WHAT IS AN ASSAULT RIFLE?

by William Sanders

"Assault rifle" has become one of the more pervasive Humptyisms of our time. ("Humptyism" as in Humpty Dumpty's famous line, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.") Among its many common misusages, it is often applied to the SKS.

What, in fact, is - and isn't - an assault rifle? In order to explain, a history lesson is in order.

The first successful assault rifle appeared in 1943. The basic concept, however, is considerably older.

During World War I, as both sides sought desperately to break the stalemate on the Western Front, it became clear to all but the most hidebound military men that the answer was mobility. Simply marching ranks of riflemen in the general direction of the enemy lines accomplished nothing but getting them mowed down.

The British and French generals never really saw what was wrong with that; but in Germany some advanced thinkers, including Ludendorff, came up with the idea of special "assault" units trained to use cover and move rapidly. Obviously such units would need as much firepower as possible, but the machine guns of the day were heavy and clumsy. The Germans tried stripping down their regular machine guns to lighten them, but this was not an adequate answer and they never did really solve the problem before the Armistice.

Meanwhile in the United States other people were considering the same problem. The US military had a long tradition of mobility and skirmishing tactics, going clear back to the Revolution and honed in generations of Indian fighting, so the American command was far more open to such ideas than the Allied counterparts. Various ideas were developed with the same basic idea: something an infantryman could carry and fire while advancing on foot, for suppressing fire during the attack and then for cleaning out enemy positions. ("Trench broom" was the expression sometimes used.)

Oddly enough, the one weapon of World War I that came closest to the later "assault" concept was an Italian one: the weird-looking Villar Perosa, a double-barrelled automatic weapon resembling nothing seen before or since. When it appeared in 1915 the Italian army tried to use it as a light machine gun, but later in the war they began to realize its potential and to use it as a handy, mobile source of short-range firepower for infantry.

Finally, the Russians introduced a remarkable experimental rifle that in some respects came close to qualifying as a genuine assault rifle, but it never reached the front in serious quantities and its development failed to survive the Bolshevik takeover. More on this here.

The twenties and thirties saw a great deal of development work on hand-held automatic weapons, and generally it followed the two directions exemplified by the American BAR and Thompson: on the one hand a big, solidly constructed light machine gun firing full-power rifle ammunition and usually fired from a bipod - though a strong man could fire it from the hip or shoulder - and, on the other, a compact, short-barrelled submachine gun using pistol cartridges. Examples of the former were the BAR, the British Bren, and the Japanese Type 99; of the latter, the Thompson, the German MP-38 (incorrectly aka "Schmeisser") and the Finnish Suomi which became the basis for the highly successful Soviet PPSh.

Most armies eventually adopted one or more versions of each of these general types. However, it was always understood that these were specialist weapons. There was absolutely no question of their replacing the ordinary soldier's rifle. The light MGs like the BAR and Bren were too heavy (and expensive) while the submachine guns were too short-ranged and limited in power to serve as main infantry weapons.

Not that it didn't occur to anyone that it would be really really neat to have something that would combine the firepower of the light machine gun and the handiness of the submachine gun and still be suitable - and affordable - as a main battle rifle. Several designers tried, but they were up against a serious and for a long time insoluble problem: ballistics. Specifically the ballistics demanded by the people who ran the armies.

From the late nineteenth century up into World War II, it was taken as Obvious To The Meanest Intelligence that a military rifle had to be capable of accurate fire at ranges up to and including a thousand yards. (In fact the shortest range for which most rifles' sights could be set was 300 yards or meters; this was considered short range, closer than which it was time to fix bayonets.) This necessitated cartridges of considerable power, firing long streamlined bullets at fairly high muzzle velocities; and this in turn required long, heavy barrels and - because a cartridge of this type had to be quite long - the rifle's action had to be pretty bulky.

And this made it very difficult to design a compact, handy weapon capable of full-automatic fire, because the powerful cartridges developed such violent recoil that only a fairly heavy weapon could be controlled on full-auto. (The US army learned that lesson in later years when it tried introducing full-auto capability to the powerful M-14; nobody could hit anything with it on auto.)

That was the situation at the start of World War II. Then a few years later the Germans (is anyone surprised?) made the big breakthrough and invented the assault rifle.

