In Part I and II of this Interview (SAR Vol. 11, No. 5 and 6), Jim Sullivan filled in the blanks on ArmaLite and the AR-15 project, the Stoner 63 project, dug deep on the Ichord Committee regarding M16 failures in Vietnam, covered the Ruger Mini 14 and M77, as well as his work on the 7.62mm Chaingun, the EPAM, Chiclet Guns, caseless ammo, Italy, Somalia, Gordon Ingram, the Beta C-Mag and the Ultimax 100. We now rejoin the Interview.

L. James Sullivan’s favorite quotes on preparedness: 1918 – Will Rogers on the US lack of preparedness for war: “If this war lasts any longer, we’ll have to buy another machine gun.”

SAR: You’ve freelanced on a lot of different projects, Jim. What did you work on in the late 1980s?

Jim Sullivan: Bill Ruger asked me over here in Arizona a couple times, back to look at a new project. He had bought a new Uzi designed submachine gun. Uzi Gal had gotten a company in Canada, the same company that makes the M16 up in Canada, Diemaco, I think it was, to try to put his new submachine gun design into production. Anyway, they tried to, and they had all the tooling, but it didn’t work very well. Ruger had bought the thing kind of “as is” and asked me to come over and take a look at it. I went over a couple times on that project. That was the MP9. A submachine gun to me is a big waste of time anyway.

SAR: Why’s that?

Jim Sullivan: Because almost everything you need a submachine gun for, something like an M4 Carbine will do better. The M4 has got its own problems, but it’s got three times the power and is far more accurate. So if you put a guy out there in a combat situation, you’ve got to make sure he’s better armed than with a submachine gun. Nine-millimeter isn’t too bad, but .45 ACP of course makes a very poor submachine gun round.

SAR: (Dan visibly twitches) OK… let’s get back to the M4.

Jim Sullivan:(Laughs) So you’re a .45 fan, huh? (Laughs again) The M4 is of course an M16, and they’ve changed the back end and the front end, and both of those changes, I mean they sound like minor changes, just a shorter barrel and buttstock, but every change means re-thinking it all. Remember, we designed this as a system. The front end, now they’ve moved the gas port further back so it’s closer to the chamber, and therefore it’s higher pressure. When the bullet passes the gas port, there’s higher pressure which that gas port has to endure, and frankly, it doesn’t survive it. Frequently guns that might work as they come out of the factory won’t work properly 1,000 rounds later. What happens is that it’s starting to, it’s like it starts trying to unlock early, and that’s a no-no, you just don’t want to do that. The M16 was always kind of marginal on this, and as the gas port erodes, it’s throwing more and more energy into the bolt, so the bolt cycles faster, that makes it try to unlock even earlier. You start getting cartridge cases that are stuck in the chamber because they haven’t had time to relax, and you get extraction problems again. That’s what’s happening because of the change in the front end. At the back end of the M4, remember, it’s an M16, but they’ve shortened the stock tube that the buffer goes back into, and they had to shorten the buffer so that the bolt has the same stroke length as the M16, and so they lost some of the weight and the potential to increase that weight. Now you’ve got less weight that you’re throwing to the rear, and you’re throwing it to the rear faster, and what they end up with was exactly the same extraction problems that they had solved in ’67. It was their solution; it was the buffer we talked about earlier. They’ve lost much of its effect.

SAR: You designed that system down from the AR-10 and worked that all out, so you have an intimate understanding of where the roots of this system are.

Jim Sullivan: Pretty much. I have a good idea of what’s being done wrong with it now. There are a few things they solved right: there was a certain amount of distance that we kept in front of the gas port, which was projectile travel time that translated into keeping the system pressurized, time under pressure for the gas system. In the Sixties they started cutting back the barrel to eleven and a half inch barrels, to ten-inch barrels, shortening that length in front of the gas port, and they had a lot of problems. I don’t know how the old M1 rifle ever got away with it. Well, I do know. That gas port is about an inch back from the muzzle. That just doesn’t work, unless you are very careful about testing every lot of ammunition for exactly the right gas port pressure, and they did for the M1. They accepted that. On the M16, and everybody else does this too, you move the gas port back as far as you can, so that you’ve got the time the bullet takes from the gas port to the muzzle as long as you can possibly give it, because that gives you continuity. Every shot operates the gas system the same. That’s very important in a gas-operated gun. On the M4 carbine like on the original rifle, it’s about 4.5 inches of travel. You need to maintain that distance when you make a carbine and they did that on the M4. If you cut the muzzle further back, you’ve got to move that gas port further back or the gun won’t cycle reliably. It’ll be different cycles for each shot.

SAR: Thus the M4 carbine has the long barrel distance in front of the front sight.

Jim Sullivan: It does, yeah. But now the gas port is closer to the chamber, and the pressure is higher. It just sends that bolt flying backwards. Well, okay, one immediate control of that is you make a smaller gas port and that does solve that problem until the erosion of firing rounds off the corners of the gas port where it meets the bore of the barrel. The gas just flows faster and faster and faster, and the gun speeds up. We didn’t dare let it happen in the M16, and an M4 is worse. The M4 inherited all of the M16 extraction problems and made them worse. The M4 is a very unreliable gun. The extraction problems are related to the pressure problems that we’re talking about. We did experimentation to find out what the pressure curves were in the gas system.

SAR: There was always the “gun lore” that the gas pressure goes up on a certain timeline, and then after the bullet exits the bore pressure comes down on a similar timeline. Bob Irwin told me stories about his tests where the pressure dropped immediately on the bullet exiting the bore, that event actually evacuating the gas system.

Jim Sullivan: That’s right. It doesn’t evacuate it by having a vacuum. It’s just the pressure that’s still in the gas system just blows it out once the pressure has gone out of the barrel. It drops very quickly, almost instantly. The idea of a slow lowering of pressure is part of a misunderstanding a lot of people have on how much time under pressure that system has. For consistency, you want the maximum amount of time, but it’s the amount of time that you can get out of bullet travel, which is so tiny that you need all the length you can get. The time that it takes for the cartridge case to relax is not that closely related to the pressure in there. The pressure is completely gone, maybe not completely, that takes almost forever on the timeline we are viewing. It’s down to just a couple hundred psi or so for a long time afterwards and that doesn’t hurt anything. That isn’t what makes the cartridge case tight in the chamber. All cartridges seize in the chamber, and then relax. That’s why cartridge brass is a magic material… It’s called objuration. A brass case in objuration doesn’t just move out and seal the chamber, it has to move back in and unseal before it can be extracted reliably. That’s what cartridge brass does that nothing else does as well. It takes time, and if you’ve been firing a long burst like in a machine gun, the hotter that chamber gets, the longer it takes for that cartridge to relax, because it’s gaining heat, and it doesn’t shrink back as fast.

SAR: Which makes for a resistance to extracting.

Jim Sullivan: Correct. The case seizes in the chamber when you’re trying to extract it and the extractor either slips off or tears the case, and that’s what caused the main failures in the M16 in the Vietnam War. Again, as we have discussed, it wasn’t really the fault of the gun, it was the fault of the ammunition change, the powder change. The gun was too close to being “wrong”, but it worked fine with the ammunition that we designed for it. Remember, we designed the ammunition too, not just the gun, we designed them together. Most weapons systems are designed that way.

SAR: What you’re hearing back from people using the M4 in combat today, it sounds like the same basic problem…

Jim Sullivan: Yeah. No question. It’s not exactly the same because the M16, without gas port erosion, ran into a problem with the powder change that the army imposed on the system. They didn’t check with Colt, the manufacturer, they didn’t check with the army, no one asked the designers and manufacturers, “Do you like this?” Procurement people just decided to change the powder. Colt found out in the newspaper. I think it was a quality control guy, an inspector that worked for Colt, and he read it in the newspaper. They didn’t even know that the army had changed powder. The army really didn’t even know it. In a way there’s two parts to the army. There’s the guys that do the fighting and the guys that sit in offices and they seem to screw up everything.

SAR: Come on, Jim, there are lots of good people working in support and procurement. SAR has focused on a lot of the programs in the past. Interesting stuff.

Jim Sullivan: Well, that may be true, but there are certainly a lot of roadblockers in there keeping the weapons from being what they should be. Half the time it’s the same guy, just different parts of his life, I guess. I don’t know what happens to them, going from combat to where they lose the big picture. It’s worse in a big army, I’m sure, I don’t know much about the small ones.

SAR: What do we need to do to fix our weapon systems today?

Jim Sullivan: To fix small arms, you have to take it out of the hands of Army Materiel Command. Their record on small arms development is criminal. They are the epitome of, the perfect example of what President Eisenhower warned everybody about, “Beware the military-industrial complex.” Army Materiel Command’s handling of small arms in the last 50 years has just been horrible. It’s wiped out the infrastructure of what had been the best small arms producing country in the world. It wiped out the US small arms industry, there was nothing like it anywhere else, the US small arms industry was magnificent. We’re the only major industrial country that has to buy most of our pistols, rifles and machine guns from foreign sources. We’ve become dependent on it. We can’t control ground wars anymore. We couldn’t control the second half of the Vietnam War, we couldn’t control Mogadishu, which was just a microcosm war, but nonetheless it had the same problems. It was an infantry war. We’ve become this arrogant superpower who thinks that we’re invulnerable because we’ve got the best ships, planes and tanks in the world, and I don’t doubt that. But, we’re not fighting naval, air and tank battles. We’re fighting riflemen, and we’re fighting riflemen that have got AK-74s, the latest AKs. Those weapons have been out-hitting the M16 by two-to-one for 20 years. There’s 100 million AKs in various shapes and sizes that have been given to our enemies, and that was for the specific purpose that the United States can’t win a ground war anymore. That was to ensure it. Russia didn’t participate in making 100 million AKs because they have a big army. The biggest army there was probably 12 million. They participated in making 100 million to give to our Third World enemies to stop us from winning ground wars. Russia looked the other way at the other countries that were making the Kalashnikovs, reverse-engineering them. They didn’t come out and say, “Stop making our design,” and today they are looking to stop this, and get royalties on the design. Just a bit late. It was all about flooding the world with AKs and stopping the US’s programs. The Russian design in this had a lot to do with compromising the American military on the ground by arming up all the small conflicts in the world.

