The unusual assault rifle found among pirates on...

Thursday, January 26 2012

High-res

The unusual assault rifle found among pirates on the Gulf of Oman, featured overnight in an At War Somali Pirate Gun Locker post, has generated a lot of traffic here. So we’ll have more follow-up coverage of this rarely seen pattern, including more thoughts from the Royal Armouries in Leeds on the scale of the SAR-80’s potential circulation.

First, a vignette. This came in this morning from Dan Dimancescu, of Cambridge:

Dear Mr. Chivers –

Your article about the SAR brought back memories of a visit to Singapore in the early 80s. I was working on a book (“Global Stakes”) about technological challenges from Asia’s NICs and was welcomed in Singapore by Philip Yeo, Minister of Defense and a fellow Harvard Business School student class of ‘76. He invited me to see a new weapon and a demonstration for two Swedish arms ‘buyers.’ We all gathered at a firing range and took turns firing two weapons. First the M16 and then the SAR. In each case, Mr. Yeo told us to dip the full weapon into a barrel of water before firing.

When firing the M16, a sharp spray of water would hit one’s eyes thus preventing accurate aiming. With the SAR 80, there was no spray and most amazingly I was told to fire a whole round with one hand with the butt touching my nose. There was absolutely no kick-back. I’m surprised the weapon did not sell more extensively worldwide.

Dan D.

Such demonstrations are a staple of the arms trade. I have a set of field reports from Colt’s Firearms Division, back in the 1960s, as its sales force canvassed the United States, and the world, trying to sell the newly fielded M-16. (Curiously, one stop was Singapore, which entertained the idea of full adoption of the M16 before deciding to develop, manufacture and field its own rifle, the SAR 80). Police Departments were hesitant to buy assault rifles back then. That hesitation has since of course mostly evaporated, for a range of reasons. But the field reports of those demonstrations from nearly a half century back make for strange and, in their way, illuminating reading about how manufacturers’ can shape a pitch. (Strange because some the ballistic demonstrations were, in two words, almost cartoonish.)

We have seen many more pitches in recent years, often in front of gullible reporters. Anyone who reads up on the history of small-arms development and sales can see that many breathlessly presented weapons fail to live up to their hype. And that many demonstrations of a weapon’s supposed effects have not much merit. And yet the demonstrations can be powerfully impressive. The same applies to demonstrations of weapons in active service. I still recall how the M60E3 impressed me when it was demonstrated in infantry-school classes, and when it was fired over our heads as we crawled through infiltration courses as young Marines in the 1980s. And that weapon was, well, all but junk. Once we reached line companies, we would spend far too much time as platoon commanders standing over cursing M60E3 gun teams as they tried to un-jam those guns. The Echo Three, as it was known, was quietly retired. Good riddance.

Back to those in-house sales-force reports from Colt’s: I’ll see if I can dig one out from the archives (read: shed full of bins) and post it here over the weekend. And one day I should post excerpts from a few of the grand-daddies of bad ballistic science. Hint: They were held by the USG.

Meanwhile, time to toggle screens and work up another story for the NYT. I’ll wander back after filing, and will post more here on the SAR 80, a weapon of which there seems to be much to say. (Thank you, Dan.)