The German breakthrough really began in the 1930s, when some of the more imaginative officers did a careful study of combat records from the last war and others, and came to the conclusion that everybody had been using way to hell too much gun. The rifles and their ammunition had been designed for long-range accuracy (largely inspired by the British experience in the Boer War) but in practice, hardly anybody except a few specialist snipers had ever had occasion to fire at ranges beyond 300 meters.

What was needed, these clever bastards concluded, was a cartridge that fired the same sort of bullet, but with a smaller powder charge. This would allow the cartridge itself to be considerably smaller, and this in turn would permit a more compact weapon, since the action wouldn't have to be as long; and, the recoil being less, the rifle could be lighter without making it hard to shoot. The lower recoil would also make it easier to train recruits, and a man could carry more of the smaller cartridges. The possibilities of full-auto fire don't seem to have been discussed at first.

The original recommendation was for a short 7mm. cartridge, but the war was about to start so the team decided instead to stay with the existing 7.92mm. caliber so as to reduce the need for retooling. The resulting cartridge was the 7.92mm. Kurz ("short") round. It was over a third shorter than the standard 7.92mm. Mauser round and considerably lighter, and it fired a lighter bullet at a somewhat reduced velocity, but it could still be used out to 300 meters and even a bit farther.

This particular egg, then, came well before the chicken; the cartridge was created first, and then the rifle was designed around it. This is an important point to understand: the true assault rifle became practicable only because of a prior breakthrough in cartridge design, which in turn was the result of radical rethinking of accepted military wisdom.

The first weapon made to fit the new round was ready for production in 1942. A test batch was sent to the Russian Front, where it proved very successful but in need of a few minor changes. With these changes, the rifle went into production the following year as the MP-43.

The MP-43 was a revolutionary design in all respects, not just the cartridge. For one big thing, the gas piston and cylinder that operated the mechanism were placed on TOP of the barrel, rather than underneath as had been standard practice in previous automatic rifles. (E.g. the BAR.) This put the line of the barrel much lower, thus causing the recoil to come straight back toward the shoulder, rather than on a line above it as with conventional rifles; and this made it much easier to control in rapid fire. Following the same principle, the butt came almost straight back compared to the usual rifle design, and there was a pistol grip like that of a submachine gun, which further made the weapon easier to handle, especially when fired from the hip. It had a long magazine holding 30 rounds, and this was detachable for rapid reloading.

The MP-43 also had the capability of selective fire - it could be fired either semi-automatically, as a rifle, or full-auto like a submachine gun. It was quite accurate on semi-auto, and on full-auto at short range it would just about cut a man in half.

The German troops loved it - the few who got their hands on it; it never did attain anything like full production. The Russians found it fascinating, and promptly began to study it.

There was one more change, toward the end of 1944; not a technological one, but one of nomenclature. The CEO of Germany, one A. Hitler of whom you may have heard, was tremendously pleased with the new rifle, and bestowed on it the name "Sturmgewehr."

Meaning "assault rifle."

The StG-44 (as it was now officially called) never was available in anywhere near enough quantity to replace the old bolt-action Mauser as the Reich's main battle rifle, but those that saw action more than lived up to hopes.

Meanwhile the Soviets had been taking a keen interest in all this. The concept of a shorter, lower-powered cartridge had great appeal to them, especially since it would require less raw materials to make both the gun and the ammunition. They didn't particularly care about range and accuracy, which didn't figure significantly in their hell-for-leather infantry tactics; they were already making use of short-range submachine guns more extensively than any other country. Furthermore, they needed something to replace their Tsarist-vintage 7.62x54mm. round, which had a peculiar shape that made it unsuitable for modern weapons. They studied the German short round and came up with their own equivalent: the 7.62x39mm. cartridge, with similar ballistics and general proportions.

They didn't, however, produce a weapon to use it until the war was almost over. A fellow named Simonov designed a carbine in 1944, and a small pre-production batch was tested in combat, but for various reasons - technical ones, plus Kremlin politics - it wasn't officially issued until '46.

