Why American Soldiers Shoot a Glorified .22

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

The mainstream media will often refer to military-style assault rifles as high-power rifles, when they are, arguably, just the opposite. The main battle rifles of WWI and WWII were high-power rifles, but the M16 shoots a teeny-tiny round. So, why do American soldiers shoot a glorified .22?

In 1948, the Army organized the civilian Operations Research Office (ORO), mirroring similar operations research organizations in the United Kingdom. One of their first efforts, Project ALCLAD, studied body armor and the conclusion was that they would need to know more about battlefield injuries in order to make reasonable suggestions. Over 3 million battlefield reports from WWI and WWII were analyzed and over the next few years they released a series of reports on their findings.



These efforts were noticed by Colonel René Studler, U.S. Army Ordnance’s Chief of Small Arms Research and Development. Col. Studler asked the Aberdeen Proving Ground to submit a report on the smaller caliber weapons. A team led by Donald Hall, director of program development at Aberdeen, reported that a .22 inch (5.56 mm) round would have performance equal to larger rounds in most combat. With the higher rate of fire possible due to lower recoil it was likely such a weapon would inflict more casualties on the enemy. His team members, notably William C. Davis, Jr. and Gerald A. Gustafson, started development of a series of experimental .22 (5.56 mm) cartridges.

The M16 shoots its glorified .22 with roughly half the energy (1300 ft·lbf) of a .308 (2,472 ft·lbf) coming out of an M14, the gun it replaced — but it does so with very little recoil.


  1. Alrenous says:

    This may explain why I grew up thinking infantry were kind of useless, when that’s not currently the case. In WWII, they used a kind of useless weapon.

  2. Isegoria says:

    The M1 Garand carried by US infantry in WWII was called “the greatest battle implement ever devised” by General George S. Patton; it wasn’t “kind of a useless weapon”. The bolt-action rifles used by the other armies weren’t useless either. Rather, most conscripts simply aren’t expert riflemen. They won’t make each shot count, so they won’t benefit from a weapon effective out to half a kilometer or more.

    What is infantry for, anyway?, we might ask, if they’re not really riflemen, and it seems that infantry troops are for infiltrating and screening out infiltrators.

  3. Alrenous says:

    Ah, so the soldiers were kind of useless, meaning the rifle was far more rifle than they could use.

    What would you say would happen if an expert rifleman with a Garand or modern equivalent attacked or was attacked by a regular soldier with a M16?

  4. Isegoria says:

    An expert rifleman with a Garand or modern equivalent, like an M-14 with modern optics, is basically a designated marksman — so his goal would be to engage from relatively long range. Modern American soldiers are well-trained though, and they have high-quality optics on their assault rifles, so the margin would be much narrower than it would be against a modern insurgent or Cold War Soviet conscript with an AK.

  5. Anonymous says:

    At high velocities, the 5.56mm fragments and causes massive damage that a .22 couldn’t hope to do in a billion years.

    Since when has “energy” from a bullet ever taken down anyone? If you don’t hit the central nervous system, you should be concerned about permanent cavity and bleedout.

    For your viewing pleasure. Black area is permanent cavity.

  6. Isegoria says:

    Of course a 5.56 causes more damage than a .22 long rifle round.

    The M16 may shoot its glorified .22 with roughly half the energy (1300 ft·lbf) of a .308 (2,472 ft·lbf) coming out of an M14, but that’s still many times the energy of an inglorious .22 — just 141 ft·lbf!

    An ordinary .22 lacks the energy to cause massive damage — so bullet placement becomes very, very important.

  7. Magus says:

    Studler was the same fool who a decade earlier had insisted that the .308 had to be the round adopted, dismissing the British-designed .280 as insufficient in power. Then he turned around pushed a much weaker round.

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