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So the Ak47 is 70 years old. That’s about as much time separating Waterloo and Rorkes Drift. That’s muskets to the Martini Henry rifle. How come despite our technology moving so much faster than it did during the 19th century has the AK not been rendered obsolete by more modern equivalents? Not just a “better rifle” like the M4, but to the musket/rifle comparison where it might be cheap and available but it’s just borderline useless against modern weapons.

It still works just fine. There might be better tools, but the AK gets the job done. Same reason why hammers with 50-year-old designs aren't obsolete.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
It still works just fine. There might be better tools, but the AK gets the job done. Same reason why hammers with 50-year-old designs aren't obsolete.

Not necessarily. For example a spear or a sword can still kill a man. The issue is that any gun can kill you long before you get to use it. So those are obsolete weapons. The same was true of muskets. You had to stand up while reloading, you could only fire a few rounds a minute, the powder blocked your vision and it was only accurate at point blank range; versus a modern rifle that had none of those drawbacks. Better weapons came along and replaced these things. So, you’d think the same would be true of an AK. Why hasn’t something better come along and displaced it?

What are the drawbacks of the AK that a modern rifle doesn't have? Is avoiding those drawbacks worth the difference in price?

Why would it be? Very little actually new have been invented in firearms since 1900. Most popular sports pistol today is based on a design over 100 years old.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
What are the drawbacks of the AK that a modern rifle doesn't have? Is avoiding those drawbacks worth the difference in price?

Iam not saying the AK47 is obsolete.

All things being equal a 70 year old gun should not be viable. You kind of have to pay for it at that point. It should be like taking a musket into WW1. This is a very old gun when in the century before 1950 you had incredible advancements in firearms technology. But then we made assault rifles and kind of shrugged our shoulders or something? Compare it to say, tank or aircraft development over the same 70 year period? Would you set a T34 against an M1A2? A T34 is cheaper, yeah, but it’s really not worth taking today.

Price isn’t an object. Expenditure on RnD was much higher after WW2 as mentioned with tanks and aircraft.

To list a few drawbacks. It needs heavy ammunition to function. It’s inaccurate. It’s loud and gives away your position if you fire it. The weapon can cause collateral damage. It requires training to use. The weapon doesn’t really help you locate your opponent who might be taking lot shots at you in the valley. Modern technology over seventy years should have addressed a few of these and led to those newer guns displacing the older ones. That not really happened except in a really minor manner. Nothing comparable to tanks and aircraft? Have infantry weapons just peaked as a technology or is all the RnD being sunk into planes and ships?



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Backfire wrote:
Why would it be? Very little actually new have been invented in firearms since 1900. Most popular sports pistol today is based on a design over 100 years old.

Because tanks and planes have. So why not guns?

It's still effective because rifle technology hasn't really changed since 1945, the AK-47 still works well enough for shooting people, and "which rifle do your troops have" has essentially nothing to do with who wins a war. In fact, since any rifle is about as good as any other rifle, the ease of logistics offered by the AK-47 can be a decisive advantage in choosing a rifle.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
All things being equal a 70 year old gun should not be viable.

Why not? This isn't a RTS where you level up your tech tree every year and old units are no longer effective, age alone is meaningless.

It needs heavy ammunition to function.

Not really. Per round it's about 50% more, but ammunition is only part of the weight a soldier is carrying. It's not going to make much practical difference. And remember, the AK-47 was largely replaced by the AK-47 outside of countries that just have stockpiles of cheap AK-47s and no funds to replace them, and the AK-74's round is almost identical to an AR-15's.

It’s inaccurate.

Nope. This is not a video game, the AK-47 is accurate enough for all practical purposes.

It’s loud and gives away your position if you fire it.

So does any other rifle without a suppressor, and even with one very very few weapons are truly "quiet" vs. "won't kill your hearing if you fire it without ear protection".

The weapon can cause collateral damage.

Lolwut? It's a rifle, not a grenade launcher.

It requires training to use.

So does any gun. FFS, we're talking about a gun originally intended to be issued to illiterate Russian peasant conscripts. Training is not an issue.

The weapon doesn’t really help you locate your opponent who might be taking lot shots at you in the valley.

Neither does any other gun.

is all the RnD being sunk into planes and ships?

You got it. Rifle technology gives minimal, if any, return on R&D. Investment in other weapons and equipment potentially gives significant return.

Because you leave it in the dirt for three months and it still works.

Cheap to produce, easy to manufacture (stamped parts!), robust and reliable in function. Can kill people at the ranges most people shoot at other people, and is accurate enough for most of the population's talent for aiming.

