Order your copy today, right here!
https://www.headstamppublishing.com/cold-war-battle
Or if you are in Europe, please order through our European site:
https://www.headstampbook.com/cold-war-battle
I’m excited to announce preorders for my latest book, “Small Arms of the Cold War: Battle Rifles of NATO” today! Following the format of our tremendously popular WWII books, this is a large-format volume overflowing with beautiful photography and historical commentary on all the major battle rifle designs of the Cold War NATO and NATO-adjacent powers. Specifically:
- Precursors – the development of the Battle Rifle from the Mondragon through the Second World War
- FAL – FN’s iconic Fusil Automatique Leger, designed by John Browning’s protege Dieudonné Saive in Belgium
- G3 – the roller-delayed blowback system designed by Mauser engineers in the late days of the Second World War, and its progeny
- M14 – the updated American Garand rifle, and its cousins like the Italian BM59
- AR-10 – Armalite’s futuristic wonder rifle that came so close to adoption and which ultimately created the AR-15
- MAS – the French copy no one, and no one copies the French, especially in Cold War small arms
- Others – lesser-used but still relevant rifles, from the E.M.2 bullpup to the SIG Stgw. 57 and the Danish LAR
More than 70 different rifles from collections across six countries and filling more than 460 pages! We have standard, signed, and slipcase options, with books expected to arrive in November 2025.
I do not see a source to get it.
Order your copy today, right here!
https://www.headstamppublishing.com/cold-war-battle
Or if you are in Europe, please order through our European site:
https://www.headstampbook.com/cold-war-battle
About the only thing all of NATO agreed on regarding rifles was the caliber. And if the United States hadn’t played 800-pound gorilla to get what was basically a .30-06-powered round, the standard NATO cartridge would likely have been the 7mm EM2 round.
What everyone overlooked was that neither round was suitable for full-auto fire from a rifle; simply too much recoil impulse. Either one was a good GPMG round, but that’s another story entirely.
With the new 6.8 x 51mm MCX Spear round we are apparently going down the same path yet again.
I doubt that it will work any better this time.
clear ether
eon
It’s only to be expected, eon: What you can’t clearly define, you can’t clearly think about.
The construction “Battle Rifle” is one of the leading indicators of how we got into this situation of idiocy with regards to the individual weapon. You can track the level of dysfunction in the issue area by how prevalent this term has become; the idjit class has adopted this meaningless term as though it actually means something, and so abandoned any form of rational construction in their thinking.
The root problem is that the delusionals think that an individual weapon ought to be able to perform the role that is properly that of the machinegun, and what’s worse, they think that they can win fights with them. This is why they keep going after these ideas, again and again, despite them having been proven wrong in practice time after time. M14/7.62 fiasco? That’s basically the precursor of the NGSW fallacy, and will end similarly with the individual weapon abandoned and left on the wayside as actual soldiers march off to war with something that works, likely the M4 carbines they’re going to “liberate” from the support troops yet again…
It’s all very fuzzy thinking by men who never saw combat, or understood what they were looking at if they did. The role of an individual weapon isn’t long-range precision fires meant to eliminate the enemy at retail scales; the true role of the individual weapon is close-in combat under 400m, and local security for the crew-served weapons. No more; no less. You try to fancy things up by pushing that range envelope any further, and what you get is ammo too heavy to carry in sufficient quantity, and a weapon too unwieldly to be really good where it absolutely has to shine, in the near-space of combat. The number of dead soldiers on your side that you’re going to get due to the sheer mass and length of the NGSW individual weapon will drastically exceed that of the number on the enemy side that you’re going to eliminate because you’ve got mo’ betta range and “lethality”, whatever the f*ck that is…
Morons. One and all. And, this BS coming in from the sidelines doesn’t help one little bit. “Oh, look… Gun Jesus calls them “Battle Rifles”… That must mean this whole line of thought is legitimate…”
F*ck me. The world is stupid, and I want to get off.
Kirk:
I agree with you the term “battle rifle” was not contemporary with the adoption of the rifles in question. However, I think it serves a purpose as a piece of shorthand. These rifles are often, but not always, selective fire, but they are not assault rifles because they do not use intermediate rounds. So the term battle rifle does serve to distinguish the first wave of post-war, full power rifles from subsequent assault rifles.
Interesting I figured the SAFN/AFN 49 would indeed be included. Plenty were produced and fielded by a handful of countries as well.
“Battle Rifle”? Seriously?
