Thread by @NaviGoBoom

Where did .223 Remington (the AR-15s adopted cartridge) come from? Was it designed to wound? Is it a meat-cooking elephant killer? Let's take a look at the history and see what it tells us! 🧵

223's history dates back quite a ways, but in the interest of clarity, I'll leave out some of the details of early military experiments with small caliber rounds, and start with the "Small Caliber High Velocity" (SCHV) program.

This program was a sort of follow-on to a program known as SALVO, but has roots back before SALVO as well. You can think of them as contemporaries, but with SCHV learning at lot from certain aspects of SALVO.

SALVO was an early 1950s attempt to brainstorm how to take US weapons technology into the future (while seeming to ignore the lessons and from WW2 that pointed to what direction technology needed to go). Ideas included multi-barrel rifles and duplex or triplex projectiles.

A lot of the ideas in SALVO were unconventional, but one important thing did stand out - the effectiveness of a smaller caliber, lighter weight projectile.

This is where SCHV really takes over.

Instead of all the multibarrel, superposed projectiles, how would a 22 caliber conventional rifle perform? The Army (through CONARC, who coordinated much of the testing) decided to have various arms manufacturers play with this idea.

This was met with resistance by some in the Army, who felt that full power, 30 caliber cartridges were the only reasonable option and that 22 caliber round would undermine combat effectiveness. Details on the testing of 22 caliber rounds in SALVO were obstructed.

Despite those efforts, several companies (and the Army's own weapons design lab) were contacted by CONARC with some basic requirements - among these companies was a small design firm (owned by the Fairchild Aircraft company) based in Hollywood, California known as Armalite.

Armalite was known to CONARC thanks to some of their previous designs - most notably the AR10 - a lightweight, 30 caliber, select fire rifle that showed promise (and many things needing improvement) during one of the Army's previous tests.

The requirements that CONARC shared with Armalite called (among other less relevant things) for a 6lb rifle, using a 20+ round magazine, capable of select fire, *and with lethality greater than .30 Carbine*.

Remember that last bit, it'll be important later.

The first thing Armalite did was try and select a commercially available cartridge that would meet the requirements - 222 Remington was a relatively new offering, originally intended for varmint hunting.

One of Armalite's designers, Eugene Stoner, had designed a rifle in the late 1940s - which he dubbed the M6. Stoner would take this rifle's design and modify it into a new rifle - the Armalite Stopette - his M6 but in 222 instead of its original full power 30 caliber round. No pictures exist of the Stopette, but at least one was built and fired - and it was reported that it had had too fast of a fire rate and was hard to control. I'll leave some pictures of the M6 (which Armalite called the AR3) for reference.

Back to the drawing board, Armalite decided to take their AR-10 and modify it to the 222 round. This rifle, the XAR-15, would prove to be of great consequence.

Stoner himself had little to do with the details of the design of the AR-15, instead focusing on designing a new projectile for 222 that would make it better suited as a military cartridge - a full metal jacket, boat tailed, spitzer bullet (as opposed to the flat base lead-nosed varminting ammo that 222 was meant for).

The XAR-15 showed great promise, but a last second curveball in the requirements for SCHV threw a wrench into the works - a helmet penetration test for the round was changed from 300 yards to 500 - which means the round would need to be more powerful.

Stoner realized that 222 was already tapped out for pressure - you couldn't get any more power out of it - so he modified the cartridge to create "222 Remington Special" - a longer cartridge, with more volume (which allows for more power), which used his new bullet design.

By this time, CONARC wanted 10 of Armalite's rifles - now dubbed the AR-15, in caliber 222 Rem Spl. These rifles would be tested extensively, and would ultimately defeat the designs offered by Winchester and the Army itself.

The cartridge would be renamed 223 Remington to avoid confusion. It would pass the helmet penetration tests and lethality tests set out for it.

And no point during it's development or testing was there a requirement that it "wound" or not offer terminal performance.

So, equipped with the essential bits of the history, what can we take away?

First, there is zero evidence, at all, the 223 was designed to wound. It having been based on a varmint round is not proof of this-especially considering the deliberately made it *more* lethal than 222.

Second, we have clear evidence that its design was meant to be more lethal than 30 carbine - itself not a particularly powerful round, but certainly not something so anemic that any reasonable person would think it designed to wound or not to kill.

Finally, to the notion that 223 was designed to obliterate everything it touched - that's silly fearmongering. While 223 is certainly lethal, and is certainly capable of killing, it isn't unique in this regard. All rifle rounds are capable of this.

Hopefully you found this interesting, or at least not totally boring. There's more to this story, but it's just more of the same - plenty of proof the Army wanted it to be lethal, no proof they wanted it to not be.

Enjoy a rare Stoner fondling an AR10.

One last note - I've heard it said that "designed to wound" was invented by officers trying to scare draftees into understanding that just because you *think* you hit an enemy combatant, A) it doesn't mean you actually did and B) it doesn't mean the target is dead.

This explanation does at least make sense, as training soldiers almost always involves bending the truth so that they remember what they need to when it matters.

Perhaps too this story was told to draftees to keep them from losing faith in the lower recoil, lightweight rifles - tell them that it feels less powerful because that was done on purpose, with a fanciful story about wounded enemy combatants and supply chain drains, and they'll sleep easier than if they were worried about their toy-like gun.

At any rate, having its origin as a training band-aid seems to be most likely - but that doesn't mean that it's true, or that the underlying justification makes any sense - a dead fighter costs the enemy a fighter, a wounded one can still do a desk job, train more enemies, or recover to fight again.

Perhaps too, the nagging doubts about early reports of the 223's lethality - where it was described as blowing people apart, a feat which wasn't ever replicated - played a role in pervading the perception of people who had actually read the initial reports, giving the "designed to wound" myth an added shred of believability.

As far as the other argument - about 223 being a meat vaporizer - that's pretty much just antigunners and journalists doing what they do best (lie, make stuff up, spread misinformation). I've seen them cite the sections regarding the initial tests of 223 *from the Army report that concluded that the initial tests were grossly exaggerated* without any idea what they were actually citing to. Silly people.

The initial requirements are said to have been laid out in that cited letter -

LTR ATDEV-3 474/6, HQ, USCONARC, 21 Mar 57, sub: Study of Military Characteristics for a rifle of High Velocity and Small Caliber.

However, I've never seen an actual copy of it to say one way or the other.

@BasedBeagles The funny thing here is that Armalite largely won out thanks to their cartridge being the best, and that cartridge was far from fully thought out - a lot of the early trouble the AR-15/M16 had after adoption was due to poor understanding of the cartridge by ammo manufacturers.