Scientific Dictatorship

...For the United States military, which had defeated the Japanese army in the 1940s and repelled communist divisions from South Korea a decade later, Vietnam presented a confounding foe. The Vietcong guerrillas and North Vietnamese regulars were marginally educated, lightly equipped, minimally trained. More than half the NVA soldiers in late 1966 had six years or less of education, and three quarters of them had less than eighteen months in their army. They were peasants, agrarian villagers indoctrinated in Marxist-Leninist ideology and fighting according to tactics articulated by Mao. American intelligence officials marveled that few of them had undergone significant training with live ammunition before being sent out against South Vietnamese and American forces. Many captured enemy fighters told of firing weapons for the first time only in combat. And yet by 1967 the Vietcong and the NVA were killing nearly eight hundred American servicemen each month.

One reason for their success was their weapons. In the mid-1950s, the Kremlin had provided Mao's arms engineers with the technical specifications for its new assault rifle, the AK-47. China had set up assembly lines to make its own version — the Type 56 — and by 1964 had distributed huge quantities of these weapons in Southeast Asia. The weapons were in some ways the ultimate compromise firearm: Shorter and lighter than traditional rifles but larger than submachine guns, they could be fired either automatically or a single shot at a time. Their smaller, intermediate-power cartridges allowed soldiers and guerrillas to carry more ammunition into battle than before, and reduced the costs and burdens of resupply. All this and they were an eminently well designed tool — reliable, durable, resistant to corrosion, and with moderate recoil and a design so simple that their basics could be mastered in a matter of hours. A large fraction of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese army combatants now carried these new assault rifles as their primary weapons. In some units the saturation rate was as high as 75 percent, and many soldiers had been given a basic load of 390 cartridges to go with their new gun. Vietnam was this new breed of rifleman's war: The majority of American combat fatalities, statistics would show, were caused by small-arms fire. This was new. For the first time, local fighters were a technological match against the well-equipped expeditionary forces of an empire. The battlefield had been leveled. Stalin's rifle, once a hushed secret, had broken out. It was changing the experience of small-unit war.

Then came reaction. Since the AK-47, or Kalashnikov, had first surfaced, the American military had dismissed it as cheap and ineffective. But as this new weapon's cracking bursts were heard in battle each day, the Eastern bloc's assault rifle at last captured the Pentagon's attention. It marked the Kremlin's influence on how war was experienced by combatants of limited means — the Kalashnikov-carrying guerrilla, a common man with portable and easy-to-use automatic arms, was now in the field by the tens of thousands, and these men were outgunning American troops. To close the gun gap, the Pentagon rushed the M16 into service...[Full Article]

Labels: AK-47, weapons

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