Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to take just a few minutes to go over
the history of the forward assist on the AR-15, because there's a bit of an interesting story to it.
So, as originally developed, the AR-15 did not have a forward assist.
It was a nice slick-sided rifle. It also didn't have a brass deflector, which some left-handed people had an issue with.
At any rate, the way the AR-15 entered US military service actually started with adoption by the Air Force
as a replacement for the M2 carbine.
And the M14 program was having some issues by the early 1960s.
It had a lot of development issues, it had a lot of production QA issues.
... Aside from the qualities of the rifle itself, the manufacturing program behind the M14 had a lot of serious flaws.
And these were starting to come to light at this point.
Now when the Air Force purchased AR-15 rifles, it did so off the shelf from Colt.
This was just a product, like a revolver or a shotgun, that they might want.
It was not a "milspec" sort of thing, there was no military standard, it was a rifle,
the Air Force decided it wanted a bunch of them and so it bought them.
And it bought them in whatever format Colt sold that the Air Force thought was good.
Now this got more complicated when the Army decided to get involved and also purchase AR-15s.
And the reason that the Army got involved was because of the problems with the M14 program.
Robert McNamara had this grand timetable in mind, and basically
the Defence Department was working on developing project SPIW, Special Purpose Infantry Weapon,
which was going to be like the super-duper rifle, futuristic thing, that was going to replace the M14.
And it would be burst firing, and have grenade launchers, and maybe flechettes, maybe regular bullets.
There were things still in development, but he had this grand timeline of exactly when SPIW would be tested,
and when the best version would be chosen, when it would go into production,
and when it would be actually issued out by the Army.
And looking at the gap that formed between when SPIW was expected to be fully in use,
and current supplies of M14 there was a gap. The Army ... had a projected shortage of rifles.
And ... McNamara figured we'll fill that shortage with a one-time purchase of AR-15s.
We'll buy 85,000 AR-15 rifles, and they'll be basically a temporary thing until we get project SPIW finished.
Now in the long term we know that that didn't work out so well.
Project SPIW was a complete catastrophe and never developed into anything
(other than an underbarrel grenade launcher, eventually).
And it would lead to basically this 85,000 unit one-time order being the foot in the door that would eventually
get the AR-15 adopted as the M16 and the standard issue military rifle, which it effectively still is today.
However, ... basically when the Army goes to buy 85,000 rifles
now this is something a little more serious than just an off the shelf purchase.
It needs to be standardised, we need to have some control, we need to have some QA procedures.
We're not willing to just depend on Colt to test the rifles and say, "Yeah, they're good",
like they would with a small procurement item like shotguns for guards, Air Force guards for example.
So McNamara and the Defence Department put together basically a committee to standardise the AR-15.
And the plan is they want to have all four branches of service standardise on the exact same rifle.
So the Air Force of course has been using the AR-15 for a couple of years at this point (this is 1963 by the way).
The Army is looking at getting in on it, the Navy and the Marine Corps don't have it yet, but ...
well, eventually we know they'll end up using it too.
And so the question comes up what do we need to standardise on the AR-15 before we put in this big formal order?
And ... one of the things that came up was a bolt forward assist.
It was of note to the Army that there is no way to manually force the bolt of the AR-15 forward manually.
If the cartridge doesn't quite go all the way into ... battery
all you can do is pull the charging handle back and let it go under spring pressure, and hope that that fixes it.
Now from the Army's perspective, this was a problem.
Of course the M1 and the M14 both had a charging handle ... effectively fixed to the bolt.
It reciprocated when the rifle fired, and if something didn't quite go into battery
you can push forward on that handle and solve the problem with a little application of force.
In fact on the M1 Garand this was sort of a necessary thing sometimes. When you loaded a new clip
on a lot of rifles the bolt doesn't go all the way forward just when you release the clip,
you have to tap the bolt handle with the palm of your hand, just give it a little nudge, and then it'll close.
The M14 didn't have that issue. The manual, ... the TM, for the M14 actually says,
"Yeah, you're not supposed to just force the bolt home to fix an issue,
because you'll probably actually just make the issue worse."
But the Army position, and they laid this out rather specifically, was kind of twofold.
It was, first off, if it even prevents one malfunction, then it's worth it,
and we should have some way to manually force the bolt forward.
And secondly, it doesn't even matter if it fixes even one malfunction, because
... not having it would be a psychological detractor for the soldier.
Having it there gives him ... the confidence of knowing that should something go wrong he can fix it,
regardless of whether it would fix it or not. So that was the Army's position.
Now the Air Force looked at this and said, "That's stupid."
The Air Force said, "We've been field testing this thing for three years, and we've seen no evidence
of an actual problem that requires a forward assist to fix, so there's no actual need.
And on top of that if we go adding something like that to the rifle
it's going to make it more complicated, it's going to make it more expensive.
It will probably", they said, "cause problems with some other part of the rifle that works fine right now."
Basically, the [Air Force] was saying if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Also, it's not broke.
Now it's interesting to go back a little bit with the AR,
and if we look at the early versions of the AR, the AR-10,
the very first AR-10s actually also did not have a forward assist.
They have a charging handle up here on the top of the receiver which was non-reciprocating.
And as the AR-10 developed and had product improvement cycles,
it ultimately ended with the Portuguese model, which is this one, which actually has a forward assist built into it.