About all I can say or do is point and laugh at the deeply unserious and highly unprofessional use of made-up terminology that originated in the 1980s gun rag trade. There is no such thing as a “Battle Rifle” anywhere in any NATO dictionary or manual. Nobody ever talked about such things, and there was zero use of any such ridiculous construction in any professional capacity. You can’t even define the term, without resort to the old saw about “Well, I knows one when I sees one…”
Disappointing, at best, to see this term make it into print in what should be at least slightly scholarly. It’s an indicator of just how we got these things, as well: Childish and utterly delusional thinking about small arms, driven more by idiots in the periphery writing delusional and dumbed-down commentary on things they really don’t understand. The US military is full of this delusional bullshit, and that’s how we keep doing these things like NGSW to answer problems that don’t exist except as chimeras in the minds of the morons pushing them.
“Battle Rifle”. Any self-respecting researcher should be embarrassed to even speak the term, let alone use it in a published work. There are no such weapons; the term was “invented” out of thin air during the 1980s by total dumbasses wanting to sell sensationalistic (and, usually incredibly wrong to a ludicrous degree…) fairy tales to a credulous public consisting mostly of little boys who never grew up. Christ, there was usually a better set of journalistic standards on display over in the hot rod magazine section…
I’m embarrassed on behalf of all involved, who apparently are oblivious to the intellectual fraud and flim-flammery they’re helping to perpetuate.
There is no such thing as a “Battle Rifle” anywhere, in any contemporary original source document anywhere in NATO or any other half-way professional citation that I’ve ever been able to find. It’s purely a marketing term, made up by fools and poltroons seeking to sell bullshit to the masses.
I can’t honestly begin to express the disappointment I feel, seeing this perpetration of outright BS. This bullshit is precisely how we get things like NGSW happening again and again: Because the people who do the decision-making are idiots who are influenced more by other idiots than anything else, and they think that the made-up terminology they hear from those idiots has some sort of validity and authority. Clarity of thought requires clarity of language; where, pray tell, is the clear definition of the term used here? Where did anyone at the time of adoption, talk about these rifles in this manner? Where was the doctrinal basis, the generative cue for this term coming into use? Were there any “big thinking” types in any NATO army that came up with it?
No, there were not. Which is precisely the goddamn problem with how we all wound up with these f*cking things; nobody thought, and now that we’re into the “after the fact”, morons are wandering the battlefield and pumping bullshit into the dead bodies of bad ideas, in order to… Oh, yeah, that’s right: Make money off of it. Same as the morons that came up with the term during the 1980s, in order to sell magazines on newstands.
If y’all aren’t ashamed, you ought to be.
I remember that the only argument in favor of the M14 in Vietnam was that if a Charlie was “hiding behind a tree” the 7.62 x 51mm round could shoot through it t get him, while the 5.56 x 45mm round couldn’t.
Seriously. That was it.
Upon hearing that one, my old Marine boss, who got very acquainted with trees all over the Southwest Pacific, just shook his head and said “that’s what grenades are for”. Just curve-ball it past the tree; problem solved.
There does seem to be a great deal of what Mentor called “loose and muddy thinking” in all of this.
clear ether
eon
There’s a complete sucking vacuum of non-thought in this arena, which is why they keep reprising BS like the NGSW.
Let’s be blunt about it: The entirety of post-WWII thought in the West was dominated by US idiotic belief in the “individual rifleman” a la Alvin York or the supposed Revolutionary War Kentucky Rifleman who “won the war” for truth, justice, and the American way.
Which was all so much specious bullshit.
The reality of combat is this: You do not address targets past about 3-400m with individual weapons. Never have; in dayes of yore, before the machinegun, we addressed those targets with massed volley fires. That was how you fought; you fired at areas likely to contain enemy soldiers, not individually targeted soldiers. As WWI came in, this became even more true, but nobody wanted to acknowledge the facts on the ground. Or, for that matter, bother to observe them.
The real deal here is that outside about that max of 400m, you need to be doing a lot of “on spec” shooting… Which is best done not by one guy shooting one shot at one observed target, but by either massed volley or MG fire. You see someone past 400m, it is very unlikely you are seeing the only target out there; there are more guys around the one you see, and you need to deliver fire on that entire squad- or platoon-size area. Thus… MG fires. If you’re shooting at that “one guy” alone, you’re basically conducting an exercise in eugenics by eliminating the enemy dumb enough to expose himself. That is not how you win wars, by providing the enemy with training sessions and object lessons in “what not to do”. You win by killing the enemy, and by eschewing the MG, you’re ignoring opportunities to do so.
