second and it has to have a psi of 52 000. Now earlier I said that chamber pressures within ARs are like 50 000 because that's what they are in the modern sense with some changes to ammo and stuff we'll talk about later. That was not what the AR-15 was during this stage of testing.

It was more like 40 000. Plus the AR-15 never fired at 3 250 feet per second. It fired at more like 3 100. feet per second, at least in all of the early trials. So why did the Army Ordnance create this seemingly incorrect spec sheet?

Well because that's how the gun performs when it's loaded with O&M powder. Like I said earlier, the O&M powder causes a higher pressure amount in the gun, again contributing to the higher fire rate and stuff like that, and it at the same time pushes out the bullet about 150 feet per second faster, which is a cool idea in isolation. but not when it causes all the malfunctions I talked about earlier.

But what this meant is now, since that was the official spec sheet, no one could go back to the IMR ammo. Think about that. The gun is developed with ammo from basically your friends, or the company you've worked with a while, their competitor. So you take in that ammo, and then you take in your buddies that runs a bit hotter, and you make the baseline what your buddy's is so that the competition gets canceled out.

As you can imagine they didn't tell Eugene Stoner or anyone else who helped develop the rifle about them changing the powder until it already happened. And then according to Eugene Stoner, a representative came to him and asked if they should switch the powder. And Stoner says no.

And the guy's like, well we already did it. Eugene Stoner said, so why are you asking me now? And he said, I would have felt better if you had approved of the package. And Stoner said, well now we both don't feel so good.

Because Stoner knows what happens when you load the wrong powder through the rifle. It's going to get people killed. And even more egregious than that is what the Army Ordnance did with Colt.

In 1964, Colt was trying to produce rifles to the Army Ordnance specifications to try to make a big group order, but they were having a lot of issues. Colt said that when testing the rifles with the IMR ammo, There was a negligible amount of misfires. Pretty much never happened.

Whereas with the ball powder it was a 50% chance of failure. And in direct side-by-side full-auto comparisons the ball powder had six times the failure rate as the IMR powder. At one point Colt was so desperate they just had a trial where they said okay we're gonna take a bunch of rifles and we're just gonna see if we can get them to shoot below 850 rounds per minute. and 60% failed.

So they go to Army Ordinance and say this is absurd we're not hitting any reliability standards with the ammo that you want to make this feet per second happen it just can't be done. So the Army Ordinance tells Colt that they can use whatever powder they want to get the reliability data. So Colt runs the XM16 with all of this IMR powder to get its specs for how the rifle performs.

and then sells it to Army Ordnance, who then promptly fills the ammo with the ball powder. 100% No way to sugarcoat it, fraud. The government is looking for evidence that the guns they're sending overseas will not get their soldiers killed. So you switch the ammo when it's convenient for you in order to turn a profit, or at least turn a profit for your friends, and then when that powder isn't working, use the one you're supposed to be using, and then switch back for the actual shipment.

Now there's debate as to if Colt was culpable in this or not. Because there is a chance... That Colt was told, okay, fine, the powder's unreliable, just use the good stuff and then we'll switch over to that.

So Colt runs the test at the behest of the Army because who are they to say otherwise, and all is well. I think they are because of something I'll talk about in the end, but I can tell you who 100% definitely knew better, and that's the Army Ordnance Department. To have that level of data that the guns are going to mess up, that someone is going to get hurt, and then to... smudge the numbers so that you can get this contract through is diabolical.

330,000 rifles were bought from Colt and shipped over under this pretense. And O&M was about 90% of all gunpowder that was in Vietnam during the war. So we outright have government officials turning a blind eye, doing whatever they can to turn a profit over and over again at the behest of human lives.

And what happened? Well, I mean, people died. See, the average American soldier had no idea this was going on. By 1965, when the conflict really kicked up, they liked the M16s to carry around because, again, compared to the M14, it was really lightweight and you could carry a lot more ammo. But every time an XM16E1 was taken into combat, there were problems.