SAR: How about the Kalashnikov itself?

Jim Sullivan: It’s an excellent weapon. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot more rugged than the M16. The M16 was always a fussy weapon. But the AK lacks some refinements. For instance, there’s no last round stop or hold open device on the basic Kalashnikov. You can mechanically lock the bolt open, but it doesn’t just lock open automatically. In combat, that saves a couple seconds of reload time. The man armed with an M16 has a firepower advantage over the man armed with the Kalashnikov. The Kalashnikov’s original cartridge stunk. It lost energy almost as fast as shotgun slugs. It was very inaccurate on semiautomatic because there was very little cylindrical portion of the bullet, it tilted and if you looked at them, depending on who they were made by, the bullets weren’t even pointed on the axis of the cartridge, they were tilted from the manufacturing process and came that way to the field. Their accuracy was very poor. The controllability was pretty good. The M16 wasn’t bad for its light weight, but the M-16 design pretty much stood still, and the AK-47 went from the AK-47 to the AKM, which was a change in material in making it. It went from a machined out receiver to a sheet metal receiver. That was the AKM. (Fact check) Then it went to the AK-74, which was their 5.45x39mm cartridge. Where it is now, the M16 is hopelessly outmatched against that one.

SAR: What country’s got the best small arms development right now?

Jim Sullivan: It used to be FN in Belgium. Now, I would say it’s probably H&K in Germany. They put an awful lot of money into R&D, and they got some pretty good stuff, but it’s based on 50-year-old technology. Just look at the G36. You make a gun out of a different material, now it’s different? The core of that gun is very much the M16/Stoner63/AR18 family. That doesn’t do anything new to the enemy.

SAR: What about the Chinese? They have a lot of neat stuff in their secret squirrel arsenal don’t they?

Jim Sullivan: I don’t see much there, really. Same principles we have been doing, dressed up differently. There are four important things that should have evolved in firearms. Up until 50 years ago, when the Army Materiel Command got their hands on our innovation process, guns evolved all over the world. Every year there were minor improvements, and maybe you’d go for 10 or 15 years before there’d be any major sea change. But 50 years ago, it just stopped dead. Even up until then, there were only two real innovative countries in small arms; most designs were either American or German. It was either Peter Paul Mauser and his contemporaries or John Browning and Hiram Maxim. Almost all of the stuff came from that group. John Garand had the first truly successful semiautomatic rifle. There’d been a lot of them tried out. Actually, it’s not really true to say that everything came from America or Germany. England, France, Belgium, and others…there’s places that would surprise you. Mexico had some brilliant work done – the Mondragon and that was 1908. Sweden, Nepal, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and don’t forget the Brits did a lot of interesting things. The Sten gun was not only the cheapest, but one of the best submachine guns ever made. However, the SMLE that was their longest production gun, it was designed by an American, I don’t know if he did it here or not. James Paris Lee was an American. He was born in Scotland, but he was American at the age of two. (Fact check)

SAR: I wasn’t aware of that. That’s going to get our British readers upset if they didn’t know. I mean, an American is one thing, but he was also a Scotsman!

Jim Sullivan: Well, their Bren gun, which is a masterpiece, started out in Czechoslovakia at BRNO as the ZB26.

SAR: You like the Bren?

Jim Sullivan: Oh yeah, it’s a beautiful thing, one hell of a good weapon. They did that right.

SAR: What’s your favorite machine gun?

Jim Sullivan: The Maxim, history-wise. Of course nothing ever equaled it. The technology too. It’s brilliant work in there that Maxim did. For instance, the water jacket. If you tilt it, I mean after 1,000 rounds it begins to steam off water. Well, if you tilt it down, you don’t want that steam driving the water that’s left out. If you tilt it up, you don’t want it driving it out this way. So what he did, he had a sliding valve in there, and when you tilt it up, the steam escapes at this end. When you tilt it down, the steam escapes at this end. If you look at the taper of the barrel, that’s the taper of the water jacket. He checked things out. This seems impossible, but he checked out how much water offset how much damage do you do to a steel barrel in firing. He said that to turn five pounds of water into steam takes the same number of BTUs, or takes more BTUs than to melt five pounds of steel. I looked it up in the machinery handbook. It does. They don’t put it that way. Since there were no war records on how to use machine guns effectively, Maxim said you want to fire continuously. He had stuff on there so the gunner could just turn the gun on, and it just stayed as long as you had this firing mechanism locked. The caissons held 3,000 rounds and the right number of jerry cans to this 3,000 rounds based on the fact that you would fire a 3,000 round burst.

SAR: What’s your favorite rifle?

Jim Sullivan: The M1 Garand, history-wise. Technology wise? It’s a toss-up between the M16 and the Kalashnikov. For handguns, personally, I like a revolver, but I don’t have to fight a war with it. If you’re facing an infantry squad, a revolver’s good, if you’re just going to die. [laughs] I think technology-wise, it’s still the old .45. I don’t think anybody’s made a better one. His FN HP was probably better.

SAR: When you look around at small arms today and people doing designs, what catches your eye?

Jim Sullivan: I don’t think they’re doing anything. I think once the main competitor, the United States, went out of business, everybody quit working as hard over at FN. They haven’t come up with anything really new. The FN-FAL, that’s all 50 years old, the MAG 58, their predecessor to the M240 series, that’s 50 years old. The M16 is 50 years old. The AK47 is too. Most of the systems that dominate the battlefield today are 50-year-old technology if not more. Ma Deuce (M2HB) is out there, and that’s 80 years old, from John Browning. The DShK is 50 years old, the PKM, 40. There’s an evolutionary change in firearms every 40 or 50 years, usually, you’d think we’re about due.

SAR: Let’s get back to the four things you were saying that should have been the focus of designers…

Jim Sullivan: I’ve got four things I’ve been working on that I think are the next steps, and I have been working on them for years. One is constant recoil, improving it. As I mentioned earlier, there was a one hundred to one advantage, but the most I’ve ever been able to get out of it is about eight to one. I’ve got some systems I’ve worked out that’s a lot higher now. Another problem with it was the long stroke needed that if you tried to scale it up to 7.62, it wouldn’t fit in a comfortable gun package anymore. I’ve got it now where I can do an 11-pound 7.62 light machine gun that is far shorter than the M240 and knocks 15 pounds off the package. That’s the equivalent of 330 rounds of 7.62 ammo. The soldier can carry twice as much ammo as his opponent.

For the second major innovation, remember, belt fed guns are damn near impossible for a walking man to reload. He’s got to set it down. He’s got to make sure that that last link is either out of the gun, or the bolt is forward when he lifts the feed cover or the link drops down in, and the only way he can get it out is to turn the gun upside-down and shake it. We timed a walking man firing and reloading his M249. It took 17 seconds from the time the guy fired his last round until he fires his next round. Anybody walking with 30-shot magazines on an M16 can fire more rounds than that. The Ultimax, the concept of the expendable 100-shot drum magazine you only use once, come fully loaded. The operator tears open the paper bag and snaps the thing into the gun. I wanted to be able to do that just as fast, only have it belt-fed. All magazines have to be expendable, because they are anyway. One of the problems with the BAR showed up in Korea. After these gun battles, they realized that they had to go out and crawl around out in no-man’s land trying to find BAR magazines. They tried to court-martial men for not pocketing empty magazines in the middle of a firefight. That would be suicidal! What the army finally had to do was issue fresh empty magazines with every issue of ammunition for the guys to load them.

SAR: You see part of the fundamental changes needed being a pre-packaged magazine, ready to go?

Jim Sullivan: Yes. That means you’ve got to do the math again, you’ve got to make sure the springs can’t set too long.

I’ve got a belt-fed rifle in the works and it’s got a precise quick change barrel. That’s the third part of the technology that needed to be developed, so that you can use it accurately as a carbine, a rifle and also as a real light machine gun. What I have is a split feed where the driving half is part of the gun, and the holding half is part of the expendable drum magazine. Snapping it into place completes the feed. So all these things come from a factory already loaded, and the soldier never handles or even sees the belt. This gets rid of six of the eight reloading tasks, and a walking man can reload his belt-fed weapon with 100-shot magazines as fast as changing a 30-shot rifle magazine. In fact, if we want to go the extra design distance, it’ll eject it, and the guy can continue to pull the trigger, and he just keeps slamming magazines in the gun. We can do all of that: I’ve done it.

Fourth, you’ve got to be able to fire that weapon from the closed bolt as a rifle, and the open bolt when you select a full auto. That’s a very necessary part of controllable full auto, and it also reduces cook-offs. Semi-auto fire needs closed bolt operation for accuracy, and quick change barrels are necessary for the machine gun. You’ve got to have the barrel change, but in order to make this work properly; you’ve got to have a precise barrel change. If you take that barrel off of that gun and put it back on, it’s got to remain in zero. It’ll take a couple more design tries, but this weapon that I showed you the drawings of, it’s got a precise quick barrel change, and I know that you can get it working because of that one I designed over in Italy.

There’s too many things wrong with the weapons systems out there, and all of them are fixable. When your people can go out into the field and they carry twice the ammo of the other guy, it makes a difference. And when you can out-hit him at three times the range, it makes a difference. All of these things are where the technology should be, but we don’t have it nailed. The technology I’m talking about has been done, projects I have worked on, but they need to be moved ahead.

