A village near Bangkok, Thailand, 11 November, 2007: SAR caught up with the intriguing and somewhat elusive Dr. Dater as he was making a pilgrimage to the site of the original Bridge over the River Kwai in Thailand (Doc Dater is a rail enthusiast as well as a military historian.) We joined him in an unsuccessful search for a mutual old friend, Don Walsh of 1970-80s clandestine weapons manufacturing fame. Don had left the US and joined the Thai Ex-Pat community in the 1980s, and Dr. Dater and I had discussed a reunion of sorts since we were both in SEA on defense related projects. Neither of us had contact with Don in a long time, and unfortunately, we did not find Don and that will have to wait for another day. We did manage to sit Dr. Dater down for a cheap glass of local white wine and the most in-depth interview ever done with a man who is considered by many to be one of the most innovative and perhaps the most copied suppressor designers of the last half century. – Dan

Dr. Philip H. Dater was born in the latter part of April, 1937 on Manhattan Island in New York City. He has two brothers, Tom and Sheldon, and a sister Emilie. Dr. Dater has two daughters from his first marriage, Diana and Valerie, and one daughter Julie with his wife, Jane, whom he has been happily married to for over thirty years. He is one of the brains behind Gemtech, and his private consulting practice with Antares Technologies has done a lot behind the scenes for the modern small arms community.

SAR: Phil, you were born right in the middle of the Great Depression, and started school just before World War Two.

Dater: That’s correct. I went to grade school in New York City, and when I was 13, we “escaped.” My mom moved to Kentucky, and I went to a military school for a year. The family moved to Wichita, Kansas, where my mom remarried, and I went to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire for a couple years. I graduated from Wichita High School East. I went to the University of Kansas for two years, followed by the University of Wichita for two more. My major for three years was mechanical engineering. Then I switched to pre-med and went to McNeese State College in Lake Charles, Louisiana, for three years, graduated from there, and then went to Tulane University School of Medicine for my M.D. degree.

SAR: Those are two recurring themes in your life, mechanical engineering and medicine. What about firearms?

Dater: Clearly the mechanical interest drove me into firearms, like it leads some to cars or other machines. My first handgun was a German Luger; I paid $15 for it from a store in Exeter, New Hampshire. I was 14 years old.

SAR: You were able to walk into a gun store in 1951, at 14 years old, and buy a handgun?

Dater: Of course. That was perfectly normal. There were no restrictions on it. No problems in society from it either.

SAR: When did your interest in automatic weapons come in?

Dater: I got my first exposure to real full auto when I was about 15. One of my classmates at Exeter lived in upstate New Hampshire, and he had a Russian PPSh-41. We’d occasionally go up to his place for the weekend and shoot that, and his 45-70 lever action. That was 1952. No one knew there was an issue about registration, so I don’t know if it was registered or not.

SAR: When did you get your first automatic weapon?

Dater: I purchased an M1 Thompson in 1955, when I was a student at the University of Kansas. Over the next couple years, until probably mid-1957, I ended up purchasing approximately 14 automatic weapons. I had a 1918A2 BAR, an M2 carbine and a Sten MK II. I also had an FG42 that I bought from a police officer. I don’t remember if it was a first or second model. None of it was in the Registry, we really didn’t know about the registration being needed. You could buy them fairly easily at gun shows. I bought my Thompson from a private individual in Kansas. We had been chatting, and I had expressed an interest in machine guns, and one of my friends there said, “Oh, my uncle has a Thompson, and he’s not interested in keeping it.” And I said, “Well, I’d sure like to buy the thing.” I paid $75 for it.

SAR: You didn’t even know what the National Firearms Act was?

Dater: No, I did not know what it was at the time. It was easy to find machine guns. Most salespeople at gun stores would provide contact information, and you could find them at almost any gun show – there weren’t many shows then, either. A lot of veterans had brought guns home and they were considered alright by everyone I met. There was no big deal about it; nobody was really concerned about it. Nobody cared. In fact, when I first moved to Louisiana, I lived for the first year in a little town called Oberlin, which is about 50 miles north of Lake Charles. The sheriff of the Parish and I would go out together, and we’d shoot turtles with machine guns. He’d take his department’s Reising M50 out and I’d take my Thompson or my Reising. We could buy surplus GI 45 ACP ammo for about a penny a round. It was cheaper than .22 long rifle, and we’d go out and shoot turtles. He never mentioned any machine gun registration. The captain of that district of the state police had his own 1928 Thompson, and he’d come out shooting with us. In fact, I would clean his Thompson. At one point, his gun wasn’t working, and I just swapped firing pins out of my M1 Thompson with it. They all had personal machine guns, no one ever mentioned anything about a “Registry” so we just bought and sold them like regular firearms. Eventually, these were taken from me. A friend of mine I’d done some trading with heard about this need to register machine guns, so he wanted to register everything, and he went to a local police department in another town in southern Louisiana to find out about it. The police department called the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Unit from the IRS to find out how to go ahead and register this guy’s collection, because they didn’t know either. This guy had Maxims and everything else. The agent from the ATTU came out and confiscated his entire collection. One of the things they asked is, “Well, where did you get this, and where did you get that?” They were interested primarily in whoever had stolen some originally from the US government or if someone originally imported it illegally. A number of machine guns that we had were converted from what were then called “Dewats” (Deactivated War Trophies), which in those days were pretty easy to buy and sell, and to reactivate. Dewats didn’t require registration in those days. The Reising that I had was originally a Model 60, and I had built the complete conversion on it to a Model 50 Reising. The agent came and knocked on my door, I was 20 years old at the time. (Of course, in those days, the age of majority was 21). He just came in and said, “I’m here about some machine guns, we just picked up your friend, and he had done some trading with you. I need to see what you have and where it came from.” Then, they took my machine guns away.

SAR: Let me recap that. It was over 50 years ago, and nobody really was paying attention to any requirement for registration, none of the police departments knew anything, many actually had their own unregistered weapons personally, and they went out shooting with non-LE. As soon as your friend found out about it and went in to register, the government came out and confiscated his firearms collection then hunted down everyone he knew?

Dater: Exactly. I didn’t really know that they were illegal for private ownership, or that there was such a thing as a Registry or National Firearms Act until the agent paid me a visit from ATTU in 1957. It was in 1968 that Congress recognized that so many guns were not registered in the NFRTR that with the new laws they had to have an Amnesty and publicize the registration requirement. At that point in1957 though, I realized that there was a serious issue about machine guns. I learned more about it, and in the early Sixties when I wanted a Sten, I wanted a Dewat because there was no big deal on it, no registration needed. I bought one from a guy up in Wisconsin, mail order, he had advertised in Shotgun News. It came with some registration papers. I called him and said, “What is this?” He said, “Oh, registration is voluntary on Dewats.” Of course, that turned out to be a valuable asset when 1968 came and went. The first registered working machine gun that I bought was in 1976, and it was the little Military Armament Corporation Ingram M11 in .380. I’d just seen the movie, “McQ,” and I went into a local sporting goods store and said, “Boy, I just saw a neat movie with a neat little machine gun. Are there any dealers in town?” The guy in the sporting goods store, sort of almost like back in the ’50s, he says, “Yeah, go see Sid McQueen at S&S Arms,” and gave me the address. I went over to Sid’s, and he had about a half dozen of these and a bunch of other things hanging on the wall. And I thought, “Gee, that is cute,” because it was so tiny. I bought it, and I bought the silencer to go with it. The Form 4 took a whole three weeks to go through. Anything that went over three weeks, everyone started to get really antsy about. The funny thing was at that point in time, when the paperwork was in on that, I got a call from ATF. This is, again, in ’76. They said, “Are you the same Philip Dater who used to live in New Orleans and had a registered Dewat Sten? Did you know that you were supposed to notify us when you moved?” And I said, “No, I didn’t know that.” They said, “Well, we’ll take care of it, we’ll amend the Registry to show that.” I said, “You know, I don’t even remember where the paperwork is on that Sten,” and they said, “Well, we’ll send you a copy of it,” and they did. They were very helpful in those days.

SAR: You mentioned that you bought a suppressor in 1976 from Sid McQueen, but that was certainly not your first experience with firearm suppressors.

Dater: I had fired an original Maxim .22 suppressor on a rifle in .22WRF caliber, and had been involved with Amateur Radio since 1950. Hiram Percy Maxim, Sr. was the Father of Amateur Radio you know, as well as inventor of the Maxim Silencer, so I was familiar with his work. It was 1958 for my first crude design though. While I knew there was registration of machine guns, nothing had been said about silencers. I had a problem with some neighborhood critters when I was living in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The first suppressor I made went on a .22 Mossberg rifle that I had. I was looking for some way to couple the suppressor to the gun. I thought of the Rayovac flashlight that had a nice big head, and Thermos made a nice big cork that was about the right size to replace the lens and the bulb. I used an old Rayovac flashlight, and for packing material on it, I used corrugated cardboard. I carefully punched out with a paper punch some quarter inch holes, and then with scissors, I cut around an outline that would just fit into the flashlight body. I made that suppressor out of an old flashlight and a whole bunch of corrugated cardboard disks. Some were smaller than others, so this might be considered “wiped”. I certainly didn’t invent “wipe” suppressors, the Welrod and some others were before then.

SAR: So your first suppressor design was over fifty years ago? What was your second design?

Dater: The second design was actually a little more sophisticated. It was made out of some brass tubing for a drain pipe for a sink, and soldered in a mount with some threads on it. Actually, the first one didn’t have usable threads, it just had a hole and a couple of set screws to hold it in. I made a little cage that supported some fiberglass insulation. It was sort of along the lines of a glass pack muffler. That was probably about ’62. I was in medical school at the time, and there was a streetlight outside of our apartment that was a real irritant, shined in at night.

SAR: So you had to attend to that streetlight.

Dater: That’s exactly what I did. That was also the first time (1962) I wrote an article in regard to suppressors. My friends there said, “Gee, that’s neat. We’d like to get some.” I said, “I don’t want to build them, I don’t have time to do it,” but I sat down and wrote an article with some relatively crude mechanical drawings as to how to build one, and it was the glass pack muffler design, and actually gave a description of how it worked, and how the old Maxim worked, and why I thought the glass pack design was probably better than the baffled maxim. I got the idea for the glass pack from mufflers.

SAR: From car mufflers? I don’t remember ever seeing a suppressor with a glass pack in it in that time period.

Dater: I don’t recall seeing any others either but it became common in the Seventies designs. I used to do an awful lot of work on my old ’55 Triumph TR2, and it had a straight-through muffler in it that was basically a glass pack.

SAR: So you took automotive muffler technology and applied it to your sound suppressor to get rid of the streetlight that was keeping you from studying or sleeping at night, during medical school.

Dater: That’s correct. [laughter] The streetlamp itself was a big glass globe with a bulb inside. I don’t know what kind of glass it was, it was probably pretty good, but it made a little hole going in, and a fairly large hole going out, and the bulb itself was in the path of the bullet. I shot it out and the next day, I went downstairs, outside, to go to my car, and I looked at that and sort of laughed. Then I visually lined up the two holes from the globe, and there’s only one window that it could’ve possibly come from, and that was my window. They did replace the bulb, and I took that out a couple days later, but I used a water gun the next time. It’s amazing what a little bit of water on a hot light bulb will do: they shatter.

SAR: What about military service?

Dater: I went into the Air Force in September of ’65 as a general medical officer. I was in the Air Force for two years and spent the entire two years stationed in Roswell, New Mexico, at Walker Air Force Base, part of the 812th medical group. The commanding officer said, “We need a pediatrician. How would you like to do that?” And I replied, “That’s actually what I’d like to go into,” so I became a pediatrician at that point, and I had a board-certified pediatrician who was my supervisor. I had a wonderful two years there defending our country against the communist menace there in Roswell to the best of my ability. I don’t think there were any communists in Roswell; it was a very Republican county in New Mexico. I took care of the children of many of the military personnel who were serving in South East Asia.

SAR: Roswell is the place that they purportedly had the alien bodies. You were in the medical groups there at Roswell. Any comment on that?

Dater: No. We don’t talk about that.

SAR: (Uncomfortable silence) Uh, OK…. After your service, you were in the medical field, and you stayed in New Mexico?

Dater: I stayed in New Mexico. I started a residency in pediatrics at the University of New Mexico, which at that time, the hospital itself was Bernalillo County Indian Hospital. It subsequently became the University of New Mexico Hospital. I completed one year of pediatric residency, and then switched to radiology. My radiology residency was done in a private institution, Lovelace Bataan Medical Center.

SAR: Going back to the firearms and suppressors, in 1976 you were still in New Mexico, and you met with Sid McQueen.

Dater: Yes, and I ended up buying two other silencers from him. One was an integrally silenced Ruger MKI pistol by Military Armament Corporation. I forget the model number on it, but I remember the silencer tube was approximately six inches long; it was a relatively compact unit. The other was an MA-1 for the M16 rifle. It had the teakettle whistle type thing on the side for pressure relief. Interestingly, Military Armament Corporation had forgotten to put the muzzle threads in this and some others of this model suppressor. This suppressor comes back over the barrel, and was supposed to screw into the barrel threads in the center support, and then there was a split collet at the back that tightened to the barrel and kept it from unscrewing. The people at S&S Arms thought that you just put the suppressor on the barrel and pulled it as far forward as you could against that internal support, and then tighten it down with a pair of vice grips. Amazingly, we didn’t have too many baffle strikes doing that. I figured out what was supposed to happen, how it was supposed to mount, thanks to J. David Truby’s Silencers, Snipers and Assassins and the diagrams in it.

SAR: You and David Truby have been friends for many years.

Dater: That correspondence started a couple years later. Sid McQueen is the guy who invented the Sidewinder submachine gun. Sid’s store was robbed once and he shot both armed robbers, killing one and permanently disabling the other. He used a registered M2 Carbine, firing 15 rounds and he said the reason he only fired 15 was the gun jammed. His family lived in the back and there was no way he was letting them be threatened.

SAR: What was your first suppressor design in that period?

Dater: I had that MAC made Ruger and after about 500 rounds, it started to get awfully loud. I called Military Armament Corporation, and asked, “How can I rejuvenate this?” The gentleman I talked to there said, “Well, there’s not much that can be done. The weapon was designed for a lifespan of 150, maybe 200 rounds. 40 or 50 rounds for qualification, then it would be taken out on a mission and deep six’d at the end.” It was not designed to come apart; it was not designed to be rejuvenated. The basic design on it was a barrel that was Swiss cheesed with holes, surrounded by stacked screen discs, sort of like the High Standard, HD Military. Then it had a wipe in the front, because MAC liked wipes. I asked if I could send it back, they said, “No, there’s no way to do that, because there’d be a tax coming back, and a tax going back to you.” They were absolutely wrong on that, but nobody knew the difference at that time. So I thought, well, they put it together, it has to be able to come apart, and that turned out to be a very difficult process. But I did disassemble it, and I found a way to repack it. The repacking was done using a copper mesh material, the Chore Boy, (at that time it was Chore Girl), pure copper scouring pads, and I figured how to modify those to have approximately the same density as the original screen washers that were in the unit. I repacked that a couple of times; it brought the unit back to normal performance. I decided I could improve the design, so, I called Sid McQueen and asked if I could build under his Class 2 license; I only had a Class 3 dealer’s SOT with a friend. I built my first prototype in a machine shop in the basement of the x-ray department of Lovelace Clinic. They had a full machine shop down there that wasn’t being used for anything else. I figured I might as well build instruments of death and destruction in the hospital. This prototype became, eventually, the model RST suppressor that I marketed under the name of Automatic Weapons Company, and the MKII Ruger that was later built under the name of AWC Systems Technology. This design used the 4-3/4 inch barreled Ruger. Basically, the back part of the barrel was Swiss cheesed, and had the Chore Boy copper scouring pads packed in there. Then there was a little separator, and then there was just a tube with a bunch of perforated holes in it, and a little bit of fiberglass wrapped around it. It was very quiet. The disadvantage was every 4-500 rounds, you had to disassemble it and repack it, but the instructions told exactly how to do it, how to prepare the material for packing. To see if the instructions could be followed by almost anyone, I handed a dirty gun to my sister with a set of instructions, said, “Here, repack this.” She found a few places where we had to modify the instructions a little bit for clarity, but she was able to do it. I figured if she could do it, anyone could.

