AHC/WI: The US adopted the FN FAL
- Thread starter Antipater
- Start date
IF the US takes the FN FAL and lever it at the .280 British round, I see few deaths in Vietnam, and US soldiers today would not be stuck with the piece of trash design of Eugene Stoner.
That question's been discussed elsewhere and the .280 wasn't mentioned in the OP.
In answer to the first part of the question, Hell freezing over. The US Army was bound and determined to have a rifle based on the Garand and no amount of common sense was about to persuade them otherwise.
Well maybe not quite that bad but the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two rifle can be seen by the fact that the FAL was adopted by 90 countries and the M14 by less than a dozen.
On to the second question. Quite a bit depends on which version of the FAL is adopted, whether it's the full auto continental job, or the semi auto Commonwealth one. 7.62mm NATO isn't the best choice for a full auto rifle but quite a few countries seemed happy enough with it and the US was looking for a fully automatic rifle and while it's not the ideal rifle for Vietnam but it's not as bad as the M14 so the pressure to change it probably wouldn't reach the levels required to junk it completely. Though I can see the M16 serving alongside it as a special forces/remf weapon in the same manner as the M1 carbine in WW2.
A US FAL would probably serve until the 1980's when NATO starts looking into a new smaller cartridge. This is where things get interesting, if 7.62 is too big and 5.56 is too small would NATO go for something between the two. In this scenario 5.56mm isn't the official American round so there might not be the same level of pressure to make it the NATO standard round.
Another idle thought is whether there'd be more pressure on Belgium to give Germany a licence to produce the FAL as the G1 and on Germany to accept the FAL as NATO standard not the FN weapon is being used by NATO's biggest member.
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Having never fired an M14 or the FN FAL, I do not consider myself at all qualified to comment on which weapon was better for soldiers to use in combat (the closest I have come is firing the Remington M740 chambered for .308 Winchester). However, I do consider the M14 to have been a conceptually flawed design, being designed to replace the M1, M3 and BAR. Which was (I think) the only possible explanation for making a battle rifle firing 7.62x51 mm rounds capable for firing full auto. In the context of standard issue rifles, I think that is a weakness, since an infantryman (not a light machine gunner) is supposed to aim and hit targets, not lay down inaccurate suppressive fire.
Venezuela used the FN FAL as its standard army rifle until around 2006. The cognitive dissonance of watching Chavistas march with the gun christened the "right arm of freedom" must have been too great, Chavez replaced them with the AKM.
Brazil still uses an upgraded, indigenous model of the FN FAL. I think they are the only remaining user of the FN FAL.
One reason I can think of for the US to adopt the rifle would be so that in the event of a WWIII type conflict, the entire NATO block would be using almost the exact same rifle, chambering the same rounds and using many identical replaceable parts.
MacCaulay
Banned
Are you kidding me? The FN-FAL is an amazing gun. I dream about it. (no shit. I had a dream I was defending a house just yesterday and I had an FN-FAL)
Fabrique Nationale made two of the best weapons in the history of man:
The FAL...
And the MAG.
The 7.62mm round they fired was larger and more powerful than the 7.62 intermediate round in the AK series, and had more stopping power. All the different permutations of the FAL (with the exception of the South African R1) could take rifle grenades, as well.
Personally, I think it's a gun that would have done quite well in Vietnam. The Rhodesians called it the 3-in-1, because it was a rifle, a light mortar (with the rifle grenades), and a light machine gun (on fully automatic) all in one.
The Vulture
Banned
If we're going to use Vietnam as a case study, anyone have any statistics as to the Australians armed with the L1 did, or would their differing infantry tactics make such a comparison an impossibility?
MacCaulay
Banned
I think you hit the nail on the head with the last part. Their tactics were very influenced by what they'd seen and done in Malaya and during the Indonesian Confrontation, and that was very different from what the American military was doing for a fair amount of the war.
A lot of the Australian interviews I've read seem to show that they didn't have any issues with the gun as far as reliability went, despite the fact that it's a very very complicated (i.e. advanced) weapon.
The Rhodesians liked it, and the Rhodesian Light Infantry was armed with it until the end of the war there.
Hendryk
Banned
I also have a soft spot for the FN-FAL but that's mostly for aesthetic reasons. So, what makes that rifle such a good weapon in objective terms?
The M14 when it was introduced was notorious for poor quality control. In particular, the timber utilised for the stocks was often shown to be rotten. It was not until serious efforts were put into improving quality control that the weapon became really acceptable.