SAR: What about changing the actual form of what we do? For 150 years we’ve been basically taking a metallic sheath with powder in it and driving a projectile down a rifled bore. We might do it faster, more accurately, fully auto, whatever, but it’s still basically the same cartridge idea. Do you see anything changing in that part of the system?

Jim Sullivan: Certainly, by getting into light-weight cartridges. I don’t mean using aluminum. Everybody thinks that’s what light-weight cartridges has to mean and it isn’t. Aluminum’s light, yeah, but it age hardens and cracks in this use, and can’t properly hold a primer pocket.

SAR: Maybe they need Sulliloy.

Jim Sullivan: (Laughs) Right. I didn’t think of that. The US Air Force in World War Two had a bunch of .50 cal. aluminum cartridge cases made. There’s a hell of a lot of weight that they’ve got to fly with. It kind of worked, but the report that was written up on it, on the problems with it, got lost. When Korea came along, and these jets were really fighting at short range, so they had to be as light as possible. They had found a big lot of this .50 caliber ammo, and they tried using it. It age-hardened, and it just ate up the bolt faces on their Browning Machine Guns.

SAR: Where do you think light-weight ammunition will go?

Jim Sullivan: I have a concept, and it’ll take a lot of development work to flesh it out, but I’m pretty sure I’m right and I’m pretty sure that real light-weight ammunition can be done. With the belt-fed rifle we discussed here, you wouldn’t be stuck with 100-shot magazines anymore if we developed this light-weight ammunition. This would be in 7.62 and you can use a 600-round backpack with a flexible chute that goes around to the belt-fed rifle. I know there have been some attempts at this, but with this technology it would work. In an assault, that soldier can fire a one-minute burst, 600 rounds, and have more 100 round packs ready to go.

SAR: Jim, for the last 50 years you’ve been at the cutting edge of arms technology in the United States and a number of other countries.

Jim Sullivan: Yes. My partner Bob Waterfield and I, who I’ve invited in again on this new design, we have been very busy. While the rest of the small arms development world has just been dying out, he and I were the ones that were doing the radical changes. How do you make full auto weapons controllable, and how do you make a precise barrel change, and how do you make an open bolt, closed bolt trigger mechanism? We’ve done all that. How do you get rid of barrel heat? These are things that other people consider to be impossible. Common knowledge seems to be that it’s impossible to reduce recoil; that’s in violation of the laws of physics, the third law of motion.

SAR: The secret’s to try to comply with those laws while designing around them.

Jim Sullivan: Precisely. We figured out what it really meant. When the Law says equal and opposite, what does that mean, equal to what? Equal results in every way every time? Obviously, the soldier doesn’t kill himself when he shoots somebody else, so that isn’t equal, is it? We’re not talking anything other than the physics. We figured out what equal meant in these firearms: it’s equal impulse, and impulse is force times time.

SAR: Where are you looking to go with this technology?

Jim Sullivan: I formed a company called Arm West LLC. Right now we’re talking to Ruger, and it’s too bad Bill Sr. isn’t still around. We have spoken to a number of companies, but frequently the modern arms companies are run by people who are more concerned with how to work with stock valuations as opposed to making better weapon systems. There’s a company called GG Green that’s innovative and they make all kinds of things, including links. They’ve got some open ideas there. We’re doing design work where at least one or more service has requested change, where they’re on record saying, “We want a lightweight family of weapons and ammunition.” That’s a matter of record, where they can’t say “We don’t need it anymore.” Army Materiel Command has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on projects that they say will accomplish this, and failed. We’re in a position now where we don’t have to go through them to get the designs out. There’s the Marine Corps requirement for an automatic rifle, and a design group can go directly to the Marines and say, “Here it is, it meets all your requirements and then some.”

At least in this position, with everything we’re doing, we have the opportunity to not be caught in the same trap full of roadblocks, there are now other options.

How do you make a fully automatic pistol, a personal defense weapon? If you read Small Arms of the World, or if you read Janes Infantry Weapons, they say it’s impossible, it can’t be done. Well, it hasn’t been done yet, and it always looks like the reason is that an equal and opposite reaction is an insurmountable roadblock. Everyone’s convinced it can’t be done. In fact, the Army Infantry School went into that theme and said that it’s impossible, so therefore gun design has come as far as it can go so you have to move into explosive projectiles. That was the premise for coming up with the requirements for the OICW. They said you can’t get direct hits, it’s too difficult, and so the projectiles must explode. How much do they spend on that?

SAR:They spent a lot of money on it, and the immediate offspring was that the kinetic energy module, the breakaway carbine underneath it, became the XM8. That went away for what appeared to be political reasons. Might be coming back now, though. So you’re looking to put together a group and take another shot at some of the better small arms solutions that you have. Correct?

Jim Sullivan: Exactly. I’m getting to be pretty old, so the program, if it gets funded, will outlive me. But Bob Waterfield’s 16 years younger, and we’ve got a third guy lined up that’s ten years younger than him.

SAR: Any advice for younger designers?

Jim Sullivan: I hope they get into it. One of the biggest problems when there’s been a 50-year vacuum in small arms design is that most of the old innovators have died off. The development of small arms is a specialty. There isn’t a college to go through for this. You’ve got to learn the opportunities and the limitations of the technology you’re dealing with, because if you don’t know the limitations, you can go off on these caseless ammo scenarios. If you don’t see the opportunities, you don’t know what can be done. The only way you can do that is to just gain experience. Unfortunately, there’s no place for them to do that here with the laws the way they are, impeding small arms design, and the lack of an educational system on firearms design. I’m not sure how to advise them, how to get that experience, how to start. It’s almost like you’ve got to do what we did and move to Singapore. Now, with the Arms Export Control Act rules, you can’t do that legally. You could go overseas and design for yourself, and then bring it home, but you can’t go and design for somebody overseas. How can you finance research under these conditions?

SAR: I’m of the opinion that if people want to be involved with firearms design, military firearms in general, they need to be around where the working reference collections are. They need to go to the museums; they need to go shoot a lot of ammo. They need to take weapons out and take them apart. They need to go to Knob Creek and put a pile of rounds through a gun and see what makes it jam.

Jim Sullivan: Yeah. It’s not simply an intellectual exercise, you’ve got to get out there and study and shoot.

SAR: Mentors – you’re talking about new designers talking to the previous generation of designers and getting that knowledge, and that there’s been almost a stopping in the passing on of that knowledge. That’s a big part of Small Arms Review.

Jim Sullivan: That definitely is true. If we can get this thing started with our tiny little nothing company, it can rebuild the whole industry because we’re talking about a new level, and making every pistol, carbine, rifle and machine gun that’ll be used in the next 50 years, and we’re talking only two generations of the pistol, but three generations of this main rifle/machine gun system. There’s all kinds of work that needs to be done and it goes all through weapons design. As an example, the mechanized infantry vehicle, it is supposed to carry the guys protected by armor into the enemy territory, and they could do their fighting without leaving the protection of that armor. Well, they got all done with the vehicle, and then they realized that you can’t shoot a weapon inside an enclosed room. All modern infantry rifles side eject. Now, you’ve got to make these guns forward eject out of a tube next to the barrel. They spent billions on these vehicles, and then they found out that simple truth. Like the Russian Nikonov AN-94 does, like their NSV machine gun, but it really means a radical change in the weapon system, changing to forward eject. You’ve got to set out in the beginning to design the locking system so it cooperates with that. We’ve got soldiers over there in Iraq who are walking around out in the open and getting picked off. Half the time, those soldiers, of course they’ve got to dismount if they’re going to go in a building, but they shouldn’t be walking out in the open like that. They should be armor-protected against small arms fire. There has been a lot of that done already, but if you’ve got a fleet of mechanized infantry vehicles, they can control the road. Nobody can ever plant an IED and dig a hole and put an IED in the road if you’ve got something like that patrolling the roads night and day. It gets down to the limitation being in the small arms technology. You have to eject forward, and then you get into the ammunition. You can make everything come in expendable magazines that the gun spits out when empty. The soldier doesn’t handle anything, he just slams fresh magazines up into a funnel, so he can hardly miss it even though he is stressed, and he just resumes fire.

SAR: When you look at a small arms design, you look for what? Simplicity?

Jim Sullivan: Simplicity’s a part of it, but it really goes to the four things I said before: Rugged, Simple, Reliable, and Accurate. If you don’t have those, you don’t have anything good for combat.

SAR: Thanks again for talking with our readers.

Jim Sullivan: Glad to!

In Part I of this interview (SAR Vol. 11, No. 6, March 2008), Jim Sullivan fills in the blanks on Armalite and the AR-15 project, the Stoner 63 project, digs deep on the Ichord Committee regarding M16 failures in Vietnam, covers the Ruger Mini 14 and M77, as well as his work on the 7.62mm Chaingun, the EPAM, Chiclet Guns, and caseless ammunition. We now join the interview when Jim has moved to Singapore and is working through the Ultimax 100.

The following is Jim Sullivan’s favorite quote on preparedness regarding a 1917 exchange between Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson: “If this country goes to war, our boys will immediately leap to arms.” Teddy Roosevelt: “Whose arms, their mothers’? We don’t have any guns!”

SAR: So, Jim, what inspired moving to Singapore?