The modern individual weapon exists for the close-in fight: Losing sight of that fact is why we have this bullshit of the 7.62 NATO as a really bad attempt at a solution to the individual weapon question. It’s too big, too powerful, and an utter mismatch to the mission.
The M16/M4 aren’t perfect, but they’re better answers to the individual weapon paradigm than any of the other oversized abortions on offer.
What’s really sad about the whole thing is that by even attempting to address the individual weapon space with the chimerical “universal cartridge”, we keep shortchanging the MG space with inadequate or barely adequate cartridges. Both the 7.62 NATO and the NGSW suck as true MG cartridges, being unable to perform as effective tools against material targets and armor/cover.
I blame this whole thing on epic dumbassery on the part of all the responsible parties, plus a whole lot of really poor thought on the issues. Which, I feel the need to point out, is only encouraged by bullshit like this “Battle Rifle” coming in from the side. The men involved in the M14 debacle (and, make no mistake about it, it was a debacle…) all did what they did reinforced by all the dumbf*ck asshole “gravel belly” types who were centered on the National Matches as the ne plus ultra of what was “necessary” for the combat soldier in terms of rifle capabilities…
Words have meaning; meanings are what we use to think about things, and when there is inadequate and inaccurate terminology, there is inadequate and delusional thought. Because the words are wrong, or don’t describe the realities they symbolize.
If you want a support MG or even GPMG round to do its job properly, it needs to be able to hit consistently and terminally out to about 1,500 meters. Period. Because 300 to 1,500 is really too close for effective mortar fire or arty support. (Targets are generally too “agile” for registered fire from either one.) And shooting at anything beyond 300 with the IW is a waste of time and effort.
The only MG round in actual combat history that actually fit this requirement other than the .50 BMG did so more or less by accident. It was the Italian 8.59 Breda (in proper nomenclature, the 8 x 59mm). Ballistically very close to the .300 Holland & Holland Magnum big-game cartridge, and as the British 8th Army found out well capable of perforating a Chevrolet 20cwt truck’s engine block at over 1,200 yards.
By no stretch of the imagination would it have made a practical service rifle round, unless you were anticipating an enemy composed of lions and tigers and bears. (Oh, my.)
But for the support MG it was pretty much perfect. Apparently purely by accident.
Today there are a couple of cartridges available that would likely do well in the same area. Namely the .338 Lapua and the .408 CheyTac. But both do have the drawback that as heavy sniping rounds (which so far is the only use DoD has for either one) they are hard on barrels, and in an MG either one would be even more so.
We need a better cartridge for the support machine gun. And we need it not to end up as the “One Round To Rule Them All” in rifles as well.
Ordnance, of course, just does not see it that way, which is how we keep ending up with underpowered MGs and overpowered rifles.
clear ether
eon
Do you have a serious recommendation for what one could call such rifles?
7.62×51 Self-loading Military Rifles is rather long winded and excludes certain similar Cold War projects due to difference in chambering.
How about what the actual nomenclature is? “Rifle”.
Simple enough?
Rather vague for a book title. Rifle? Which one?
I don’t particularly care to carry water for whoever came up with ‘Battle Rifle’ as every rifle in a military context outside of those used for training is intended for battle even if only rarely.
However, there is enough cultural miasma about that I have some vague idea what Ian means when he writes “Battle Rifle.” I believe most people do even if that term means little by itself. I don’t particularly see anything wrong with that, either. Colloquialism is a useful time saving aspect of speech.
I will say that were they never to define what they mean by “Battle Rifle” in the book, then I would be rather disappointed as the term is one largely of vague cultural understandings instead of anything specific.
Look back at the body of historical references: Nowhere will you find anyone using the terminology of “Battle Rifle”. It’s all continuous noun nomenclature of “Rifle”, even in the American documentation. Nowhere will you find anyone saying anything like “This here is a battle rifle…”, nor will you find anyone suggesting that what they needed for the modern battlefield was a “Battle Rifle”. The term doesn’t exist until the 1980s, and it was not coined by anyone in the actual field; it was a construction created by the usual feckless felchers of the gun magazine trade, who universally got damn near everything wrong and whose works have to be carefully excised of all error before even thinking of using them as reference works. The sheer amount of misinformation and outright fabulist bullshit coming out of those tomes should preclude adopting anything coming out of them, ever, for any reasonably scholarly or doctrinal discussion.