SAR: You started Automatic Weapons Company in 1976?

Dater: Yes, but it wasn’t my Class 3 dealer’s license. Initially, it was a Type 6 Manufacturer of Ammunition. I got a little Star reloader, and I was going out machine-gunning with some of my friends on Sunday mornings, a group in Albuquerque led by a psychiatrist who billed himself as New Mexico’s oldest and largest machine gun dealer. He was older than the rest of us and he was more corpulent as well. And, he was a lot of fun. I started loading ammunition for other people there and figured I needed a license to do it. In ’78, my partner in our Class III dealership, which was called Historical Armaments, ended up in some legal difficulties, and ATF “suggested” that I divorce myself from him. At that point, I changed the Automatic Weapons Company license to an 07 manufacturer, and paid the Class 2 SOT. I also was making integrally suppressed Ruger 10/22 rifles. That was also around when you and I started talking about suppressors.

SAR: There was one major suppressor manufacturer at that time that had a production quality line and my company was a distributor for him. Other than Military Armament Corporation, there was Jonathan Arthur Ciener.

Dater: That’s absolutely correct. Jonathan, as I recall, actually started around 1975, somewhere in that area. In my opinion he is, more than anyone else, responsible for the civilian interest in ownership of firearm silencers. He advertised everywhere. I know I saw his ads in American Rifleman. They were in a lot of the gun magazines. I think they were even in Popular Mechanics or Popular Science. Little, one-inch ads about silencers, and his products were cutting edge technology for the era. Many of his designs were using baffles, not packing material. Some of them were a little larger than what I was doing, but they worked extremely well. If it hadn’t been for Jonathan, I don’t think that the civilian suppressor market would be where it is today. He was a pioneer. Jonathan was “it” on the civilian market, the leader. For the military, Reed Knight and Mickey Finn were both early on, Don Walsh also. I didn’t meet Reed until the early ’80s, and I know he had been in the business for quite a while prior to that.

SAR: One of your most popular designs was the SG-9.

Dater: The SG-9 design itself came in, I believe it was ’78, possibly as late as ’79, and it was actually originally called the M-76, because it was for the Smith & Wesson 76. That was the first one. And the second one was called I guess SM2 for the Sten, and then subsequently it became the SG-9. The SG-9, which is made today the same way it was made in the late ’70s, used stamped baffles. The difference between the Sten version and the Smith version was the barrel and barrel mounting nut that was interchangeable in there. The interchangeability carried on to a little bit later in the early ’80s, either late ’83 or early ’84, when I designed what became the Mark 9 suppressor, that not only did I build under my Automatic Weapons Company license, but AWC Systems Technology ended up building also. That was a coaxial design, and the basic baffle stack, the basic configuration was my design on it. I had different barrel and mounts available for the Smith 76 and for the Mark II. Tim Bixler was working as the machinist for AWC Systems Technology. He took the design and made it into a very universal suppressor where all you changed was one little aluminum part at the back of the suppressor, and you could mount it on almost anything imaginable, including the HK weapons, the MP-5, which was coming up at that point in time, mount it on the Ingrams. The MK9 became a true workhorse. People still refer to it sort of as the standard of comparison for performance on 9mm sub-gun suppressors. Yes, it’s a little large. The original one was two inches in diameter and 12 inches long. About ’91, I redesigned it a little bit, came up with the MK 9K, which is still classed as a workhorse, and it too is pretty much a standard of comparison. We shortened the “K” up to where the overall length of the suppressor was seven and a half inches instead of 12, with more efficient diversion of the gases into the coaxial entrance chamber. The actual entrance chamber was surrounding the baffle stack.

SAR: The Bixler mount system, AWC Systems Technology had many different mounts for the MK9 series, for Beretta 12, MACs, I think there were about nine different mounts that you could get for it.

Dater: Well, it wasn’t an issue until ’86 that the ATF started having questions about suppressor parts, and the MK9 started late ’83, early ’84. Bixler, a very innovative machinist, came up with the interchangeable mounting system. It was a slight redesign in the entrance chamber, and also came up with the first practical 3-lug coupler and patented it successfully. It did not use any springs. In fact, he sold the patent to what has now become STW, and they’re producing that mount themselves. At Gemtech we’ve gone with Greg Latka’s mount, which is a push and twist and lock system.

For most of these early designs, I was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, working out of my garage, had a lathe, had a drill press, no milling machine. What little welding I did was done with oxyacetylene, and it tended to be more silver soldering. My products were basically hand-built, one at a time. There were limits as to what I could do but it was a great stay-at-home hobby for a doctor. When you’re on call, you stay at home and build silencers. [laughs] Sometimes, when I’d be on call at the hospital and had to stay there, I’d just go down to the basement and I’d work in their machine shop, which I had a key to. Automatic Weapons Company went fairly slowly for a number of years. Around ’79 or so, Chuck Taylor wrote a little short piece on my work. The first major piece that was written on my suppressors was done by Peter Kokalis. He came out and wrote it in August of ’81. Peter at the time was a freelance writer, had a few items published in Soldier of Fortune, and he’d asked Bob Brown for an assignment to write about. “Oh, there’s a suppressor manufacturer in New Mexico, why don’t you call him?” Peter came out and spent a couple days with me, stayed at my house. We went through a lot of the designs. Bob Brown came down for the photo shoot and the product demonstration. Peter wrote a fabulous article on my products. It was not really what you’d call a puff piece, because he was very honest in his evaluations. One of the things I did respect very much about Peter was that he did not try to take any product, which of course worked very well for me, because, being as small as I was, I couldn’t afford to give away much. He did buy some products, but he paid full dealer price for it.

SAR: That’s entirely appropriate, respectable, and it has been my policy all along as a writer, and it is SAR’s policy. Robert K. Brown is an operator with real world suppressor experience going back to the Sixties. What was Bob’s reaction to your suppressors?

Dater: My recollection is that he was very pleased with what he saw, but it was Peter’s article so he just enjoyed shooting. We had the silenced Ruger pistol; we had a Ruger 10/22 rifle. We had a couple for the M16 and one for the Sten and the Smith 76. There were several for center fire pistols. Bob certainly enjoyed going out on the mesa and shooting. In Albuquerque, we used to be able to just go out on the edge of town and shoot all kinds of stuff. It was not nearly as developed as it is now. I did go to a civilian gathering; Peter Kokalis invited me to come to one of Dillon’s earlier shoots at S-P (ShitPot) Crater in ’81. That was the first time I actually met Mike Dillon. I met a number of the people in the Class 3 community. We camped out there at the crater and did the night shoot, and just had a lot of fun.

SAR: What was the end result of the Soldier of Fortune article?

Dater: I got real busy. [laughs] Soldier of Fortune magazine was really on the way up. It was a relatively new magazine at that point. It started in ’75 as a quarterly and it had just gone monthly. It’s called “Doc Dater’s Deadly Devices.” It was in November of ’81. Somewhere along in that period, I wrote an article on suppressor design for SWAT Magazine, and it was in the Volume One, Number Two issue, Chuck Taylor had asked me to write it. It was a 5,000-word article, and what I didn’t realize, of course, was they only paid for about the first 3,000 words, and the rest of it was just sort of freebies.

SAR: Writing has never paid that well. Your suppressor line in 1981 was fully developed, for Automatic Weapons Company. I had a number of pieces from AWC, and I’ll be honest, Jonathan Ciener was where I was buying most of mine. Your product was also highly respected by people. At that time, in the civilian market, there was the new SWD product line, the old MAC stuff, the old RPB items, but they pretty much stayed to the MAC suppressors, some .22 cans, and M16 cans. There were a number of shops in the early Eighties that turned out clone cans of the MAC styles.

Dater: That is about right; there wasn’t a lot of production work in this business. I stayed by myself until probably about ’83. At that point, one of my customers in Friendswood, Texas, was Lynn McWilliams. He had bought a number of items, and he wanted to buy more than I could produce. Lynn said, “Why don’t you let me take over the actual production and manufacturing? You just do design work and I’ll pay you a royalty on the products that you design, that I build.” That sounded like a pretty good idea. I think my sales, before I joined up with Lynn, had been right around $25,000 a year. Of course, those are in 1981 or ’82 dollars which is about $250,000 a year today. [laughter] He started doing the production, and Tim Bixler was his machinist. Tim worked out of his garage, but he was an outstanding machinist, and he was more oriented towards production. I still manufactured some of the parts, and I had the engraving equipment, so I did all the marking on the suppressors. They came out for a couple years under the name of Automatic Weapons Company in Houston, Texas. In about ’85 or ’86, Lynn changed the name of his company to AWC Systems Technology. We continued to work together, until probably about ’89, when he hired Doug Olson who had been with Mickey Finn’s organization, Qual-A-Tec, and started to produce some of Doug’s newer designs. We sort of went our separate ways around then. It was very amicable. I still think very highly of Lynn McWilliams, and I consider him a friend.

SAR: Up until the late 1980s, where you had split off from AWC Systems Technology, what were the development levels of your sound suppressors?

Dater: We still were producing the integral Ruger pistols and rifles using some of the late ’70s technology, which was the shredded copper packing material, and the fiberglass. These were systems that worked; all of the projectiles were kept sub-sonic. Because of porting, the weapons cycled well: the accuracy was phenomenal on some of those weapons. It had to do with velocity control and making the bullet run at a speed where it gave its greatest accuracy for the twist rate of the barrels. On the center fire suppressors, of course, this sort of technology didn’t work. Others were machined baffles, usually out of aluminum. Fairly shallow M-shaped baffles, and one of the first M-baffles or K-baffles. This letter description is the letter that the baffle most closely resembles when it’s cut cross-sectionally. An M-baffle is basically a cone with a spacer that is built integral to it. It’s a conical baffle and spacer that’s been integrated. That was difficult for me to machine with the equipment I had, there was no automation. What I had were strictly manual lathes. What was easiest for me was to just make spacers out of tubing, and then stamping the baffles. Originally I ended up getting fender washers bought at the hardware store, and then I bought a hydraulic press and I made some dies and formed the baffles into shallow cones. Then I only had to trim the baffles, because they wouldn’t necessarily fit in the tube correctly. Eventually, I started having the washer blanks custom punched with a specific inside diameter hole, and a specific outside diameter, so that when they were formed, the hole on the inside would expand out to the size that I wanted, and the outside would constrict in, just enough to where it would fit inside the tube, and I could maintain good alignment throughout the entire suppressor. One of the things we found at that point was that the sound levels varied with the diameter of the hole in the baffle or the aperture. The tighter the aperture, the more gas was trapped in the baffle itself, and the exit of the gas was delayed more. The problem is that there’s always a little bullet instability. When the bullet leaves the rifling, it starts to spin in free air, which in this case is inside the suppressor. If you have the aperture too tight, which some people do even today, then you’re more apt to clip baffles. There’s a definite compromise in there. We did some experiments at AWC Systems Technology on a .223 thread-on suppressor where we tried various apertures. We started with a quarter-inch, .250 aperture throughout the suppressor, did sound measurements, then increased it 15 thousandths, did some more measurements, increased it again 15 thousandths, did some more. We found there’s probably about a three-decibel loss in performance with each increasing of the bore aperture.

Throughout the ’70s and most of the ’80s, we all used relatively simplistic baffle designs, that tended to have a lot of symmetry. This helped with the accuracy of the system. Around 1980 I started thinking, “I need to know exactly what we are doing. I need to get some reliable method of trying to do sound measurements.” I’d read the Frankfurt Arsenal Report, the World War Two study, where they had done sound measurements out on the field with a big microphone. The tests I remember were on the Sten, with and without the Mark Two suppressor. Non-suppressed, they were measuring 124 decibels or something like that. On the suppressed, it was down in the 90-decibel range, give or take a moderate amount. They were using a microphone that was fairly large. They were recording it on high-quality recorders, then taking it back into the lab, and playing the recorders into oscilloscopes to try and get the actual sound pressure levels. They were setting the microphone; I believe it was something like five meters from the muzzle. Well, I knew that the sound measurements they were doing did not ring true. I knew that the sound levels were higher than that. My first attempt at doing sound measurements was like many people at that time, with a little Radio Shack $39 meter. It gave wonderful results. I mean, non-suppressed .22s were in the 120-decibel range, if you could estimate how high the needle was kicking, because it didn’t have a peak hold or anything like that. I realized that didn’t work very well. I was talking with Don Walsh or Reed Knight, I forget which one it was, and they said they were using the B&K 2209 with the 4136 microphone. The non-suppressed and the suppressed results I was getting were nowhere near believable. I couldn’t afford the B&K meter at that time. I was doing acceptably well practicing medicine, but there’s only so much of that revenue that one can divert into the hobby, and my feeling has always been that any hobby that’s being run as a business has to be self-supporting, and not depend on capital infusions from elsewhere. The next sound meter I got was a Heathkit. This was their new digital spectrum analyzer. It was an interesting device. I think it actually went up to something like a maximum input of 130 decibels, somewhere along in there. I figured I’d just space the microphone out. I would get the energy level at each half-octave. But I didn’t really understand the concept of rise time at that point. The rise time on that meter was not very good. So the results were not totally believable there either. If I integrated all of the spectrum, I could come up with an [absolute] sound pressure level, which I didn’t quite believe. It was still measuring too low. If I took just one specific frequency, it was 4,000 hertz, it was closer to what I would’ve anticipated. On some of my early measurements, I looked at that one frequency as being what the actual sound level was. I was talking with Reed Knight sometime in the late ’80s, maybe it was ’87 or ’88, and he said, “You know, this company, Larson-Davis, has a meter that may do the job,” it was the model 700. So I called Larson-Davis, and I bought one of the meters.

SAR: Model 700?

Dater: Yes, Model 700. It had some problems. It had kind of a slow rise time, maximum input was 140 dB. After playing with that for a couple months, I realized it wasn’t going to do the job. So I called Larson-Davis and said, “Here’s what I need,” and I went through the specs that I needed, which included the 20-microsecond or better rise time, that was in the military standard. They said, “What you need is our 800B, and you need this microphone.” Then they made a wonderful offer. They said, “Since you bought the original model 700 for this one purpose, and it’s not suitable, we’ll allow you, as a trade-in, what you paid for the model 700,” and that was really a dealmaker. I got the 800B. Of course, from that point, all of the readings were completely believable and completely consistent with what the B&K did. I really credit Reed an awful lot with guiding me on doing sound measurements. It was the late ’80s when I got the Larson-Davis. Some of the catalogs that Lynn McWilliams and I did as AWC Systems Technology, we put in sound measurements that we got with some of the earlier equipment that really wasn’t doing the job quite right. But we were proud of the sound measurements we were getting. We should’ve been proud of them. The numbers were pretty good. Reed called at one point and said, “Phil, I don’t believe you’re getting the results you think you are.” He was absolutely right.