Jim Sullivan: Again, it was Armalite. They had been over there trying to sell the AR-18, and the problems between Singapore and Colt on the M16 manufacture also involved the State Department. It was a huge mess. The US State Department wasn’t going to let Singapore sell any M16s they made, claiming US technology was involved. Singapore had contracted with Colt to build a factory to build M16s for their military. They also thought they were going to be able to sell them in the region. Their understanding of the deal with Colt was that they would have that part of the world and they could sell M16s to anybody the State Department agreed to. Once Singapore made their 100,000 M16s for their army, they wanted permission from the US State Department to sell to Malaysia. I don’t know how they found this out, but this is what I am told happened: Colt pressured the State Department to tell Singapore no, because they had a man in KL (Kuala Lumpur) that was going to sell the M16s to them. Singapore’s the one that did all the demonstrations that got Malaysia ready to buy. They wouldn’t have contracted on the M16 if they had known they wouldn’t be able to sell them regionally.

SAR: That’s a deal we’ve all seen before.

Jim Sullivan: Remember, this was when the Munitions Control Act and the new Arms Export Control Act of 1976 (AECA) was coming into play. The ramifications weren’t known yet, so it was hard to tell how things would be viewed by the US State Department regarding US made defense articles, let alone the quagmire of design and US based technology exports. Singapore wanted another gun to make that they could sell, that the AECA didn’t forbid. Armalite was all ready to sell them or license the AR-18 to Singapore so Singapore could make it and sell to, no longer Malaysia – they missed that opportunity – it was the Philippines that was the next customer in line. But again, the US State Department said no way. I wasn’t on the AR-18; that had been Art Miller’s project. I was working nights there at Armalite, so Armalite knew me, Armalite knew CIS and the problems they were having, and so Armalite said to me, “What would you think about going over to Singapore?” They hadn’t talked to Singapore yet. They said they saw one way around this technology transfer issue. The AECA didn’t forbid it at the time, although it does now, an American could go anywhere he wants to and design guns there. They said, “What would you think about going over there and designing a gun?” I jumped on that. They set up a meeting, and they talked to the Singapore people and we all agreed I would go. What they wanted was an assault rifle. I don’t know why they were doing both at the same time, they had bought the Sterling assault rifle, which was really an AR-18 knockoff.

SAR: So, it’s 1978, and you saddled up and headed to Singapore to design a new “Assault Rifle.”

Jim Sullivan: Correct. I took my whole family – wife and kids. It was supposed to be a two year project, but it ended up to be three years. I loved it, it’s a great place. It was a bit hard to get along with the people there at first. We did travel around Southeast Asia a lot. We’d take the train up to KL maybe three times a year. That is the most beautiful train ride around. Only problem was that at that time, people used to not want to go in first-class because the Communists that were in the jungle would shoot at the first-class coaches when the train crossed their areas. Some people, when they’d come to the bad areas along the track, would move back into the cheap seats, with the chickens and goats. Once they passed the Communist Guerilla areas, they’d move back up front. Singapore to KL up to Bangkok: all the way along there. That whole west coast of Malaysia is great. Penang is simply beautiful. Our son went over there first, but he couldn’t get a job, so he went back to the States. Our daughter went to high school there and graduated in Singapore. She just loved it. Every year at The American Singapore School, they’d go off on trips, and she ended up going to about 30 different countries when she was in high school.

SAR: Great way to grow up and learn the world. In those three years, your project was originally to just make something along the lines of an AR?

Jim Sullivan: Yes, an “assault rifle” was what they had said. They weren’t real specific, and I had a bunch of ideas I wanted to try out. One of them was how to make a controllable full automatic gun. If you can’t hit anything in full auto, the gun is worthless. It goes to my guideline rules of Rugged, Simple, Reliable, and Accurate. If the accurate part is missing, the rest of them don’t count.

SAR: I like that motto, it goes to the heart of things. How were the people to work with?

Jim Sullivan: I liked the people very much, but I didn’t like what they call “filial piety.” Your boss is god-like and Americans don’t accept that very well. I was kind of in the same position that Bob Fremont had been. I had argued with the Chairman of the Board and he was an officer in the government. He made a suggestion that I didn’t think would work and I argued with him about it. Everybody froze up solid, but I wasn’t going to give up on it. I was expected to stop talking because he was upset.

SAR: That’s not really an American trait.

Jim Sullivan: (Laughs) You got that right. Anyway, he ended up beating his hands together, and he couldn’t even talk he was so upset. (Laughs again) Two guys helped him out of the room. They said, “Don’t anybody leave,” and we just sat there absolutely silent, nobody could talk, and pretty soon they came in and said, “Okay, you can leave now.” Last I heard of that!

You know, they had good machinery, but the machinists were basically uneducated types that are just naturally gifted people. They did good work because they had this innate understanding of mechanisms and mechanics. I got along real good with them. Funny, because they didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Mandarin. It was a difficult environment in some ways. I had designed this thing, and it was obvious how it was supposed to work, and the machinist was making the two or three parts that had to go together. The other engineer who kind of acted as the interpreter went out because of a fuss going on out in the machine shop. He came back in and the machinist was hanging his head, following along. These two parts didn’t fit together and they were ashamed. I said, “Oh, well, he gets 20 lashes.” (Laughs) They kind of brightened up because I was kidding, and pretty soon they went back and came back in again with the drawing, and they were both kind of smirking, and here it was because of my mistake on the drawing. I said, “Okay, now you only get 10 lashes.” They all laughed, and that story went all through the plant. It became real easy to work with everybody over there, there was no tension at all like there had been at first.

SAR: Let’s recap this. You had ideas, and you’d seen and designed different systems and studied all around. At this point you had 25 years of small arms design, and now you’ve got a country and a company that wants a rifle, and they’re not really quite sure where they’re going with it, and you’ve got full access to the machine shops and design. The end result is one of the most controllable machine guns ever made, the Ultimax 100.

Jim Sullivan: Yeah, it was great! I started in on making a machine gun that in fully automatic fire would be accurate. I had lots of ideas, plus some things I had seen elsewhere – you know Hugo Schmeisser’s work, I had seen the guns. In fact, they had some at Armalite, but I hadn’t paid much attention to the STG, although I recognized some kindred ideas. The Ultimax idea came from over there. It wasn’t until I was working on this thing as an assault rifle that it all clicked. One of the things about 5.56 being a small cartridge with low impulse is that you don’t need excessive length in the gun. I had already recognized that as a blowback submachine gun, the MP-18 in World War I was designed to get controllable full auto, but that was a blowback gun, and I got to thinking about that principle. How could you do it in a gas-operated gun? You can’t use blowback, of course, with a high-pressure cartridge like a rifle cartridge. The case walls seize in the chamber and it’ll just blow the back end right off the case. The pressure needs to come down enough so that you can get extraction. Pistol bullets that are used in a submachine gun are low pressure so no problem, but that higher pressure was a huge stumbling block. We had solved this in several weapons before, but not to my satisfaction for a controllable weapon. They gave me several guys to assist me, and I invited Bob Waterfield over there too. He came over a couple of months after I had started, and I’m glad he did. Bob did almost all the work on the 100-shot round magazine, and I concentrated on the gun, but there’s a lot of overlapping on that type of thing. He did an excellent job. Think of the requirements we faced. First, I had to design a gun that would fit the equipment they had at the factory; that they could build with what they had. The reason that factory could make the M16 is because Colt had come over there and gave them all the production equipment, tooling and everything else, a turnkey line. Now, I had to design a gun that could be built on what the factory had, or could use. The skills necessary to manufacture something are different from the skills needed to design something. My specialty is the product, not the production end of it and I now had to engineer for manufacturing capability, not what might have been my best choices.

SAR: Adding another dimension to the design phase. Any examples?

Jim Sullivan: I used sheet metal that was simple to form – not drawn, complex shapes. These were very simple shapes requiring very simple machining. And to also make use of some of the Colt machines and processes because by then they were familiar with them, so that they were similar type. Other than the magazine, there are no dimensions that are the same on the two guns. But some of the machining that’s done on the bolt and bolt carrier is similar in principle, so they could set up and do it.

SAR: Did you have any problems with the system you designed?

Jim Sullivan: There are always problems. I made a first prototype. Talk about a plumber’s delight. Except for the barrel coming out of this junk pile, you wouldn’t know it was a gun. (Laughs) I tackled that thing very early on and got the controllability I wanted but not the looks. Then I made the gun fire full auto only, and from the open bolt, and tried to interest them in working backwards towards the assault rifle idea. I was going for an open bolt, closed bolt trigger mechanism. You really can’t get accurate semiautomatic fire from an open bolt mechanism. You get too much lurch in the gun before it fires, throwing your aim off.

SAR: So you went off on a tangent to the goal of an assault rifle. Were they supportive of that?

Jim Sullivan: Yeah. What I was doing there for the first year, and what they were doing was in parallel, and they would only end up with one of these guns. What I suggested to them is why don’t we break off and go in this direction, and come back to the assault rifle? They liked that idea because they saw that of these two programs, one of them would just die a natural death. I knew that would happen too, and I didn’t want it to, because I really had something with that controllable full auto.

SAR:What’s the heart of the system?

Jim Sullivan: Everyone thinks they know the reason a gun kicks. A bullet goes this way…

SAR: …and Mr. Newton tells us that there will be an equal and opposite reaction….

Jim Sullivan: …and it’s true you can’t violate that principle, Dan, but recoil is a measure of force times time. Let’s take a simple bolt action rifle: The force of recoil is the same force that’s driving the bullet, and it’s for the same amount of time that it takes to drive that bullet. In other words, whatever amount of time it takes to accelerate that bullet from the back of the barrel to the front, and out through the front of the barrel, that amount of time is what that same force is pushing rearward against the gun and against the guy’s shoulder. Okay, of course it kicks, but here’s the thing: that time is very short, so the force is very high. Recoil is a function of force times time. In a machine gun, let’s say it’s firing 600 shots a minute, that’s ten shots a second or one shot every one-tenth of a second. You have one-tenth of a second to deliver that force. If you’re delivering it in the one-thousandth of a second that a bolt action rifle does, you’re screwed. But if you can find a way to stretch it out, instead of a thousandth of a second, stretch that time out to a tenth of a second, that’s 100 times longer. That means the force is one one-hundredth, and it’s the force that moves you, not the time. It not only means that you can reduce that force to one one-hundredth; that’s a hell of a reduction in force. It also means it becomes a constant force, because you time it so that it fires this shot and stretches all the recoil out until exactly the time it fires the next shot. So the force is not only a very small force, it is now constant. It doesn’t hit you as a bunch of sharp impacts.

