Small Arms History and Design

Behind the Curve: New Technologies, New Control Challenges, a new Occasional Paper from the Small Arms Survey, looks at three recent developments in small arms manufacturing, technology, and design—polymer frames, modular weapons, and 3D printing—as well as the use of new technologies for improved small arms control.

For each topic, the publication reviews relevant control challenges and options, to assist UN member states preparing for the Second Open-ended Meeting of Governmental Experts under the Programme of Action (PoA) on small arms, to be convened at UN headquarters in New York, from 1 to 5 June 2015. As mandated by the UN General Assembly, the meeting will consider ‘recent developments in small arm and light weapon manufacturing, technology and design’, including ‘[p]ractical steps to ensure the continued and enhanced effectiveness of national marking, record-keeping and tracing systems in the light of such developments’.

These developments pose a series of challenges to the implementation of existing control instruments, such as the PoA and the International Tracing Instrument (ITI).  Two of the developments were identified at the PoA’s first Open-ended Meeting of Governmental Experts, held in 2011: the use of polymers to produce firearm frames and receivers, and modular weapon design. Since 2011, the production of firearms using additive manufacturing methods (3D printing), particularly by unlicensed parties, has generated concern among policy-makers and law enforcement officials.

The following Article discusses three historic battles:

(1) The Ia Drang River Valley; November 14th-15th 1965 (with reference
        to Hill 881; April - May 1967)
(2) Mirbat: July 19th, 1972
(3) Wanat: July 13th, 2008

(4) Addendum (Adhesion Warfare)

This Article aims to focus on dismounted infantry small arms and should not be considered as an exhaustive account of the battles, or the circumstances surrounding those battles.  I have also tried to address the small arms ‘bigger picture.’ 
This Article is my endeavour to better appreciate the role of small arms at three influential moments in history.
I hope that this distillation of 'available information' may be helpful to those looking for insights into these historic events.

The full text of the Handbook is freely available online: http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/resources/publications/by-type/handbooks/weapons-id-handbook.html

Arms and ammunition are evidence. Many weapons carry marks that, combined with their physical characteristics, reveal important information about them, including their manufacturer, age, and origin. This information, in turn, provides vital clues about the sources and flows of weapons in the area in which they were found.

The goal of this Handbook is to provide the reader with a basic understanding of how to identify and analyse small arms and light weapons, and to track their proliferation. The process of identifying arms is complex, and no single guide can provide all of the information required to identify every weapon or round of ammunition that may be encountered at crime scenes or in conflict zones. Instead, this guide explains the process by which weapons and ammunition are identified and arms flows are tracked. Reference material on specific small arms, light weapons, and ammunition is included throughout the guide. This material will help readers to take the steps necessary to identify the make and model of the most commonly encountered weapons and ammunition.

The central claim underpinning the Revolution in Military Affairs isthat battlefield imperatives drive technical and more widely social change: thattechnology evolves according to a logic that starts with the relationship between the offence and defence in battle. Thus the ambition of the military organisationis to develop weaponry that can beat the adversary. A failure to grasp thisessential truth leads to defeat in battle. This paper demonstrates how technologychange happens in practice. By looking inside the ‘black box’ of the military organisation, what emerges is a more complicated picture that takes into accountthe way arguments for technical change are constructed and deployed within thebureaucracy based on a variety of battlefield interpretations. This shows that technology development is not necessarily driven by either frontline demands orscientific understanding but in reference to who has organisational power andhow they use i

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER

This book examines Western military technological innovation through the lens of developments in small arms during the twentieth century. These weapons have existed for centuries, appear to have matured only incrementally and might seem unlikely technologies for investigating the trajectory of military–technical change. Their relative simplicity, however, makes it easy to use them to map patterns of innovation within the military–industrial complex. Advanced technologies may have captured the military imagination, offering the possibility of clean and decisive outcomes, but it is the low technologies of the infantryman that can help us develop an appreciation for the dynamics of military–technical change.

Tracing the path of innovation from battlefield to back office, and from industry to alliance partner, Ford develops insights into the way that small arms are socially constructed. He thereby exposes the mechanics of power across the military–industrial complex. This in turn reveals that shifting power relations between soldiers and scientists, bureaucrats and engineers, have allowed the private sector to exploit infantry status anxiety and shape soldier weapon preferences. Ford’s analysis allows us to draw wider conclusions about how military innovation works and what social factors frame Western military purchasing policy, from small arms to more sophisticated and expensive weapons.

This thesis is concerned with the design and development of British infantry rifles. The specific weapons considered are the Lee-Metford (LEME) first introduced in 1888; the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE) brought into service in 1904; the Experimental Model No.2 (EM2) briefly designated the Rifle No.9 Mk.I in 1951; and the Section Small Arms Post 1980 (SA80) issued to troops in 1986.