SAR: In the early ’80s, you started having concern about scientific testing of sound. As a physician, at what point did you begin to get concerned about hearing loss and hearing damage from firing weapons?

Dater: It was around the same time. I hadn’t really gotten into knowing what was safe and what wasn’t safe. I hadn’t really studied that very much. But it was around that time that I began to realize that I was having hearing problems. I shot many tens of thousands of rounds through machine guns, through sub-guns, hunting turtles with the sheriff of Allen Parish, Louisiana, and with some of my friends, this sort of thing. “Real men don’t wear hearing protection” was what we thought. While getting ready for quail season or pheasant season, we’d go skeet shooting with my stepfather. You’re on a 12-gauge for 25 shots per round and usually run about four rounds. What was even more irritating was the ringing in my ears continuously, which has not gotten better, but fortunately hasn’t gotten a whole lot worse since I started using sound suppressors. Then I read that the VA spends on average approximately $4,000 per year per veteran in hearing damage claims. I know the kind of sound levels that some of those troops have been subjected to. It became a real issue and sound suppressors on firearms can definitely help.

SAR: You’ve written about sound testing, due to your concern about the misinformation that the whole industry had about sound suppressors.

Dater: I currently still publish a pamphlet on this. I wrote an article for Small Arms Review on Firearm Sound Testing (August, 2000). I had read the Mil Standard – 1474c – what it was saying about the equipment requirements. I also knew what levels were believable and what weren’t, and I would hear people say, “We did measurements and we’re getting 48 decibels reduction,” or some bizarre number, and I’d ask what the suppressed and non-suppressed was, and the suppressed levels were running a way lower than they should, or the non-suppressed were running a little lower than they should have. I could look at that data and explain, “Your microphone or your system does not have the rise time to actually catch the peaks.” In the mid ’80s, a friend of mine who worked at Sandia Labs said that even in 20 microseconds, you’re probably missing a good deal of the sound level peaks, because they’re of shorter duration than that. “We know, we blow up things, and we measure sound pressure levels. We have transducers that pick up sound impulses that have rise times of less than 20 or 30 nanoseconds, much less microseconds.” I said, “Gee, what do those transducers cost?” He said, “Well, they run about $1,000 each.” I said, “That sounds great.” He says, “Yeah, but they’re only good for one shot, and then they’re toast.” That, of course, was not practical.

There were, and are, a lot of people who try to promote their product, testing with equipment that just flat out wouldn’t do the job. The famed Radio Shack meter, or the meter by Quest that had, I think a 100-microsecond rise time, missed most of the suppressed pulse. During that period, Al Paulson was starting to do silencer reviews. Al and I talked a lot. Some of his very early reviews of some of our product actually used some of the data from my spectrum analyzer. Then he decided that, and rightly so, that he needed to get his own meter, and he got a B&K 2209. We worked together, comparing a lot of the test results that we got. Al got very good results. His results were believable and accurate, and Al’s a true scientist. I’d written something previously that Al ended up quoting in his book, Silencer History and Performance: Volume One.

SAR: A number of other people who were in the industry shared information.

Dater: In those days, you would be hard pressed to think of a suppressor designer who wasn’t willing to share non-proprietary information, to discuss the science with others. There really was a Renaissance of suppressor design from the 1980s-90s. It was an exciting time in this business. That was around the time I was getting ready to leave New Mexico. I still built a few things under the old Automatic Weapons Company name, which is a name I still maintain. I had incorporated in the meantime. The corporate name is Antares Technologies Incorporated, doing business as the Automatic Weapons Company. Originally, it was to be just the corporate structure for the building of suppressors, but it ended up becoming more of a consulting firm to the small arms community.

SAR: You’ve worked with a number of clients over the last 20-odd years, on firearm and suppressor design.

Dater: True, but my prime focus as a business is my partnership in Gemini Technologies; Gemtech. After I moved to Boise, Idaho, in ’91, I started to build again under the Automatic Weapons Company name, and sold a few items. I actually even ran a small ad in the old Machine Gun News, including an ad to do sound measurements for other manufacturers, because I knew that I was doing them correctly and could be of service. That’s why I was happy to get involved with the Suppressor Trials you ran for Machine Gun News in 1997, as well as the 1999 Suppressor Trials for Small Arms Review.

SAR: You were one of the volunteer testers – brought your own meter. Al Paulson did, Dr. Chris Luchini and Dr. Reagan Cole from the University of Arkansas were there as well, all running parallel meters during the 1999 trials. It really was like a Renaissance, with all the great information being shared.

Dater: The first one at Knob Creek in 1997 was right before Machine Gun News went under. Al Paulson and I were there, and we both ran our meters. Mine ran a little easier, because the Larson-Davis has the real beauty of being able to be driven and read by a laptop computer. I could assimilate and do the analysis on the data faster than Al could on his B&K, where he had to handwrite everything down and then do all the math. The results that we got were, between the two meters, basically identical, maybe a half-dB difference on the averages. We learned an awful lot in that trial. One of the things that we were doing was, and you were there, Dan, we had the ammunition out in the sun, and we started off early in the morning, running all of one manufacturer’s suppressors. It was about 50 degrees out and it was just miserably cold. By mid-afternoon, when it was up well into the 90 degrees, we were getting into some of the other manufacturers, which included some of our product, and the ammunition had been sitting out in the sun all day, the ammunition was physically hot, and the pressures were a little high, and the sound levels were certainly off on all of it. We learned that you don’t do testing of a given manufacturer, and complete all of his stuff, but as we did two years later at the 1999 SAR Suppressor Trials, you do categories of suppressors together. That way, you have less variation from the climatic changes that occur during the day, and of course all tests include the environmental data. One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that measurements made on a cold day are not necessarily going to be the same as those on a very hot day. There’s an awful lot of variation in actual sound measurements. When we did the test under the auspices of SAR in ’99, we were, I believe, a lot more accurate in that we were doing. With Drs. Luchini and Cole there doing spectrum analysis parallel to the B&K and Larson Davis meters we were seeing the time curves and spectrum curves. Unfortunately, Al had a bad microphone element. Regardless, because I was involved in the testing, allegations were made by a number of people that I cooked the results. John Tibbetts was standing there, looking over my shoulder at every single shot that was fired, no matter whose it was. John said, “There’s no way you could’ve cooked the results, I was watching your results too.” And a few of our things didn’t perform as well as we thought they would.

SAR: I’ve got to take some heat on this, because we never published the full set of results on the 1999 suppressor trials, and there were allegations that that was done to protect some manufacturers. Total baloney, it was my call. The fact is that the guys who were supposed to write this into a book didn’t turn in the coordinated end results for over a year. It was incomplete and had formula that didn’t work, and there was no way we could do anything with the information we had because it was incomplete and too easy for people to misread or misquote. Rather than take all those results and put them out as a skewed group with everybody picking at it, I chose not to publish it. The information was given to every manufacturer tested. They all had their own information, but we never published the entire thing, because of the timeliness of it. It was bordering on irrelevant as a body of work.

Dater: By the time all the data was available; a lot of people had progressed on to different designs in their production models. What was great about those two suppressor trials, the first one in particular, was almost everybody in the industry was there, with maybe one exception. Everybody who was making suppressors was there, and had their stuff out. Tim LaFrance was talking about all his experiences with people, and the newer suppressor manufacturers were getting hints from the older guys, and there was a real sharing of scientific information at that first one. The second one, there was a little bit more involvement, but there were some people coming in and trying to “trick” the tests, taking what was supposed to be a dry can and putting a little bit of oil in it, and you could see smoke coming out of their cans. There were people trying to skew the tests. That defeated the purpose of the whole event. There are a number of issues with some of the published testing results. We at Gemtech, and Lynn McWilliams at AWC have always been very honest in our test results even as we refined our testing methodology. There was a time, certainly in the ’80s, and maybe into the early ’90s, when we all published the dB ratings, but we stopped doing it for a number of reasons. One of them was that as we got more experience, we found there was a lot of individual day-to-day variation that went on; there was variation with the ammunition used, with the temperature of the suppressor and the weapon. We found that on an extremely hot day, like a nice summer day with ambient temperature of 110 degrees in the bright sun, nobody’s suppressor measures extremely well. Humidity makes a difference as does barometric pressure and altitude. There are just too many variables. The other thing is that when we would measure things, we would do a string of ten rounds, and we would take an average of the ten, we didn’t just pick one or two rounds, we didn’t throw out one or two, we averaged all ten. The results we would get today would vary one or two dB from what we get tomorrow, or what we got the day before. So, on a given day, at a given time, under given circumstances, the sound results are absolutely correct. The problem is that not everyone measures the same way we do. I’ve heard manufacturers say, “My suppressor is doing 38 decibels,” and I would say, “Did you actually measure it?” “Well, no, but I compared it to one that I measured previously, that I measured at 34 decibels, and it sounded like it was at least four decibels quieter, so this one is doing 38.” I don’t think anyone’s ear is that good – especially a shooter who has hearing loss like most of us do. The other thing is we had heard that there were groups or manufacturers who would run a string of 20 shots, and pick the one best shot, and say, “My suppressor does X dB reduction.” Al Paulson has always measured the string of ten rounds, and has published the average. Usually, he also has the extreme spread in there, and he does a good job. When you’re going to measure a suppressor, you really need to buy one off the shelf from an independent dealer. If you want a brand X suppressor, go to a dealer and buy the brand X from him. Don’t order it directly from the company, or don’t accept it directly from the company, because you don’t know that you’re getting a production item. You may be getting a tricked item. We have measured suppressors that have had some fairly wild claims as to performance, and we’ve never been able to reproduce those results. Other people that we know who know how to measure firearm sound have measured the same suppressor and not been able to reproduce the claimed results. So, the question always comes up: Was the unit that was set up “tricked?” Did it have an extremely tight aperture for some reason?

SAR: In the real end user world, that wouldn’t function properly.

Dater: No, or wouldn’t function with a moderate amount of full auto fire. At the ’99 trials, there were one or two manufacturers who claimed they were doing dry pistol suppressors, and you could see a stream of steam come out, and we actually started shooting the first shot through a piece of white typing paper to catch water or grease or whatever, to determine if the unit was “wet.” Almost any pistol suppressor is going to be 10 decibels quieter if it’s wet. It was depressing to me to realize that, from that first time that we tried it, where there really was this incredible exchange of scientific knowledge and mentoring, and just a great experience, by the second trials, there were people who were coming in, trying to trick the testers, trying to get better numbers instead of trying to find out what they were really doing with their suppressors.

SAR: That’s the reason I haven’t done another trials. I’ve been a bit frustrated because there are things that I call fan sites that are put up on the Internet, and they pretend to be objective, and they use bad science and they use inaccurate but flattering testing. We won’t give any validity in Small Arms Review to the sites that are shills for manufacturers. That’s just something that our readers and especially our government readers need to be acutely aware of, is that just because it’s on the Internet does not mean it’s true, and that there are some people who are skewing numbers, and putting up unscientific data, and pretending to be objective, and they’re not. We’ll have nothing to do with that, because procurement people and general customers are making decisions based on what amounts to baloney. Who suffers in the end is the guy on the ground with the gun. That’s unacceptable.

Dater: That’s correct. It was exhilarating to be part of those two Suppressor Trials, and I wish you could get a government or academic group to sponsor and provide oversight for another Trials, to take the baloney out of it. One later outcropping of the open testing environment we were having was that in late ’92 or early ’93, Jim Ryan of JR Customs responded to my ad in Machine Gun News about doing some testing. He and his partner, Mark Weiss, came over to Boise, and we did some sound measurement testing. He said, “What can we do to improve the product a little bit?” I said, “You might try a little bit of this, little bit of that,” based on my experience and what I was doing to a certain extent at the time. As 1993 progressed, Jim made the suggestion, “Why don’t we just join forces and make a new company?” Out of that, Gemini Technologies Incorporated was born, and it uses the trade name Gemtech, which has become almost a household word in suppressors these days. For the first couple years, Jim worked in Washington and I worked in Boise. Then about ’96, he moved to Boise, and we started working together on a day-by-day basis. We started to produce more and more product. I think the first year we turned about $15,000 in sales in the new company. In early ’94, Greg Latka joined Gemtech, from his company, GSL Technology. He had been corresponding with Al Paulson. Al said, “You ought to talk to these people at Gemtech, they have some good ideas, and you have some good manufacturing capability, and that sounds like a good match.” It certainly was. Greg is still with the company. We’re both actually classed as consultants, but we’re heavily involved in the day-to-day operation of the company.

I think the 1990s were the Golden Age of suppressor design. Just look at the groups that were out there – Knight’s, AWC Systems Technology, OPS Inc, John’s Guns, I don’t want to leave anyone out but the list goes on and on, and if you compare the before and after out of that decade, it’s amazing. When Jim Ryan and I started, we were using ’80s technology, using some fairly simplistic machined baffles. Greg opened our eyes as to the capabilities of CNC Machinery. He is a very innovative machinist, and is also a very good designer. It’s hard for me to say exactly who was responsible for which innovation that we made. Certainly, as a company, we made a lot of innovation. The so-called K baffle is not a new concept. It dates back to a patent in the late ’20s or early ’30s, which never went anywhere. Then some fine tuning that Doug Olson did when he was working with Qual-A-Tech, where he was using flat baffles with some strange geometry in it, and conical spacers instead of straight spacers, which had been the prevailing wisdom. Those two together, if you made them as one piece, was sort of a K baffle. We started using the K baffle in production, and we were the first of the suppressor companies to use it actually as a production item. We made our changes to the way gases were diverted in both the Olson design and some of the earlier designs, in that we were using scoops instead of slanted sidewalls in the baffle, which was a more effective method of production. The K baffle, of course, was not a patentable item, at the time that we were making improvements in it, and it has been very widely copied, has become kind of the standard of the industry. It’s probably the most efficient baffle for its size. It is a little pressure-sensitive, and there are some pressures that it really doesn’t work very well with, including the .50 BMG caliber. We had an interesting experience with that. We made a .50 suppressor, and we fired the first shot on the Barrett rifle, pulling the string, and it worked real well. Jim Ryan fired the second shot, and he thought he broke his shoulder, because everything sort of came apart at that point, as the suppressor itself launched downrange. The K baffle has one disadvantage. It has a certain inherent weakness, due to the direction of vector forces in the structure. What had happened on the first shot was some of them had collapsed a little bit. And the leading, instead of being about .55 caliber hole throughout the lead, was about .70 caliber, but the exit port was about .40, and of course that’s just a little bit too tight for the .50 caliber bullet, and the unit went downrange. Newtonian physics being what it is, the recoil was fairly intense.

SAR: Three pounds going downrange, with an equal and opposite reaction onto Jim’s shoulder. [laughter] I remember that phone call from Jim.