It was a semi-automatic weapon, without full-auto capability, and pretty old-fashioned in design; it used a ten-round fixed box magazine, it had a conventional one-piece wooden stock, and it was distinctly on the heavy side for what it was. It was emphatically not an assault rifle; it was very much a conventional rifle, and it shared only two of the StG-44's characteristics - it used a short, reduced-power round, and the gas cylinder group was mounted above the barrel rather than underneath.

This was the Samozaryadni Karabin Simonov: the Simonov Self-loading Carbine, aka SKS. It was simple and easy to master, and dead reliable even under the worst conditions, but obsolete even when it was issued. However, it was later widely adopted by the Chinese and by the Soviet satellite forces. (The Kremlin preferred to have its puppets armed with inferior weaponry, just in case they got uppity.) It saw considerable use in Vietnam, especially in VC hands, and in Africa and the Middle East, as well as the later Yugoslav civil war.

The SKS didn't stay in first-string Soviet military issue very long. Something far more advanced was on the way.

It was, in fact, an assault rifle. It was in fact, barring a couple of abortive German designs, the second assault rifle in the world. It was called the AK-47. It still is.

Meanwhile what was going on in the rest of the world along these lines?

Hardly anything, actually. The concept of the assault rifle (the term had not yet come into general use) had attracted considerable interest in military circles, and several countries developed weapons that fit the general template. A new concept had arisen, though: instead of a lower-powered round of conventional caliber, you could get better results by using a smaller-diameter bullet - about .22 - at much higher velocity.

None of these designs went anywhere, because of the deadening hand of the US military establishment. Despite the experience of two world wars, the American brass remained adamant that a main battle rifle had to be able to deliver a heavy bullet at long range.

(They did, during World War II, adopt the concept of a light weapon firing a reduced-power cartridge: the famous, or infamous, M-1 carbine. This was in no sense an assault rifle - even in the selective-fire version later developed - and the concept was carried too far; the .30 Carbine round proved wretchedly inadequate for serious combat, though it had and has its devoted defenders.)

Eventually they grudgingly agreed to shorten the good old .30-06 a little, and reduce its power very slightly, but the result - the 7.62x51mm. aka .308 - was still very much a full-powered round with ballistics well up to World War I standards.

And because the US exercised decisive control over NATO, the .308 round was adopted in 1953 as the standard NATO cartridge, thus killing several promising assault rifle designs, notably the British EM2. Thanks to American military politics, through the fifties and well into the sixties the Communist countries were the only ones with assault rifles.

Eventually a designer named Eugene Stoner developed a series of modern weapon designs, one of which in particular shared most of the basic characteristics of the StG-44 and the AK-47, but in a much more modern form. The Armalite AR-15 had the straight-back stock design and pistol grip, gas cylinder on top, large-capacity magazine and full-auto capability; but it made extensive use of modern plastics and alloys to reduce weight, and it fired a small-bore, high-velocity round that eventually proved to have devastating effects on human targets.

The new rifle was enthusiastically adopted by many Asian countries, where its light weight made it ideal for their small-statured soldiers and its firepower was invaluable in jungle country. The US military were far less enthusiastic. They saw no use for such a weapon; it was too small and light, it fired a ridiculously small bullet - a .22, for God's sake! - and the full-auto feature would just encourage the troops to waste ammunition. Besides, it looked funny, and it wasn't worth a damn for doing the Manual of Arms.

It also hadn't been designed at the Springfield Arsenal. That was the real killer.

However, Special Forces had started operating in Southeast Asia, working with indigenous forces that were starting to adopt the AR-15, and they took to it right away. Eventually, after long and bitter argument and heavy political infighting, the US brass very grudgingly agreed to acquire the newfangled weapon in limited quantities, mainly for special operations. Once the thin end of the wedge was in, though, it was just a matter of time; the new Air Cavalry troops found the M-16, as it was now called, ideal for their purposes - being handy for riding around in helicopters - and the M-16 began to be issued more widely. As the Vietnam War began and escalated, it gradually supplanted the M-14 in the combat zone, though the 14 was still in general issue elsewhere.