It's one of the best gun designs in history and it hasn't become obsolete because it isn't obsolete - it's still doing what it was designed to do and doing it well.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
So the Ak47 is 70 years old. That’s about as much time separating Waterloo and Rorkes Drift. That’s muskets to the Martini Henry rifle. How come despite our technology moving so much faster than it did during the 19th century has the AK not been rendered obsolete by more modern equivalents? Not just a “better rifle” like the M4, but to the musket/rifle comparison where it might be cheap and available but it’s just borderline useless against modern weapons.

guns haven't changed much. About all a modern AK or AR has over a 1960's iteration is the ability to mount optics and accessories.

Nothing much new has changed in physics, chemistry, or metallurgy to radically change firearms. Firearms technologies are mature. Advances have been incremental, barrels last longer and are more accurate now for example than 50 years ago, but only marginally so. What may have been a 4 MoA gun in 1960 might come out as a 3 MoA gun today, maybe 2.

Alternatives like lasers have their own technological hurdles.

Where we really see advances are in things like optics, durability of magazines, barrel life, accessory systems, and other such things.

I suspect that we'll see some other radical paradigm shift have to overtake the world before the AK47 will be made obsolete, and short of everyone sporting personal antiballistic laser arrays in a truly ubiquitous manner, I'm not sure what it would be

Simple.

Waterloo - Rorke’s Drift saw multiple advances in firearms technology. Development and refinement of cartridges, ignition systems, capacity, feeding, rifling and more all took place during that period.

Firearms tech since the invention of the AK-47 has largely stayed the same. Any refinement that has taken place has been successfully integrated into the AK design. There has simply been no need to abandon it.

It’s a street fighting short burst automatic weapon. It doesn’t have to be accurate, doesn’t have to be light in weight, doesn’t have to be quiet, and it doesn’t require lots of range time to point and shoot.

It’s incredibly durable and very cheap to produce. You can bury it in sand, dig it up five years later, and it will fire a clean round without jamming.

Good caliber of round that has stopping power.

The AK platform isn't obsolete, it's been constantly upgraded since it was called AK-47. It's decades since the Soviets switched to a smaller caliber bullet and a lot of other changes have been made regarding materials and the ability to add accessories. The Finnish versions still use the 7.62x39 ammo but the quality machining and improved iron sights make them a lot more accurate than AKs with the common sight setup - not that those are inaccurate either if the shooter is properly trained. Shouting religious slogans just doesn't make up for range time.

As for older versions, well, not everyone can afford the latest toys. Or the training and facilites needed to keep a "finer" weapon working for that matter. An AK is very simple to field strip and clean - there's only a few parts to remove, too big that you could conceivably lose them, and you need no tools for it. The barrels are chromed and very durable, the gas system incredibly sturdy and easy to keep clean. You don't need any special oils or solvents either unlike some more finicky rifles that won't work properly if you don't use manufacturer approved (extremely expensive) chemicals. And they're cheap, and plentiful, and relatively easy to pick up from unscrupulous dealers if you need to buy more. It might not be the best assault rifle but it's often the best option if you have to equip badly trained troops.

The AK-47 is obsolete as modern fighting weapon, if we define "AK-47" as the milled or stamped pattern chambered in 7.62x39. There are no first-world countries using it. Russia dropped it before I was born.

"Why are so many other countries still using it" is a better question, and of course the answer is that it's cheap and easy and 7.62x39 is a good, cheap round, and all that just works.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
Compare it to say, tank or aircraft development over the same 70 year period? (snip)
Nothing comparable to tanks and aircraft? (snip)
Because tanks and planes have. So why not guns?

the B-52 is about the same age as the AK-47, and is expected to remain in service for another 30 years.

At some point the basic design, whether it be the airframe of the B-52 or basic receiver\gas system of the AK simply becomes as good as it's going to get for the job you're doing with it.

 Ouze wrote:
the B-52 is about the same age as the AK-47, and is expected to remain in service for another 30 years.

At some point the basic design, whether it be the airframe of the B-52 or basic receiver\gas system of the AK simply becomes as good as it's going to get for the job you're doing with it.

This is a very good example. The B-52 is obsolete in its original role of attacking well-defended Soviet targets and has been completely replaced in that role, but it has found a much less demanding role as a bomb truck against targets that can't shoot back. Sure, you could sink huge amounts of money into designing and building a new bomber, but what is there to gain? The B-52 is already perfectly adequate for the job of moving bombs from point A to point B, so at best a new bomber could keep doing the B-52's job equally well. And so the B-52 will continue to serve until fatigue life limits force a replacement.

