Video Report: Army Research Lab Develops AI-Enabled Robot Tanks
By Caleb Larson,The National Interest
In his book The Gun, author C. J. Chivers describes the heady post-war years of the mid 1940s, when the scramble to enter the atomic age was defined by enormous technological challenges, and when a humble Russian arms designer name Mikhail Kalashnikov would create something that would turn his name into veritable brand.
“The world had yet to develop a reliable and lightweight automatic rifle, a firearm that could fire at the rate of a Maxim gun out to typical combat ranges and yet be managed by a single man. Throughout fall 1945, Sergeant Kalashnikov and a larger design collective had worked on a submission for the contest’s first phase, which required competitors to submit a packet of technical specifications. The Main Artillery Department wanted a weapon that fired like a submachine gun but out to greater range. It issued the guidelines. The weapon must be compact, lightweight, highly reliable, simple to manufacture, easily operated, and composed of a small number of independent parts. And it must fire a new cartridge, only recently designed by Soviet ammunition experts. Sergeant Kalashnikov’s team made hundreds of sketches, detailing each of the proposed weapon’s main parts, trying to put a practical form to the commission’s request.”
Kalashnikov, who’s father had been declared a Kulak, and who’s family had grown in abject poverty, won the design competition to create the Soviet Union’s standard-issue rifle.
