About six months later, as Baghdad settled down and coalition forces got a better handle on widespread looting and street violence, AK prices reverted to previous levels. By then, the bulk of AKs from military arsenals either had been destroyed by coalition forces or distributed to Iraqis. As the summer progressed and insurgent groups coalesced behind political and religious leaders in opposition to the Provisional Authority, demand grew again to the point where small arms were being imported from the neighboring countries of Iran and Syria.
As U.S. forces prepared for an unexpected and extended guerrilla urban war in Iraq, their own small arms seemed unsuited to the task. GIs were issued the standard M16A2, which followed the M16A1, the official and more formal name of the M-16, from the Vietnam era. The A2 had improved sights, a modified handguard, and a different “twist rate” in the barrel. It fired a three-round burst, but the most important difference was the ammunition. The A1 fired the standard U.S. 55-grain, 5.56 × 45mm round, designated as the M193 cartridge. NATO altered the round to fire a 62-grain bullet instead of the 55-grain and classified the cartridge as the SS109. The U.S. designation was the M855. (A grain is a unit of mass equal to 64.79891 milligrams. It is used for measuring bullets and gunpowder in the United States, while most other countries use the metric system.)
The SS109/M855 could not be fired from the old M-16 rifles because the bullet would not stabilize in the M16A1’s 1:12-inch twist rate. The A2 twist rate was 1:7-inch to accommodate the longer, heavier SS109/M855 bullet. (A 1:7-inch twist rate means that the bullet makes one complete twist in seven inches of travel.)
One of the most important advances in small arms is the concept of rifling, the purpose of which is to stabilize a bullet in flight and improve accuracy. As firearms developed, designers noticed that bullets would wobble once they left the barrel. By adding spiral grooves in the barrel, they could make the bullet spin and be more stable in the air, especially at high speeds. This is the reason why quarterbacks throw a football with as much spin as they can on the ball; it gives a longer and more accurate pass. It’s also why a fast-spinning top has stability while slow-spinning tops wobble and fall over sooner.
Like everything else in arms design, there is a trade-off. Too low a twist rate and the bullet does not stabilize enough. But spinning the bullet too much accentuates even the most miniscule manufacturing defects, causing it to be unstable. Arms designers use complex computer models to find the best twist rate based on barrel length and bullet mass, but field experience usually yields the best data.
And there was another problem adapting the A2 to urban combat. Troops engaged in street fighting in the cities of Somalia years earlier noticed that they spent a great deal of time running in and out of infantry vehicles like Humvees, helicopters, building doors, and passageways. For these kinds of highly mobile situations, their rifles were too long and cumbersome. The quick fix was to outfit soldiers with carbines, rifles with shortened barrels, to make moving around easier. Just prior to their combat roles in Afghanistan and Iraq, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne and 101st Air Assault divisions had their A2s replaced with M-4 carbines, which were shortened versions of the A2. Although the M-4 barrel was only about six inches shorter than that of the A2, the weapon was much easier to handle in confined spaces because it was lighter and had a collapsible stock.
There was still another trade-off, however. The shorter barrel of the carbine gave the bullet a lower velocity compared to the longer-barreled A2. For the M855 bullet to be lethal, it must hit its target at more than 732 meters per second. As with its predecessor, the M193 NATO round penetrated human flesh and spun, causing devastating tissue damage. This only worked at high velocities, however. When fired from a long-barreled A2, the M855 bullet left the barrel at 914 meters per second and entered the target at 732 meters per second at a distance of about 200 meters. With the M-4 carbine, however, the bullet left the barrel at only 790 meters per second and after only 50 meters it had already dropped below the 732 meters per second threshold needed to inflict catastrophic damage. Specially equipped troops have complained that while the weapon was excellent for close-in fighting, it was ineffective at stopping enemy soldiers farther away. The problem was mitigated by the army’s adoption of the MK262 Mod 0 cartridge that fired a slightly heavier 77-grain bullet with a tiny hollow point that fragmented inside the body. GIs reported more kills with this combination.
With more wars being fought in urban environments, the U.S. military eventually had to come up with a new type of weapon that would combine the lightness and shortened length of a carbine with the firepower of the standard M-16. Clearly, the M-4 was an interim, stopgap weapon. Although it was good for close quarters, it overheated on fully automatic fire and became unreliable because of the great stresses placed on its parts. Like Kalashnikov years ago, U.S. military planners had been looking for a new rifle for a new kind of warfare.
A plan for such a rifle, dubbed the XM-8, had been in the works for several years. Prototypes had been tested during 2003 and 2004 and deployment had been hoped for in 2005 but had been held up by the Iraq war and technical issues. Like all new army rifles, political and financial arguments surrounded it. In the case of the XM-8, Congress was reluctant to spend billions to outfit soldiers with new rifles while the war was draining the treasury—not to mention the task of training soldiers on a new weapon on the fly. Adding to the argument was that the new rifle came from Heckler & Koch, a German company, which would mark the first time that a non-U.S. design was used for GIs’ rifles. Some suggested that because Germany had tried to block the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Congress would be remiss in rewarding a German company even though the rifles would be built inside the United States. As the war progressed, the XM-8 was gaining more and more favor with military planners and the soldiers who tested it, but until it was to come online American GIs had to fight the war in Iraq with the weapons they had available, and that included, ironically, AKs. (Many firearms experts, even those inside the military, contend that the XM does nothing significantly better than the current family of small arms. Nevertheless, Defense Department officials want a new weapons system to replace the M-16 series.)
Early reports from the front found GIs using AKs that they had picked up during raids. Unlike Vietnam, where GIs were afraid to use AKs for fear of drawing friendly fire because of the unique sound of the weapon through the dense jungle, where the enemy could be a few feet away and you couldn’t see them, soldiers in Iraq had no such trepidation. In this war, they were rarely close to enemy combatants without knowing it. In many instances, combatants could see each other across open terrain.
One of the first stories to surface was that of the 3rd Battalion, 67th Armor Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, which operated tanks in the city of Baquba in the summer of 2004. Along with Fallujah, Ramadi, and Samarra, this city of 280,000 people, about thirty miles northeast of Baghdad, and within the so-called Sunni Triangle, saw some of the heaviest ground action of the war.
In general, four-man tank crews were issued two M-4 carbines and four 9mm pistols in the belief that the group would mainly stay inside and fire the tank’s turret-mounted machine gun. But as often occurs, real-life combat is not what Pentagon brass envisioned. While on patrol, the tankers found themselves trying to squeeze their vehicles through streets too narrow to accommodate them and over roads barely wide enough for a person to walk down. They were forced to leave their tanks and patrol on foot. “Normally, an armor battalion fights from tanks,” said Lieutenant Colonel Mark Young. “Well, we are not fighting from our tanks right now.” With each tank group short at least two rifles, the soldiers routinely used AKs, confiscated from raids or checkpoints, and put them to good use. Like their enemy brethren in Vietnam, they appreciated the gun’s simplicity, reliability, and knockdown power, qualities absent from their M-16s and M-4s.