And, too… WTF creates the need to differentiate this supposed separate class of individual weapon? Is there some massive difference in capacity or usage? No; there is not. The idjits that procured these things basically baked in all the deficiencies of the previous generation of infantry individual weapons, and so far as there is any improvement, it was entirely of a minor incremental nature. There isn’t a hell of a lot you can do better, tactically speaking, between an M1903 Springfield, an M1 Garand, or the M14. All of them possess the same limitations, the same conceptual flaws, the fixation on things that the actual infantryman’s individual weapon no longer should have been doing.
The range band for the individual weapon should probably end at a max of 400m; anything past that, due to the fleeting nature of observation in modern war, rightfully belongs to crew-served weapons capable of addressing areas, not points. This is the salient thing, the one that everyone misses: Sure, some few really good and inspired marksmen like Alvin York or Carlos Hathcock can do cool things that are really tactically irrelevant out past the 400m markers, but the point is that they’re tactically irrelevant. Why? Because, as I keep pointing out, you see one guy at those ranges, you only start winning engagements when you use that “one guy” as the centerpoint of your beaten zone, and thoroughly saturate that squad- or platoon-sized area around him with fires that kill all the other poor schmucks that didn’t skyline themselves. That’s the tactical reality; you shoot the “one guy”, and you’re basically wasting a golden opportunity to eliminate the actual issue, which is the small unit he belongs to. Oh, and by the way… There’s another, unspoken thing: You want to eliminate any and all “learning opportunities” in your own tactical and operational policies; you’re striving to utterly destroy the enemy such that there are no survivors to take “lessons learned” back home with them, to pass on. Ideally, you want that squad whose lone idjit you managed to spot dying all around him, eliminated from the pool of potential veterans on the other side.
These two factors are a large part of why the US Army and Marine Corps operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were so, shall we say… Non-productive. We weren’t fighting to eliminate the enemy, though we said we were. The real deal was, I hate to tell you, that we were running training exercises for the enemy, so that they could hone their techniques and units, building morale.
Whenever you are in a war, you have to keep an eye on what you’re actually doing: Are you running training, for the enemy? Or, are you doing your best to kill all of them, all the time, and prevent any of them from learning how to fight you?
If you aren’t, well… You’re an idiot. Or, the US military leadership class, most of whom are utterly oblivious to any of this. I’d say they were idiots, but I think the results of the last few wars have pretty much proven that point.
The NGSW fiasco is just more indication that the idjit class running the military does not know what the f*ck they are doing, and a lot of the intellectual cover for their bullshit starts with crap like this in the civilian gun trade, because all these self-appointed “experts” tout their little hobbyhorses about “how marksmanship won the Revolutionary War” and the primacy of the “individual marksman” winning WWI and WWII, when the reality is that none of these felching morons can even articulate what the hell the modern individual weapon is supposed to be doing in the first goddamn place.
Which ain’t, I will continue to contend, is not addressing targets out past 400m. Those targets, when properly addressed by small arms alone, belong solely to the tripod-mounted belt-fed machinegun, which ought to be trained and employed a hell of a lot more effectively than any in the US military have bothered with for the last fifty years.
@ Kirk;
Not to bring politics into it, but for the last six decades I’ve suspected that a lot of it is the “nation-building” mindset we evolved after 1945. “Today’s enemy is tomorrow’s ally.”
That worked with Japan, Germany, Italy and etc. because all of the above were s#!t-scared of the USSR, WARPAC, PRC, and etc. And we did get some good alliances out of it.
Where the theory fell down was when we were and are directly engaging polities and cultures which are by nature forever opposed to our very existence. There’s a fundamental difference there and our Fearless Leaders refuse to see it.
We fought and lost every war since 1945 on “nation-building”. If you want to see just how ludicrous the concept was and is, check out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Private_Little_War
This exchange between Kirk and McCoy sums it up in a nutshell;
People then and now probably have never realized that Kirk was quoting Dean Rusk (1909-1994; U.S. SecState 1961-69) almost verbatim.(It’s amazing what you could learn at “dead dog” parties at Trek conventions; I got that tidbit from Gene Roddenberry.)
We’ve pursued that “equivalency” for the last eight decades. And we seem to be oblivious to the fact that it hasn’t worked.
Tactics are the ground level result of strategy. Strategy is downstream of policy. And policy begins with theory.
