CAR-15 FAMILY ①
CAR-15 FAMILY ①
Caliber: 5.56 × 45mm M193
The meaning of CAR-15 is confusing. In current popular usage, it is a generic name for many shortened carbine versions of the Colt AR-15 rifle, while technically it only refers to the CAR-15 weapon system developed by Colt in the 1960s.
The Colt CAR-15 was a coveted personal defense weapon among Army aircrews during the Vietnam War. There never seemed enough of the stubby little guns to go around. (Firearms News photo)
| Colt's own product catalog used the name CAR-15 very early, but most soldiers had never seen it. |
When Colt obtained the patent and technical data of Armalite's AR-15 in 1959, although there were still many controversies about the AR-15 in the US Army at that time, Colt had already begun to develop a gun family around the initial weapon prototype and named it " CAR-15 5.56mm Military Weapons System", where "C" is the abbreviation of Colt . They felt that if the rifle model was adopted, other models in the gun family would also be purchased to a certain extent, which would increase their sales. So Colt developed two rifles, two heavy barrel assault rifles, a carbine, a submachine gun, and a life-saving rifle under the name of CAR -15 .
Before the concept of the CAR-15 family was developed, Colt had already produced two rifle models for the US military, one was the 603 with an auxiliary push handle, and the other was the 604 without an auxiliary push handle. Colt incorporated these two rifles into the CAR-15 family system. In February 1964, the US Air Force began to name the 604 as the M16, while the US Army named the 603 as the XM16E1, which later developed into the M16A1. In May of the same year , Colt showed their CAR-15 family to military leaders including General Wheeler.
The first to be adopted was the CAR-15 submachine gun, so the Rock Island Arsenal published the "Basic Operation and Maintenance Manual" (No. POMM 9-1005-294-14) for the " 5.56mm Caliber CAR-15 Submachine Gun" in September 1966. Since the manual only referred to the weapon as " CAR-15 " at the time, and most users had never heard of or seen other members of the CAR-15 gun family (although Colt had printed a promotional brochure for the CAR-15 military weapon a few years earlier, this book was for "potential customers" such as senior officials of the Ministry of Defense, and most soldiers had never seen it) , even the official name of the CAR-15 submachine gun, the Colt 607, was not known to many people. With the end of the 1960s, the concept of the CAR-15 family of rifles officially died out. Other members of the family were not adopted. When the first two rifles were named M16 and M16A1, they were no longer related to the CAR-15 family of rifles. Many people only knew the CAR-15 submachine gun and its subsequent models. Over time, " CAR-15 " slowly evolved into a general term for various shortened versions of the M16 series. Later, Colt used CAR-15 to refer to the civilian semi-automatic model of its products, which led to further confusion in the name.
For example, in the notes of Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, the CAR-15 rifle used by Delta Force is explained as "Colt's AR-15 ", and the CAR-15 used by Delta Force at that time was mainly RO727, which is an M16A2 carbine. Retired Delta Force member Larry Vickers also has such a description: "In the second half of 1988, when I reported to the Delta Force's Operations Personnel Course (OTC), I received a brand new Colt carbine. Although Colt's official name for it is the 723 carbine, we call this type of rifle CAR-15 for short ."
In fact, the same confusion in the name also occurs in the M16 series. Technically speaking, the real M16 can only be the model adopted by the US Air Force during the 1960s, but now M16 is often used to collectively refer to a series of rifles including the M16A1, M16A2 and the latest M16A4.
Note: The above parameter table is for models before 1965. For example, the grip of the CAR-15 submachine gun in the later models has been changed to the same length as the standard rifle.
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