American AKs in Vietnam

Nikephoros

Banned
It'd probably be the extreme velocity of the 5.56mm NATO round that gets it through modern kevlar and such, as it's a round that can tumble on impact (though I think that problem has been reduced in recent years).

The modern 5.56 NATO also has a steel core, which I imagine would add to its effect.
 
I think the debate has been won by a new contender, the Mosin-Nagant.

stuff you know if you have an AK-47, or an AR-15, or a Mosin Nagant:
____________ ________
AK: It works though you have never cleaned it. Ever.
AR: You have $9 per ounce special non-detergent synthetic Teflon
infused oil for cleaning.
Mosin: It was last cleaned in Berlin in 1945.
____________ _________ ____
AK: You are able to hit the broad side of a barn only from inside the
barn.
AR: You are able to hit the broad side of a barn from 600 meters.
Mosin: You can hit the farm from two counties over.
____________ _________ ______
AK: Cheap mags are fun to buy.
AR: Cheap mags melt.
Mosin: What’s a mag?
____________ _________ _______
AK: Your safety can be heard from 300 meters away.
AR: You can silently flip off the safety with your finger on the
trigger.
Mosin: What’s a safety?
____________ _________ ________
AK: Your rifle comes with a cheap nylon sling.
AR: Your rifle has a 9 point stealth tactical suspension system.
Mosin: Your rifle has dog collars.
____________ _________ _______
AK: Your bayonet makes a good wire cutter.
AR: Your bayonet is actually a pretty good steak knife.
Mosin: Your bayonet is longer than your leg.
____________ _________ ___
AK: You can put a .30″ hole through 12″ of oak, if you can hit it.
AR: You can put one hole in a paper target at 100 meters with 30
rounds.
Mosin: You can knock down everyone else’s target with the shock wave
of your bullet going downrange.
____________ _________ ___
AK: When out of ammo your rifle will nominally pass as a club.
AR: When out of ammo, your rifle makes a great wiffle bat.
Mosin: When out of ammo, your rifle makes a supreme war club, pike,
boat oar, tent pole, or firewood.
____________ _________ _________
AK: Recoil is manageable, even fun.
AR: What’s recoil?
Mosin: Recoil is often used to relocate shoulders thrown out by the
previous shot.
____________ _________ _______
AK: Your sight adjustment goes to “10″, and you’ve never bothered
moving it.
AR: Your sight adjustment is incremented in fractions of minute of
angle.
Mosin: Your sight adjustment goes to 12 miles and you’ve actually
tried it.
____________ _________ _______
AK: Your rifle can be used by any two bit nation’s most illiterate
conscripts to fight elite forces worldwide.
AR: Your rifle is used by elite forces worldwide to fight two bit
nations’ most illiterate conscripts.
Mosin: Your rifle has fought against itself and won every time.
____________ _________ _________
AK: Your rifle won some revolutions.
AR: Your rifle won the Cold War.
Mosin: Your rifle won a pole vault event.
____________ _________ _______
AK: You paid $350.
AR: You paid $900.
Mosin: You paid $59.95
____________ _________ _______
AK: You buy cheap ammo by the case.
AR: You lovingly reload precision crafted rounds one by one.
Mosin: You dig your ammo out of a farmer’s field in Ukraine and it
works just fine.
____________ _________ _____
AK: You can intimidate your foe with the bayonet mounted.
AR: Your foes laugh when you mount your bayonet.
Mosin: You can bayonet your foe on the other side of the river
without leaving the comfort of your foxhole.
____________ _________ ________
AK: Service life, 50 years.
AR: Service life, 40 years.
Mosin: Service life, 100 years, and counting.
____________ _________ ________
AK: It’s easier to buy a new rifle when you want to change cartridge
sizes.
AR: You can change cartridge sizes with the push of a couple of pins
and a new upper.
Mosin: You believe no real man would dare risk the ridicule of his
friends by suggesting there is anything but 7.62×54r.
____________ _________ _______
AK: You can repair your rifle with a big hammer and a swift kick.
AR: You can repair your rifle by taking it to a certified gunsmith,
it’s under warranty!
Mosin: If your rifle breaks, you buy a new one.
____________ _________ _____
AK: You consider it a badge of honor when you get your handguards to
burst into flames.
AR: You consider it a badge of honor when you shoot a sub-MOA 5 shot
group.
Mosin: You consider it a badge of honor when you cycle 5 rounds
without the aid of a 2×4.
____________ _________ __
AK: After a long day the range you relax by watching “Red Dawn”.
AR: After a long day at the range you relax by watching “Blackhawk
Down”.
Mosin: After a long day at the range you relax by visiting the
chiropractor, then watching “Enemy at the Gates“.
____________ _________ ___
AK: After cleaning your rifle you have a strong urge for a stiff shot
of Vodka.
AR: After cleaning your rifle you have a strong urge for hotdogs and
apple pie.
Mosin: After cleaning your rifle you have a strong urge for
shishkabob.
____________ _________ _______
AK: You can accessorize you rifle with a new muzzle brake or a nice
stock set.
AR: Your rifle’s accessories are eight times more valuable than your
rifle.
Mosin: Your rifle’s accessory is a small tin can with a funny lid,
but it’s buried under an apartment building somewhere in Budapest.
____________ _________ _____
AK: Your rifle’s finish is varnish and paint.
AR: Your rifle’s finish is Teflon and high tech polymers.
Mosin: Your rifle’s finish is low grade shellac, cosmoline and a
paste made from Olga’s ground up toenail clippings.
____________ _________ _______
AK: Your wife tolerates your autographed framed picture of Mikhail
Kalashnikov.
AR: Your wife tolerates your autographed framed picture of Eugene
Stoner.
Mosin: Cameras had not even been invented to photograph the young
Sergei Mosin.
____________ _________ ________
AK: Late at night you sometimes have to fight the urge to hold your
rifle over your head and shout “Wolverines! “
AR: Late at night you sometimes have to fight the urge to clear your
house, slicing the pie from room to room.
Mosin: Late at night, you sometimes have to fight the urge to dig a
fighting trench in the the yard to sleep in.
 