Same thing with the AK-47. You might be able to build a better gun, but the role it fills is not a demanding one and the AK-47 is perfectly adequate for it. Unless you're the US and have an unlimited military budget there are better places to spend your resources.

There's even a fair number of decent smaller forces still sporting new guns that are basically new 7.62x39 AK's with rails (I'd even include something like the Galil ACE in that, as used by Vietnam), for a lot of them the advantages of a SCHV round just don't come into play as much, and the 7.62x39 round doesn't really lose any viability.

The AK-47 is stupidly durable and reliable. It's one of very few guns you can take into basically any environment, expose it to the harshest elements in that environment for a week, pick it up and have it still work.

Most guns jam and degrade in the desert, the snow, where ever without regular and sometimes constant maintenance. The AK on the other hand can be placed into any kind of bull gak and at the very least function manually.

You can juggle bullet weight and velocity, but humans haven't massively changed in how they can handle recoil. The difference between a repeating firearm and a non-repeating one is a huge gulf, the difference between one automatic weapon and another is tiny.

There's no real room to go other than adding rails/sights/bling to the gun and that doesn't change how it works fundamentally. As other people have said it's a mature technology, it's done.

Or maybe the simplest answer: the gun is good

What are the innovations which have been introduced since the AK47 was designed?

Low calibre ammunition -- available as the AK74.
Caseless ammo -- which proved to be more trouble than it's worth.
Bullpup design -- this doesn't have overwhelming advantages over conventional design.
Red dot sight and tactical rails can be retro-fitted to the basic AK-47 if you wanted. For example, there are AK47s with grenade launchers.

Taken as a whole, there have not been any fundamental advances in infantry rifle design since WW2. This is partly because the weapons are already good enough.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
This is partly because the weapons are already good enough.

Which if you think about it, isn't that kind of weird? it's almost 2020 and we're still mostly killing people with little pieces of flying metal. I was sure by now we'd have, you know, lasers and flying cars and robot butlers.

The future is here and with the exception of readily available, thoughtfully curated pornography, it's been largely disappointing.

 Peregrine wrote:
It's still effective because rifle technology hasn't really changed since 1945, the AK-47 still works well enough for shooting people, and "which rifle do your troops have" has essentially nothing to do with who wins a war. In fact, since any rifle is about as good as any other rifle, the ease of logistics offered by the AK-47 can be a decisive advantage in choosing a rifle.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
All things being equal a 70 year old gun should not be viable.

Why not? This isn't a RTS where you level up your tech tree every year and old units are no longer effective, age alone is meaningless.

It needs heavy ammunition to function.

Not really. Per round it's about 50% more, but ammunition is only part of the weight a soldier is carrying. It's not going to make much practical difference. And remember, the AK-47 was largely replaced by the AK-47 outside of countries that just have stockpiles of cheap AK-47s and no funds to replace them, and the AK-74's round is almost identical to an AR-15's.

It’s inaccurate.

Nope. This is not a video game, the AK-47 is accurate enough for all practical purposes.

It’s loud and gives away your position if you fire it.

So does any other rifle without a suppressor, and even with one very very few weapons are truly "quiet" vs. "won't kill your hearing if you fire it without ear protection".

The weapon can cause collateral damage.

Lolwut? It's a rifle, not a grenade launcher.

It requires training to use.

So does any gun. FFS, we're talking about a gun originally intended to be issued to illiterate Russian peasant conscripts. Training is not an issue.

The weapon doesn’t really help you locate your opponent who might be taking lot shots at you in the valley.

Neither does any other gun.

is all the RnD being sunk into planes and ships?

You got it. Rifle technology gives minimal, if any, return on R&D. Investment in other weapons and equipment potentially gives significant return.

I think you’re really underselling how much the rest of our technology has moved on since 1949. We replace every piece of technology within a few years. Why not guns like the AK?

It wouldn’t necessarily take a revolution in rifle technology to render the AK obsolete. For example, let’s say you developed a cheap form of protection that rendered the ammunition ineffective at a certain range. Well, that would render most of the guns in the world pretty pointless beyond making a lot of noise. Likewise, what if you had a cheap drone that you could send out into a valley and pick off anybody from a mile away unseen. Well, that would render fighting in the old way as pointless as going in line or square.

People used similar arguments in the 19th century for keeping muskets and not bothering with iron sights. The mentality of “its good enough and not worth the R&D” cost quite a few lives. Crimean War and Austro-Prussian war for example. Muskets vs rifles; hilarity ensues. If you can fire faster at longer ranges more accurately or have other advantages that can translate into very real benefits.