For one, another issue that I didn't mention up until now is during World War II in the Pacific campaign, we saw that one of the biggest problems is that rifles that were just like on a soldier's shoulder or hanging out at camp or something like that would get water damage or would get like dirt or sand inside of the chamber and that would cause corrosion which would cause problems with the weapon. An easy fix for this is to chrome line the chamber. Chrome is very resistant to corrosion and it is a very slick surface for material so if you just chrome line the inside of the rifle's chamber most of that corrosion will fix itself.

The army took a look at this offer and said, nah, that would cost money. And instead, knowing full well what could happen, because again, it happened before during World War II, just shipped them out to see how bad it could go. At the beginning of the war, in nearly every gunfight, there are dozens of accounts of soldiers dying due to jammed rifles.

Stories of support elements arriving to see soldiers dead lying next to disassembled guns because the soldier was... desperately trying to figure out what was wrong before they were shot. When I got out to the battle forward area, there was a firefight with a VC.

There were heavy concentrated fire from our side to the VC. There was 16s jamming a great deal. The men were putting up the best they could, but the 16 would keep jamming.

They'd throw it down and try and grab another one. And another man would come by and pick this one up because his had also jammed. What was causing the jamming of the M16s?

Do you know? It seems that the excessive firing through the M16 will cause it to jam after a certain period of time. There was one story of, in the Marines, I believe, a soldier died because he wasn't even fighting.

He just had a long ramrod, basically a stick. He was running up and down the firing line, unjamming everyone's rifles for them, because he was the only one who had one. Oh yeah, that's something else I forgot to mention.

None of the M16s were issued with cleaning kits. Straight up, they advertise the M16 as a self-cleaning rifle. In other words, by shooting the gun, it's going to clean out everything anyway, so there's no reason for you to keep up with it.

Now, this is an absurd statement. However, there is some evidence that this might have come from Colt rather than the Army Ordnance. Because of the whole, like, sealed system I mentioned earlier, there are some, like, early taglines from Colt saying that any gunk around the chamber cleans itself when you fire the gun.

So maybe that's where it comes from. But... either way the concept of not issuing cleaning equipment is insane especially in the jungle like sure the system may be self-cleaning but if you drop it in like a river water will get in this actually didn't become that known to the public until for one Colt sent investigators into Vietnam to see what was wrong with all the guns and two soldiers began writing letters home to their family asking their family to send them cleaning equipment from like their old hunting equipment they had growing up, and things like gun lube. Which, of course, made the families back home upset, because why do they have to supply, you know, gun equipment that the military won't? And not to mention the number of people who it was already too late for by the time they found out what the jam was.

Because if you're in the middle of a gunfight and your gun stops working, writing a letter home is not going to do a lot. Some of the investigators from Colt who went over to Vietnam to see what the problem was said that they would pick up... barrels for inspection and they couldn't see through them.

They were so fouled up with gunk because what would happen is the slower burning powder would stick to the inside of like the barrel in the gas tube and then that would cause other debris to form and then all of that would cause pitting, effectively erosion inside of the chamber. Basically not a good situation to throw an explosion into to see if the gun cycles. This became such an issue back home that in 1967 the House of Representatives appointed a committee. to investigate everything I've talked about.

The selected chairman of this committee was Representative Richard Eichard of Missouri. The full name of the 50-page document this subcommittee would produce is The Report of the Special Subcommittee on the M16 Rifle Program of the Committee on Armed Services House of Representatives, also known as the Eichard Report. In 1967, this investigation committee sends Earl Morgan to basically compile all the data I've mentioned up until now.

Everything that was going on with the rifles, all the bias that showed up in trials. And they had a huge hearing where they had people from Army Ordinance come, they had Eugene Stoner come. Pretty much anyone who was involved with the project gave a testimony. Throughout the hearing, they questioned a lot of people from Army Ordinance who just gave circular answers to everything. When asked why they put a forward assist, they just said, because we were told to put a forward assist.

and then they'd be asked, oh, who told you to? And they'd be like, we. Regarding the powder change, the quote from the committee said, the failure on the part of officials with authority in the army to cause action to be taken to correct the deficiencies of the 5.56 ammunition borders on criminal negligence, which while I appreciate their language, I would say it more than borders.