Dater: We all laughed about it later, but there was an initial concern that he might’ve broken something. But that’s part of the R&D process. You learn things. Take Ops, Inc. – Phil Seeberger. He’s a fascinating character. He started in the mid-’80s, and he had some theories about a mechanical phase cancellation, which may or may not have worked the way he says. But he certainly built some product that worked quite well. It was fairly lightweight. But again, there was a lot of innovation, a lot of thought process that was going into it. Military Armament Corporation really popularized the “wipe,” a WWII concept seen in the Welrod and other suppressors of that era. The wipe is a piece of rubber or urethane or similar material, with a little hole in it that is seriously less than the diameter of the bullet. The whole idea is that as the bullet passes through the suppressor, it hits the wipe, it exits out, and then the wipe material snaps back and sort of locks the gas in the suppressor and lets it come out fairly slowly, cooling and interrupting the gas flow. The problem is that anything that touches the bullet in free flight once it has left the rifling, causes horrible accuracy problems. If you’re using a hollow point or a soft point, high velocity projectile, you’ll just have the projectile disintegrate right at that point. It will go ahead and expand. Wipes were seldom used in anything other than pistol calibers, the potential accuracy issues were terrible. The Knight’s Armament early pistol suppressors, the Hushpuppy, used a number of wipes in it, to give a very compact unit. Reed told me once, “It’s very quiet, but it’s not being shot at 50 yards, it’s being shot at one to two yards, and at that range, the accuracy is not an issue, it’s not going to be deflected that much.” There certainly were uses for the wipes. The problem, of course, was that they had to be replaced on a fairly frequent basis. Military Armament Corporation used them. We, at Gemtech, got away from wipes completely. As Automatic Weapons Company, I never used wipes.

SAR: But at Gemtech, you did have one wiped can…

Dater: We had one wiped can, it was the Aurora, and it was a nine-millimeter pistol suppressor that was 3-1/4 inches long, and 1-1/8 inches in diameter, and it had wipes in it, and some grease for artificial environment technology. It did an honest 25 decibels reduction on the first shot, and deteriorated from there. It was designed, really, as a 10-to-12-shot suppressor. That’s strictly last ditch effort. It was designed to be in the pilot’s bailout bag on say, a Glock 26, which is a very compact 9mm pistol. The idea was a downed pilot, if he is discovered, can use it at basically a one-to-two-yard range, to take out a sentry, take out the person who has just discovered him, or to take out an enemy combatant, so he can steal his uniform, overcoat and his rifle. Strictly for evasion. It was not intended for backyard shooting or target shooting or anything like that. We also had a 9mm pen gun that looked like a mini-kubaton. It had no projections sticking out the side. It was four inches long, 9/16 inch in diameter, and the first run of 20 used 9x19mm. The subsequent ones use the .380 cartridge, which was probably a little better suited. It was kind of miserable to shoot. You could put it on a keychain, nobody ever spotted what it was. In fact, one of our customers, before 9/11, was going through airport security, and he threw his keys in the tray, and when he threw the keys there, he spotted his LDE-9 pen gun on the key ring. He said he had a real adrenaline issue until he got through the other side, and they handed him the tray and said, “Here’s your pocket contents, sir.” [laughter] Not a product we offer anymore. We probably built about 30 or 40 of the .380s. Our core product has been silencers. That’s what we wanted to concentrate on. When you start producing firearms themselves, then you have the excise tax issues to deal with. The way we legally avoided the 11% excise tax on those pen guns was we just sold them all out on a Form 4 with the $5 transfer tax.

SAR: Under section 4181, that if the Form 4 transfer tax is paid on the first transfer out of a manufacturer or importer, there’s no Federal Excise Tax owed, because the transfer tax is an excise tax and the first payment counts.

Dater: That’s correct. As an “Any Other Weapon,” it qualified for the $5 transfer tax. Of course, we had dealers who were really unhappy about that, because even though they didn’t have to do the fingerprint or sheriff’s signature, they didn’t get transfer approval as quickly.

SAR: Using the Form 4 front only method of transfer directly from the manufacturer can certainly save some FET money. Phil, In today’s market, there are basically four companies that come to mind as working the major contracts, the military contracts. Knights Armament clearly is the leader in government contracts on suppressors. Gemtech is certainly in there, with Surefire, and Ops Inc. as well. These four suppressor brands are the ones mostly seen overseas in our military’s hands, although there are other shops selling to government agencies.

Dater: I think these are probably the major ones. Surefire’s a relative newcomer to the suppressor field, but they have phenomenal manufacturing and marketing capability and contacts, because of their flashlights. They have a decent product. Don’t forget, however, that there are other manufacturers who have made sales to the government. It’s extremely difficult to get to that Holy Grail of a real “contract.” The true government contract is frequently the death knell for a small company, because of the strings the government puts on everything, to make sure they’re getting their money’s worth. We get primarily large “sales orders” at Gemtech as opposed to “Contracts,” and that suits us just fine. There are contracts, and there are sales orders or purchase orders, and they’re different things, and there are a lot of small companies that have received a purchase order for a production run, a small run. But a genuine military contract, well, the companies that have actually achieved that, or can afford it and handle it when it happens are few and far between. The main one that comes to mind is Knight’s Armament. They’ve been having actual honest to goodness contracts for years. The truth is that if somebody really is working in that field, the government doesn’t really appreciate them talking about it.

SAR: That brings us around to advertising suppressors. The internet has given rise to a new level of suppressor advertising and claims being made, as well as guerilla marketing being done by companies. Are you seeing innovation from some of these companies?

Dater: Not many. Look, guerilla marketing is fine as far as that goes, people need to try to build business. However, the vast majority are basically taking a product that another company has developed, and has been marketing successfully, making a few extremely minor changes to it, perhaps changes in the method of assembly or actual manufacturing, without changing the product itself very much, and putting it out under their own label. I believe that certainly in the civilian marketplace, that the ’90s was where the majority of the innovation had occurred. Innovation in anything goes in jumps. There’ll be some innovation, and then there’s a plateau that goes for a number of years, and then all of a sudden there’s an increase in innovation, and then another plateau. Now, some companies will take the innovation that others have done, and just copy it absolutely identically. Some will find very minor changes, and some will use, actually, older concepts and older designs, and make some truly major changes to it. That ramps up the next slope of innovation. Unfortunately, there are a number of companies that don’t make true innovation. Changing a thread pitch is certainly not innovation. Rather, they just copy other’s products. They may change manufacturing technique. If you find a specific design that works, and that you like, that is machined parts, and you change it to casting, that is a manufacturing innovation, but it is not a technological innovation. The same thing with taking discrete parts and merging them into a module. That, again, is a manufacturing issue. It’s not technological innovation. At best it’s flattering to be mimicked, at worst, it’s frustrating to see the level of intellectual theft a few of the newer shops are stooping to.

SAR: Phil, you have had over 30 years of time that you’ve worked intensely on designing suppressors, and to stopping hearing loss, and have led the charge in Gemtech, one of the groups that’s been at the forefront of the suppressor industry for many, many years. I’d like to explore a little bit aside from that. I know with Antares Technology that you do suppressor seminars.

Dater: I do. As Antares Technology, I’ve traveled fairly extensively in Europe, and now in Asia, examining historical suppressors, suppressors manufactured by contemporaries abroad, and I’ve done sound measurements for a number of European manufacturers under contract. I do not divulge the results that I get. If they wish to divulge them, they’re certainly free to do whatever they wish. But I have studied a lot of the historical suppressors, things not common to the community, such as Welrods, DeLisles, Chinese Type 67s and the suppressed Makarovs. (Read Doc Dater’s take on historical suppressors in the next issue of SAR.) The training seminars I have done are in sound suppression issues and hearing damage issues. I just completed teaching a two-day course at LMO in Nevada on sound suppressor design, function, hearing loss, and sound measurements; mostly government clients. My prime interest has been in sound measurements and hearing damage, but it’s awfully hard to get up and talk without going into a lot of what makes the things work. They’re not just sound catchers you buy at the auto muffler supply store. There is some real science to suppressors. I’m interested in the designs, I’m interested in teaching. I’ve accumulated 30 solid years of knowledge in suppressor design, and I enjoy sharing it.

SAR: You’ve also worked on consulting projects with a number of companies in the small arms.

Dater: We really cannot discuss it, there are confidentiality issues. I am available for consultation on firearms design and sound suppression issues. Some of my European competitors have hired me to do sound measurements so that they have measurements utilizing the US system and the US technique, and what has become a very standard procedure, so that they can compare their product with products built in the States.

SAR: Jim Ryan left Gemtech in 1998, and Mark Weiss left at the same time.

Dater: Yes. Kel Whelan came into Gemtech, I believe it was March 2000. He came over from Weapon Safety, a retail store in Bellevue, Washington. He was in charge of their Title II sales department. He saw an opportunity with our small blue sky company, and he came in to be in charge of our sales and marketing, and has done an excellent job. He’s been a wonderful addition to the company.

SAR: The trend in suppressors through the ’90s was to try and make them smaller, quieter, narrower, trying to compress them down to a certain point, and there were some issues that came out of that.

Dater: There were definitely some issues. The first thing is, the suppressor marketing people analyze the market and say, “Well, here’s what the customer wants: a silencer that works just as well as it did in the Antonio Banderas movie, ‘Assassin,’ and it is one inch in diameter, three inches long, will work on anything from .22 long rifle up through .50 Browning, and does 40 decibels reduction. That’s what the customer wants.” The customer, unfortunately, does not understand the basic laws of physics. At the moment the bullet leaves the bore, you have a certain volume of gas at a certain pressure and temperature that you have to deal with, and you have to drop your pressure one way or another. When you start making things too small, you are not dropping your pressure enough, and one of the things that happens is that the pressure stays higher in the bore for a longer period of time and cycling becomes more violent. As the cycling becomes more violent, and the cyclic rate goes up because of the violent cycling, you start beating the crap out of your gun, and you shorten the life of the weapon. Yeah, it may be smaller and lighter weight, but the reliability of the entire system is diminished. People don’t realize that suppressed weapons are a system; they’re not just an accessory you hang on like a flashlight. The other thing is that you’ve got to have some volume in the entrance chamber. There are people who have made really short cans, and they’ve taken the blast baffle and just shoved it up almost right against the muzzle. And in .223, at least, and especially in the shorter barrels, you’ve got a lot of unburned powder particles that are coming out like a plasma jet of superheated sand. Not only does it seriously sandblast the blast baffle, but it also sandblasts the muzzle. There have been some designs, the Smidget was one, that Al Paulson said at about 75 rounds, absolutely ruined the accuracy of his rifle because it eroded the muzzle. These are concerns. When you’re dealing with the pressures that you’re dealing with, you have to put in a margin of safety for your wall thickness of your tubing, so that you don’t end up rupturing the side of the suppressor and blowing stuff out the side, or breaking welds, because the entrance chambers are not designed properly. There’s a lot more to designing a suppressor than letting a monkey stick washers in a piece of pipe.

SAR: With suppressors there’s always been kind of a “spy thing.” There’s a mystique to suppressors and using these items, and I think what you’re pointing out here is that beyond all of that, there has to be sound understanding of the laws of physics, the mechanical things that are involved, the construction of all of it, and how a heat engine actually works.

Dater: You’ve got to understand thermodynamics, you’ve got to understand strength of materials, you’ve got to understand flow dynamics; all these things enter in there. This gas is a fluid that is flowing, and you’re creating turbulence and you’re trapping it here and there, and it’s going to dump heat wherever it happens to be, because it is significantly hotter than the ambient temperature of the suppressor. A lot of folks just do not understand that.

SAR: To be simplistic, exactly what does a suppressor do?

Dater: A suppressor reduces the sound of the muzzle blast, and that’s all it does. It does not eliminate the sound, but it reduces it down to where it is not perceivable from as great a distance and it helps confuse the target because the target does not hear the muzzle blast and can’t localize where it came from. Basically, the suppressor is taking the high energy that is being suddenly released at the moment the bullet uncorks from the end of the barrel, and it is releasing that slowly into the atmosphere and cooling it. The best example is one I use in my classes: You take two party balloons and blow them up. One of them you put a pin into and you let the pressure out almost instantaneously, and it makes a big pop. The other one, you undo the valve on, let the pressure out over about a two-second period, and there’s very little noise associated with it. You still dealt with the same amount of energy. It’s just you’ve done it over a different timeframe. Suppressors functionally work by reducing temperature through conduction, convection, radiation. That reduces pressure. Reduced pressure by increasing the volume, and then spread out the time curve, the time exit curve.

SAR: There’s a design goal to have a suppressor that can go in a belt-fed weapon and work for 1,000 rounds full auto, belt-fed through the gun.

Dater: The other issue you run into immediately is heat buildup. Most of the steels that are used in suppressors, whether it’s chrome-moly or whether it’s 300 series stainless, which everybody likes because it is more rust-resistant than chrome-moly, the core temperature of your suppressor goes up to about seven and a half degrees per round, up to around 1,000 degrees, and then rate of increase diminishes. But at 1,000 degrees, that steel has approximately 6% of the tensile strength that it had at room temperature. You’ve got to have a margin of safety in there when you start getting these things real hot. The other thing is on .223, and it does not happen on other calibers, but on .223, the projectile has a real large surface area and a real small mass of lead. The friction of shoving this projectile through a piece of pipe that is smaller in diameter will generate an awful lot of heat. The heating of the barrel is more from the friction than it is from the actual flame temperature. When the bore temperature gets up over about 650 or 700 degrees, and a suppressor will actually increase the rate at which the bore temperature goes up, then with the large surface area of a very highly heat-conducting metal, that is copper, and the small mass, that mass of lead in the center starts to melt, or certainly it starts to soften. Lead itself melts at around 650 degrees F depending on how it’s alloyed. When that happens, the bullet destabilizes. As soon as it leaves the muzzle, it starts to yaw more than normal. If you have a reasonable aperture through your suppressor, you’re going to start clipping baffles. Now, if you want to have a suppressor that’s going to do 500-round dumps on an M249, you’re going to need to open up the aperture throughout the entire suppressor to probably .38 caliber or better. Most people have taken it up to about three-eighths of an inch. Then it doesn’t matter if your bullet yaws pretty badly, because you still have plenty of clearance and you’re not going to clip baffles. Otherwise, I can just almost guarantee you’re going to clip the front end cap and clip some of the baffles, somewhere between 150 and 200 rounds.

SAR: Now we’re back to “You can’t repeal the laws of physics” that are involved in all of this design.

Dater: Precisely. Many of today’s designers, and that term I’m using awfully loosely, because I don’t think there are a lot of true designers out there, are just putting together things. They see a sketch from here, they see a photo from there, they say, “Any fool can do this,” and they build it. But most of them do not understand what’s going on in there. There are not a whole hell of a lot of mechanical engineers who are designing suppressors. Doug Olson is one, so is Joe Gaddini. I am being a bit severe here as there are certainly others who do understand the interior ballistics, and are in this industry.

SAR: The other guys look really cool in black ninja outfits with a suppressor when they put their pictures on YouTube.

Dater: [laughs] I won’t say anything there.

SAR: That’s OK, I will. YouTubing is hurting our war efforts and creating misconceptions on a massive level. I think the next big set of firearms restrictions is going to be blueprinted by the YouTube ninjas as the anti-firearms proponents gather intel on what is “scary” next. Phil, any message in particular you want to pass on to our readers?

Dater: Yes. Let me start by saying a little something about Sid McQueen, who was a truly innovative firearms designer. He was not exactly a suppressor designer. Most of the suppressors that he built, I designed, because I worked with him fairly closely on a number of issues. He designed the Sidewinder submachine gun, which was a truly unique weapon, and generated about a half dozen patents for him. He was always designing, always innovating. When the ’86 law passed, this was really a true disaster. Sid had a new assault rifle on the drawing board. The way Sid would design some of the stuff is he would make a drawing, then he’d cut out cardboard parts, and he’d stick pushpins in them, and see how various surfaces interacted. I’d never seen this done before. I suspect it’s probably not uncommon, but certainly that’s the way Sid did it. When the ’86 ban passed, he rolled up his designs, put them in a filing cabinet, and has not looked at them again to this day.

