Origin
United States
The United States became the world's dominant arms producer from WWII onward. American weapons including the M1 Garand, M1911 pistol, M16 rifle, M4 carbine, and a vast array of artillery, aircraft, and naval weapons have defined modern warfare and been exported to militaries worldwide.
United States Arms & Weapons
Overview
The United States entered the 19th century as a minor military power and ended the 20th as the world's dominant one, with an arms industry whose output in scope, quality, and innovation has shaped modern warfare globally. American weapons have been exported to allies and adversaries alike, and many — the M1911, M1 Garand, M16, .30-06 cartridge, and others — are among the most influential designs in history.
Small Arms Milestones
Pistols
- Colt Model 1873 Single Action Army — The iconic revolver of the frontier era; .45 Colt
- Colt M1911 — Designed by John Browning; .45 ACP semi-automatic; adopted 1911; served as the US standard sidearm until 1985; arguably the most influential pistol design of the 20th century
- Beretta M9 — Replaced the M1911; 9mm; 15-round magazine; NATO standard
- SIG Sauer M17/M18 — Current US military standard sidearm
Rifles
- Springfield Model 1873 "Trapdoor" — First standard US breech-loading rifle
- Krag-Jørgensen M1892 — First US magazine repeating rifle
- Springfield M1903 — Mauser-based bolt-action; 5-round internal magazine; used through WWII
- M1 Garand — Semi-automatic; 8-round en bloc clip; "the greatest battle implement ever devised" (Patton); standard US rifle 1936–1957
- M14 — 7.62mm NATO; 20-round magazine; transitional design
- M16/M16A1/A2/A4 — 5.56mm; the standard US military rifle since 1964
- M4 Carbine — Shortened M16; current standard US issue
Machine Guns
- Browning M1917/M1919 — Water and air-cooled; used in both World Wars
- Browning M2HB (.50 cal) — Heavy machine gun; introduced 1933; still the US and NATO standard heavy MG
- M60 GPMG — 7.62mm; used Vietnam through the 1990s
- M249 SAW — 5.56mm light machine gun; squad automatic weapon
Artillery and Heavy Weapons
- M1 155mm howitzer (Long Tom) — WWII standard heavy field piece
- M109 Paladin — Self-propelled 155mm; current US standard
- M270 MLRS — Multiple Launch Rocket System; precision-guided rockets
Aviation and Missiles
- P-51 Mustang — WWII long-range escort fighter
- F-86 Sabre — First American swept-wing jet fighter; Korean War
- F-4 Phantom II — Vietnam-era multirole fighter
- F-15/F-16 — Cold War fighters still in service
- F-22 Raptor / F-35 Lightning II — Current generation stealth fighters
- BGM-109 Tomahawk — Cruise missile; 1,500+ km range; first combat use 1991
Nuclear Arsenal
The United States developed the first nuclear weapons (Manhattan Project, 1945) and maintains a triad of land-based ICBMs (Minuteman III), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (Trident II), and strategic bombers (B-52, B-2).
This article is a stub. Contributions covering specific weapons systems, manufacturers, and conflicts are welcome.
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Bolo Knife
The bolo is the broad-bladed working knife of the Philippines — wider toward the tip, weighted for the chop, the universal tool of field and jungle — and a weapon with a genuine military career: the blade of the Philippine Revolution and the guerrilla resistance of World War II, and, in an unusual compliment, an official issue pattern of the United States Army, whose M1904 and M1917 bolos equipped engineers, medics, and machine-gun crews through two wars.
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Bowie Knife
The Bowie knife is the great American fighting blade of the nineteenth century: a heavy sheath knife, typically with a clipped point and a blade of eight inches or more, named for James Bowie and made famous by the 1827 Sandbar Fight, where a wounded Bowie killed his attacker with his big butcher-style knife. Within a decade Sheffield's cutlers were shipping Bowies to America by the crate, and the knife had become sidearm, tool, and legend across the frontier.
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Colt Single Action Army
The Colt Single Action Army of 1873 — the Peacemaker — is the revolver of the American West. Adopted by the U.S. Army in .45 Colt and sold across the frontier in dozens of calibers and barrel lengths, it combined a simple, strong single-action lockwork with the new self-contained metallic cartridge. Soldiers, lawmen, cowboys, and outlaws alike carried it, and its silhouette became — and remains — the visual shorthand for an entire era of American history.
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Ek Commando Knife
The Ek Commando knife is the private-purchase fighting knife of World War II America: hand-ground daggers and fighters from John Ek's Connecticut shop, sold only to service members and shipped with a certificate carrying each knife's serial number. Paratroopers and raiders bought them by the thousand, presidents and generals owned presentation pieces, and the distinctive cast-lead X-head rivets in the wooden grip made the Ek one of the most recognizable American blades of the war.
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HK MP5
HK MP5 Submachine Gun
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KA-BAR Knife
USMC utility knife
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M1 Garand
The M1 Garand was the first semi-automatic rifle adopted as the standard arm of any major power, giving the American infantryman of the Second World War a decisive firepower edge over every bolt-action rival. Gas-operated, chambered in .30-06, and fed by an eight-round en-bloc clip, it fired as fast as a man could aim. Patton's verdict — 'the greatest battle implement ever devised' — has headed every account of the rifle since he wrote it in 1945.