Nobody seems to remember the axiom,
So far, we haven’t done that. In fact, I see no evidence that we have even tried to do so.
clear ether
eon
@eon,
I’m never going to take seriously any argument that references a work of fiction as a source. Unless that argument is over which mental disorder the author of said fictional work was experiencing at the time of writing…
Roddenberry and his idea of “Prime Directive” was demonstrating utter cluelessness and cultural blindness entirely consonant with the arrogance of his times. Any argument couched in those terms, from any aspect, is one I’d throw out without even considering seriously, given the number of contradictory cases that he basically ignored. Not every culture does poorly out of experiencing contact with another more “advanced” one; Japan springs to mind, along with a few in the Indonesian archipelago. The real problem isn’t the contact, it’s the grabtastic dysfunction of the contacted “civilization” that’s the damn problem. Look at Ireland, as an example: Never got its act together, still hasn’t got it together, and the next time there’s a real security threat to the British Isles and the Brits have to do something serious about it? Buh-bye to “Irish independence”. And, whose fault is that going to be? The Brits, for wanting security, or the Irish for not managing to take care of themselves YET AGAIN. Ireland and serving as a baseboard for invading the rest of Europe has a long and sordid continuity going back to the Vikings.
Rusk, being of that same ilk that got us into Vietnam with their advanced “thinking” about nuanced tit-for-tat negotiating are what screwed us in that war; had someone gone in from the beginning and done what Nixon did with Linebacker, and bombed North Vietnam flat while mining its harbors? The war would have been over in short order.
These assholes all have one thing in common: They think war is a thing of nuance and equivalency; you bomb my town, I bomb yours. That’s not how it works, if you want to win. The signposts are all there: Observe Imperial Germany and Austria, post-WWI. They thought they’d been cheated of victory, and were up for another attempt under different management. Cue WWII, and the utter destruction of an entire generation of German men, the flattening of cities, and the total surrender of a burned-out husk of a nation.
Haven’t heard much from the Germans, in terms of “world conquest” since, have you? That’s how you win a war, by actually killing the enemy. Once it’s gone to shooting, there is no “nuance”, there is no “equivalency”. That’s why we haven’t won a war since WWII: Nobody wants to do the necessary, because they’re seduced by the siren songs of “Well, we can be ever so precious and humane…”
Which is precisely why 9/11 happened, and why the Israeli-Arab thing is what it is. You have to reach, convincingly, into the minds of the other side, and convince them, in their soul of souls, that they lost. And, that trying again would be folly… Half-measures don’t do that, and neither does “humane war”. There is no such thing, and the idea of surgically precise fires taking out “the bad guys” out past 400m instead of dumping a belt or two of MG fire on that observed individual is part and parcel of the mentality which leads to defeat in detail.
Trust me on this: If you ignore distant fires, drive through your ambushes, and all the rest of the stupidity American troops did in Iraq and Afghanistan, all you’re going to do is get more of the same. Lots more. You have to kill the bastards, every time they raise their little heads and do anything even remotely akin to opposing you, and the only way you win is by convincing them and all the people around them that shooting at an American is utter folly which will result in the utter destruction of all involved, along with a considerable amount of collateral damage. They don’t learn, otherwise, and you’re conducting a training event, providing a learning experience. If the experience you provide encourages them to attack you… You’ve failed. You want mothers, wives, and sisters bewailing the idjit types as they bravely take up their AK47s; you want those women angry at the recruiters, you want those recruiters being targeted because all they bring is failure and death into those villages. Let them live? You’re only making more of the enemy, and training them.
Points our genius “leadership” seem unable to grasp.
As used in print, the term refers to selective fire military rifles chambered for 7.62 NATO and rounds in that same ballpark. The first time I heard the term, it was from an acquaintance who was laboring under the impression he had used one during his youth in Rhodesia. I’ll email that grampa ranting away at the keyboard takes umbrage at the term. That’ll set him straight. Thank you.
very nice work Ian – pics are beautiful (even of the French stuff)
good job
CG
I am neither a fan of the odd “battle rifle” terminology nor the ridiculous prices this publisher is charging for its over-illustrated products. Nobody is in my view served by images blown up to span the binding abyss between pages.
But I have to admit that this book is the first publication outside Germany that I am aware of, correctly identifying the gap between German G1 and G3 designations, the G2, as assigned to the SIG 7.62×51 version of the Swiss assault rifle, and G4 to the AR10.
The Collector’s Grade FN books are pretty clear on the four different rifles.
The Fudds out there are appear to be unaware of the whole issue, just as they are that the G1 was the FAL. Anyone knowledgeable on the issue, however? They know.