The 1986 ban was a true disaster for small arms development in the United States. There are several ways to develop new weapons. One is when the military says, “We need such and such, and of course we don’t want to pay for development, so we want it commercial, off the shelf.” You can design something commercial off the shelf, but unless you know you’re going to sell some of them, you can’t afford to do it. If you’re going to truly do design, you really don’t want another day job. Without being able to sell designs on the civilian market, it’s just not cost-effective to try and design things. The other way is you get some sort of a committee to design them within a major firearms manufacturing company that has the money to do it. Certainly, government does not want to fund development and when they do, they control it. The innovators out there are being shut out by the terrible maze of regulations. If we had had these restrictions in effect for the last 100 years, we would not have any of John Browning’s designs, we would not have any of Stoner’s designs, or Johnson’s designs, all of the seminal firearms of the last couple hundred years came out of individual shops in America, where people sat there and designed them in their garages, basements or kitchen tables. Look at Carbine Williams. He designed truly innovative weaponry in prison, and fortunately had a warden who realized his genius. I have gone through the licensing process for almost four decades now, and I am willing to go through the roadblocks to do my design work, but so many talented people just throw their hands in the air and go do something else. How can this be a good thing for small arms development, or for our national defense?

Something else I would like to share with the readers of SAR. A lot of the old-timers in this industry are getting up in the age group where some are not going to be here next year. Too many have already gone. We all have a defined period where we can be productive. The members of the new generation are the ones who will carry on the design work. If they’re smart, they will study and build on the past. They will look at what has been done before, listen to what has been said, and read what has been written and hopefully they have access to reference collections to study. But then they need to go out and follow their own inspiration. It does not work to just simply take someone else’s design and produce it. That’s not contributing to the art. What contributes to the art and contributes to technology is to say, “This has been done, that has been done, but I’m having an epiphany, and here’s an idea that just came to me in the shower this morning. Let’s see if this will work.” Then take the time and effort, work through these ideas, because sometimes the oddest inspiration can pay off in a good design. I truly believe the next generation will end up going beyond where we went. One can hope, one can hope.

The Interview ended as Doc Dater had just finished riding through the Thai jungle on elephant back and we were sitting on a floating restaurant barge off of the Mae Klong. As we ate sticky rice, Doc spoke of the sacrifices of the men who died on the Death Train project which was immortalized in the 1957 movie “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” We went to the camp cemetery to see the memorial. The last words of the Interview were spoken, and Doc Dater turned on his heel, and with a spring in his step he started across the oldest part of the original bridge whistling “Colonel Bogey’s March,” fulfilling a quest over half a century old, as he headed out to see the railway in the Thai jungle on the other side. -SAR

Doc Dater continues his stories and discusses his “take” on various suppressor designs in the next issue of SAR. Don’t miss it!

In late 2003, a small group of US police snipers formed a support network to address the operational equipment needs of US military snipers deployed abroad in the war on terror.

Formerly known as the Adopt A Sniper program, the effort began as a simple request for assistance among deployed friends in the National Guard and Reserve, who as civilians, also served as police officers. These police officers were employed as SWAT team snipers at home, and were assigned as snipers within the United States military. Once deployed, the citizen-soldier snipers requested assistance from their SWAT sniper friends in procuring specialized gear which was better suited for their missions and could not be supplied by their military units.

As the Global War on Terror progressed, the urban mission profiles of US police snipers and US military snipers were found to overlap. In addition, the gear and supplies needed to accomplish the two seemingly different missions were found to be virtually identical.

Due to the enormity of the commitment in Iraq and Afghanistan and the differences between the various units and staff personnel, many American snipers and designated marksmen were unable to procure the necessary equipment required to complete their missions. Snipers and designated marksmen were spending their own funds and enlisting help from their families and friends in procuring gear. Due to the cost and difficulty of procuring equipment, many servicemen often go without gear desperately needed, due to the expense associated with procuring it.

Currently, the U.S. military utilizes fully fledged sniper teams who are often fully trained and equipped, and designated marksmen of mechanized, mortar or cavalry units who, like their full fledged sniper brethren, are also assigned what is normally a sniper’s job. Unlike the more highly trained sniper, the designated marksman is often a non-infantry soldier within in the position without the training and ancillary gear normally issued to the infantry sniper.

The designated marksman position is often assigned to one or two soldiers within a platoon to provide the support of a sniper at the platoon level. Unfortunately, Stryker-equipped mechanized infantry, and other non-infantry units are often equipped with either an accurized M16 rifle, or an M14 rifle. The M14 rifle issued may be of Vietnam-era vintage, and older than the soldier’s parents. As sniper related gear is frequently not on the Modified Table of Equipment for Stryker and other non-infantry units, these marksmen are asked to complete their mission without equipment normally associated with the sniper mission, and frequently with nothing more than a rifle. Amazingly, as U.S. soldiers have always done, these soldiers are doing the job regardless of the obstacles presented.

AmericanSnipers.org organizational mission is to assist soldiers by providing the equipment and gear needed to accomplish the task. Formed in 2004, AmericanSnipers.org began with a few police officers sending gear from their own gear bags. Using contacts developed throughout the US police and military sniper communities, American Snipers.org networked with military snipers deployed abroad, obtained overseas addresses, and began sending desperately needed gear and supplies that are specifically tailored to the sniper mission. The organization has supported snipers and designated marksmen in over 425 different platoons of the United States military and has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in funds and gear for US snipers in all branches of the armed forces.

Snipers and designated marksmen are encouraged to work through their own supply systems and to make their needs known to their superiors to maintain continuity and flow of information.

However, that failing, AmericanSnipers.org has the ability to provide gear that goes directly to the military address of the sniper himself. When the sniper’s deployment ends, the sniper is asked to give the equipment to his replacement (if it is serviceable) or keep the equipment if he re-enlists and plans to return to overseas duty in a sniper billet.

The organization has grown into a full time program funded entirely by civic donations, and staffed by 12 police and U.S. military snipers from across the United States. One hundred percent of monetary donations is applied directly towards supporting Soldiers and Marines, whether by purchasing needed equipment, paying shipping charges, or conducting fund raisers for a US military sniper platoon deployed abroad. AmericanSnipers.org operates as 501(c)3 non-profit charity, allowing tax-deductible donations. No volunteer receives a salary in any form and the entire effort is conducted on the staff’s own time.

For more information, visit www.americansnipers.org.

For the last couple of years the NFATCA has had the fortune of working extremely close with the NFA Branch. Ken Houchens was graceful enough to begin the process of sharing information with us on how things actually worked within the Bureau. Thanks to Ken and the tireless efforts of Gary Schaible, we know a lot of information today that seemed a mystery five years ago. A number that I carry about and speak of is the actual number of transferable machine guns available to the NFA community. Keep in mind this was a snapshot taken at the end of last year based on the information that Ken and Gary were able to glean from the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record (NFRTR). Yes, we all know that the registry has some problems, but Gary and Ken did a lot of work to come up with this number on that particular day last year. There were, at the time, 182,619 transferable machine guns in the NFRTR. And guess what? That number isn’t growing. I am still amazed when someone asks me, “Why are prices still going up?” It is a simple law of supply and demand. With that number declining every year the value of a transferable machine gun will continue to increase in value.

In addition to this research, the Bureau has provided us with a lot of good information on just how much activity takes place in the NFA community. In 2006, ATF processed a total of 370,905 Forms including everything from a 5320.20 to a Form 10. If you look at the processed total for 2007, that number is 650,024. If you think the economy is slowing this process down, think again. The NFA Branch has been busier in the last year than they have in the history of the Branch. Keep in mind that this number represents all Forms processing that must take place to keep track of any NFA weapon.

The NFA Branch has undergone a complete upheaval in everything from employees, to training, to management to the total process in its operations. Nothing short of a miracle could have prompted Ken Houchens to stand in front of the entire import community and show the rank and file that the average transfer time for a Form 3 was 5 days and the average time for a Form 4 was 22 days. Compared to results from 5 years ago this progress is simply staggering. However, please note that these times represent the time of actual processing at the Branch. It does not include time in the mail, check clearing, routing between agencies, FBI fingerprint processing, security/background checks, etc. These other activities outside the branch must be considered when looking at the total time frame of a transfer. Thus, a Form 4 transfer will take an average of 5-6 weeks to work its way through the system though the Branch time takes 3 weeks. This is still an extraordinary improvement from the 4-7 months it used to take.

In addition to the above numbers, in 2007, the NFA Branch processed a total of 21,949 Form 4s, or an average of 133 Form 4s per day. The Branch also processed some 50,082 Form 3s for an average of 304 Form 3s per day. Combine all the rest of the forms that the Branch processed in 2007 and you will find that the Branch processed an average of 3,940 forms per day, assuming a work available load of 165 days per year. Keep in mind that many of the examiners have worked weekends and a ton of extra hours to try and get the trade in a position where it didn’t take 10 months to get a transfer completed. I know we all recognize that the entire Branch has done a great job.

With the change in the Branch Chief, the NFATCA will be working extremely close with all personnel to make certain that we continue to hold up our end on submitting clean forms. In the past we have written several articles on the kinds of mistakes we have made that slowed down the processing time. For 2007, the winner of the bad habits for submission awards were poorly hand written forms and bad checks. Let’s all try and do our part and keep the input side of forms processing clean in ’08 and keep this magnificent process running like the clockwork it has been during the last year.

There is a lot of information on the numbers that we simply don’t have the time and space to share in this article but as future articles come around we’ll share as much of that current information as possible.

The NFATCA is making constant and consistent giant steps forward for the betterment of the NFA community. But our strength lies in our numbers and we need your support. Log on to www.NFATCA.org and see for yourself and join us in our efforts.

Command Arms Accessories Introduces Two New Forward Grip and Bipod Combinations

Command Arms Accessories (CAA) the manufacturer of unique and innovative weapon accessories is proud to introduce two new Forward Grip and Bipod Combinations. The Pod Grip, a molded grip and stable bipod combination, offers improved muzzle control and increased accuracy. Manufactured from high-density polymer, it has four finger grooves for a comfortable and secure grip. The push button instantaneously releases the bipod legs allowing the operator to immediately move from the CQB position to the fighting prone position. The bipod feet are serrated for improved gripping. The rail mounting surface of the grip/bipod has two location lugs which lock into the Picatinny rail eliminating any front to rear movement on the rail. Quick release and installation on the rail is accomplished with a spring loaded rail clamp and thumbnut. The second model is the Pivoting Pod Grip and has all of the features of the Pod Grip plus the additional features of pivoting up to 60 degrees off center in both directions (120 degrees total), for acquiring and maintaining the sight picture. The bipod legs re-center automatically once released from the ground for instant weapon repositioning. A unique joint in the grip base allows the operator to correctly position the rifle straight up and down even if the bipod legs are on an uneven surface. The Pod Grip and Pivot Pod Grip are made of super tough polymer with a hard black anodized stainless steel mechanism for use in wet, humid, or salt-water conditions. Tough polymer legs are reinforced with a 1.2mm steel insert heat treated to 48 Rockwell for extra strength. An optional ambidextrous pressure switch mount (PGS) is also available. These new products as well as all other CCA accessories come with a Lifetime Warranty. For more information please contact Command Arms Accessories, Dept. SAR, 76 Vincent Circle, Ivyland, PA 18974. Phone: (267) 803-1518. Fax: (267) 803-1002. Website: www.commandarms.com.

Samson Manufacturing Introduces Krinkov Tactical Rail

Samson Manufacturing makes a full line of tactical rails for just about any tactical rifle. It has now expanded its line of rails to include a very innovative 4-sided rail for the diminutive Krinkov series of AK rifles. The new rail system requires no gunsmithing other than removing the weapon’s existing wooden upper and lower handguard. The wood upper handguard is removed from the gas tube and then the tube is replaced. The rail features a barrel clamp that fastens around the barrel just forward of the rear trunnion. The two-piece rail system then fastens to the barrel clamp with four socket head screws for a very secure fit. It has four 1913-Picatinny Mil-Spec rails located on top, both sides and the bottom. The top rail features a clearance slot so that iron sights can still be used. The bottom rail and side rail have clearance cuts for either side or bottom folding stocks. The new rail system allows the addition of optics, lights, lasers and vertical grips (like the excellent new TangoDown Vertical “Stubby” grip shown in the photo). Two models of the Krinkov rail are available; the Model 2 for the Yugoslavian M92 and the Model 3 for the Bulgarian rifles. These, like all of Samson’s other rails, are made from 6061 T6 billet aluminum alloy for light weight and rugged strength. They also feature a black anodized finish and laser-etched T-slot letters and numbers. This new rail is added to a long list of existing rail systems and accessories for most tactical rifles as well as the new SIG 556. For more information please contact them at Samson Manufacturing Corporation, Dept. SAR, 110 Christian Lane, Whately, MA 01373. Phone: (413) 665-1162. Fax: (413) 665-1163. Website: www.samson-mfg.com. TangoDown products can be located at TangoDown, Dept. SAR, 1588 Arrow Highway, Unit F, La Verne, CA 91750. Phone: (909) 392-4757. Fax: (909) 392-4802. Website: www.tangodown.com.

PentagonLight Adds New MOLLE Light Forest

PentagonLight has expanded their highly successful MOLLE Light family with the introduction of their new MOLLE Light Forest. Reminiscent of the widely issued WWII TL 122 vintage military flashlight, the MOLLE Light is an up-to-date version and the smallest high-power anglehead LED flashlight available in the market today. Its small size fits through PALs webbing for secured hands-free attachment on MOLLE vests and compatible gear. The rotating metal clip provides attachment options to numerous other locations. Powered by a single AA battery, this 40-lumen white light has a runtime of up to 3 hours. A green filter is stowed in the base for changing the beam color to green for use as a hunter safety light, and is suitable for outdoorsman/campers without spooking wildlife. The filtered green beam also produces minimal signature to night vision goggles and devices. A top mounted button on/off switch allows operation without removing from webbing. A miniature magnetic compass in the tail-cap serves as a navigation aid. With this new addition, the MOLLE Light has furthered itself as an icon of compact personal flashlights. For more product information on MOLLE Light Forest and other advanced illumination tools please contact PentagonLight, Dept. SAR, 151 Mitchell Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94080. Phone: (650) 877-1555. Fax: (650) 877-9555. Their website is www.pentagonlight.com.

Hardigg Introduces HK UMP Storm Case

Hardigg now has a Storm Case made especially for the Heckler & Koch UMP submachine gun. The new case measures 20×14.6×5.8 inches and looks discreetly like a hard computer briefcase. The case is made from injection molded HPX resin and features easy opening “Press & Pull” latches. It also features a soft grip carry handle, lockable padlock hasps and a pressure release valve. On the inside, the watertight case has custom foam that is cut out for the UMP with its stock folded and an extra magazine. There is a removable piece of foam to accommodate a gun with attached optics. A removable upper foam tray reveals a bottom layer of foam that can store up to five magazines or accessories. It also comes with a padded shoulder strap and is available in either black or olive drab. Storm Cases offer more than just a very durable watertight, padlockable made in the USA case, they also are unconditionally guaranteed for life. For more information on this as well as their full line of weapon, industrial and custom made cases, please contact them at Hardigg Storm Case, Dept. SAR, P.O. Box 201, South Deerfield, MA 01373. Phone: (413) 665-2163. Fax: (413) 665-8330. Website: www.hardigg.com.