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M16 Rifle
The M16 brought the assault rifle to the West: Eugene Stoner's AR-15 design in 5.56mm, built of aluminum forgings and polymer around a direct-gas action, light enough to carry all day and controllable in automatic fire. Its Vietnam introduction was marred by a self-inflicted reliability scandal, but the matured M16A1 recovered completely and became the enduring pattern for more than more than fifty continuous years of American service rifles — today's standard-issue M4 carbine is its direct descendant.
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M1911 Pistol
The M1911 is John Browning's masterpiece: a short-recoil, single-action semi-automatic in .45 ACP that served as the standard American sidearm for an unmatched 74 years, from 1911 to 1985. Born of the Army's demand for real stopping power after the Philippine campaigns, it fought in both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, and its tilting-barrel action remains, unchanged in essentials, the mechanical basis of nearly all of the serious combat pistols still being designed and manufactured anywhere in the world today.
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M24 Sniper Weapon System
The M24 Sniper Weapon System (SWS), based on the commercial Remington Model 700 action, is a bolt-action sniper rifle adopted by the United States Army in 1988 as its standard sniper rifle.
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M3 Grease Gun
The M3 'Grease Gun' was America's Sten: a .45 caliber submachine gun of stamped steel and welded seams, designed in 1942 to replace the superb but slow-and-costly Thompson with something a car plant could stamp out by the hundred thousand. Ugly, slow-firing, and utterly practical, it armed tankers and GIs from Normandy to Korea and Vietnam — and stayed in U.S. armored vehicles until the 1990s, outliving the Thompson it replaced by half a century.
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Marine Raider Stiletto
The Marine Raider stiletto is the U.S. Marine Corps' copy of the British Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife: a slim double-edged dagger designed purely for silent killing, issued in 1942 to the new Raider battalions and paramarines. About 14,370 were made by Camillus, carried at Makin, Guadalcanal, and Bougainville, and its silhouette — with the Raider patch it appears on — became one of the Corps' most storied emblems, though as a working knife the delicate blade lost the argument to the KA-BAR within a year.
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Mark I Trench Knife
The Mark I trench knife of 1918 is the most recognizable close-combat weapon of the Great War: a double-edged dagger blade beneath a cast bronze knuckle-duster grip, its pommel ending in a skull-crusher spike. Designed for the raid — the silent, clawing fights in enemy trenches where rifles were useless — it reached the AEF late, served again in the Second World War with paratroops and rangers, and remains the collector's archetype of trench warfare.
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Model 1860 Light Cavalry Saber
The Model 1860 Light Cavalry Saber was the standard edged weapon of the Union horseman: a curved, single-edged blade of about 35 inches in an iron scabbard, lighter and handier than the heavy Model 1840 'Old Wristbreaker' it replaced. Hundreds of thousands were made during the Civil War, and though the revolver and carbine did most of the cavalry's real killing, the saber charge at Brandy Station and Gettysburg kept the blade's place in the war's story.
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Remington Model 1875
The Remington Model 1875 was Remington's answer to the Colt Peacemaker: a big single-action Army revolver in .44 and .45 calibers, built on the frame lineage of the company's famous percussion Armys and instantly known by the distinctive web of metal under its ejector housing. It lost the Army contract race to Colt but armed frontier lawmen, outlaws — Frank James carried one — and foreign contracts, and it stands today as the great 'other' sixgun of the Old West.
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Springfield Model 1861
The Springfield Model 1861 was the standard infantry arm of the Union in the Civil War: a .58 caliber single-shot muzzleloading rifle-musket firing the hollow-based Minié ball, accurate to ranges no smoothbore approached. Over a million were produced by Springfield Armory and contractors, and its combination — old muzzleloading manual of arms, new rifled accuracy of the Minié revolution — is written in the war's terrible casualty lists that run from Antietam and Fredericksburg to Cold Harbor.
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Thompson Submachine Gun
The Thompson was America's first submachine gun: a .45 ACP automatic designed as a trench broom for a war that ended before it shipped. Instead it found infamy in Prohibition Chicago, fame in Marine hands in the banana wars, and vindication by the million in the Second World War, where simplified M1 versions armed sergeants, raiders, and paratroopers of every Allied nation. No firearm carries a bigger spread of reputations — gangster icon and GI workhorse in one.
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Winchester Model 1866
The Winchester Model 1866 — the Yellow Boy, for its gleaming brass receiver — was the first rifle to carry the Winchester name: the Civil War Henry improved with a wooden forearm and Nelson King's loading gate, which together turned a fragile war rifle into the frontier's first practical repeater. It armed settlers, Native warriors, and foreign armies from the Bozeman Trail to the Ottoman trenches at Plevna, and it founded the lever-action dynasty that followed.
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Winchester Model 1873
The Winchester Model 1873 is the archetypal lever-action of the American West: an iron-then-steel-framed repeater feeding centerfire .44-40 cartridges from a tube magazine as fast as a hand could work the lever. Sharing its ammunition with the Colt revolver on the same belt, produced in the hundreds of thousands as rifle, carbine, and musket, it armed ranchers, railroads, lawmen, and outlaws alike and earned the marketing title history decided to keep: the gun that won the West.
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Winchester Model 1892
The Winchester Model 1892 was John Browning's compact masterpiece of the lever-action line: the pistol-caliber Winchester rebuilt around his locking-block action, slimmer, stronger, and faster than the toggle-link 1873 it replaced. Over a million were made for the world's saddle scabbards and trap lines — and Hollywood made it immortal, putting the '92 in nearly every Western ever filmed, usually standing in for rifles a generation older than itself — the public's image of the frontier repeater is, anachronistically, mostly this gun.