If you push the charging handle down, it locks onto the bolt carrier and you can actually force it forward.
Of course, this was the final version of the AR-10 to be adopted by anybody.
When things came back to the AR-15 in 5.56 (or .223),
that forward assist mechanism never made the transition to the new design.
Now back when the Army was working on adopting the M14,
one of the issues they had with the FN FAL was that it didn't have a forward assist to it, and the M14 did.
So this is something that was kind of in the Army, this wasn't sprung out of nowhere by the Army.
Still however, the Air Force said, "Look, it just doesn't matter."
Now as for the Navy and the Marine Corps, they were both pretty ambivalent.
The Navy said, "It sounds nice, but we wouldn't hold up development of the rifle to get it."
And the Marine Corps basically said more or less the same thing, like
"It doesn't sound like we need it, but if it doesn't cause any problems, what the heck, why not?"
And at this point ... they go into development of four different versions.
So both the Colt company, who ... at this time owned the AR-15,
and also Springfield Armory both start developing solutions.
Now they come up with two different solutions each.
Colt's first idea is kind of like this. Colt's first idea is, "We'll just mill a slot in the top of the receiver,
we'll fix a charging handle to the bolt carrier and, presto, it'll be permanently attached,
and it'll reciprocate. And you can forward assist the heck out of it if you want to."
Now the problem with that of course is we're cutting a big open slot
in the top of the receiver, and it's going to let a bunch of junk in.
On the AR-10s here, by the way, they had a telescoping dust cover to prevent that.
So that version from Colt never goes anywhere.
Colt's second idea was the one that ultimately got adopted, which is the plunger device.
Which we have here, this is another Brownell's gun.
This guy. And it's a little plunger that ... matches up with ratcheting teeth on the bolt carrier.
And when you push the plunger in, it ratchets the bolt carrier forward bit by bit.
So this was Colt's better idea.
Springfield Armory came up with a couple of variations on what was effectively
they put a little pin on the top of the bolt carrier.
They ... cut this open and put a cam in the top of the upper receiver,
and then they added a little flap spring to the charging handle.
And the idea was basically the charging handle would lock into this pin on top of the bolt carrier,
and when you smack the charging handle forward, it would force the bolt carrier forward.
They went through a couple iterations of this, and ultimately in the summer of 1963
the Army did a formal test on the Springfield version with this basically forward assist charging handle,
and the Colt version which had this plunger.
For the record, when Eugene Stoner was ... asked about this, because he was of course involved,
his conclusion was that the whole thing was unnecessary.
He agreed with the Air Force that it wasn't a problem that needed solving.
When push came to shove, he recommended
actually the Springfield version, with the modified charging handle.
And he didn't say that because he thought it was the more effective solution,
he thought this was a dumb idea that people were eventually going to realise was dumb,
and they'd want to then get rid of it. And he went for the version that would be the easiest to get back out of.
Basically the easiest to revert the tooling to, once people realised that they didn't actually need a forward assist.
So Stoner would end up being proven completely wrong historically, in that they never did get rid of the forward assist.
So it's probably good that his recommendation wasn't taken in this case, because
the plunger style forward assist did a lot better in testing than the ... charging handle style of forward assist.
... The problem was it was a little bit more fragile, and it didn't always quite work.
There were a number of occasions in the testing
when they attempted to use it and it didn't actually close the bolt all the way.
And for all of the things you can say about the plunger forward assist,
namely it does add complexity, it does add cost,
it ... gives you a button which people are always going to push when they have the opportunity to push,
even if it actually makes a problem worse.
For all that, it does generally do what it's supposed to do which is it will close the bolt,
whether that ought to be done or not.
So that was Stoner's position on the matter.
Dumb idea, go with the one that you can just get rid of easier.
Now they did testing in three different conditions to evaluate the forward assists.
They did mud testing, they did dust testing, and they did cold weather testing.
And really it's the mud testing where the forward assist became usable,
in that there were a lot of failures to feed which could be remediated by cramming the bolt forward.
And these were virtually always accompanied by failures to extract.
Once you jammed the cartridge in there you could get it to fire, but then it wasn't going to extract.
And you'd have to mortar clear or otherwise remediate that following problem.
The Air Force maintained that this was not a problem that needed a solution.
The Army maintained that, "Yes, by god, they wanted it and they were going to have it."
And ultimately the Army won out kind of just by persistence and stubbornness.
In order to prevent further delay of the actual purchase,
the Defence Department just kind of came down arbitrarily and said,
"Alright, look. We're going to introduce the plunger forward assist for the Army."
Colt was willing to manufacture these guns without the forward assist for the Air Force.
So that solved their problem, "You guys don't want it, you don't have to have it,
but the Army wants it and so they can have it."
And then over time this becomes the de facto standard,
because the Army is buying far more of these guns than the Air Force is.
So that is why actually ... for a long time you would find Air Force AR-15s
that had no forward assist on them, because they were old early-purchase Air Force receivers
that just got rebuilt and reused for many decades of service.
So this remains a little bit of a controversy today, not a particularly serious one really.
I mean in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really make any difference.
I tend to believe that the Air Force was right, that it is an unnecessary thing,
however, it really doesn't cause any problems, aside from it does add a little complexity,
it does add a few extra parts to the rifle.
And it is a button that people will always press, given the option.
There's a control: you must activate the control, or else why is it there?
So hopefully that's been a little bit enlightening to you guys. Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
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