I think it outright steps into. Also in this report, they specifically call out O&M saying the relationship between them and the government needs a second look. The subcommittee also calls out the gross use of military and business relationships and effectively says this is a problem that never should have happened in the first place. The committee attempted to find some individual or person who could be blamed for wrongdoing, but as I've mentioned through this video, it's such a tangled web of, you know, generals and people at companies and just an intricate series of shadow deals to make this happen, they couldn't really pin anyone down.

The only person directly mentioned in the report is Nelson Lynn Jr. He was a general who approved the initial batch of XM-16s to be bought from Colt, and then shortly after his retirement, he got a high-ranking position at Colt. This is what I meant earlier by, I think Colt knew what was going on, because if The ordinance department had really betrayed them and caused so many people to get killed with their own rifles based on a lie. Why would they hire that guy to a position as soon as the job positions open? But even then, while that almost definitely tells us there was some kind of handshake that happened behind the scenes, they can't outright accuse him of just getting a job somewhere.

And other than that, there were no outward public examples of people getting favors for favors. At the end of the day... Hundreds if not thousands of Americans died and there's no one to point a finger at.

In the meantime designers set about making the best of what they had and redesigning the AR-15, now the XM-16, to survive in the field. The first thing they did was add the chrome chamber and chrome line barrel as mentioned, which did help a lot with the damage and fouling within the barrel. Another thing that they changed was the buffer system. They changed the weight in it.

The buffers, the part in the spring... I have the gun here I can just show you. The buffer is the part back here in the stock that pushes the bolt back forward.

They made it a different system so that it would more firmly clasp the bolt into place. One problem that was happening on full auto fire was something called bolt bounce where basically there's not enough pressure keeping the bolt forward so as the bolt flies forward it quickly bounces back and forward for a second. Which is fine when you're firing one at a time because you know you have time between shots for it to settle.

But if you're on full automatic that is almost definitely going to cause a misfire or it's going to cause the hammer to drop and nothing to happen meaning you have to re-rack. All kinds of problems. So the buffer change and chrome lining the interior basically meant that the M16 or XM16 at the time was able to work off of the bad powder and other circumstances.

There were also some other changes made when the A1 was adopted. Like for example on the original models it was completely naked down here where like the mag release and the dust cover are, meaning that you were likely to hit it on something and potentially drop your magazine. So beginning on the A1 they added these little lines around it to keep that from happening known as fencing.

In February of 1967 the XM16 with these improvements was reissued back out to the military as the M16A1. And as a testament to the rifle's design, it was able to put up with the poor conditions with a few adjustments. Adjustments that should have been figured out before it was ever sent over, but it cost a lot of blood because the government wanted to go about it the way that they did.

In 1968, McNamara would shut down the Army Ordnance Department, as well as the Springfield Armory. Now the actual location of the Springfield Armory is a historic site. And the Army Ordnance Department has been reformed into the Army Ordnance Corps, which like I mentioned is more bomb disposal and unrelated.

And the people who did all the decision making and bad decision making for the government just kind of like faded out into other branches and bureaucracies. In 1974, a firearms manufacturer named Dennis Reese would buy the rights to the name Springfield Armory and make a new unrelated gun brand off of the name of the Springfield Armory, which is the Springfield company you know now that has zero relation to the original Springfield Armory, again besides the name. I know everything I've mentioned has been very critical of Springfield Armory in this video, like the old one, but you got to remember publicly these were the guys who designed all the rifles for the American soldier throughout all of our finest moments in history, so the name has a lot of positive association behind it. I'm just a crazy conspiracy theorist. The first rifle this new Springfield Armory would go about making is a redesign of Springfield's M14, titling it the M1A.

Kind of poetic, starting where the last one left off. Eventually NATO would adopt the 223 round, renaming it to the metric version of 5.56x45 NATO. In 1970 the government's powder issue was worked out, they got better powder, and now the AR-15 design that used to look like this Now looks like this and comes in all barrel lengths or manners you could imagine and to this day is the standard rifle of our armed forces.

And due to the AR-15's adaptability, the military's original dream of having the same gun be everything from a personal defense weapon to a squad support weapon had finally been realized. It's just a shame that it took so many bodies for them to figure that out. However, there are still a lot of older people you'll meet who will talk about how unreliable the M16 is, or how prone it is to jamming, or how many people it got killed.

