Aside from its radical appearance, this new rifle was built by a firm outside the closed circle of government-connected small-arms developers—a company with no small-arms experience to boot.
The genius behind this bizarre infantry weapon was Eugene M. Stoner. He was born on November 22, 1922, in Gasport, Indiana, and, like Kalashnikov, had no formal engineering education. He never graduated college. During World War II, Stoner served as an aerial ordnance specialist with the Marine Corps, mainly in the South Pacific and northern China.
Also like Kalashnikov, Stoner had an innate sense about firearm design and mechanics and considered guns and shooting a hobby. He too was a curious tinkerer. His vocation was aircraft, however, and he had worked at several aircraft companies, including Vega Aircraft, which was later absorbed by Lockheed. In 1954, Stoner found a job at aircraft maker Fairchild, headquartered in Hagerstown, Maryland, about sixty miles north of Washington, D.C. A year earlier, the company’s president, Richard S. Boutelle, had decided that Fairchild should diversify from its core aircraft business. The 1950s were a time when many tough and lightweight materials had become newly available to the market, and he wanted to exploit them. Nonferrous materials such as aluminum were being used in aircraft because of their high strength and low weight, in addition to a new crop of plastic products and fiberglass that were also very strong for their weight. The company had gained expertise in working with these new materials and believed there was money to be made outside of aircraft fabrication.
The company decided to target small arms. Studying the terrain, they realized that the small-arms business in the United States was woefully behind the times. After all, the army had not introduced a new weapon since the M1 in the 1930s. Company engineer George Sullivan was convinced that space-age materials, especially plastics and fiberglass, could be incorporated into rifles instead of the traditional wood and steel, offering battlefield toughness with light weight. As he discussed this with Boutelle, they became more excited about the possibility of producing a thoroughly modern weapon using the latest materials technology. The two men were convinced they had a winning idea, and this is where Stoner came in. As chief engineer, his job was to design such a rifle under the company’s newly established division known as ArmaLite, an appropriate name considering the company’s mission.
Working in the company’s Costa Mesa, California, laboratory, Stoner produced the AR-10, a lightweight rifle that surprised yet intrigued military personnel because it was like nothing they had ever seen. It fired the 7.62 × 51mm round that the army had insisted upon, but, being outsiders, ArmaLite overall received a frosty reception by Ordnance. Their timing also was poor, as the Ordnance bureaucracy was knee-deep protecting the M-14 against the foreign-made FAL and had little time for another rifle entry, especially one with such an outlandish design. Boutelle and his team persevered, however, and resistance among a few military leaders melted as they continued to test and modify the weapon. One person in particular, General Willard G. Wyman, commander of Continental Army Command, was particularly impressed. Wyman, who had been the commanding general of IX Corps in Korea, understood the lessons of that war and knew that U.S. infantrymen needed an automatic weapon that would not kick like a mule. Clearly, he was not a fan of the Ordnance Department, the M-14, or the 7.62 × 51mm bullet. If he and Stoner worked together, they could help each other.
Wyman asked Stoner to redesign the AR-10 to accept a smaller bullet that could be shot at high velocity. Both men knew they were up against the AK, which had set the standard for assault rifles. They were also up against the Ordnance bureaucracy, which had already fought successfully against an intermediate round and would surely contest an even smaller round.
Undeterred, Wyman gave Stoner his requirements. He wanted a rifle that could fire in automatic or semiautomatic mode, a magazine that could contain twenty rounds, and a weapon that would be lightweight, about six pounds. The bullet had to maintain a flat trajectory like the .30-caliber round. The small projectile had to pierce body armor as well as both sides of a standard army helmet and a .135-inch steel plate at five hundred meters. This was a wise move by Wyman both militarily and politically. The distance requirements he set were beyond those suggested by reports out of Korea about the more compact theater of combat. In this way, he probably hoped to make the new gun more palatable to those who opposed the smaller round on the basis of range.
Stoner had his work cut out for him. Like Kalashnikov, he designed his weapon to fire a specific bullet, but unlike his Soviet counterpart, he had to build his special bullet first. A .22-caliber military round simply did not exist, so Stoner modified a commercial .222-caliber cartridge from the Remington Arms Company, which they made to order in large numbers for his experiments. The AR-15, as the improved weapon was named, had the same space-age look of the AR-10, and with twenty-five rounds it weighed a little over six pounds. Military testers at Fort Benning, the home of the infantry, liked the AR-15’s light weight and high power. It was a truly innovative weapon, and in test firings the rate of malfunctions clocked in at 6.1 per thousand rounds, compared to 16 per thousand for the M-14. The Ordnance people, however, whose stock was getting lower by the minute among military brass, were embarrassed by the AR-15’s stellar performance. They had spent decades coming up with a new infantry rifle, and this outside group, working only a few years, offered a better weapon than the M-14 on all counts.
Stoner’s weapon had a gas tube above the barrel similar to the AK, but with a major difference. Instead of the gases pushing back a piston attached to a long rod, they traveled the length of the tube into the bolt carrier mechanism, forcing the bolt carrier to the rear, which rotated the bolt via a cam, unlocking the breech mechanism and forcing the bolt and bolt carrier back. This eliminated the gas piston, and getting rid of a part is always a plus for a weapon. However, this gas system had a major flaw. Because it blew gas back into the receiver, it was prone to fouling, a trait that would not become apparent until the Vietnam War. Fouling occurs when the sticky residue of hot gases, burned powder, and microscopic particles of cartridge cases get stuck in rifle parts, literally “gumming up the works” and jamming the weapon.
Also like Kalashnikov, Stoner took ideas from previously built guns, like the FN-FAL and even the MP44 Sturmgewehr, from which he borrowed the hinged dust cover over the cartridge ejection port.
The AR-15 still needed work, especially in dealing with barrel ruptures due to water intrusion. Stoner claimed the problem was not as bad as the Ordnance people had suggested, even going so far as to imply that the tests had been rigged to eliminate the weapon. Because ArmaLite had a very small engineering staff, the weapon was at the mercy of Ordnance personnel and their technical recommendations, and they had every reason to discredit the weapon and offer Stoner bad advice.
As tensions continued to rise between Stoner and Carten, Ordnance sent three of the fifteen AR-15s they had been testing to Alaska for firing under extremely cold conditions. Without notifying Stoner, they sent rifles to Fort Greeley. This move was particularly provocative, because Stoner said he had an agreement with Ordnance that he be called on site whenever testing took place so he could answer questions and make sure that the gun was being used correctly. This was standard procedure for most new weapons, especially for a radically designed weapon like the AR-15, a gun with which shooters were not familiar.