I think you have to look at how you're using either assault rifle. An assault rifle is supposed to be a combination of a machine gun with a rifle. The M-16 puts more emphasis on the rifle part and seems better at long-range while the AK-47 emphasizes the assault and is better at close-range. In the Vietnam jungle, you can see why the AK worked better. I compare the M-16 to the AK-47 as a scalpel versus a machete.
 
Why reverse-engineer the AK47? Just work outward from the construction blueprints of the StG 44, just don't botch the job as was done by forcing the FG 42 and the MG 42 to mate and adopt its deformed offspring as your new machine gun :D
Using western plans would do wonders for the propaganda department.
 

Stephen

Banned
Why would it hurt anymore than an ordinary M14. Bull puped M14 already exist.

tci_m89.jpg


http://world.guns.ru/sniper/sn66-e.htm

But there would be no point in a Bull Pup BAR in the Vietnam war because the 30-06 amunition was no longer standard.
 

Stephen

Banned
There have been experiments done with caseless amunition but they have been found to be lacking in reliability. But one thing that is easy to notice is that the solid block explosives on caseless amunition takes up much less space than the loose grain powder in brass amunition. So why dont they combine the compact solid block propelants with the reliability of brass shells? Then you could shoot high velocity bullets from pistol sized shells!
 

burmafrd

Banned
We should have told NATO that the standard rd was going to be the 30-06 and if they did not like it THEY could buy all the ammo.
 
So why dont they combine the compact solid block propelants with the reliability of brass shells?
AFAIR Steyr was quite close in late 1980s to mass-producing standard infantry rifle with caseless cartridge, and H&K came up with quite advanced designs too. There's one inherent problem with caseless cartridges: heat dissipation. Case ejection removes quite serious amount of parasite heat from rifle's innards. Without that, rifle is prone to overheating.

We should have told NATO that the standard rd was going to be the 30-06
Even American generals understood by 1945 that 30-06 was an overkill (not that 7.62 NATO was significantly better).
 

MacCaulay

Banned
WI, before the Vietnam War, the United States manages to reverse egineer a Russian AK-47 and mass produce them? This would obviously improve U.S. chances in Vietnam. But what else?

I hate to be a spoilsport, but I don't think any amount of amazing weaponry is going to improve what was essentially mismanagment at the strategic level. Though I hate to turn this into a discussion about what happened to the US in Vietnam. Give the US AK-47s. Give them F-117s. It's still going to be LBJ picking the targets in the basement of the White House.
 

Stephen

Banned
AFAIR Steyr was quite close in late 1980s to mass-producing standard infantry rifle with caseless cartridge, and H&K came up with quite advanced designs too. There's one inherent problem with caseless cartridges: heat dissipation. Case ejection removes quite serious amount of parasite heat from rifle's innards. Without that, rifle is prone to overheating.