And of course, who could blame them for the experience they had? Imagine being in a gunfight and seeing the same rifle jam over and over again. But what a lot of people don't realize is several of the names we scratch into monuments are only there because of other names we put badges next to.

Most would agree that we should never have been in Vietnam in the first place, and most would also agree that if we're going to go there, the least we could do is try not to die. But in a time when it seems like the American soldier was despised by both the people he was fighting and the people he was in the land of and the people back home, he probably didn't think he was being despised by the people making his rifle either. But I've got news. In the beginning, I asked the question, why?

Because sure, there's money involved, but why is something like this even allowed to come about in the first place? How can there be this many fail-safes fail that allow a bad decision? to kill this many people. And the terrifying reality of all of it, of why cult would allow this to happen, why government officials would allow this to happen, why the idea would even be dreamt up in the first place, is that it's just good business. And sure, while any one individual would never make a decision as simple as make more money in trade for human lives, that kind of decision can get made when it's so disassociated from the person making it.

See, one of the reasons the committee... wasn't able to find any single instance of wrongdoing, or wasn't able to prosecute anyone based on what happened, is because you just... can't.

This took hundreds and hundreds of people checking boxes and signing their names on paper. It doesn't start with someone at the ordinance department saying we can make money it will just take a few bodies. It starts with someone saying well everything's been good with Springfield so far so we'll keep it how it is. And then the next guy down the line agrees and then another and then another.

That by the time someone starts to recognize what's wrong they have to work their way up a ridiculously complicated chain of command. to get anything figured out. And the reason this chain of command never gets changed is because it's working.

The war machine keeps chugging along and people keep cashing their checks. And it takes extreme instances like what happened here for any tables to get turned around. But again the M16 is one small corner of the totality of government affairs.

How many other times do you think this sort of thing happened during the war with explosives or vehicles? How many times do you think there was some kind of bureaucracy that kept food going where it needs to, or clothes, or hygiene equipment. The M16 issue stood out because there were bodies laying next to rifles.

That's easy to connect. But how many other bodies are there that we can't find the strings on? But as long as we keep winning, as long as there's more alive than dead, no one's going to see the issues enough to make change happen.

So until then, like I said, it's just good business. And that's perhaps the most depressing part of all of this. There isn't one guy we can pin it on.

There isn't one problem. It's a problem of the whole machine. And honestly, I don't know what to do about it. Like I said at the end of the day, the organizations are gone. There's not a lot that can be done with it now other than to just know.

So hopefully it doesn't happen again. But what this really was was catharsis for me because if I had to know about that, you do too. So you're welcome. And hopefully you enjoyed this crazy conspiracy rant, whatever this was, video about the M16. And I know YouTube won't, so if you got to see this before it got taken down, congratulations.

At the end of the day, I hope that maybe you learned something from this nonsense, and above all else, I just want to say thank you for watching. Thank you all so much for the support you've been showing the channel, the podcast, everything else. It means the world.

I'm going to hurry up and get to editing because I'm technically late on this video. My apologies for that. But like I mentioned at the beginning of the video, if you're interested in the Stalker Tour, get tickets while you can at the link in the description. And if you're interested in the Creepcast merch, check that out in the description as well.

You guys have been fantastic. Thank you so much to Factor for sponsoring this video and putting up with me. I appreciate it. And thank you all for putting up with me as well.

Let me know what you thought of this video. I'm kind of doing this as a test. There's some historic videos I want to make around firearms, but I don't know if you all care about that. I obviously care about that if you can't tell at this point, but you all might not. So please be honest, be harsh.

Let me know what you think. Let me know if I got anything wrong. I am willing to admit I am stupid. As a matter of fact, I'll admit right now I am stupid, but please don't hold it against me. Now, thank you all for watching this long.

Thank you for the support. It means the world. So I'm going to go ahead and get to work on this, and I believe that should do it for now.

But I just want to say, thank you for watching. I hope that you enjoyed, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!

Transcript for:The M16 Conspiracy: Sabotage and Consequences

Transcript for:
The M16 Conspiracy: Sabotage and Consequences