Quite a large number if you acknowledge that the world's largest democracy's Army, Police Force and paramilitary utilise a modified version of it in very significant numbers. Then if you consider that other members of the Commonwealth adopted it en mass, again in a modified form, along with numerous countries in Latin and South America, African and most of NATO, its not doing too badly. Suddenly the M14 appears to be the odd man out, now doesn't it?
Apart from commonality with its allies, a concept that the US tried to sell. Of course, what was really meant was "use weapons stamped 'Made in USA'".
Reliability and ease of use. The M14 also has both those qualities - now. As I've already mentioned, when it was first introduced it was derided as a piece of rubbish by most foreign soldiers who got to use it. I've been told by Australian soldiers who encountered it in Vietnam that they were often able to smash the stocks simply by dropping them on the ground, with rotten wood being evident in many of them.
I joined the Australian Army in 1977. I served with numerous veterans of Vietnam, Malaya and even several of Korea. I trained in the same tactics that were utilised in Vietnam.
I'd suggest that the very different approaches of the two military forces make comparisons almost impossible. The Americans benefitted from an enormous logistic system which catered to their every whim and provided them with massive quantities of ammunition. Therefore they relied heavily on firepower to achieve the same objective that the Australians, because they were reliant on a relatively tenuous logistics system which stretched back to Australia, had to utilise men to do. Ammunition was precious and not to be wasted. Therefore fully automatic weapons were to be used sparingly. The US military would not hesitate to drop millions of dollars worth of HE on an objective and fire millions of rounds of ammunition in order to declare it "clear" of the enemy. The Australians would actually go and look to see if they were there and then engage them.
When the Australians, under US auspices in 1965-6 developed a 7.62mm Minigun equipped M113 (quite independent to the M163 AA system), it's tactical value was questioned openly by the Australian officers who witnessed its trials, simply because it directed too much fire in too small an area (roughly equivalent to six GPMGs), in their opinion. The result was that the vehicle's development was abandoned.
The L1a1 SLR was the right weapon for Australian theory and doctrine. Aimed, controlled and directed fire (by NCOs) was how they believed contacts should be prosecuted. Still is.
The M14 was the wrong weapon for the theory, doctrine and practice that was being developed by the US military in Vietnam. The M16 was much closer to what it believed it needed under the theories put forward by S.L.A. Marshall, where aiming was no longer necessary and firepower was the answer to all tactical problems.
No, it isn't. It is a utilitarian piece of fine engineering and gunsmithery. There is nothing remarkable about the weapon and it builds on the previous developments of assault and semi-automatic rifles up to that date. BTW the term "battle rifle" is very much an American one. It isn't used outside of the US.
How old are you?
Or perhaps you should think seriously about not eating cheese before you go to bed.
Normal people don't have such dreams.
I never got to Vietnam (Air Force instead), but many many of my friends and schoolmates did. Several of them came back with stories about Australian units carrying on a fight with their L1s while their American counterparts were frantically clearing jams in their M-16s, particularly during the monsoon season. Two of them to this day credit Aussies with making it possible for them to come home alive because of the reliability of the L1 in firefights compared to the M-16 piece of trash. Given what they told me and what I've learned since, IMHO the civilian officials and military officers who tested and approved the M-16 for military use should have been put on trial for treason and murder, starting with McNamara.
The problem in Vietnam was not that the M16 was necessarily a bad weapon. The problem in Vietnam with the M16 was because the Army had changed the powder mix in the cartridges, away from the relatively low carbon mix specified by Armalite and Stoner to a cheaper, carbon high mix, with the result that there was greater fouling, which in turn coupled with the myth that many soldiers believed that they "never need clean this rifle", meant that there was a greater than normal proportion of stoppages.
That being said, the use of the Llungmann direct gas system in the M16 is rather conducive to fouling. Which is why most of the proposed improvements, such as the H&K416, utilise a conventional gas piston.
The problems with the M-16 (spit) in Vietnam were far more wide-ranging than simply the cartridge powder specs. Books could and have been written about that experience, as well as the political and financial considerations that were behind the weapon's ultimate acceptance.
But to get back to the OP, any impartial consideration of the FN FAL at the time of its development should have led to its acceptance by the U.S. military. The fact that it wasn't was due to military parochialism and myopia. Makes me wonder how the Korean War would have turned out if the U.S. forces had been equipped with it.