Two Assault Rifles

A new section from Stewart Brand's Maintenance on Books in Progress

Stewart Brand continues his digression on manuals with an investigation into two assault rifles:

SOME OF THE MOST VALUED MANUALS focus on known weaknesses of the device in question.  John Hall’s musket manual did that.  So did John Muir’s VW manual.  This digression-within-a-digression examines what was behind the most famous of all manuals dedicated solely to maintaining a flawed tool.  It emerged from the Vietnam War and one of the harshest maintenance dramas in history.

In the earliest years of the war—the mid-1960s—the North Vietnamese outgunned US forces on the ground. China had provided them with AK-47s—a cheap, highly effective firearm referred to as an "assault rifle"—which means a gun that can shift from semi-automatic (bang bang bang) to fully automatic (braaaaaaaapp). The US responded by fielding its own assault rifle— a brand new, highly sophisticated weapon called the M16.

Read the piece here. Collaborate here.