New A2 Back Up Iron Sight from GG&G

Improved and redesigned for 2008, the GG&G A2 Back Up Iron Sight (BUIS) provides the operator with an easy-to-install and easy-to-operate flip-up rear sight and includes the all important locking detent. Improvements include a more tactile and ergonomic windage knob, a countersunk crossbolt and more streamlined body. The GG&G A2 BUIS is always at the tactical ready once placed in the up position. The sight cannot be folded down without depressing the spring assisted detent release button located on the left side of the sight base. This totally eliminates the possibility of accidentally lowering the sight. All of these enhanced benefits improve the A2 BUIS and are offered without additional cost. The new sight can be used as a co-witness iron sight with most red dot sighting systems, as a stand-alone sight or in conjunction with the GG&G F.I.R.E. rails. The sight weighs just slightly over 2 ounces and features the standard military A2 style double peep aperture. The mount body and sight stem are manufactured from billet 6061 T6 aluminum alloy and Type III hard coat anodized in a non-reflective mil-spec finish to provide combat durability. All steel components are black manganese phosphated per mil-spec. As an option, the sight can be ordered with the XS same plane aperture or the Trijicon tritium aperture installed. For more information on this as well as an extensive line of fine firearm accessories please contact GG&G, Dept. SAR, 3602 East 42nd Stravenue, Tucson, AZ 85713. Phone: (520) 748-7167. Fax: (520) 748-7583. Website: www.gggaz.com.

The “Program Executive Office (PEO) Soldier” is the over arching US Army organization responsible for the development, procurement, fielding and sustainment of nearly everything the soldier wears or carries. PEO Soldier at each AUSA event shows off its accomplishments in small arms, accessories and related individual and crew served weaponry within its expansive and well-staffed booth. The 2007 AUSA Annual Meeting exhibit was no exception. The PM for Soldier Weapons, Colonel Carl Lipsit, was there again and ready to discuss programs and US Army initiatives and objectives, and to provide this snapshot of ongoing efforts.

XM320 Grenade
Launcher Module (GLM)

The planned one-to-one replacement for the aging M203, the XM320 GLM, is in final testing to address numerous Army requested changes deemed advantageous before fielding. The contract for this more or less Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) item was awarded to Heckler & Koch in 2005. First fielding is planned for late fiscal year 2008 and will begin with the Army’s Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs). The US Army plans to procure upwards of 60,000 M320s over the next 5 years. Final operational testing includes evaluation of the day/night sight (DNS) mounting bracket and remote activation switch. A commercial hand-held miniature laser range finder will also be procured and issued with the GLM to allow for range determination to the target, the most common reason for grenadiers missing targets with low velocity 40x46mm ordnance at ranges beyond 150 meters. The M320 will provide the war fighter with new capabilities to include modular on or off the weapon use, night fire capability and first round on target accuracy within 5 meters.

M110 SASS

The 7.62x51mm NATO Semi-Automatic Sniper System (SASS), developed for the US Army from the COTS Knight’s Armament SR-25/MK11 sniper rifle systems, has completed all testing, is in production, and by the time this article is published will have been fielded with various US Army units to include US Army National Guard units from New York. The M110 SASS brings back to the regular Army the availability of aimed and accurate .30 caliber semi-automatic rifle fire that was lost when the bolt-action US M24 Sniper Rifle fully replaced the semi-automatic Vietnam era M21. Old lessons relearned again. When you find an auto-loading sniper rifle like the M110 SASS that can deliver accuracy on par or better than a bolt-action rifle, and with that it brings the ability for rapid multiple shot/target engagement capability, a capability always appreciated in the fast moving urban combat environment, keep a place for such a “tool’ in your infantry tool box.

XM26 MASS

As has been reported in detail in a recent SAR issue, the XM26 Modular Accessory Shotgun System (MASS) has been in development for nearly 10 years. The US Army is now close to fully fielding the final weapon and has been working on various improvements to the design. This includes a new liquid (oil) hydraulic M4-style butt stock to reduce felt recoil from the relatively light weight shotgun in the stand-alone mode. 3-round and 5-round box magazines will be available for the M26 to suit the needs of both weapon mounted and stand-alone use.

M2HB QCB

PM Soldier Weapons will have released a solicitation for a Quick Change Barrel (QCB) version of the venerable M2HB heavy machine gun before this article is in print. The requirement will be for upgrades to existing guns to be installed at Anniston Army depot and then to purchase these upgrades on new guns at a later time. This requested package, available for some years from various vendors as COTS items, includes the quick-change barrel, fixed headspace and timing, new safety and an improved blank firing adapter and flash hider.

Breaking News in US Weapons Procurement: Information that Shook Up the Small Arms Community

The last several years have been “interesting” in the small arms community, as various companies jockeyed to present replacements for our legacy system; the venerable M16/M4 rifle. At this AUSA meeting, information was available that rocked the community.

Colonel Lipsit provided some insight into the then ongoing Extreme Dust Environment testing that was being conducted at Aberdeen Proving Ground in 2007. The test included the standard issue M4 Carbine (from US Army stock), the new SCAR-L Standard Carbine (prototype – LRIP design status), the HK416 Carbine (new production) and the XM8 Baseline Carbine (Spiral 3 prototypes from US Army stores). The M4 was tested with standard USGI aluminum magazines, the HK416 and SCAR-L with the vendor provided magazines and the XM8 with the polymer XM8/G36 magazine that is unique to that system. This test was intended to ascertain the performance of the US M4 Carbine in a severe dust/sand environment with various lubrication and cleaning methods/intervals applied. This is the third such test conducted on the M4 since 2006.

During the test, the weapons and test ammunition loaded in magazines and placed in magazine pouches, were “conditioned” in the dynamic dust chamber for 30 minutes. If ejection port covers were present on the weapons (M4 and HK416 only), they were closed and the bores sealed with shoot-through dust caps, SOP for soldiers in such environments. 120 rounds were then fired through each sample. The weapons were then re-exposed in the chamber again and another 120 rounds fired. At 600 round intervals the weapons were field stripped and wiped down. Lubrication was applied as per the manufacturers established guidelines for this test. At 1,200 rounds, the weapons were thoroughly cleaned. Testing continued to 6,000 rounds on each sample, the 6,000 round figure based upon the expected barrel and bolt service life as listed in the US military M4 specification document.

This testing, started in September 2007, was conducted after pressure was applied by Congress, primarily from the office of US Senator Tom Coburn, a hard charging Republican from Oklahoma and a long-time supporter of the US ground-pounder. Senator Coburn, and his equally engaged staff, orchestrated a delay in the confirmation of the then pending and now current Secretary of the Army, the Honorable Peter Geren, during the summer months of 2007. The purpose of this delay was to force the Army to evaluate the reliability of the US M4 Carbine against select op-rod 5.56mm carbines in a harsh dust/sand environment replicating as close as possible conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even special fine silicon based sand of the light powdery nature found in the Arabian Gulf was obtained for this assessment. An earlier and similar test at Aberdeen in January 2007 of new M4s, M16A2s and M249s in this dust/sand environment, conducted without lubrication in hopes that reliability would increase, ended with poor results for the M4; far below what had been expected, with a stoppage occurring on average once in every six rounds fired. A second similar test conducted by the Army in May 2007 ended with an average stoppage rate of one in 88 rounds fired. This latest 2007 dust/sand test was conducted using heavy lubrication, and as a result of Congressional involvement and pressure, included three modern carbine systems each of which employs an operating rod-style gas system.

Colonel Lipsit was quick to remind this writer that there was no requirement from the User Proponent, that being the US Army Infantry Center at Fort Benning, for a replacement to the M4 at this time. Therefore this test was for data collection only for review by the US Army in its current planning for what might one day replace the current M4 Carbine when the sole source contract to Colt Defense ends in June 2009.

First Formal US Army Test of Op Rod Carbines

With the help of experts in the community, Congress mandated that in addition to testing the baseline US M4 Carbine that this assessment would also include three other systems that stand out from the ever increasing field of more than 15 commercially available op rod ARs. These three carbines were picked because they are or were recently being considered for US fielding, or are actually blooding bad guys in combat by an elite assortment of US Government organizations as is the case with the highly regarded HK416. Already fielded with select US Special Operations Forces, the HK416 Enhanced Carbine has exceeded expectations of the elite user community that have adopted it to replace M4s and MK18 CQBRs. As has been reported in the “Army Times” over the last 16 months every tier one (classified) unit within the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has tested, fielded and continues to employ the HK416 today.

Even the US Army’s own relatively new and mostly unknown Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG) selected and fielded the HK416 in 2005 but ironically has been recently told by US Army leadership that its use of the HK416, a “non-standard” carbine, creates too many questions and requests from conventional units as to why the rest of the US Army cannot benefit from the availability of superior commercial off-the-shelf op rod carbines. They were then directed to turn them in. The removal of the 416s from the AWG began in November 2007 and will likely have been completed by the time this article goes to print. AWG sources reported that even after more than 2 years of hard training and combat use, not a single part was replaced in any HK416. Because M4s are hard to come by at the moment, the AWG received FN M16 lowers (with the M16 engraving milled off and M4 over stamped) with M4 upper receivers fitted to them. The 416s were sent to the depot; their fate unclear. Superior carbines as proven by other units, paid for by the US taxpayer, cherished by highly experienced and decorated AWG unit members, removed from a highly regarded operational unit and replaced by the very weapon they elected not to field to begin with.

SCAR Lights Up the Field

The second entry within this dust test is the new SCAR (Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle) being developed under contract for the USSOCOM by FNH USA, a regular and proud exhibitor at the AUSA Annual Meeting. Like the HK416, the SCAR family of rifles and carbines was developed as a result of user dissatisfaction with the documented poor performance and limitations of the 40+ year old M16/M4 platform when used hard in torturous SOF environments and on SOCOM missions. Like HK416, SCAR was developed from day one with first-hand user input and has been jointly and exhaustively tested by the expected end users, to include US Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force Special Operators in environments that closely replicate those in which the system will actually be deployed. The SCAR also uses an operating rod-style gas system and thus does away with the hollow gas tube and associated carbon fouling and heat transfer issues that have plagued the M16 and M4 with their direct gas system arrangements. It also boasts barrel life expectations of 35,000 rounds or greater and 100,000 round weapon service life, according to company and USSOCOM sources.

Dust off your XM8s

The third candidate (the word candidate may be misleading as the US Army is careful to point out this extreme dust/sand test was for data collection only. The final results will be reported to the US Army Infantry Center and be included in their ongoing Capabilities Based Assessment (CBA) intended to clarify and chart the US Army’s future path or plan for future small arms, due sometime before 2010) was the now defunct, and once US Army sweetheart, polymer based XM8. Once again operating with a piston rod, or operating rod gas system, the XM8 in its final official Spiral 3 configuration set a high water mark during reliability and environmental testing by the US Army in 2005 by achieving an impressive 18,000 round MRBEFF (Mean Rounds Between Essential Function Failure) performance rating (in layman’s terms, zero stoppages or parts failures in 18,000 rounds fired). No other official developmental carbine/rifle in the reported recent history of US Army testing has fared that well, according to sources within the test agencies.

Historical Significance

Four very different weapons in the first direct comparison test by the US Army in decades. The US M4; a combat proven and highly regarded variant of the original 1960s-era ArmaLite AR-15, first officially fielded with US forces in 1964, with its aluminum two part upper and lower receiver, add-on rail system and direct gas tube-style operating system. The HK416; a highly product improved hybrid of the famous ArmaLite platform, also sporting the two-piece forged aircraft-grade aluminum receiver design and using the proven pusher rod gas system first employed by its maker in the polymer G36 rifle in 1995, and with many of the same advantages and disadvantages of the Stoner design from which the weapon was reverse engineered. Then, the shinning star of the Tampa-based US Special Operations Command; the all business SCAR-L (L for “Light” for those versions chambered for the 5.56x45mm NATO cartridge). With its one-piece extruded aluminum upper receiver with polymer lower receiver and user exchangeable barrels, the SCAR represents a unique departure for a US military rifle in that is shares up to 82% parts commonality with its big brother SCAR-H (H for “Heavy” or caliber 7.62x51mm NATO), and the many modular variants in the SCAR family, to include the short-barreled “CQC” (Close Quarters Combat), “S” (Standard Carbine) and “SV” (Sniper Variant) models. All basically the same caliber-specific platform, but with different interchangeable parts available for the user to configure the weapon he or she needs for today’s mission. Finally, the son of G36: the XM8. Arguably the most controversial rifle since the original AR-15 was introduced into the US military in the 1960s due to the unconventional way in which it was developed by the US Army and the fierce resistance from within the US Army itself, and the small arms industry, to its possible procurement from a foreign vendor without a US production plant and one that is not part of the existing US Small Arms Industrial Base. The mere thought of the US fielding a replacement to the US M4 and M16 without full and open competition, and direct comparative testing with other available systems, doomed the XM8 from the very start. An all polymer rifle save the barrel, bolt and select internal parts with a separate upper and lower receiver arrangement, using a polymer magazine and offering the user a multitude of possible variants mostly configurable in the field, the XM8 offers some notable advancements in ergonomics, user exchangeable stock options galore and a very innovative multi-function sighting device combining all of the needed “aimers” (red dot reflex sight and IR laser aimer and illuminator), and all zeroed in one single and simple operation.

Early Results

While the US Army’s Carbine Severe Dust Tests had just been completed and the final report still being written at the time of writing, early intel indicates that all three op rod carbines finished far ahead of the M4 for reliability in this environment. Sources report that the XM8 performed best amongst this pack with one stoppage every 472 rounds. The XM8 was followed by the SCAR-L with one stoppage every 265 rounds and then HK416 with one stoppage every 257 rounds. The M4’s performance was one stoppage every 68 rounds, just barely 2 magazines fired without incident, and a reliability rate almost 7 times worse than that of the XM8 under identical test conditions and protocol, almost 4 times worse than the SCAR-L and HK416. Reliable sources within the community reported that an adjustment to the lubrication schedule for the SCAR-L was required early on in the test, that one of the ten HK416 test samples performed poorly having most of the recorded stoppages and thus lowering the overall score of the weapon system (had this one sample performed like the others it would have finished at the top of the pack) and numerous barrels were replaced on the M4s to complete the 6,000 round test. When presented with these reliability numbers the Army was quick to down play the significance of the results, stating that these tests were conducted in extreme conditions that did not address “reliability in typical operational conditions” and that “everybody in the Army has high confidence in their weapon.” However, this is not what knowledgeable users are saying to this author and SAR.

Easy Answer? Not So.

From all of this modern carbine/rifle technology to choose from, developed at a cost to the US taxpayer of reportedly $70M or more ($20M SCAR, $50M XM8, zero dollars for HK416), surely the US Army could select the best available carbine for our troops and get that to the field before the shooting is over. They could but one problem remains: there is no requirement for a new carbine, or even meaningful incremental carbine enhancements. The term incremental can be defined as the 75% or “90% solution” versus the fanciful so-called “leap ahead” or “100% solution” we in this country too often pursue while all but ignoring available and affordable incremental upgrades and enhancements offered off-the-shelf by industry. This writer is not talking about accessorizing existing platforms, such as the addition of different butt stocks, rail systems, sights and the like. We have done that with some success over the years with flat top receivers and modular rail systems. While this enhances the use of the weapon for the operator, it does nothing to address the basic function or performance of the operating system, weapon integrity, function, safety and/or operator upkeep.

While the users on the ground surely would welcome a new carbine with the enhanced capabilities now and very soon to be in use in US Special Operations units, the official procurement process starts with a properly formulated and approved Requirements Document. In the US Army this begins within the lead proponent for small arms, the US Army Infantry Center at Fort Benning, Georgia. The USAIC, as mentioned earlier, is in the throngs of their CBA to determine where they want to be in 5-10 years with US Army small arms. Shall they field a new conventional carbine in 5.56mm? Should they leverage the polymer or caseless technology being explored in the current JSSAP LSAT program? Should the new suite of US Army small arms include air-bursting, or counter defilade technology, a technology that the US Army has invested deeply in over the past years to the tune of more than $377 million for the OICW/XM25 and XM307 Advanced Crew Served Weapon programs?