SAR: OK, Jim, the mass of the bolt is traveling rearward after it unlocks. It travels rearward on the spring, and that spring applies pressure against the rear of the stock and the platform, the shooter’s shoulder. That bolt mass never has a jarring impact to the rear because you’ve got such a long recoil spring designed into this. It runs out of energy, and the spring energy forces it into return. So the spring is always constantly pushing backwards against the platform, which is your shoulder.

Jim Sullivan: That’s right. You don’t have two things going on in there: it’s constant over the stroke. You can’t do it perfectly because of friction and a lot of other things. If you take an assault rifle of the same weight as the Ultimax, the Ultimax out-hits them about eight-to-one, on light machine guns it out-hits them three-to-one, but they’re heavier. It’s finding the harmonic of a machine gun, and balancing it with a constant recoil system.

SAR: So, what was the response from CIS to this?

Jim Sullivan: Excellent. We went to the range, and they were impressed. It’s a shame it never made it to the SAW trials in the US. The Ultimax kicked the M249’s ass in all of our trials! But, the politics involved kept it out.

SAR: It’s 1978 and you’re with your family in Singapore, and you’ve designed the constant recoil system in the Ultimax 100.

Jim Sullivan: Singapore was 1978 to 1981, and the Ultimax was what I did first. We got the proof of concept done and we took it to one of their army bases to shoot. They did the firing against their M16s as I think that was all they had to compare it with. Later on, they got a hold of some of the Minimis. This is before the US adopted the Minimi. After they fired the Ultimax they were sold on it, and that was very early in the program. Bob hadn’t finished the 100-round drum yet and we just used a standard M16 magazine. The prototype gun looked really crude but it was the first step. This was about the time that I found out that they had been running a parallel program to make the Sterling rifle, what became the SAR80 in Singapore. The US military had come out and I suggested that we go in this new direction, do this machine gun first, partly because the US military already had come out with the Squad Automatic Weapon requirement.

SAR: So you saw this as a possible SAW candidate?

Jim Sullivan: They were so angry over the State Department screwing them over on the export of the M16 projects that they refused to enter it in the SAW trials. This was too bad because it would’ve beat that M249. By then we actually had tested it against the new M249. There was no way to really compare it because the guys in Singapore couldn’t hold an M249 on target at all. One guy fired the thing. It was kind of a gravely berm and he was laying at an angle to the gun. He started shooting and it was so wild that he froze on the trigger. It swung him around and rolled him over. He was firing straight up in the air, and we’re all steppin’ and fetchin’ all around there. Luckily, he ran out of ammo. There was a lot of nervous laughter after that. They couldn’t hit anything with it. They wanted to get into production on the Ultimax immediately. There were actually 16 patentable items, and they patented it in 19 countries: separate patents. That’s the most patents I’ve ever had at one time, but patents run out after 17 years. At any given point the most patents I had active was 200, so I’ve gotten a lot of patents, on a lot of guns.

SAR: How many of the Ultimax 100 were made?

Jim Sullivan: I never got a full count, but about 10,000 for their army. One guy out of ten had the Ultimax 100. They’ve got a system like Switzerland does where everybody has to go in and serve. They have a fairly big army, 100,000 men or so. I looked on Wikipedia on the internet and they said they’re up to 80,000 Ultimax 100s made now, so they’ve sold a lot of them. A lot of the users are Central and South American countries.

SAR: I understand that the Mark IV Ultimax, with the quick changeable barrel, has some interest in the US military. Vince Dinero is involved in that project.

Jim Sullivan: Yes. Bob Waterfield and I went back to Quantico and put on a demonstration with the Ultimax. This was a different group of people from the ones who had tested it a year before that. There were four guns they had tested at 29 Palms. Ultimax was one, and they had a Colt Light Machine Gun, HK’s MG36, and the M249. Somebody had taken off the elevation slide on the Ultimax. On the Ultimax, when the aperture drops down without the slide, all you see is a pivot pin and you can’t get a sight picture at all. Still, on one of the tests, it beat the M249, and yet nobody could get a sight picture. Out of all the four guns, the Ultimax was chosen by almost all the Marines that tested it.

SAR: Are you familiar with the Israeli Negev?

Jim Sullivan: Yeah, I am, I’ve fired it. I was over at IMI one time, and they were going through their paces with that thing. A lot of similarity in the Negev system to the Ultimax but it’s not controllable like the Ultimax and it’s no better than the M249 in my opinion. They shortened the travel, and didn’t really get the constant recoil thing although people say the Negev does. It doesn’t.

SAR: In 1981 you left Singapore?

Jim Sullivan: From there I went to Italy. I had a program where I did an assault rifle for Beretta. They had the AR-70, then the AR-70/90 later on. There was one gun I was supposed to do, and there was another they were doing with SIG or somebody in Switzerland. That had fallen apart on them and whatever that program was they weren’t able to sell it to their own military. Beretta wanted a new gun to offer. Again, the Armalite people kind of lined that up because they knew the people over there at Beretta. I spent a year and a half there and did a prototype of that.

SAR: They never completed it? Italy has some new offerings now.

Jim Sullivan: All they did was a prototype. My agreement with them was a royalty agreement. They couldn’t make it without my permission, and we hadn’t reached the point where they had signed yet; assignment hadn’t been made. What went wrong was, right about the time I got done with it, their Air Force went and bought 17,000 of the gun they thought they were never going to be able to sell to their military. They didn’t need my project anymore. Mine was a controllable full automatic weapon, somewhat different in principle from the Ultimax, and it would have an open bolt, closed bolt trigger mechanism, to fire accurate semi-auto. It had a precise quick barrel change. You need the barrel change for hot barrels for the machine gun role, but that traditionally has ruined your accuracy, it makes for a loose, sloppy fit for barrel, for heat expansion, and ruins it as a rifle. But this system didn’t do that. It was accurate hot or cold, you could change barrels and it stayed put on accuracy.

SAR: At the end of that project you came back to the US?

Jim Sullivan: Yes. I met a US submachine gun designer named Gordon Ingram. I had actually known him for a while and one day he and his “angel” who had funded one of his programs ended up there at Beretta. We all went out to dinner together. This was right about the time things were falling apart on the Beretta project, and it looked like there was going to be no completion on this thing, and his angel asked me to do the C-Mag for him – it was part of my Italian project ideas. Actually, he feigned interest in the C-Mag. What he wanted me to do, though, and this ended up kind of as a fight between myself and Gordon, was to take Gordon’s program over, where in this guy’s mind, Gordon had kind of messed up. There were problems with the gun. That’s what the guy wanted me to do. Gordon had been working on something similar to the Mini 14 idea in 5.56, but it was based more on the M1 Carbine.

SAR: He didn’t have a drum magazine for this…

Jim Sullivan: No, it was an assault rifle. The gun I did for Beretta had a double drum magazine. It was the predecessor of the C-Mag. I took the innards out of my Italian design and that eventually became the C-Mag, but that was my design, my invention. It didn’t belong to Beretta yet, because they hadn’t completed the program because our agreement was they had to fund the whole thing before I made assignment. They hadn’t done that. So, I was with Gordon and his financial backer, and I mentioned this C-Mag – it wasn’t called that at the time – and he got all excited about it. He wanted me to leave Beretta, and that was fine with me because it was all coming apart. I still had to complete some stuff, so I said, “Okay, in two months we’ll get on this C-Mag.” Before the two months was up, it became clear that what he really wanted me to work on was Gordon Ingram’s program. Well, I wouldn’t do that. The thing that Gordon and I had the fight over was that this guy that was funding all of this, he was setting up in Somalia, in Mogadishu. I had gone down there, still thinking the interest was in my magazine, and it wasn’t. Gordon, when he found out I was going down there, he thought I was stabbing him in the back. I wasn’t, but he thought that.

SAR: Did you ever get that squared away with Gordon?

Jim Sullivan: Yeah, but it took a while. He never did quite trust me after that, which is too bad. Anyway, I did make the deal on the magazine with the guy. He was kind of an entrepreneur. It wasn’t his money, he had a group of investors lined up, and one of them was the ex-governor of Georgia, Carl Sanders. Sanders was the real investor in this thing, and then he and this entrepreneur had a falling out, and neither one of them owned enough of it, and they got Sylvia involved, otherwise it would have fallen apart.

SAR: What was your inspiration on the beta C-Mag?

Jim Sullivan: I designed it there in Italy for the purpose of the gun I was designing, and I used a double drum magazine because it makes a lot of sense. You’re familiar with the old German saddle drum magazine?

SAR: Of course. The 75-round saddle drum fit on the MG15 and the MG34 with a special top cover.

Jim Sullivan: I was going to do that basic design, only the one I did for Singapore, the two drums were right up tight against each other. I had to spread it out again when I made it a C-Mag; when I wanted to make something that would fit the M16. But the thing about it is the M16 was designed for a 20 or 30-shot magazine. We really designed for a 25-shot at the start. The bolt comes back, it barely over-travels, 3/16ths of an inch, and that’s enough time for the cartridge to get up there before the bolt is bounced back forward and starts chambering it. The C-Mag, you couldn’t make 100 rounds work, because 100 rounds moves slower than 30 rounds. In theory you can just make the spring three times stronger and get it to move as fast, but in reality you can’t. It’s like putting the brakes on and the gun couldn’t cycle. This was all in 1983.