Technology has been pretty much exponential over the past 200 years. We still had cavalry fighting with swords and lances in 1914; 31 years later we were dropping nukes on people. I doubt people in 1800 assumed the musket or cavalry would become obsolete or that war could be waged beyond the horizon.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
I think you’re really underselling how much the rest of our technology has moved on since 1949. We replace every piece of technology within a few years. Why not guns like the AK?

It wouldn’t necessarily take a revolution in rifle technology to render the AK obsolete.

There are a lot of really well reasoned, articulated posts answering exactly this. Why are you reiterating the original question again?

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
Technology has been pretty much exponential over the past 200 years. We still had cavalry fighting with swords and lances in 1914; 51 years later we were dropping nukes on people. I doubt people in 1800 assumed the musket or cavalry would become obsolete or that war could be waged beyond the horizon.

I think WW2 would have ended substantially differently had we not actually dropped the bomb until 1965

 Ouze wrote:
The AK-47 is obsolete as modern fighting weapon, if we define "AK-47" as the milled or stamped pattern chambered in 7.62x39. There are no first-world countries using it. Russia dropped it before I was born.

Very few first world countries used AK in the first place. They used FAL or G3. Plenty of those still in service too, especially G3's.
Finnish Army still has something like 100k+ AK-47s, and in fact our current infantry rifle is not much different from AK-47.

AR-15 is only about decade newer design than AK-47.

 Ouze wrote:

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
I think you’re really underselling how much the rest of our technology has moved on since 1949. We replace every piece of technology within a few years. Why not guns like the AK?

It wouldn’t necessarily take a revolution in rifle technology to render the AK obsolete.

There are a lot of really well reasoned, articulated posts answering exactly this. Why are you reiterating the original question again?

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
Technology has been pretty much exponential over the past 200 years. We still had cavalry fighting with swords and lances in 1914; 51 years later we were dropping nukes on people. I doubt people in 1800 assumed the musket or cavalry would become obsolete or that war could be waged beyond the horizon.

I think WW2 would have ended substantially differently had we not actually dropped the bomb until 1965

Providing more examples isn’t restating the question. When you debate something you come up with examples and no honestly I don’t feel anyone has answered the question. Not everything can be spat out and addressed in a single sentence. Why has there been technological stagnation in infantry weapons when normally they would either be displaced by better systems or rendered obsolete. The statements people have made boil down to “its good enough”, “technology just hasn’t advanced”, “R&D has went elsewhere”, “you don’t get a good return on improvements”; those are answers which create additional questions. I think those questions are worth asking. If you don’t then why are here?

Oh sorry, 31 years from cavalry to atomic bombs. That actually makes the case stronger for technology advancing really rapidly over the years.. Also, I don’t actually mention Hiroshima so yeah.

 Ouze wrote:


the B-52 is about the same age as the AK-47, and is expected to remain in service for another 30 years.

At some point the basic design, whether it be the airframe of the B-52 or basic receiver\gas system of the AK simply becomes as good as it's going to get for the job you're doing with it.

Another good example is the M2 Browning. That gun is 100 years old this year. I'm unaware of any plans in the US military to replace it (they tried once only to find that there was no practical improvement to be gained).

You've basically identified one of the core reasons its still in use - body armour. Whilst there is some around not every army has widespread access to it and even the armour that is used doesn't cover the whole body. In addition civilians, support units and a huge number of people don't have any access to it.

So the 47 can still shoot through cloth and bodyparts and kill so why replace it? There's no counter-arms race going on (esp in 3rd world and many other poorer nations where the 47 is popular) to really cause a need to replace.


And that's another aspect, most of the countries making heavy use of it are poorer nations. They don't have a huge R&D budget (if they have one at all); they don't have huge resources to pour into top end machining and equipment.They want a cheap, easy to maintain, decent killing weapon that is easy to get ammo for and supply. The AK 47 provides pretty much all those things and will still make everyone duck their heads when it fires and it will still kill people at decent ranges for combat.

Whilst technology has come on in leaps and bounds in some markets (esp computing); its not been as fast in others. Furthermore some of the advances at the high tech end are very advanced, but ultimately not feasible for a warzone. The weapons are too high maintenance; too unreliable; too expensive for mass production and use etc...

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
. I think those questions are worth asking. If you don’t then why are here?

Since you seem to be content to handwave away the detailed, reasoned answers you gave as "one sentence answers", and then just reiterate your stance without addressing any of them, it's definitely a question I'm asking myself as well.