Strategic Pause?

Thus, without a formal requirement for anything new, the US Army continues to procure M4 Carbines and plans to do so up until at least June 2009 when the current M4 contract expires, at the tune of up to $375 million on a sole source basis without evaluating other current COTS weapons. The US Army states clearly that the M4 meets current US Army carbine specifications; and it does. There is no argument to that point. Colt is building for the US Army the carbine they have asked for and has on multiple occasions proffered to the Army various enhancements to the weapon, most of which were not accepted as they were not required in the weapon specs. However those specifications were written more than two decades ago based on the then current performance of the M16A1/A2, long before the advent of the modern op rod AR, the unibody extruded aluminum receiver of the SCAR, or the highly modular and user configurable design of a modern weapon like the XM8.

The Smoking Gun: Soldier Perspectives on Small Arms in Combat

One has to question the wisdom of not leveraging the incremental improvements that the current modern crop of assault rifles offers the end user. This point is especially driven home when one reads the US Army sponsored, Center for Naval Analysis conducted survey of 2,600 soldiers that had returned within the previous 12 months from Afghanistan and Iraq and had engaged in a firefight using the M9, M4, M16 (A2 or A4), or M249 during their last deployment. While the majority (75%) expressed overall satisfaction with their current rifle or carbine, few had ever seen and literally none have used a SCAR-L, XM8 or the HK416 or anything of a more recent design. Their frame of reference is thus limited to only what they know and have seen first hand. Given a shorter and lighter carbine with adjustable length butt stock versus the longer, heavier M16 with fixed stock; who would not welcome that, especially when fighting from vehicles and in the urban environment? Surely then the M4 would get high marks when that question is asked; which do you like better? The real test would be to offer the soldier a look at and chance to handle the more modern COTS carbines developed in the past 10 years like those described above. Surely the results of such a survey would be far different. Why not field one or more of these proven, modern carbines in a combat unit, say to a company or battalion as we have done with the Land Warrior ensemble, and then let them tell Army leadership where to spend our precious small arms procurement dollars?

What has not been widely reported from this US Army sponsored study is that, quoting from page 17 of this report, the “Percentage of soldiers who report experiencing a stoppage while engaging the enemy” was 19% for both the M16 and M4 (26% and 30% for the M9 and M249 respectively). The report goes on to state that, “A large impact means the soldier was unable to engage the target with that weapon during a significant portion of or the entire firefight after performing immediate or remedial action to clear the stoppage” (author’s emphasis added). 18% of these same soldiers stated that they were unable to clear that stoppage and get the weapon running again during the course of that engagement with the M4, 20% with the M16, 38% with the M9 and an astonishing 41% with the M249. Nearly one fifth to almost one half of the unit was “out of the fight” due to serious malfunctions in their basic weapon. These are the statistics taken right from the US Army’s own report. When questioned, US Army officials were quick to blame poor soldier maintenance for the stoppages. Sadly, we have seen this tactic used before with early AR-15s in Vietnam and more recently with the British Marines and their SA80A2’s in Operation Iraqi Freedom; blaming the war fighter for the inherent shortcomings of the weapon system.

One can then see a direct correlation between operational reports from these 494 combat soldiers surveyed who reported poor reliability to the extent of complete failure to operate during the heat of battle and the recent poor results of the same weapons in the Extreme Sand/Dust Tests described above, results that some in the Army are saying are acceptable. It is certain that those 494 brave men and women were not so satisfied with the weapon when it was useless in their hands with the enemy all around.

One then must ask why our most elite units are not using the same standard issue rifles or carbines as used by our conventional forces and instead have sought out, tested, and have fielded with great success weapons like HK416, and soon SCAR, the USSOCOM MK46 and MK48 machine guns, the MK43, and every type of handgun imaginable except the US M9?

Not the Last Word

As reported last year by this writer, this subject is far from over. Congress is involved and is drafting new legislation to persuade the US Army to consider incremental and commercially available small arms, and ammunition enhancements, both of which can and would make a big difference on the battlefield for the solider, every solider, not just our most elite warriors. In fact, on page 29 of the CNA survey referenced above, and I quote, “Twenty-six percent of M9 users requested higher caliber ammunition and increased stopping power. M4 and M16 users echoed this recommendation. When speaking to experts and soldiers on site, many commented on the limited ability to effectively stop targets, saying that those personnel targets who were shot multiple times were still able to continue pursuit” (author’s emphasis added). Soldiers are asking for more reliable weapons and more capable, more lethal bullets and ammunition yet we continue to buy thousands more of the same small arms and millions more of the same cartridges to feed them. Is it a matter of money? Is it simply too expensive to field enhanced small arms and ammunition?

The Flawed Cost Argument

The current unit costs on the current contract for carbines, and the wealth of defense spending on programs like the Joint Strike Fighter ($4.2 billion) for R&D alone, or the Army Future Combat System (FCS) which in the current defense budget received $3.2 billion for R&D, places the modern and advantageous weapons like HK416 and SCAR, and enhanced ammunition types like improved “blind to barrier” bullets and medium caliber rifle cartridges, well within reach for all US military personnel. For the $430 million dollars spent since 1980 on so-called “leap ahead” small arms programs, from which no single weapon or new round of ammunition has been fielded, we could have fielded more than a quarter million new 5.56mm or 7.62mm SCAR rifles at $1,800 each, or 358,000 new XM8s or HK416s in the more lethal 6.8x43mm SPC caliber at around $1,200 a pop. (For comparison, the 2005 contract price for an M4 was $980, $836 in 2007). However the internal bureaucracy and strong institutional resistance to field something new in the way of a modern carbine and/or rifle, anything new that is available today not in 2010 or beyond, and has been proven by other users (and in the Army’s own tests) to be incrementally better and easily integrated into the forward deployed units, is both hugely perplexing and mind numbing to this writer and many others in the community.

The Bottom Line

There should not be a single day that any US serviceman or servicewoman steps off a truck, aircraft or ship without the very best small arms technology America can provide. That technology exists today. The funds for its purchase, fielding and sustainment are obviously available and are being spent, but on decades old technology. This issue is critically important as we lose personnel in combat every single day and any advantage, even one that is ever so minor, may improve the odds of both user survival and ultimately mission success. Our weapons should be the most reliable, hard hitting and user friendly weapons on the face of this round globe yet they are not, and we should be ashamed as a result. Our fleet of small arms is old and showing their age.

Aging Fleet of Old Warriors

The average age of our eight top “work horse” weapons from the M9 to the MK19 is 33 years, 25 years if you remove the oldest- the M2HB- 23 years without the M2HB and M203 and still 21 years old with the oldest three removed from the average. If our computers, vehicles, night fighting capability, body armor, rations or medical equipment were from the same era as that of our most recently adopted small arms (mid-1980s), our forces would be hard pressed to perform on today’s modern battlefield as they have so stunningly performed during OEF/OIF. With a few exceptions, such as the new M110 SASS or M107 sniper systems, we have not fielded any new small arms designs since the mid 1980s. Again, not just for our most elite warriors in units that we do not discuss in print, but for every Soldier, Airman, Marine, Seaman, Coastguardsman and Special Operator. Anything less is a sad compromise – a compromise that we are making today and a compromise that costs lives.

The German Success Story

Even the German military, who’s annual defense budget spending figure of EUR 29.31 billion (GDP 1.3%) is far below that of the US ($42.8 billion) and below many neighboring countries in Europe (GDP 2.0%) have since 1995 replaced nearly every one of their small arms, have added numerous new calibers and capabilities they had not possessed previously. Because of this successful incremental fielding approach, the German military has the most capable set of military small arms in the free world today. In new improved small arms they have fielded no less that six since 1995 to include handguns, rifles/carbines and sniper rifles, and are working on at least three more that this writer is aware of, a new 4.6mm handgun, lightweight 7.62mm machine gun and improved .50 caliber heavy machine gun. Nine new capabilities have been added to the German small arms arsenal also since 1995 and include the first general-issue Personal Defense Weapon within NATO, a 5.56mm LMG, .300 Win Mag and .50 BMG sniper rifles and two 40mm grenade launchers, both under barrel and 40x53mm belt-fed versions. No less than six new calibers have also been fielded within the German military in the last 10 years to include brand new high performance cartridges like the 4.6x30mm PDW round. While the Germans continue to investigate advanced technology with R&D funding, they have not forgotten their soldiers fighting on today’s battlefields and have applied the “90% solution” by fielding incrementally superior small arms and capabilities. The same can be said to a lesser degree for other NATO countries like Britain, Spain, Norway, Canada and others. Let us also not forget the substantial efforts of potential threat countries as well in their development and fielding of incrementally superior small arms.

Officially, the conventional side of the US Army has not tested a single one of these COTS German weapons for possible US adoption, not one, yet many (no less than four) are in use by select US Special Operations units over those standard US issue weapons available from US military stores and which are in fact comparable in cost or less expensive than the US equivalent.

The Consequences of Failing to Act

A highly decorated US Army Special Forces senior NCO recently stated as part of this debate, “Most of the boots on the ground in OEF/OIF will be the first to tell you that the enemy has no respect for our war fighters in a head-to-head confrontation while maneuvering with his individual weapon (M16/M4). An enemy who does not respect a Soldier’s ability to deliver pain or death will always bring the fight directly to the Soldier, at belt buckle distance.”

We would like to urge everyone to get involved in this, and help our service members to get the best weapons possible. They deserve our united support. Write your elected officials on Capitol Hill. Write the US Army and Defense Department leadership. Demand that we first test then field the best commercially available weapons and ammunition that industry offers today to all of our war fighters and that we do it now, not 5-10 years down the road.

By David Gaboury

Anyone who knows the name Uzi Gal recognizes him as the designer of the UZI submachine gun. Many people also know he designed the semiautomatic UZI carbine that was sold in the United States by Action Arms from 1980 until 1989. But those are just two projects from a lifetime devoted to firearms design. During the 25 years he lived in the United States, Gal did consulting work for many firearms manufacturers, including Colt, Ruger and Knights Armament. His final design project was a semiautomatic pistol and he worked on it until illness forced him to stop shortly before he died.

Uzi Gal moved to the United States in 1976 and began working under contract for Action Manufacturing. He set up his own business called Gal-Tech and obtained an FFL and SOT. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Gal was extremely interested in the new crop of semiautomatic pistols appearing on the market. An examination of his FFL logbook shows that he purchased many 9mm and .40 S&W pistols. He examined those guns carefully; weighing, measuring and analyzing each of the gun’s components. Ergonomics and reliability were paramount to Gal and he felt that no one had achieved the perfect combination. The solution to this problem was to design a pistol himself. His goal was not to come up with a revolutionary new design but to put together incremental improvements across several key design areas. He believed that by meticulously inspecting the strengths and weaknesses of the many pistols on the market and applying his own insights learned through years of design and combat experience, he could design a weapon that was friendlier to the casual as well as the professional shooter. Gal believed that soldiers could use a poorly designed gun after extensive training, but an infrequently used self-defense pistol must have an optimal design to keep the casual shooter from fumbling with it. That was the pistol he wanted to design. While such a pistol would be ideal for the civilian market, Gal also knew it would give an edge to law enforcement and military users and he hoped for widespread use of the weapon.

By 1997, Gal had a Technical Data Package (TDP) assembled for his new pistol and he engaged a group of investors to fund his project. Initially the investors created an Israeli based company with the intention of manufacturing the pistol in Israel and exporting it to the U.S. and other parts of the world. It was hoped that IMI could be contracted do the manufacturing of the pistol and negotiations went on for a time, but IMI eventually turned down the project. They were already working on a new pistol that eventually became the Jericho (Baby Eagle). Gal considered working with Diemaco, the Canadian company he worked with on his model 201 submachine gun (which became the Ruger MP9), but he wanted to avoid the inherent problems of shipping prototype pistols back and forth across the border. Finally, Gal and the investors reached a deal with Reed Knight at Knight’s Armament Company (KAC) to use their facilities to build the pistol prototypes and work on the pistol could now begin.

Technical Details

Uzi Gal’s design was for a mid-sized 9mm pistol built on a machined aluminum frame. He planned to make a polymer frame at some point but not until the aluminum framed pistol was complete and on the market. Much of his design focused on the features Gal thought were essential to reliable use in real-life defensive situations; including the placement of all control levers, the ergonomics of the grips and the overall reliability of the pistol. Most of the major parts for the prototypes were made at KAC, while small parts such as pins, buffers, springs and screws were purchased from standard U.S. suppliers. Two components required external vendors: the slide and the barrel. The machined steel slide was rough formed by one of the vendors, finished machined by KAC, and then heat treated and nitrided by another vendor. On the prototypes, the heat treat and nitriding stress relieved the heavily machined slide and caused it to warp. The problem would have to be resolved on production guns.

The barrel, designed by Gal, was produced by Lothar Walther and was the heart of the pistol. It contained both the locking lugs, which locked the barrel to the slide, and the cam lug. The cam lug ran in a separate piece under the barrel called the cam pathway, which caused the barrel to rotate and separate from the slide. Gal was very protective of these features, and vendors were never provided any information about the lugs that would allow them to understand how the pistol worked. Lothar Walther was provided a different print of the barrel that had extra material where the locking lugs and cam lug would later be machined out at KAC. Both 1:10 and 1:16 twist barrels were tried in the prototype and while both were accurate; the 1:16 twist gave the best performance across nearly all types of 9mm ammunition.

The pistol used standard SIG P226 magazines. Gal knew that careful design, extensive testing and stringent quality controls are needed to produce a successful magazine and the process can easily stall the design effort for a new weapon. Additionally, this choice would provide a source of high-capacity magazines during the assault weapons ban.

Working with a Legend

This author recently had a chance to interview Trent Warncke of Inverse Technologies. For almost a year he was a design engineer at KAC and served as the program manager on Gal’s pistol project. Warncke’s experience on that project gives interesting insight into the thinking of a legendary firearms designer.

SAR: At what point did you get involved with Uzi’s pistol project?

Warncke: I started working at Knight’s Armament in April 2001 and a few weeks later started working with Uzi on the project. My role was a mix of design engineering and program management. I coordinated work with subcontractors to ensure that the pistol parts were made to Uzi’s liking and assisted Uzi with design, testing and eventually financial oversight for the program. When I took the program over it was relatively mature. The first prototype was complete and had successfully fired at least 100 rounds. The goal was then to get a second prototype built and start debugging it. Uzi traveled to KAC two weeks a month and while he was back in Philadelphia, I did a lot of the legwork to keep the project moving. KAC was to make a total of 12 prototypes. Only two complete prototypes were made to my knowledge, as Uzi’s death shut down the program.

SAR: What design criteria were most important to Uzi?

Warncke: Reliability was almost everything to him. He saw the need firsthand in the IDF and knew that simplicity of design was an essential part of reliability. His baseline for the pistol was influenced by the early 1980s test reports of the U.S. Military’s sidearm, which yielded the Beretta 92FS and a Department of Justice test plan that called for no more than one malfunction per 2,000 rounds. Uzi would not be happy until the pistol met that DOJ specification. He also referred to various testing procedures that many different weapon manufacturers and militaries used to test reliability. Uzi said he wanted to subject the pistol to various mud and salt conditions, but we never got there.