Over the past twenty years academic literature has demonstrated that technological determinism has persistently crept into accounts of technical change. By consistently leaving human agency out of the equation, technology has appeared to evolve autonomously and to have determinate effects. Whilst studies of civilian technologies have shown that this way of seeing has serious flaws, very little has been undertaken to show how the same issues arise in a military context. The approach adopted here explicitly aims to highlight and avoid problems of technological determinism by putting human choice back into the story of British rifle design.

This is achieved through the identification of key personalities and social groups who had a perspective on, and an interest in, the development of the various systems. Having identified the key actors, their views on each artefact are explored. What emerges is that different groups see a particular technical solution differently. The arguments about what must be included in, and what is irrelevant to, a design of rifle are as a result exposed for further examination. The eventual weapon that emerges from these debates can be seen as a negotiation among the various parties: an artefact around which various perspectives coalesce. What transpires is a detailed picture of the tactical problems each weapon attempts to resolve. This not only indicates how various groups see the battlefield problem but also describes how these same actors want the infantry to fight.

The full text of the Handbook is freely available online: http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/resources/publications/by-type/handbooks/weapons-id-handbook.html

Arms and ammunition are evidence. Many weapons carry marks that, combined with their physical characteristics, reveal important information about them, including their manufacturer, age, and origin. This information, in turn, provides vital clues about the sources and flows of weapons in the area in which they were found.

The goal of this Handbook is to provide the reader with a basic understanding of how to identify and analyse small arms and light weapons, and to track their proliferation. The process of identifying arms is complex, and no single guide can provide all of the information required to identify every weapon or round of ammunition that may be encountered at crime scenes or in conflict zones. Instead, this guide explains the process by which weapons and ammunition are identified and arms flows are tracked. Reference material on specific small arms, light weapons, and ammunition is included throughout the guide. This material will help readers to take the steps necessary to identify the make and model of the most commonly encountered weapons and ammunition.

"The Town of Jönköping in Southern Sweden saw a number of great changes in the early 17th century. Here, in what was then a border town, the Crown made large investments. Drafts for impressive fortifications, encircling a modern city on a new site were made. And all inhabitants had to move in the 1610s. Another important enterprise was the foundation in 1620 of two new Royal Chartered Factories, the Jönköpings Faktori making firearms and armor, the Vantmakeriet producing cloth for the armed forces on a large scale. This was part of an extremely ambitious scheme for the rapid modernization and re-organisation of the kingdom. The aim was to become a major player in the troubled politics of early modern Europe and to take part in the Thirty Years War.

In 2004 a large excavation, the Apeln site, made it possible to uncover whole properties, once belonging to master craftsmen employed by the arms factory. A number of well preserved 17th and early 18th Century workshops used by gunsmiths and makers of armor were found together with dwellings and store houses. The finds shows that match locks, wheel locks as well as flint lock weapons  have been made in these sophisticated workshops. The hierarchial organization of these places of work has been studied and the inhabitants have been identified from the written records of the population. Another topic has been the techniques used for building new solid ground, as these lots were expanded out into the Lake Munksjön.

After the collapse of the Swedish Empire in the beginning of the 18th Century a troubled time began. With no more large orders for weapons coming in from the army the town as a whole had to adapt to a different economy. In the Apeln site merchants and craftsmen with a civilan production gradually took over the properties, causing re-building and further enlargment of the plots. In the following century the industrialization led to a decline for what once had been the new town of an Absolutist State. The craftsmen found it hard to compete with massproduced goods. And a number of simple dwellings were added to already existing buildings; breing rented rooms for poor immigrants from the surrounding countryside. In the excavation of 2004 it was possible to record these remains too, a rare feat as Swedish archaeology in the beginning of the 21st century normally overlooked features of such a late date.

To sum up  - the excavations at the Apeln site in Jönköping offered a rare opportunity for a closer look at one pre-requisites for the aggressive foreign policy of Sweden in the 17th century - the production of firearms. The work of the craftsmen, gun smiths as well as maker of armor, has been studied together with building traditions and other aspects of the material culture of these highly skilled professionals and their families. The development in later years, with wealthy merchants living in close proximity with the poor, illustrates the transition in this and many other towns during the Days of the Industrial Revolution. The excavation has been extremely valuable in adding so much new knowledge about urban life and development in early modern Sweden. The excavation was also important as a field where new methods and techniques were tested for the first time in Jönköping. Hopefully this report can transmit some of the excitement we felt when carrying out the dig!  "

The full text of the Handbook is freely available online: http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/resources/publications/by-type/handbooks/weapons-id-handbook.html

Arms and ammunition are evidence. Many weapons carry marks that, combined with their physical characteristics, reveal important information about them, including their manufacturer, age, and origin. This information, in turn, provides vital clues about the sources and flows of weapons in the area in which they were found.