SAR: Where did the physical work get done for the C-Mag?

Jim Sullivan: In the US. The original idea was to make this an expendable package of ammo that the soldier would use once and toss. The ammunition was going to be low temp ammo. On the technical side, barrel heat doesn’t really come from the powder gases; it comes from the friction of shoving a bullet through the barrel with the brakes on. A Spitzer bullet, a lead core bullet, remember that we think of lead as a solid, but lead is real weak, and it’s nothing more than hydraulic fluid when it gets heated. Imagine a bullet copper skin has been filled with hydraulic fluid, and now you hit it with 50,000 psi behind it, driving it through the barrel. That’s where barrel heat comes from – resistance. The reason I know that is from the ammunition that we did: Delta ammo. It’s a steel bullet with a plastic sabot, and the rifling twist is transferred from the sabot into the bullet by fingers that reach through grooves on the steel bullet. You can get 19 grains of powder to give you as much energy in 5.56 using that as 26 grains in standard ammo. The difference between 19 and 26 isn’t really the barrel heat. Sure, the powder’s got something to do with it, but a bullet only takes one millisecond going down the barrel. The powder hangs on for a little while longer. It’s venting out the barrel. It’s about one and a half milliseconds at 5,000 degrees, which is hot as hell, but that’s 5,000 degrees for only one and a half seconds on a long burst. That won’t heat that barrel up enough to boil water; the real heat is coming from friction.

SAR: One and a half seconds, you mean…

Jim Sullivan: Yeah, a thousand-shot burst is the equivalent of a 5,000 degree torch put on the barrel – 5,000 degrees for one and a half seconds. You can take 5,000 degrees and go very quickly like that over the back of your hand and it doesn’t do anything. That’s about a half a second that you’re exposing it to. At one and a half seconds, an M16 barrel, just to use a well-known weight, is 1.7 pounds. It will not heat 1.7 pounds up more than 30 degrees. It won’t even boil water. There are all kinds of things that should have been done by now in small arms development. You don’t need water-cooled barrels or seven-pound barrels on .30-caliber machine guns. You can get by with rifle barrels if you design the ammunition correctly. Nobody’s doing this kind of work.

SAR: Reducing the friction? What about the chamber heat?

Jim Sullivan: Most of that just comes back from the pressure, from the heat that builds up in front of it. The hottest part of the barrel isn’t the chamber area, it’s well forward of that. That’s one thing you can do to fix the systems. You can get rid of barrel heat, not entirely, but you can sure reduce it with ammunition design. Since the barrel’s the heaviest single part in a machine gun, if you can cut two and a half pounds out of a machine gun barrel and get rid of a quick barrel change, you’ve done something for a machine gun. Although I developed the magazine in America, I had invented the ammunition in Mogadishu, so we chose England to develop that in. You could still do that back then. Americans could still develop things overseas. Today you can’t legally help a foreigner in designing munitions. That’s the AECA. All this was before that law changed, and I went and developed that ammunition in England. The name of the company was Delta.

SAR: What happened with the C-Mag?

Jim Sullivan: The C-Mag became a success; just not so much in this country. Remember, the C-Mag is a different type of drum. The Ultimax drum moves pretty slow. The C-Mag has an accelerator in it so it’ll work on an M16 because you don’t have much time to get that top cartridge lifted up and presented. The way they work, it’s like two rings of ammunition moving together, and you can squeeze them together. They make their full circle and they get to the end of their circle, and then they get squeezed. As they squeeze together, this doubles the speed of the cartridge. It’s changing it from a double column to a single column. That doubles the speed and cuts the force in half. Now you can have twice the spring force and twice the speed of the cartridges at the top. If you took the Ultimax drum, it wouldn’t be near fast enough. It was fine for the Ultimax because I sailed way on past the back end of the magazine and gave it just lots of room, lots of time before it starts ramming the cartridge forward. You can have a sluggish drum magazine. Before the C-Mag the only way you could get something like this to work was you had to design a gun for a drum, you couldn’t just put a drum on there. Some of the other high capacity designs, well, they’re not that reliable because they use way too strong a spring force. Spring force equals drag on the bolt. That limits the reliability of the gun. It’s all about getting that cartridge out there just as fast as if you had a 30-round magazine. The C-Mag system does it.

SAR: How long did you work on that project?

Jim Sullivan: Six months, I guess. It didn’t take very long. That’s been pretty successful, but not in the US military market. The US, they don’t seem to even know what’s out there, and for another thing, they don’t test anything in the US unless they have a big budget for testing. That means they don’t like to test anything that they haven’t written a requirement for. That means they don’t write requirements for stuff that’s already there. I don’t know what’s gone wrong here. When I say “they,” I mean Army Materiel Command and it’ll be one of their agencies. I don’t think they’re opening the market up to enough tests other than just specifically the things that they are writing a requirement for and not testing what’s out there to see if it suits. The other thing is they like program longevity; I mean to the point of the extreme. They never want a program to end. I think the last thing they want is the successful conclusion of a project.

SAR: You’re defining “bureaucracy.”

Jim Sullivan: I know, and the contractors know that, and cooperate because they want it that way too. That’s why they love stuff like caseless ammo, even if somebody in there knows that they’ll never get to the finish line with that idea, they love those programs. You can always make small incremental improvements.

SAR: Still, there have been a lot of successes and advancements out of these programs…I mean, research has its place, but admittedly not as many fielded projects as there have been programs.

Jim Sullivan: (Jim gestures emphatically) That’s the whole point! Look, after C-Mag, I had made some money, and I went back to my office in Armalite and did a lot of proposal work and stuff. I did a lot of consulting. I went over to Royal Ordnance, Nottingham; just short-term stuff. Looked at the British SA-80 program. It was at the time they were shutting down RSAF and Enfield. They had already switched all the manufacturing to Nottingham. There wasn’t all that much to my involvement. They asked me to go over there and take a look at it, I did and I told them my views on the gun, and they got angry and that was the end of it. From what I saw, everything about it was wrong. For instance, they were using an M16 type bolt and not making it right. In manufacturing it, first you drill a hole for the firing pin. Once that hole is there, everything centers on that hole. You turn the outside, you cut the slots and everything else. They didn’t do that. They cut all the outside first, then tried to drill the hole for the firing pin in the center. It wasn’t “true.” Then they found out you can’t drill a hole that way, holes go off this way and that way and aren’t centered. To solve that, what they did was mess with the firing pin tip. The firing pin has a nice, respectable diameter for most of its length until the front. Instead of a tapered firing pin so that it’s good and strong, they just narrowed it down, and they had the thing about a half-inch long, and just a sixteenth inch in diameter. Another thing was the magazine well. It’s a sheet metal receiver, and the magazine well is sheet metal, but it has to be welded on. That’s fine. But the sheet metal stamping for the magazine well, they stamp the slot, the little hole, the slot for the magazine latch, they stamped it in there, and then they weld it on. I mean, sure, you save an operation because you can stamp the hole instead of machining it, but no two latch positions on any guns are precisely the same. Their magazines on some of the guns were jammed up and the bolt couldn’t move ’cause the magazines were stuck in there on some guns. On other guns it was too low, wasn’t feeding properly. They didn’t fix this stuff, it just went on and on like that. They’d hold plus or minus one-thousandth, completely unrealistic tolerances, which nobody could make the parts to. The firing on that trip when I went over there was still done at the only range they had, which was still at RSAF Enfield. One of the things you do to test is you load up a mag, put it up in the rifle, you fire a shot and let the thing cycle and chamber the next round, and then instead of firing that next round, you hand extract it and look for scratches on it. When I did this test, it was just scratched all to hell. They weren’t up on that. The back end of the lugs, you’ve got to carefully smooth off that corner. These were just raw. It was just cutting the cartridges. I don’t know why they weren’t getting split cases from that. Maybe they were.

In part three of the interview with L. James Sullivan, we cover Uzi Gal, the Ruger SMG, Kalashnikovs, “Sacred cows”, his current design work and Jim takes a no-holds-barred look at the current USM4 issues. Don’t miss it!

SAR: Tell me a little bit about your background. Where did you go to school? Are you an engineer by training? Have you always been an inventor? Were you always interested in firearms?

Sullivan: I took two years of engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle. The Korean War was on by then, so a few months before I got drafted, I left school to go to the Sparling School of Deep Sea Diving in Long Beach, Calif. I wanted to become a diver in the Army. I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting. In the 1950s, the John Wayne movies “Wake of the Red Witch” and “Reap the wild Wind” made a big impression on me. I wound up in the Army as a diver repairing oil pipelines in Inchon Harbor in Korea. Hardly the romantic John Wayne image.

Anyway I was a terrible student, with barely passing grades, but I was fascinated with guns and that was why I went into engineering. Through that, I got a background in math and physics. But I have always called myself a gun designer because that’s what I am. “Engineer” was a title I was granted by the companies I worked for but it is a title I don’t want to usurp from people with the degree.

On the other hand, the university system can only teach what’s been done before. Designing is half engineering and half originality. You need both to design superior technology and originality is not something that can be taught. Like art or music, it is within the individual.

I love mechanisms, especially machineguns. I love the challenge. And there is plenty of stuff left to do, although most gun companies have not designed anything new in 50 years and don’t know how to anymore.

SAR: What do you mean?

Sullivan: Well, for example almost every military small arm today fires semi- and full automatic but can’t hit anything on full auto. Full auto weapons have to be designed for controllability, and I mean deliberately, and with not just hope for that left. Full auto firing makes the barrel too hot – so hot it will burst in 500 rounds. So a man can’t fire all the ammunition he can carry. Barrel heat comes from bullet friction, not gas temperature, so design a bullet that doesn’t go through the barrel with its brakes on and the barrel can fire all the ammo the man can carry or lay his hands on.