If the Steyr weapon you are refering to is the ACR then that was actually a composite cased round rather than a caseless one. Plastic shells are quite good but I still wonder why the dont combine compct high explosive with brass, shoot a .223 from a rimfire size shell.
 
I hate to be a spoilsport, but I don't think any amount of amazing weaponry is going to improve what was essentially mismanagment at the strategic level... It's still going to be LBJ picking the targets in the basement of the White House.

I know this isn't a 'Who lost Vietnam?' thread*, but it is a Vietnam thread.

I think the common misconception of LBJ's 'micro-management' of the war is most effortlessly demolished by Eliot A. Cohen in Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime. He makes the case that LBJ lost the war in Vietnam worse than it otherwise would have been lost because he didn't exercise enough control.

And as for the bombing maps in the White House, this article by NR and Hannity-show conservative Rich Lowry summarises Cohen's position:

'When it comes to Vietnam, Cohen's perspective leads him to defend LBJ's notorious review of bombing targets as an appropriate exercise of oversight, given the strategic and political consequences of the targeting choices. In Korea, the military had heedlessly prompted a massive Chinese intervention, and a repeat was obviously to be avoided. Besides, LBJ approved most of the targets anyway. It is hard to blame Johnson's interference for the failure of the war, Cohen writes, when military leaders were also clueless about how to fight it: "There is no evidence that they understood any better than the civilian leadership the mentality of friend or foe, or that they had any ideas for bringing the war to a conclusion on terms acceptable to American diplomacy and bearable for the American public"'

Just my 2c.

(BTW, that big face-plate thingy on the M14 bullpup stock, it's there because God didn't intend for that weapon to be modified thus. Without it the shooter obviously gets a face full of brass--the Steyr or the FAMAS don't have that feature, because I imagine they expel the extracted cases properly.)


* I avoid then like the plague. Too revisionist for my tastes.
 
I hate to be a spoilsport, but I don't think any amount of amazing weaponry is going to improve what was essentially mismanagment at the strategic level. Though I hate to turn this into a discussion about what happened to the US in Vietnam. Give the US AK-47s. Give them F-117s. It's still going to be LBJ picking the targets in the basement of the White House.
Fine, let's put someone good in charge of the war.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
I know this isn't a 'Who lost Vietnam?' thread*, but it is a Vietnam thread.

I think the common misconception of LBJ's 'micro-management' of the war is most effortlessly demolished by Eliot A. Cohen in Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime. He the makes the case that LBJ lost the war in Vietnam worse than it otherwise would have been lost because he didn't exercise enough control.

And as for the bombing maps in the White House, this article by NR and Hannity-show conservative Rich Lowry summarises Cohen's position:

'When it comes to Vietnam, Cohen's perspective leads him to defend LBJ's notorious review of bombing targets as an appropriate exercise of oversight, given the strategic and political consequences of the targeting choices. In Korea, the military had heedlessly prompted a massive Chinese intervention, and a repeat was obviously to be avoided. Besides, LBJ approved most of the targets anyway. It is hard to blame Johnson's interference for the failure of the war, Cohen writes, when military leaders were also clueless about how to fight it: "There is no evidence that they understood any better than the civilian leadership the mentality of friend or foe, or that they had any ideas for bringing the war to a conclusion on terms acceptable to American diplomacy and bearable for the American public"'

Just my 2c.

(BTW, that big face-plate thingy on the M14 bullpup stock, it's there because God didn't intend for that weapon to be modified thus. Without it the shooter obviously gets a face full of brass--the Steyr or the FAMAS don't have that feature, because I imagine they expel the extracted cases properly.)


* I avoid then like the plague. Too revisionist for my tastes.

Point taken. I completely agree with you. I just remember when I was a kid turning to my dad (a history professor at U of Iowa) and asking him if we could have won Vietnam if we'd had Stealth fighters. And how he, a guy who'd been in the Army in the 60s and the 70s, let me find out for myself just how much of an oversimplification that was.
I mean, I felt terrible just typing as little as I did, because that war can't be simplified down to one thing or another and wind up with a happy ending.
 

Stephen

Banned
(BTW, that big face-plate thingy on the M14 bullpup stock, it's there because God didn't intend for that weapon to be modified thus. Without it the shooter obviously gets a face full of brass--the Steyr or the FAMAS don't have that feature, because I imagine they expel the extracted cases properly.)

The brass should be ejected to the side so I think the big chin rest is more so your face dosnt get chewed up by the bolt. I dont know why the Israelis who made that gun didnt bull pup somthing more suited to the layout like an FN FAL.
 
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