Marines are not limited to taking and qualifying on just one of the MOS courses listed above. During an enlisted Marine's career he may qualify for many MOS codes, not unlike the way a Boy Scout collects merit badges on the way to Eagle Scout rank. The Corps values weapons skills, and encourages Marines to master them, ensuring that individual marksmanship will continue to be a living part of the Marine ethos.
The Weapons Training Battalion is both an armory and a schoolhouse. Yet the battalion is not just sitting on its laurels. Innovations during the past year included moving targets on the qualification courses at Quantico, firing from inside nuclear/chemical/biological (NCB) suits, and a new night combat syllabus. Colonel Nance and his Marines are looking forward to the 21st century. In the next ten years, they expect to specify, test, field, and train a new combat rifle, a new combat shotgun, ammunition, and other systems.
Firearms
A Roman centurion evaluated his legionaires by their proficiency with sword and javelin. Genghis Khan judged his Mongol warriors by their skill at archery from horseback. Air Force pilots judge one another according to the quality of their "hands" on the stick. Among Navy aviators flying skills are judged by how well a pilot can "trap" during carrier landings. Every Marine is a rifleman, and the measure of a rifleman is marksmanship — the ability to cause a weapon to project a metal pellet across a volume of space so that it strikes a target with precision. I happen to like this way of sizing people up, because it is a skill that no one is born with. Shooting skills have to be learned. Unlike baseball or other sports which use the same innate reflexes as throwing rocks or swinging branches, there is no natural equivalent to shooting a firearm. Doing it well requires speed and precision — as well as stress and risk — greater than nature could ever evolve. Shooting skills are also gender-independent. The upper body strength required to shoot well is minimal. Despite the cultural traditions and legal barriers that restrict them from combat, women can learn to shoot just as well as men. Some of the top-scoring Russian snipers of World War II were women, and women compete equally with men in a number of Olympic shooting events.
Within the Marine Corps, the ability to put metal onto a target is taught as a common skill. Every officer and enlisted Marine who graduates from the OCS or the Basic School learns to fire and qualify on a variety of firearms. Without an acceptable level of marksmanship, they cannot graduate, or for that matter, stay in the Corps. This emphasis on shooting benefits the Corps in many ways, both obvious and hidden. Most evident is the reluctance of our enemies to face Marines in combat. Before the first shots of the 1991 Gulf War were even fired, many Iraqi soldiers expected to be annihilated by the Marines facing them, so they surrendered when the ground war began. More practically, Marines who can accurately deliver aimed fire will use less ammunition, reducing the load on hard-pressed combat logistical systems.
What follows is a look at Marine small arms today and tomorrow. We'll explore the heavier stuff later, but first we will learn about the weapons that define "Marine."
M16A2 Combat Rifle
The M 16A2 rifle is the standard weapon in Marine combat units. Basic marksmanship skills are established and evaluated with this rifle; and every Marine in the Corps, from the newest Private to the Commandant, can fire the M16A2 with precision. The M16 had its origin in German assault rifles, like the MP44, developed during World War II. The MP44 combined the precision of a semi-automatic bolt-action rifle with the firepower of a fully automatic submachine gun or machine pistol. The assault rifle allowed troops to lay down a heavy volume of fire with good accuracy and still have the mobility of light infantry.
Following the war, many armies developed their own assault rifles (today called combat rifles), but with mixed results. The Russian AK-47, designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov, set the pattern for the modern combat rifle. Designed for cheap mass production, the AK-47 could fire semi-automatic (single-shot) or full-automatic (pull the trigger and get a stream of bullets). Because it was simple and rugged and easy to obtain, it became the symbol of Third World "popular liberation" movements during the Cold War. Western armies lagged behind Russia in combat rifle design during the 1950s, but began to catch up in the 1960s. Belgium's Fabrique Nationale (FN) and Germany's Heckler & Koch (H&K) produced 7.62mm combat rifles on the AK-47 model, but the United States still lagged. Because the U.S. Army had sunk a huge amount of money into a new semi-automatic rifle, the 7.62mm M 14, the Army rejected an experimental FN-type weapon, the T-48. The M 14 could be readily assembled by the same plants that built the Garand M-1 during World War II while the T-48 would have required massive industrial retooling.
In the late 1960s, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) standardized upon a smaller lightweight cartridge for future small arms, allowing more rounds to be carried by an infantrymen. Though this high-velocity 5.56mm/.223-inch round provided lethal hitting power (engineers use the gruesome term "wound ballistics"), there was strong resistance in the U.S. military to switching over to a new weapon firing it. What convinced the U.S. military to accept the new caliber was the Armalite AR-15, an automatic rifle designed by the brilliant Eugene Stoner in the late 1950s. Lighter and easier to fire accurately than the M 14, the AR-15 was a revolutionary weapon. It caused such a stir that Colt Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut, arranged a license to produce it as the CAR-15. Military and government agencies including the Air Force Security Police, Secret Service, and FBI bought CAR-15s commercially. The CAR-15's popularity put pressure on the Army and Marines to adopt it as well. By 1966, Colt produced an Army version, the M 16, which was quickly issued to Army and Marine Corps units. It was a mistake.
The first troops to receive the new weapons were already embroiled in the jungle war of Southeast Asia. But the M16 had a troubled start there, being both loved and despised by the troops. On the plus side, the M 16 was 1.2 Ib/.55 kg lighter than the M 14, and soldiers could carry more ammunition. Troops also liked having "personal machine guns," and developed the habit of using full-automatic suppressive fire in the close confines of the Vietnamese jungles. This was gratifying-when it worked. But then there was the down side: Almost as soon as the troops switched to the new weapon, they found that the M 16 was prone to jamming and fouling, particularly in the muddy lowlands of South Vietnam. This was not just a minor annoyance. In combat, a jammed weapon will get you killed. Rumors spread among the troops that this was a common occurrence. It was the start of one of the worst ordnance scandals in U.S. military history.
Congressional investigators later found that the reliability problems resulted both from the way the Army redesigned the CAR-15 into the M 16, and from the way the troops had been trained to maintain it. Against Stoner's advice and Colt's specifications, the Army had substituted a lower-than-recommended grade of propellant in the 5.56mm cartridge used by the M16. This led to fouling and internal corrosion of the weapon. There were also reliability problems with the cartridge primers (the tiny explosive charge struck by the firing pin). The Army had accepted lower-quality standards in machining weapons parts, and it showed. Finally, due to shortages of cleaning kits and lubricants, at least some troops in the field were told, incorrectly, that the M 16 was a "self cleaning" weapon. In fact, the M 16 is a precision machine, requiring regular inspection and cleaning. As a result of Army mismanagement and inept fielding, the reputation of the M 16 was seriously tainted. For a time, Marines in Southeast Asia were reissued their old M 14s, until the Army could fix the M 16.