For the most part, the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc countries were now producing an improved version of the AK called the AKM, which stood for AK Modernized. This rifle and subsequent improvements continued to be known by many people by the original AK-47 moniker. Most firearms experts today call the rifle and its many iterations the AK no matter what model they’re talking about.
The Soviet Union had finally geared itself for up-to-date sheet metal production technology, and the AKM was able to shed almost three pounds from the earlier milled version. This weight loss gave the gun an even greater cachet. Kalashnikov and his team also added a new trigger assembly component that increased the “cyclic rate” during automatic fire, meaning that less time elapsed between rounds, offering greater accuracy to inexperienced shooters.
Unlike the Germans and the Soviets, U.S. ordnance experts did not embrace the superiority of the intermediate round for modern combat. The bureaucracy was still wedded to the larger round, in this case the standard .30-06 cartridge (usually pronounced “thirty-aught-six”) that was used in the M1 Garand, the army’s standard issue. This view was not universally accepted, and there were intermediate-round boosters within the military establishment, but these voices were crushed by those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, partially because of inertia and partly because of a cozy relationship between the government and the Springfield Armory, which had held a near-monopoly position on production of the M1 since the 1930s.
Historians looking back on this often are struck by the irony that the Soviet system, so bogged down in bureaucracy, was able to move ahead in the weapons area while the United States, with its history of technological innovation, lagged behind because of entrenched financial arrangements.
The M1, or Garand, as it was known for its designer John Garand, performed flawlessly during World War II, prompting General George Patton to call it “the greatest battle implement ever devised.” The M1 was simple and reliable and the first self-loading rifle to be adopted by any army as standard issue. Warfare was changing, however, and the M1 was falling behind. The rifle was heavy, clunky, and held only eight rounds in its magazine. Most important, it was not an automatic weapon.
Despite the growing evidence against the .30-caliber round, the Springfield Armory’s position and that of the army remained steadfast. This was seen most dramatically during the waning years of World War II when the army had begun working, albeit halfheartedly, on an automatic weapon. But the project was doomed before it got off the ground, because instead of seeking new designs and new ammunition as the Germans had done with the Sturmgewehr or the Soviets with their AK, the Ordnance Department insisted that it employ .30-caliber ammunition, which was too heavy for automatic firing by a lightweight gun. They insisted on a design criteria that disregarded the laws of mechanics. Other resistance to an automatic weapon came from military corners that saw automatic weapons as a waste of ammunition, insisting that U.S. soldiers firing large-caliber single shots carefully from long distances was in the best tradition of the U.S. military. Still others refused a radical new design because they wanted a weapon that could be built using M1 machinery. In reality, they wanted an improved and automatic version of the M1, an impossible task.
One of the champions of the .30 caliber was Colonel Rene Studler, who had worked his way up the military ladder to chief of the Small Arms Research and Development Division of the U.S. Ordnance Department. Studler had enjoyed an exemplary career, with a string of successes including the M1 steel helmet, the M3 submachine gun, and the Williams M1 Carbine. If anyone could get the bureaucracy moving on an automatic weapon, Studler was the man.
While work was under way, international politics entered. With the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after World War II, there was a desire for a uniform weapon and ammunition that could be used by all signatories, including the United States. The European NATO nations believed that the day of intermediate rounds had come, and their struggle with the United States for a smaller standardized round left the world of reason and entered the realm of nationalism. With the United States being the most powerful nation in the world, and the force that had defeated the Axis powers, the Europeans faced an uphill fight. The large round became the cause célebrè for the Americans and a point upon which they seemed unwilling to yield.
British thinking on the subject of cartridge design, however, was very advanced. British designers had been experimenting with a still smaller round, the .276 caliber, as far back as 1924. Because of their light weight, small bullets like the .276 and even the .22 caliber—the kind used by weekend critter hunters—could be propelled at such high speeds that they extensively destroyed body tissue through a process known as hydrostatic shock. The argument seemed counterintuitive to many who just assumed that a larger bullet would do more damage, but in fact a smaller, higher-velocity bullet contains so much kinetic energy—because less energy is spent propelling its small weight through the air—that once stopped inside an enemy’s body, all its pent-up energy is immediately discharged to destroy surrounding tissue and vital organs. These were not just ballistic theories. So-called Pig Boards, tests in which pigs, whose anatomy resembles that of humans, were shot with small-caliber bullets propelled by high-powered cartridges, proved the devastating power of small-caliber weapons.
If the U.S. military was unwilling to budge from the .30-caliber cartridge, the chances of accepting an even smaller round, let alone an intermediate round, were nil. The fight that followed almost split NATO apart only a year after the pact was signed. After witnessing comparative test firings of a Belgian FAL rifle, their own EM-2—both using a .280 cartridge—and the T-25, a modified M1 firing half-inch-shorter .30-caliber bullets, the British contingent returned home from the United States and announced they were going with a .280 round and their EM-2. To hell with the Americans and their .30-caliber weapon. To hell with NATO. The United States held fast to the obsolete .30-caliber round and, in effect, offered no concessions to its European counterparts as far as ammunition was concerned. Purists noted that although the caliber was called .30, it was not a .30-06 but a 7.62 × 51mm, also known as the .308 Winchester round. The .30-06 was in actuality 7.62 × 63mm.
You might think that the public would not have cared about these seemingly small differences, but the argument captured the attention and ire of the British public, who, somewhat remarkably, understood enough of the fine points of the ammunition fiasco to be peeved. Passionate arguments in Parliament split the country. One side wanted Britain to go it alone without the United States or NATO and produce their rifle with the small round. The other side believed that a unified NATO was the country’s best defense against a growing Soviet threat and that giving in to U.S. demands was the best course.
The fight lingered for years with neither the Americans nor the British giving way. Finally, further tests in 1952 showed that the T-44, the latest incarnation of the M1, and the FAL were both viable NATO weapons, a conclusion that satisfied both parties’ egos. With the Canadians as intermediaries, an agreement in 1953 between Prime Minster Winston Churchill and President Truman meant that the British would accept the U.S. 30-caliber cartridge (7.62 × 51mm) if the United States would accept the Belgian FAL as the NATO standard. U.S. bullets and Belgian guns. Even the popular press noted this important moment, as Newsweek declared in its July 20, 1953, edition that that FN-FAL (the full name was Fabrique Nationale-Fusil Automatique Léger, or Light Automatic Rifle) would be the new NATO assault rifle and therefore the one to be used by U.S. troops.