The army, being the army, had however proceeded to ruin the M-16. First the brass insisted on a heavier bullet - for no good reason except their continuing obsession with range - which threw the firing cycle off with deleterious effects on reliability. They also accepted the manufacturer's claims that the new rifle was so designed that it didn't have to be cleaned, and this was passed on to the troops, many of whom died clutching jammed weapons before it was at last realized that the 16 had to be cleaned regularly and carefully like any other automatic weapon. Eventually some of the problems were corrected, but the M-16 never fully realized the potential that had been seen for it; even to this day, it remains a temperamental beast, all too easily disabled in rough conditions - such as the sandstorms of the Iraqi desert, where all too many American soldiers found themselves facing the enemy with hopelessly jammed M-16s.

All the same, the US at last had an assault rifle - and the M-16 does qualify, despite some differences from the original German design; it can be considered as representing the second generation in assault rifles.

Today there are quite a number of rifles in existence which could justly be classified as assault rifles; I couldn't name them all and there's no point in trying to do so. In fact the basic assault-rifle template has become pretty much the default style for military rifles, so that the term has become meaningless for military purposes; most modern battle rifles issued by major powers could be considered as assault rifles without stretching the term too badly.

So what, then, is an assault rifle?

We've seen that the assault rifle originated in Nazi Germany during World War II, and that the term itself originated with Adolf Hitler - who was merely indulging in his usual wishful thinking; the StG-44 saw very little "assault" use, because by late '44 the German army was entirely on the defensive and not doing very well at it, but still it's not a bad term; the assault rifle is indeed well adapted to mobile offensive warfare.

We've seen that the rifle Hitler was talking about had certain characteristics which have been shared by its descendants up to the present day:

(2) The capability to be fired full-automatic, that is like a machine gun;

(3) An in-line stock design and pistol grip, with gas cylinder usually above rather than below the barrel, so that the recoil will come straight back toward the firer's shoulder and thus make the weapon more controllable in full-automatic fire; and

(4) A large-capacity detachable magazine, 20 or 30 rounds or more.

Let's compare these to the criteria set forth in the US Assault Weapons Ban bill recently in the news, as well as in other Federal legislation:

(1) A semi-automatic rifle. Wrong. Full-automatic capability is a sine qua non of the true assault rifle. But since full-auto weapons were already illegal or virtually so - allowed only with prohibitively complicated and expensive licensing procedures - under Federal regulations going back to before World War II, an accurate definition would have made the whole business redundant. And we couldn't have that, could we?

(2) Detachable magazine. This is an absolute requirement under the terms of the Assault Weapons Ban: no detachable magazine, then it isn't considered an assault weapon. Correctly so; this is indeed a characteristic of the true assault rifle.

(3) Any two of the following:

Pistol grip type stock. Correct in a sense but irrelevant; the purpose of this type of stock is to make the assault rifle easier to control in full-automatic fire. In a semi-auto it has no effect one way or another; it is purely a matter of appearance and personal taste.

Bayonet mount, Totally irrelevant; most military rifles for centuries have taken bayonets, and at the same time some legitimate assault rifles don't.

Flash hider, grenade launcher, and/or threaded barrel. Equally irrelevant; these are features of military rifles, but not particularly the "assault" type - in fact the original assault rifle, the StG-44, didn't have a grenade launcher in its first versions, or a flash hider either. (It is claimed that a threaded barrel makes it possible to fit a silencer. In fact, for technical reasons, a rifle of this type cannot be effectively silenced.)

It will be seen that the SKS, so frequently referred to by the activists and the media as an "assault rifle," is no such thing, either by the correct military definition or that of the Assault Weapons Ban.

It will also be seen that the official definition of "assault rifle" has very little to do with the true meaning of the term - or indeed with anything to do with the effectiveness of a weapon, or its potential use in violent crime (how many drive-by bayonetings have you heard of?) - and is more concerned with cosmetic issues. Basically an "assault rifle," as the term is used by political activists and careless journalists, is any rifle that looks scary.

The activists would be far closer to the target if they would speak of "military-style rifles." That is really what they mean; and it would have the advantage, from their viewpoint, of taking in several non-assault-type weapons that they also would like to ban, such as the SKS and the M-1 carbine.

But "assault" sounds so much more menacing. So much more powerful and dangerous.

The man who coined the term "assault rifle" also said, "What matters is not what is true, but what is believed."

And they know very well how that works.