The goal of this Handbook is to provide the reader with a basic understanding of how to identify and analyse small arms and light weapons, and to track their proliferation. The process of identifying arms is complex, and no single guide can provide all of the information required to identify every weapon or round of ammunition that may be encountered at crime scenes or in conflict zones. Instead, this guide explains the process by which weapons and ammunition are identified and arms flows are tracked. Reference material on specific small arms, light weapons, and ammunition is included throughout the guide. This material will help readers to take the steps necessary to identify the make and model of the most commonly encountered weapons and ammunition.

This article examines the British army's decision to adopt the Lee-Metford magazine rifle in 1888. Examining the perspectives of a number of constituencies in the services shows that the magazine arm was not adopted out of an ambition simply to produce greater volumes of fire. Instead a number of factors shaped the decision to abandon the previous service arm, the Martini-Henry, many of which were contingent and reflected the particular attitudes of those groups with an interest in the infantry's equipment. What ultimately becomes apparent is that the Lee-Metford was embraced primarily because it did not force any one constituency in the army to adopt the tactical preferences of any of the other groups involved.

De meeste Europeanen kennen de Steyr AUG (StG 77), maar niet iedereen weet dat zijn meeste gebruikers en licentieproducenten Australië en Maleisië zijn. Oostenrijk komt pas op de derde plaats. In 2020 vierde de Australische AUG de 35e verjaardag vanzijn invoering in de bewapening.

This article examines the British army’s decision to adopt the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE) in 1903. Historians invariably assume that this weapon was developed in response to demands to modernize and improve the army following the failures and poor marksmanship of British soldiers fighting in the Boer War. Understood this way the SMLE’s selection appears inevitable and as a result is rarely examined in close detail. This stands in contrast to the wealth of attention dedicated to exploring how the cavalry fought to hold onto the arme blanche despite the apparent revolution in machine-gun and artillery firepower. Upon closer examination, however, neither way of thinking about the changes occurring in the British army after the Boer War does justice to the complexities surrounding the development and selection of the SMLE. Rather, by considering the manner in which different communities within the army thought about battle, and in particular how engagements on the North West Frontier shaped perspectives on marksmanship, this article demonstrates how the cavalry and the Indian Army played an important part in the adoption of the SMLE.

Международная научно-практическая конференция «Война и оружие. Новые исследования и материалы» проводится в стенах старейшего военно-исторического музея России с 2010 года и является самой значительной и единственной в России по данной тематике.

In recent years, the most significant development in home craft-production technology has been the successful employment of simple electrochemical machining (ECM) setups to produce rifling grooves in barrels made from commercially available steel tubing. This short article explores the basic technical characteristics, applications, and limitations of ECM in the context of personally made firearms (PMFs).

https://armamentresearch.com/briefings/

Whilst some 3D-printed firearms designs, such as the famed 'Liberator', are almost entirely constructed from polymers (and are therefore subject to some fairly unforgiving material limitations), more recent designs have relied on the integration of critical components produced from metals, such as steel barrels and breech faces. These components are better able than polymers to contain the pressures exerted on them when a round is fired. However, the commonplace use of non-printed components has made 3DPF terminology less clear, and necessitated the development of a simple classification schema.

https://armamentresearch.com/briefings/

At far right, the image above appears to show a Belgian FN CAL (Carabine Automatique Légère; Light Automatic Carbine) rifle in the hands of fighters from the National Resistance Brigades, the paramilitary arm of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). The DFLP are an extreme-left member group of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). This image was shared by an official National Resistance Brigades social media account in 2014.
The CAL is a self-loading rifle chambered for the commonly encountered 5.56 x 45 mm cartridge. While not especially significant in terms of capability, the presence of the CAL rifle in a conflict zone is noteworthy to those interested in arms proliferation. Although the CAL’s predecessor, the FAL, is commonplace in many conflict and post-conflict regions, and particularly within the Middle East and Northern Africa, the CAL itself is largely unknown outside of Europe.

ARES has documented Houthi fighters with two models of anti-materiel rifle (AMR) manufactured in Canada and the United States of America, but more images posted to social media appear to show a Houthi fighter armed with an Iranian AM50 (Sayyad-2) AMR.

Produced by the Iranian state-controlled Defence Industries Organization’s (DIO) Individual Combat Industries Group (ICIG), the AM50 is a single-shot, bolt-action, anti-materiel rifle chambered for 12.7 x 99 mm (.50 BMG). Further technical information about the AM50 is shown in the table below, taken from a brochure displayed at a past International Police, Safety and Security Equipment Exhibition in Iran.