The answers you got were actually good answers. if you look at how modern combat happens in terms of engagement range, and the reality that weapons development (much like the development of literally everything else) starts to reach a part of increasing costs vs diminishing returns, you have your explanation whether you like it or not. What actually wins wars in the first world? It's not the number of people killed via small arms combat between infantry units, not anymore.

To paraphrase someone else, why haven't hammers got significantly better in like a thousand years?


As an aside, I think we really need to standardize the terms we are talking about here. Are we talking about the AK pattern using 7.62x39, or the AK74 and its descendants, or what? Because I I mentioned earlier, the former really IS functionally obsolete, but much as how some countries still use WW2/Korean War era planes as frontline fighters, it fits their needs, is plentiful, and works on a tight budget.

The latter is not at all obsolete and is still under active development just as the modern M4 is.

A lot of the technologies mentioned by the OP are in use - we have armed drones and pinpoint bombs/missiles that can surgically target relatively small areas even with friendly troops close by. The fact remains we still need to arm our troops since we still need them to actually hold ground or clear people out of buildings or engage enemies otherwise too difficult to target with long-range munitions.

As everyone else already pointed out, rifle technology is basically a solved problem at this point and most of the issues you're bringing up are more related to cost and training than technology. More accurate rifles exist, more powerful rifles exist, lighter rifles with overall better performance exist and many of these are in use by militaries around the world. Fundamentally they all do exactly the same thing and the reason for that is we haven't found a better way to do it yet. It may be that we never will. Perhaps the most efficient way for soldiers to kill their targets at fairly close ranges is and always will be firearms?

Things like guided bullets may become a part of warfare eventually, but one of the things history has taught us about weapons development is that cost and ease of use are at least as important as the quality and features of the weapon, if not more so. The AK-47 works and is extremely cheap and durable. It's by no means the best at anything it does (save possibly not breaking) but that doesn't really matter. Rifles are now quite a small part of warfare anyway so that's why most R&D is sunk into weapons that make a difference like ships, planes and missiles/bombs.

There has been attempts to improve our current firearms technology (which is basically late 19th century level) but they tend to produce small/debatable advantages and huge increase of cost, so not really worth it.



Basic principle of the modern firearm has proven hard to improve in meaningful fashion. There is a bullet, and a propellant. If you make propellant much more powerful, it means more recoil and heavier weapon. If you increase rate of fire, it means gun heats up faster.
Metal cased ammunition works well because each expended case absorbs some of the heat generated when propellant is ignited. In plastic case (or caseless) ammunition this does not happen, the gun absorbs all the heat, that is not a good thing.

So as I see it, if we want to make current crop of firearms signifantly better, one of two things need to happen (preferably both): invention of much more efficient propellant than present cordite type propellants, and much stronger materials than current steel and composite products. Neither of these is particularly easy to come by, though I don't rule it impossible that such an advance could be around the corner.

I mean, we did use light bulbs in essentially unchanged form for 100 years while everything else advanced around them, but they finally became obsolete.

Slipspace wrote:
A lot of the technologies mentioned by the OP are in use - we have armed drones and pinpoint bombs/missiles that can surgically target relatively small areas even with friendly troops close by. The fact remains we still need to arm our troops since we still need them to actually hold ground or clear people out of buildings or engage enemies otherwise too difficult to target with long-range munitions.

As everyone else already pointed out, rifle technology is basically a solved problem at this point and most of the issues you're bringing up are more related to cost and training than technology. More accurate rifles exist, more powerful rifles exist, lighter rifles with overall better performance exist and many of these are in use by militaries around the world. Fundamentally they all do exactly the same thing and the reason for that is we haven't found a better way to do it yet. It may be that we never will. Perhaps the most efficient way for soldiers to kill their targets at fairly close ranges is and always will be firearms?

Things like guided bullets may become a part of warfare eventually, but one of the things history has taught us about weapons development is that cost and ease of use are at least as important as the quality and features of the weapon, if not more so. The AK-47 works and is extremely cheap and durable. It's by no means the best at anything it does (save possibly not breaking) but that doesn't really matter. Rifles are now quite a small part of warfare anyway so that's why most R&D is sunk into weapons that make a difference like ships, planes and missiles/bombs.

Could infantry become marginal to the point of being irrelevant? If WW3 happened, for example, that conflict would revolve around ICBM’s hurling nukes at each other. You would never have the millions strong armies of infantry like you had in WW1 and WW2? Their role seems incredibly reduced in modern warfare, a bit like how the cavalry’s role became more and more marginal as time progressed? Until eventually they were seen as a suicidal method of fighting war kept on only out of romantic tradition?