Imagine a world without Vietnam. I don’t mean the unified country of 98.86 million people in Southeast Asia that is a thriving economic powerhouse today. I mean, imagine a world without the Vietnam War. What if, when the French were beaten at Dien Bien Phu and the communists were creeping south like some kind of malignant political disease, we didn’t intervene? What effect might that have had on the affairs of men today?
These sorts of imponderables keep decent alternative history fiction writers fed and clothed. However, that’s not what we will be discussing today. I want to instead relatedly ponder a world without the M16.
Origin Story
The American love affair with the M16 rifle was almost an iffy thing. The only reason we ever met the gun was that American Air Force General Curtis LeMay attended a picnic where somebody was using one to shoot watermelons. LeMay detonated some fruit with one of these radically advanced high-velocity rifles and then used his clout to buy a few for the Air Force to use as airfield defense weapons. The Army brass then got all covetous and began issuing the lithe little weapons to Special Forces troops operating in the jungles of Vietnam. The rest is, as they say, history. That was not, however, how it was meant to be.
In the early 1960s, the M14 was the standard infantry rifle used throughout the U.S. Army. A product-improved, magazine-fed upgrade on John Cantius Garand’s gas-operated masterpiece, the M1 Garand, it featured essentially the same action we used to spank both the Nazis and the Japanese during WWII. The M14 was the result of a contentious competition between the T44 and the T48, prototypes for the M14 and an American-made version of the FAL produced by Harrington and Richardson, respectively. When Uncle Sam chose the M14, he did so for good reasons. The selective-fire M14 was supposed to replace the M1 Garand, the M3 Grease Gun, and the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR).
The M14 was the direct result of lessons learned during the Second World War. WWII was the most horrible, bloodiest, most destructive conflict in human history. Nobody actually knows how many people died. Estimates range between 50 and 85 million.
Nowadays, there is a 1-in-100,000 chance that a 21st-century human will perish as the result of armed combat. In the mid-1940s that number was 300 per 100,000. With that sort of intensity driving the developmental train, American industry designed the optimized .30-caliber rifle with which to prosecute a war fought on the plains of Europe. The end result was 44” long and weighed 10.7 lbs. with a loaded 20-round magazine.
For the conditions under which WWIII was expected to have been fought, the M14 was legit perfect. Widespread mechanization meant that most American soldiers would have ridden to the battlefield rather than walked. Having an armored personnel carrier handy also lets the typical mechanized grunt pack plenty of extra ammo, even if it is big and heavy. What you got in exchange for all that length and bulk was some superlative range and exceptional downrange thump.
In trained hands, the M14 will reach out a really long ways. The Army puts the maximum effective range of the M14 at 800 meters. That of the M16A1 with which I was issued back in the day was only 460. For certain tactical applications, bigger is better.
What If?
So, where might military small arms evolution have gone had we not gotten involved in Vietnam? The diminutive M16 might have just rendered yeoman’s service slung from the shoulder of a relative handful of Air Force security police guarding USAF airfields across the globe. These winged guardians would have appreciated the rifle’s modest weight and fast handling, particularly for a gun that was carried a lot and fired relatively little. Meanwhile, American ground pounders would have clung dogmatically and righteously to their nearly four-foot, long-range .30-caliber rifles.
Had we avoided involvement in Vietnam but ultimately engaged the Russians in the Fulda Gap, then all bets would have been off. Today, we maintain several thousand nuclear warheads with a notable portion deployed and ready to go. The Russians apparently stockpile comparable numbers. Back in the 1980s, between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the world had tens of thousands of these monsters set to go.
Had we ever gotten into a real superpower shooting war, then the chances that somebody might have unleashed one of those puppies in the heat of the moment would have been strong. Albert Einstein once opined, “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Had we started swapping nukes back in the 1980s, what few survivors might have prevailed might likely now be crouched in caves wearing animal skins.
However, what if that didn’t happen? What if we avoided both Vietnam and planetary atomic suicide? I would propose that, had that been the case, we would have seen some fairly radical upgrades in the basic M14 chassis. Some variation of the M14 could even still be our standard infantry rifle today.
Details
When I was a kid, we all looked to the stars for our future. As a child of the Space Age, I assumed the turn of the millennium would see scheduled commuter service to the moon and explorers planting the Stars and Stripes on Mars. That’s obviously not how things turned out.
Elon Musk certainly has some lofty aspirations, but the defining technology of the Information Age has been microelectronics, not space exploration. It turns out that the real legacy of Star Trek was not spaceships jetting off to other planets; it was doors that open automatically when you approach them at Walmart and personal communication devices you can carry in your pocket and use to speak with people in Norway. That same tech obviously found its way onto our military weapons.
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I think it is a safe bet that the evolved version of the M14 rifle would have eventually incorporated an indestructible collapsible polymer stock, optics mounts, space for lights and lasers, and enhanced ergonomics. The resulting optimized rifle would have retained its .30-caliber power, but would have been shortened for use inside buildings and built-up fortifications. It probably would have been fitted with an adjustable stock that could be optimized for use inside vehicles or in conjunction with body armor. In short, I think Uncle Sam would likely have been fielding something like the Springfield Armory SOCOM 16 CQB.
History has borne this out to a degree. After our experience in the arid wastes of Afghanistan, Army planners are once again appreciating the value of large-bore battle rifles with plenty of long-range power. Had we avoided Vietnam and the M16 distraction, we probably would have remained on that course for the past half century.
Ruminations
It’s an interesting intellectual exercise to ponder what might have been. Had we not gotten mired in a dank, suffocating jungle war in Southeast Asia, there is a reasonable chance we would not have adopted the M16 rifle. Had we not adopted the M16, the Soviets probably would not have followed suit with their 5.45x39mm Kalashnikovs in 1974.
Presuming we avoided the urge to immolate ourselves in the decades to follow, we would quite likely still be using the 7.62x51mm NATO while the Russians would be churning out 7.62x39mm by the zillions. For the gun nerd truly committed to his craft, that is indeed a fascinating thing to ponder.
The argument could be made that the SOCOM 16 CQB really is the ultimate technological evolution of the M14 service weapon. I would assert that this same evolved rifle that American grunts likely would have been packing had we never chased that small-caliber distraction, is available in civilian form for shooters from Springfield Armory today.
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