And magazine capacity? You can empty a 30-round magazine in three seconds. But you can’t change a magazine, pocket the empty and resume firing, in three seconds. So, the man spends more time reloading than firing which increases his vulnerability in combat.

These are 101-year old problems and are slowly being solved by the world’s gun designers, not by the gun companies. That’s how it was usually done before, but the process was slowed after 1950 when the military adopted the “French Arsenal System,” a derisive term meaning to design by committee.

Now guns are supposed to be designed by government contractors per formal requirements written by soldiers and experts. Sounds reasonable but the contractors have never designed a gun before and the experts who write the requirements may be expert gun users but are blind to the opportunities and limitations of technology. They can only ask for what has been done before or for impractical things like caseless [ammunition] and then protect their worthless projects from competition for several years by dismissing all real advances in small arms as having “No Requirement.”

Look at the SAMP 2000 (Small Arms Master Plan). All the money [in the budget] was dropped except for the OICW (Objective Individual Combat Weapon). One frame combines two guns in one, a standard rifle and one that fires an explosive round. That explosive round is supposed to be set off by a computer device that can exactly tell range and communicate that information to the round so that it will explode next to the target, and presumably cause some damage. So, by formalizing the requirement and giving a fortune to contractors who can keep straight faces, they think it will happen. But that is not how innovation works. No matter how much the government spends or pushes to change technology in a particular direction, it doesn’t speed up innovation or fool Mother Nature.

For starters the size and weight limitations of the shell would need an explosive that is four times more powerful than any known explosives and the shrapnel material would have to be denser than any material on this planet just to equal the effect of the 40 mm M203 explosive round, which is adequate if it explodes close to the target. Then they have to develop the technology to make it explode where they want plus or minus a few inches. Mortar designers have been trying to develop similar technology for 50 years but aren’t there yet. Part of the problem is cost. One odd fact about explosive shells with sophisticated fuses is that little ones don’t necessarily cost less than big ones. I guess they think the formal requirement solves that problem by stating the allowable cost.

The OICW will probably end up like the last boondoggle, the Advanced Combat Rifle (ACR) program, whose formal requirement was that it have twice the hit probability of the M16, which was reasonable for once since it had already been done. The Singapore 5.56 mm Ultimax had already out-hit the 5.56 mm M16 and all other 5.56 mm weapons by way more than 2 to 1 at the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham, England. But when that was pointed out to the officer running the ACR program, he wasn’t interested. He only tested guns that fired freak ammo – caseless, semi-caseless and multi-projectile – that all failed for the same reasons that each had failed before. The program was a total failure. Cost – $100 million – and they never tested the technology that worked.

SAR: When did you become a member of the M16 design team? What drew you to this particular project? Did you know Stoner before joining the project? How long were you with the M16 project and Armalite?

Sullivan: After I left the Army, I went to work for Boeing as a tool designer. Then I read about the AR-10 and Armalite – in Time magazine I think. I was impressed with Stoner’s unique gas system invention, which used the rear of the bolt for the gas piston (unlike the Ljungman or French M1949 gas tube systems).

So, I wrote Armalite’s president, Charles Dorchester, sent him a design drawing for an expendable magazine to get my foot in the door and asked for a job. I started as a draftsman. They were just finishing the final U.S. prototype of the AR-10 at the time. The gas tube was on the side of the barrel and the gas got piped through a transfer tube into the side of the bolt carrier. They wanted the gas tube and transfer tube moved to the top where the transfer tube would be less exposed, but the cam pin and cocking handle left no place for the stationary transfer tube. So I combined it with the carrier key and let it move with the carrier. It worked so they let me design after that, starting with the AR-15.

I had never met Gene Stoner before I joined Armalite in 1957. He, of course, had been there for several years (started in ’53 or ’54 I believe) and had brought his 30-06 prototypes with him with his unique gas system and 8-lug rotary bolt concepts that were then used in Armalite’s AR-10 and AR-15. He was Chief Engineer and my boss at Armalite and later at Cadillac Gage on the Stoner 63 program.

Stoner was a great guy with a tremendous sense of humor and a pleasure to work for. He was a brilliant inventor as everyone knows but he was not a one-man show.

First of all, he had nothing to do with the Armalite AR5 and AR7 survival rifles or the .222 “Stoppette” rifle or AR9 or AR17 shotguns. Those were all designed by other people, mostly by John Peck and Art Miller. Stoner designed two guns while at Armalite, the AR-10 and the AR-16 (not to be confused with the M16), both 7.62 mm NATO caliber assault rifles. But he is also credited with designing the 5.56 mm AR-15 (M16) “scaled down” from his AR-10 and the 5.56 mm AR-18 “scaled down” from his AR-16 and has been called the “Father of 5.56.”

However, the first 5.56 mm assault rifle designed at Armalite was the “Stoppette” designed by a guy, whose name I’ve forgotten, using the .222 Remington cartridge. Stoner didn’t believe the small caliber (5.56 mm) cartridge was a suitable military cartridge and designed only .30 caliber rifles until 1973. In the meantime (1957 to 1959), Bob Fremont and I designed the AR-15 (M16) and its 5.56 mm cartridge (modified from .222 Rem). Art Miller designed the AR-18 in 1963 after Stoner left Armalite.

In 1962, Bob and I joined Stoner again at Cadillac Gage where he was designing the 7.62 mm Stoner 62 rifle and machine gun. The owners of Cad Gage wanted a 5.56 mm model so Bob and I designed the Stoner 63.

I designed three more 5.56 mm weapons after that, the Mini 14 for Ruger in ’67, the Singapore Ultimax 100 in ’78 and a double drum rifle/machine gun in ’81 called the ARMi for Beretta. The Mini 14 and Ultimax were successful but the ARMi died when the Italian military adopted an earlier Beretta design. I did however salvage my double drum magazine from the ARMi program and redesigned it as the C-MAG in ’84, which has been adopted by the Germans so it’s done okay.

I believe Stoner designed two 5.56 mm weapons, the FARC in 1973, which was never produced, and the Stoner ’86 machine gun (designed in ’86). It’s rumored that the ’86 MG is starting in production. I wish it well.

SAR: What were some of the more memorable moments in the M16 project? What were some of the difficulties?

Sullivan: From the start, we (Bob Fremont and I) put the AR-15 gas tube on top and used the AR-10-type cocking handle on the first prototypes. But the Finger hook of that type of cocking handle has to have an open slot in the top of the receiver which weakens it and since the hot gas tube was now just below the hook, the hook got so hot on full auto it burned your finger when trying to cock. So I redesigned the cocking handle to pull from the rear which doesn’t get hot and that allowed the receiver slot to be closed off so the AR-15’s receiver became stronger than the AR-10’s.

Although the two guns generally look the same, most of the details in the AR-15 differ from similar details in the AR-10 in ways that made the AR-15 parts more readily interchangeable, simpler and cheaper to make, easier to takedown, smoother operation, stronger, and with increased spring room which made the AR-15 more reliable and eliminated the need to replace springs that could set.

We designed the cartridge for IMR tubular grain powder instead of Winchester’s Ball powder and contracted with Remington to make the ammo. We therefore developed the gun and gas system for the pressure curve of IMR powder and other characteristics of that ammo.

Unlike the AR-10, which had only marginal room for its extractor spring, the relatively larger bolt of the AR-15 had adequate spring room to operate reliably with our ammo. Although we made a modified bolt with even more room, it proved unnecessary during extensive test firing so we went into production with the apparently adequate and simpler design. That became a bad choice later.

We made three other bad choices – the cartridge rim should have been thicker and/or stronger, the buffer should have been heavier, and the chamber of the barrel should have been chrome plated. Omitting the chamber chrome plating was outright stupid but none of the “bad choices” caused problems during our tests or the Army’s tests of the first Colt production guns or the first combat reports from Special Forces in Vietnam, which said that the AR-15 and cartridge were absolutely deadly and effective and superior to the Army’s .30 cal. M-14. By 1962, the world’s press was calling the AR-15 a miracle or “Super Gun,” but that didn’t last long.

In the meantime, we completed the AR-15 testing and development and Bob Fremont left Armalite in 1959. During the next year I designed the .22 AR-7 Survival Rifle and left in 1960 after Armalite assigned the AR-15 rights to Colt. Stoner left in 1961. Art Miller stayed and designed the AR-17 shotgun and 5.56 mm AR-18 assault rifle and AR-180 civilian model. Art had returned from Holland in 1959 after he had converted the AR-10 design to metric. Armalite had been a division of Fairchild Aircraft but was cut loose about 1961, after the AR-15 was assigned to Colt. Armalite supported itself thereafter from the sales of the AR-7, AR-17 and AR-18.

After leaving Armalite, I worked at National Cash Register (NCR) for two years until Stoner invited Bob Fremont and myself to join him for a new gun program at Cadillac Gage. Stoner was just completing his .30 cal Stoner 62 convertible rifle and machine gun. Bob and I designed the 5.56 mm Stoner 63 version from 1962 to 1965. Stoner left in 1963 to develop his 6425 Bushmaster 25 mm gun at TRW. Bob Fremont left in 1964 to join colt and correct some of their AR-15 production problems. I left to join Ruger in 1965 after the Marines had tested the Stoner 63, ordered 300,000 and been shot down by the senate funding committee which decided that the Marines should use what the Army uses (in other words, the AR-15 which by then had been adopted and officially designated the M16).