Uzi also put a lot of emphasis on ergonomics. We spent hours in the extensive KAC museum holding various weapons and commenting on their ergonomics. The Colt 2000 was one of his favorite pistols in terms of good ergonomics.

SAR: So the KAC museum turned out to be a valuable resource in the design process?

Warncke: It definitely was. Uzi tried to learn from what other firearm designers had done. This may sound like an obvious approach but I know some designers who avoid examining other weapons so they don’t stifle their creativity. Uzi would often times ask me to accompany him to the KAC museum in order to examine several firearms. The pistol prototype didn’t have a safety yet and one would have to be added before it could be sold to in the U.S. We would hold pistols in the museum and talk about the safety location and ergonomics in order to determine where the safety should be located. He would spend a lot of time examining grips as well, being obsessive about their shape and texture. Uzi’s attention was mostly focused on issues that surfaced during testing of the pistol. When you fire several hundred rounds a day, many issues become apparent.

SAR: I can picture Uzi as an old-time craftsman building this gun by hand at a small workbench, but that’s not how he worked, was it?

Warncke: No, not at all. Uzi didn’t make any parts himself, and he was very particular about that. He felt that to evaluate his design you must assemble and test weapons using parts that matched his prints. He felt that if he filed or Dremeled parts to make them work he would not have a good baseline, and the results would be inconclusive. Uzi had some 2-D CAD software that he ran on an Apple laptop. It would have been easier if he used our 3-D software from Solid Edge, but he was very concerned about electronic files being stolen so he only gave us printed copies of the TDS. A few parts with cammed surfaces were hard to call out on his 2-D software so I recreated them in Solid Edge. It became a challenge to keep the prints updated with all the revisions that many of the parts were going through as designs changed, but Uzi wouldn’t budge on the security issue.

SAR: What was the biggest design challenge you worked on with Uzi?

Warncke: We had a problem where the weapon would sometimes fail to extract the spent casing, causing a double feed. This malfunction rarely happened but it was very concerning to Uzi and he would not approve the pistol until this issue was resolved. The pistol used a rotating barrel principal in order to unlock the system. Our first thought was that the rotation of the barrel was “throwing” the extractor away from the centerline of the bore and thus causing the extractor to disengage or override the rim of the spent case being extracted. High-speed digital video yielded little help, but we were able to capture a malfunction with it. We tried stronger extractor springs to overcome whatever force was pushing the extractor out of engagement with the spent case’s rim. This seemed to help, but it was difficult to determine if the changes were sufficient since the malfunction only occurred a few times per thousand rounds of firing. We also tried reducing the mass of the extractor. Finally, we theorized that at the moment of firing, gases leaking before the case was fully expanded to the chamber walls may be forcing the extractor outward. To address this issue Uzi added gas relief slots to the extractor. All these solutions seemed to help the issue.

SAR: How did you handle the warping problem with the slides?

Warncke: The warping was very minor for most of the slides and was overcome by working the barrel in the slide. One solution that Uzi and I discussed was that production slides could be pre-heat treated, then machined with periodic stress relieving operations and lastly nitrided. This process would allow the oversized part to warp before the machining steps took place. The problem was that it would cost a lot more to machine the slide in the hardened state compared to the non-heat treated state so Uzi eliminated this option. The other option is to machine the slide from unhardened steel with periodic stress reliefs between machining operations. Once all the machining was complete, the entire part would be hardened or heat treated. The periodic stress relieving should prevent most warping during the final heat treat.

SAR: What was Uzi’s approach to solving problems?

Warncke: His approach to problem solving was based on his work in the IDF where he spent most of his time doing small-arms research in both garrison and combat environments. He told many stories of testing new sights and various magazines in combat, keeping detailed records of how the stressed soldiers performed with the item being tested. His scientific approach of collecting field data was evident when we would live-fire the pistol and encounter malfunctions. Once a malfunction occurred, he insisted that I not move or clear the weapon. While holding the weapon pointed downrange, Uzi and I would analyze the malfunction and describe it in a logbook. All the magazines we used for testing were numbered and recorded with each malfunction.

As rigid as Uzi was about certain items such as collection of test data, he also possessed a “let’s try it” attitude. We tried a number of extractor designs to cure the extractor problem. One would think Uzi’s personality would have demanded a computer analysis of each of the new extractor designs, but instead he just had them made and we would go shoot them to determine the results. Uzi also asked others around him for advice when issues arose. He turned to Reed Knight many times for suggestions as Reed had designed the Colt 2000 Pistol with Eugene Stoner, and had dealt with issues that come along with a rotating barrel pistol. Uzi had strong opinions and would let you know if he disagreed, but he would listen to everyone’s opinion before making an important decision.

SAR: Did Uzi help with the marketing of the weapon?

Warncke: Uzi was a designer at heart, but he did help with marketing. Uzi and the investors knew it would be easy to find a manufacturer but it appeared they wanted to sell the TDP outright. Reed Knight suggested to Uzi that he talk to Bob Morrison of Taurus. Their U.S. headquarters was just south of KAC in Miami. On the first trip, we took one of the prototype pistols and met with Bob and one of Taurus’ top designers from Brazil. Overall, they were happy with the design. Uzi and I made a second trip to Taurus where we were able to meet with other officials of the company in hopes of them buying the TDP. Uzi’s son came with us to help his father due to his failing health. In the end, Taurus decided not to buy the design. I think they were afraid to buy the TDP when they knew Uzi would not be alive to help them with initial production problems, as is common with all new weapons. At this point, the project investors own the design and the prototypes. Maybe someday it will go into production or they might consider doing a limited production run of the guns for collectors who want to own “the last Uzi design.”

SAR: You must feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with such a legend in the history of firearms.

Warncke: Uzi was truly one of the most influential people I have ever worked with – both as a small arms designer and as a person. I was fortunate enough to train under him for a year, but I was blessed to have been his friend. He possessed tremendous knowledge of small arms and his days of serving in the IDF taught him a lot of interesting things. He was always making comments that were in contrast to current opinions and he could back up his claims with actual combat test data from IDF soldiers. Besides having tremendous knowledge about small arms, Uzi was always patient and respectful with everyone. There were many challenges in the pistol program that would have made many people lose their temper. Uzi never once lost his temper or raised his voice. Even when he was disappointed by people, he had an attitude that would always make the best of a bad situation. He was also compassionate for all people. When he was telling war stories, it was clear that he respected the enemy as human beings. It was a real honor to work with Uzi on his last project, and I will never forget the time I spent with him.

Resources:

UZI Talk Discussion forums
www.uzitalk.com
Inverse Technologies
726 East Main Street
Suite F #161
Lebanon, OH 45036
(937) 470-7466
info@inverse-tech.com

Knight’s Armament Company
(321) 607-9900
www.knightarmco.com

Text and photos by Dan Shea

We thought it appropriate to focus and profile one of the exhibitors at Partner 2007, and Kompanija Sloboda from Cacak, Serbia seemed a good choice since we are familiar with them. Sloboda was started in 1948, and has a reputation for being able to produce almost any small arms ammunition above 14.5mm.

SAR readers will recognize the name of the company as the hosts of the “Living History” live fire events that are held at their ranges several times a year. It would be a mistake to think this is all they do as this is a corollary to their main businesses. Sloboda has an arms production section, as well as producing some items for civilian, household use.

The factory is located about 140 km from Belgrade, in the city of Cacak. Cacak (Cha-Chek) is a city of over 100,000 people and is a heavily industrialized area in the mountainous region of Serbia. There is an excellent labor pool of skilled workers, many of them second or even third generation workers at the Sloboda plant.

We toured the facility several times before the 1999 NATO bombing when US missiles were dropped onto the facility. Much of the wreckage still remains but it was not the critical parts of the facility that were damaged. We have had several visits to the factory since then, and they are in full production.

Sloboda is known for its engineering staff as well as the fact that they have a full testing facility and certifications that are up to any standard in the European community. They are qualified in the ISO 9001:2000 category, and the production is strictly overseen by government inspectors.

Sloboda has a lot to be proud of, and is looking forward to many years of service to the military and police communities.

Contact:
Foreign sales:
Kompanija Sloboda
Ratka Mitrovica bb, 32000 Cacak
Serbia
Phones: ++381 32 26 21 41
Fax: ++381 32 22 63 90
E-mail: slobcom@ptt.yu
http://www.sloboda.com

US or US Contractor sales:
Defense Munitions LLC
631 N. Stephanie St #371
Henderson, NV 89014
Tel: 702-566-9811
Fax: 702-558-1728
Email: Info@defensemunitions.com
Website: www.defensemunitions.com

The Partner 2007 military show was the third in what has become an annual presentation by the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Serbia every June. It is presented in cooperation with the major business conglomerate YugoImport-SPDR. SAR was invited, as usual, by the firms of Zastava, Sloboda (see accompanying sidebar), Krusik, and many of the smaller Balkan arms designers who are readers and sometime contributors to these pages. In addition, we had the chance to sit with the new leader at YugoImport, Mr. Nenad Miloradovic. He is a small arms engineer with a strong background in design, and brings a new perspective to this old and powerful company. We had the opportunity to discuss the future of small arms, as well as the mechanics.

All in all, this was a great opportunity to look for new products and to see what was happening in the innovative factories of Serbia. The fact that Serbia is called an “emerging nation” leads to somewhat of a misunderstanding of the capabilities here. The infrastructure is older, but the government has fostered an atmosphere of advancement and many of the factories have added top quality CNC capabilities as well as training up the work forces.

We’ll leave the politics to others, and simply take the readers on a journey through some of the items featured at this third annual trade show.

Milan-Blagojevic-Namenska A.D. had a nice display of their innovative firearm and munition products, primarily in powders. Word is they are very busy right now but are still aggressively looking for customers. www.mbnamenska.com.

The operating system is the open bolt, blowback configuration; common for most submachine guns designs, but a liability for a suppressed weapon, due to the noise the cycling bolt produces. The breech bolt, recoil spring and plastic buffer design appears very similar to that of the Chinese Type 43 submachine gun, which is merely a copy of the Russian PPS-43 introduced during World War II. The select-fire trigger mechanism is very comparable to that used on the ZB26 light machine gun. A number of ZB26 weapons were purchased from Czechoslovakia and used by the Chinese military.

The Type 64 submachine gun is very well made weapon with very few stamped parts. The receiver is milled from a block of steel and has two AK-style lightening cuts milled out of each side of the receiver. The AK-type top cover is a sheet steel stamping. Both the front and rear sights are mounted by spot welding on the suppressor tube, which provides for a rather short sight radius and places the rear sight a fair distance from the shooter’s eye. The rear sight is a two-position flip up type with ranges of 100 and 200 meters and is protected from damage by protective side ears. The front sight is a hooded, threaded post design and can be adjusted up or down to correct elevation. The two-position mode-of-fire selector is located on the left side of the receiver and can be easily manipulated with the thumb. Rotating the selector to a forward position provides for semiautomatic fire, while the rearward position is for full automatic fire. The fire positions are marked with Chinese characters. The front sling swivel is spot welded onto the left side of the suppressor tube and the rear swivel is located at the pivot point of the buttstock. Interestingly, the suppressed Type 64 submachine gun is serial numbered and has the Chinese State Factory 66 markings on the left side of the receiver. Generally, weapons intended for covert missions usually lack markings of any type to conceal their origins. The weapon and suppressor have a good quality matching dull blue finish.

More AK Features

The Type 64 also has a number of features borrowed from the milled receiver Chinese Type 56 assault rifle, which is nearly an exact copy of the third model Russian AK-47. One of the most obvious AK features is the checkered wooden pistol grip. There are two safety devices: the AK style right-side mounted safety lever blocks the bolts rearward movement. This safety allows the weapon to be carried with a loaded magazine. In the event the weapon is dropped on its buttstock, this type of safety is designed to keep inertia from inadvertently jarring the bolt rearward, possibly chambering and firing a cartridge. There is also an SKS rifle type safety lever positioned at the rear of the trigger guard that blocks movement of the trigger when applied. The AK style under folding steel buttstock is released by simultaneously pressing two buttons located at the pivot point. The stock lock mechanism has two half-moon cuts on each side that the spring-loaded buttons fit into, securing it in an open or closed position. The receiver top cover and the pistol grip design also demonstrate AK-47 influence. The magazine release is located under the front of the trigger guard and is also of the same style as the Type 56 (AK) assault rifle – as is the trigger guard itself, attached to the bottom of the receiver with rivets. Like the AK, the Type 64’s bolt is designed to ride on rails milled into each side of the receiver channel. The bolt charging handle extends from the right side of the receiver and reciprocates when the weapon is fired. Even the ribbed magazine displays many AK characteristics.

Maxim Type Suppressor

The Maxim spiral-baffle type suppressor of the Type 64 is an integral design and not an add-on type as used on most submachine guns. The last 4.6 inches of the 9.6 inch barrel has thirty-six, 3-milimeter gas vents drilled into the 4-groove barrel in a spiral pattern. The jacket that covers the barrel has a stack of dished baffles each with a 9 millimeter hole in the center. There are two rods that pass through the sides of the baffles that keep them properly aligned. At the end of the outer tube is a removable end cap. The barrel jacket is attached to the receiver by an interrupted thread design that allows removal by turning the knurled retaining nut one-third turn, and pulling the jacket straight out away from the receiver. The baffle stack is removable for cleaning. The jacket end cap can be unscrewed and the baffle stack can be lifted out as a unit by a bale attached to the baffle assembly. The end cap and suppressor retaining sleeve both have holes for a spanner wrench. Due to the Chinese use of corrosive ammunition, the bore and outside of the barrel and most of the suppressor parts are chromium plated. In addition to significantly reducing the sound of a fired round, the long suppressor effectively serves as a flash hider.

The weapons were made for the Chinese People’s Army and were also offered for export sales. The Type 64 submachine gun was manufactured at State Factory 66 in China. The weapons were exported through China North Industries, commonly known as Norinco. The Type 64 suppressed submachine gun was superseded in service in the 1980s by the Type 85 submachine gun that was also made at State Factory 66. The Type 85 is a simpler and lighter version of the Type 64 weapon. The Type 85 is also chambered for the same 7.62 x 25 mm Type 64 subsonic cartridge, and like the Type 64 submachine gun can also chamber and fire a standard supersonic 7.62×25 cartridge in an emergency. The weapon has an effective range of 200 meters and uses the same blow back, select fire action and is fed by a 30-round box magazine.

Field stripping Procedures

• 1. Be certain that the weapon is not loaded by visually checking the chamber.
• 2. Remove the magazine.
• 3. Depress the recoil spring guide rod that extends through the receiver top cover.
• 4. While holding the guide rod in, tilt the receiver top cover upward and remove it.
• 5. Push the guide rod forward out of its retaining flange at the rear of the receiver.
• 6. Slide the bolt rearward to the back of the receiver and tilt the rear of the bolt upward and slide it out of the receiver.

Specifications Type 64
Country of origin: Mainland China, for use by the Chinese People’s Army and export sales
Cartridge: 7.62×25mm (Subsonic Type 64)
Operation: Blowback, select fire
Feed: 30-round or 20-round double feed curved box magazine
Weight empty: 7.6 pounds
Length: stock: Folded 25-inches, Extended, 33-inches
Barrel: 9.6 inches
Rifling: 4 grooves, right hand twist
Muzzle velocity: Subsonic below 1,100 fps
Cyclic rate of fire: Approximately 1,300 rounds per minute
Effective range: 200 meters
Manufacturer: Chinese State Factory 66
Exported by: China North Industries Corporation

Special thanks to Al Houde and Beth Crumley of the U.S. Marine Corps Museum, Quantico, VA