In the meantime, the Vietnam War was heating up, Colt was getting big orders for the AR-15/M16 and then someone in the military changed the 5.56 mm ammo powder charge from IMR to Ball powder. They did it without tests or checking with Armalite or even notifying Colt who, of course, continued to fire the acceptance tests with IMR powder. Colt didn’t learn about it until they read in the newspapers that all the M16s in Vietnam were jamming, one Marine unit had been overrun, and everyone killed because their M16s jammed.

The field investigation found that the guns were all jammed by a fired cartridge that had failed to eject and that none of the dead had a cleaning rod to clear the jam. The world’s press blamed the gun and its reputation changed from the best to the worst overnight. But further investigation showed that that Marine unit had trained with the M-14 and never seen the M16 until they were issued M16s without training or cleaning equipment when they arrived in Vietnam and were sent into combat. But none of that explained why a gun that used to work didn’t work anymore so it gradually became obvious that the jams were caused by the change in powder.

To say that IMR powder is better than Ball powder is no more true than to say that gasoline is better than diesel fuel, but if you tried to run your gas engine on diesel fuel it wouldn’t work. And that, in effect, is why the M16 didn’t work with Ball powder.

Specifically, Ball poser has higher gas port pressure, which causes the gun cycle to speed up. That causes two types of malfunctions, light strike misfires from bolt carrier bounce and failures to extract a cartridge that has stuck in the chamber because it didn’t have enough time to relax its fire-formed press fit.

Our earlier “bad choices,” (the light weight buffer, weak extractor spring, thin cartridge rim and no chromed chamber), made those problems worse, but, except for the chromed chamber, all of the problems and causes would be cured by going back to the IMR cartridge the gun was designed for. So that is what Stoner, representing Armalite, argued. But the Army argued that it had already stockpiled 100 million rounds of Ball powder ammo and it would take months to fill the pipeline and replace it. Congress investigated and issued the Ichord Committee report finding mostly the Army at fault in “that the failure on the part of officials with authority in the Army to cause action to be take to correct the deficiencies of the 5.56 mm ammunition borders on criminal negligence.” [See page 5370 of the Ichord Committee Report].

I wish I could say that Stoner or Fremont or myself saved the day, but Colt’s Chief Product Engineer, Foster Sturtevant, solved the problems with a heavier buffer assembly having a plurality of inertial masses acting in delayed sequence to oppose bolt rebound. It slowed the cycle back down, reduced the bolt carrier bounce that caused light strike misfires and gave the cartridge time to loosen up in the chamber so it extracted better. Furthermore, it was a simple change allowing riflemen to just change buffers in the field. Another simple fix by Colt designer Bob Roy was to add a rubber plug inside the extractor spring to increase spring force. These cures got the Army off the hook and allowed them to keep using Ball powder ammo.

Although those cures have proven to be good sound improvements, Ball powder is still not compatible with the M16 and should never have been issued for that weapon. It fouls the gas system and wears out the piston rings.

SAR: What other projects have you worked on since the M16?

Sullivan: After the Marines were not allowed to buy the Stoner-63 I quit Cadillac Gage and went to work for Ruger. I designed a bolt action rifle, the Model 77, and the Mini-14. Both have sold one million each. I stayed with Ruger for three years, from 1965 to 1968. The I went to work for Hughes Advanced Armament, part of Hughes Helicopter. That was later sold to McDonell Douglas. I spent 10 years there. For five years, I worked on a worthless caseless ammunition project. All died ludicrously when the breaches wore out and blew up the magazines during testing. Some lasted several hundred rounds, but we did all of our shooting with a long string.

One thing I did design at Hughes was the 7.62 mm chain gun. Lenny Price invented it and designed it for 30 mm on the helicopter and 25 mm on the Bradley [infantry fighting vehicle].

The British use the 7.62 mm as the coaxial machinegun on the Challenger [main battle tank]. The reason they use it is because it ejects the brass forward, outside the vehicle so most of the sound and breech gas are also ejected outside the vehicle.

A motor driven gun makes sense for a vehicle. As a motor driven system, it does not matter what kind of ammunition you use. A special ballistic match flash tracer can be fired along side the main gun on the tank to see if the main gun will hit the target. It was first used in combat in the Gulf War.

Hughes was already started on the 30 mm version for a helicopter. By taking Lenny Price’s idea and proposing it as a part of its helicopter system, Hughes was able to get a contract for the helicopter and the gun. But the Army wanted to see the gun work first. So, we made the first 7.62 mm prototype in six months, which proved the chain gun principle. It meant a lot to Hughes because they got not only the bigger chain gun contract but the helicopter contract as well.

Armalite was back in business by then. They let me have an office there to do work at night [while working at Hughes]. I worked on a .22 rifle for John Wayne. He had a good time; took it out on his yacht and shot at cans or whatever was out there floating in the water. Then a new business manager working for John Wayne pulled the support for the project, said he was too busy sorting out Wayne’s bigger investments. But it was fun for a while.

Armalite knew people at CIS [Chartered Industries of Singapore]. CIS had spent a fortune on a factory to make M16s but it was standing idle after they had supplied the Singapore armed forces. They wanted a rifle to replace the M16 and I agreed to work for them. I left Hughes and went to live in Singapore. CIS really wanted a light machine gun. That’s when I designed the Ultimax, between 1978 and 1981, and that’s when I first started developing controllable full-auto weapons.

I wanted to make a light weight controllable full auto weapon so I modified the Davis Recoilless Gun Principle. The Davis gun shot a bullet out the front and a sandbag out the rear so that all of the recoil was in the motion of the sandbag and none of it in the gun. It didn’t matter how light the gun was because it wasn’t the recoiling mass. In the Ultimax I used the bolt carrier as the sandbag and threw its weight to the rear with a conventional gas system. But instead of throwing it out of the gun, which would have made it recoilless, I gave the bolt carrier enough room and spring force to slow it to a stop before it hit the rear wall. The Ultimax is therefore not recoilless, but the force of recoil delivered to the shooter is only the spring force. To see how that compares to a “normal” recoil force, consider that recoil is a measure of force times time so the longer the time the lower the force. The Ultimax stretches the time out over the whole cycle time which is 100 times longer than delivering it during the bullet acceleration time in a bolt action rifle so the recoil force (and force of the spring) is 100 times less than the force delivered by the bolt action. Furthermore, it is delivered as a constant push during a multi-shot burst, not as a series of individual sharp blows. That, however, is only the theory. Due to friction and the fact that man is a rubbery mount that smoothes out recoil spikes, the Ultimax is nowhere near 100 times better than the M16, but it outhits the M16 by about 8 to 1. The priniciple is called “constant reaction” and I’ve patented its equation in 21 countries.

SAR: Are you surprised by the longevity of the M16?

Sullivan: Yes, I am surprised especially because of the limitations of the smaller caliber. I know all the arguments for high velocity ammunition, all the comparisons that are made. The 5.56 mm round is a weaker, shorter range round. But we have to live in the world the way it is.

SAR: What are you working on now?

Sullivan: I have since worked out variations on the constant recoil principle. One was for a very powerful light weight sniper rifle which cut its recoil spike in half (followed by a low force push) so it could be twice as powerful as 7.62 mm NATO but with no greater spike. Proposed it for the SAMP 2000 Objective Sniper Weapon, got a development contract (the only one I’ve heard), got a single-shot firing fixture made at Saco Defense, which proved it worked and that was the end of it. The SAMP 2000 budget got diverted to the OICW after that.

Got a couple more in the works. One is the “Counterpoise” kit that makes the M16/M4 carbine more controllable. The other is a 7.62 mm belt-fed rifle that will be a full-performance machine gun weighting only 11 pounds instead of 23 pounds like the M-60 or MAG58, and [it will be] far more controllable. And unlike other belt feds, which are almost impossible to reload on the move, a walking man will be able to rapid reload as fast as changing a rifle magazine. And it will select fire full auto, open bolt and semi-auto closed bolt for rifle accuracy. So it can be added to the 5.56 rifle squad without subtracting and thus regain long range accuracy.

SAR: How does an idea for a design begin? How do you get your ideas?

Sullivan: I work on a standard drafting board. Calculators are wonderful things. One of the things I regret is not working with CAD [computer aided design] over the years. Designers will go further, faster with it.

In inventing you see a problem and then design a solution. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes you see a problem no one else has. Sometimes it’s like a flash, like a light bulb going on. Usually it’s nothing like the “Eureka” type of discovery. More often you think of a solution and then dismiss it because the solution has a different problem. Then later you solve that new problem – sometimes years later. It’s not something that comes finished and ready to go. You have to work on it.

Eugene Stoner is often credited by the press as the “designer of the M16” when in fact he is only the inventor of the M16. So what’s the difference? And who cares?

From a business standpoint, only an invention is patentable so the identity of the inventor and people he sells it to are important but the identity of anyone who designs that invention is irrelevant because the designer doesn’t own the invention. Stoner assigned his patented gas system invention including early prototypes to Armalite in return for a royalty agreement. Armalite then paid the costs needed to design and develop that invention in the form of the AR-10 and AR-15/M16 ready for production and then licensed or assigned all rights to Colt for royalties that they shared with Stoner. Strictly from a business standpoint the fact that Armalite hired designers to help Stoner is no more relevant than the fact that they hired a janitor to clean his office.

Furthermore, it’s not good business to include irrelevant details in a press release or advertisement so it’s common practice for gun companies to either omit any individual name or to credit one person for all the work. Armalite at least credited Stoner, but Colt tended to omit even Armalite’s name.

Why should we care who the designers were? For historic accuracy and because their work determined the value of the product just as much as the invention did. I have over 200 patents worldwide. I guess some people can sing, some people invent. It’s just built into the person.

SAR would like to thank Mr. Sullivan for sharing his views with our readers, and we hope to bring more information about his designs and current projects in future issues.