Sarawak, January 1964
‘You may be intrigued to hear that we have got our first Armalite rifle in Sarawak—captured from the Indos yesterday’, an officer of the British Far East Land Forces stationed in Singapore wrote to his colleague in Whitehall. ‘This may act as a suitable incentive to hasten our own.’1 In the context of the broader correspondence between these officers, preserved in the National Archives, the ironic tone becomes clear—a barely concealed frustration with the sluggish procurement bureaucracy in London, expressed through studied understatement.
Indeed, British troops fighting since 1963 in an undeclared war against Indonesian guerrillas in the jungles of Borneo felt abandoned by their leadership. While their own long, heavy rifles, designed for conventional warfare against Soviet troops, were of little use in the dense jungle, their opponents carried brand-new American weapons with which they could execute rapid raids from the undergrowth. Attempts to obtain such rifles themselves led to what amounted to organized looting expeditions; the British government could only gradually procure these still barely known weapons, today familiar under the name AR-15 and primarily known for horrific mass shootings and as an identity symbol of American gun culture.
The records in the National Archives documenting this military back-and-forth—test reports, parliamentary debates, and financial and corporate correspondence surrounding the unexpected acquisition of Armalite rifles—offer an insight into a process that reaches far beyond the bureaucratic details of procurement history. They reveal the significance of an object that repeatedly changed sides: a weapon crafted from modern aerospace materials, designed to increase American military lethality, appropriated by Indonesian anti-colonial fighters, and re-appropriated by British troops who increasingly found themselves in the murky, irregular conflicts of decolonization. Yet this trajectory is more than just the biography of a weapon. Following the Armalite through British military institutions reveals what the participants themselves could rarely articulate: a fundamental transformation in what it meant to be a soldier. Bodies learned new movements, tactical thinking adapted to irregular warfare, and the very category of ‘the soldier’ shifted from disciplined imperial infantryman towards something more autonomous, more mobile, and uncomfortably similar to the guerrillas British forces ostensibly sought to suppress.

Marketing a Tool of Violence
The AR-15 represented American industrial modernity and societal change in material form. Developed in the 1950s by an aerospace engineer using materials like aluminium and fibreglass, it was designed not to fire single, accurate shots over long ranges, but to fire small, fast bullets—and a lot of them. This broke radically not only with traditional rifle design philosophies, but also with notions of American masculinity and marksmanship. Even poor marksmen could use it effectively, as one trial report noted.2
The US Army rejected the idea at first, committed as it was to heavy, full-power rifles in the tradition of American marksmanship culture. Colt, the rifle’s manufacturer, began marketing the weapon abroad, relying on racial stereotypes: smaller Asian soldiers, it was suggested, would benefit from a lighter weapon with less recoil.3 When the US Army finally began deploying AR-15s to Special Forces in Vietnam in the early 1960s, reports explicitly connected ‘the light weight and small stature of the Vietnamese soldier’ with the weapon’s suitability for warfare in the jungle.4 The most advanced American engineering was coded as an ‘Asian weapon’—and the Indonesian Army was among the first buyers.
When Indonesian soldiers and guerrillas started to fight British troops in the undeclared war on Borneo known as ‘Konfrontasi’, the powerful British Army rifle, the SLR, proved to be more of a hindrance than an asset. Against the light and short Armalite wielded by the Indonesians, British soldiers felt outgunned. With a rapid rate of fire and manageable recoil, it was perfectly suited for jungle warfare characterized by speed and mobility, but also stealth and guile. With sufficient numbers in British hands, the Armalite fostered warfare practices such as long, silent patrolling, surprise encounters, ambushes, and quick withdrawals. American technological modernity, filtered through guerrilla warfare in South-East Asia, transformed British imperial soldiering.
Significantly, British adoption of the rifle came largely through Gurkha units, who pushed for its procurement and used it first in significant numbers. Gurkha troops were themselves subject to racialized perceptions in military memoirs and official documents—characterized as small, fast, and compact, their physical stature explained as an advantage in jungle terrain.5 The chain of associations was thus completed: a modern American weapon, racially coded for ‘small Asians’, used by Indonesian guerrillas, adopted by ‘small’ Gurkhas for irregular jungle warfare—and then, through them, gradually integrated into the most elite British units, including the SAS. The weapon’s journey through these racialized categories reveals how technological modernity and imperial hierarchies could be simultaneously maintained and undermined.
‘Out-Guerrilla’ the Guerrillas
In the memoirs of General Walter Walker, who commanded British forces during the Borneo campaign, this shift became tangible. Describing the evolution of his troops, he wrote: ‘That was the way our Gurkhas learned to move and they learned to do it better than the guerrillas. They were able to out-guerrilla the enemy in every department of the game . . . The Regiment gradually devised tactical techniques and battle skills which would have done credit to a cat-burglar, gangster, gunman and poacher.’6
Walker’s formulation crystallizes the transformation. To ‘out-guerrilla’ the guerrillas meant to think and fight like the enemy—and use their guns. What made a ‘good soldier’ was no longer parade-ground discipline but guerrilla effectiveness, and the Armalite fit this new identity perfectly: light, mobile, and suited for ambush rather than pitched battle, in a way it was a gangster’s gun in the hands of imperial troops. Walker, who later attempted to establish an anti-communist paramilitary organization in the UK,7 linked this shift in categories to a critical diagnosis of his compatriots at home: ‘Victory in guerilla warfare goes to the tougher, more resourceful soldier and the more gadget-filled our life becomes the harder it is to produce him.’8

‘Don’t Give Our Troops This Gun’
While figures like Walker—born in British India in 1912 and socialized in an imperial context—were classic examples of the ‘imperial adventure hero’, who shaped quintessential British martial values by adopting foreign practices,9 the British public reacted negatively to the blurring of boundaries between the worlds of classical and imperial warfare. Reactions to a sensationalist article about the Armalite in the first issue of The Sun in 1964—‘British troops get tiny killer’—revealed anxieties that the military would not explicitly acknowledge. Angry letters poured in,10 including one memorably titled ‘Don’t give our troops this gun’. Citizens called it a ‘barbarous instrument unworthy of use by a civilized Country’ and a ‘further reprehensible descent from humane standards’. One correspondent framed it in explicitly theological terms: ‘This diabolical instrument of torture makes gaping wounds by tearing right through the body . . . If, after 2000 years of Christianity, a British Government can stoop that low, then Christianity has been an utter failure.’
These letter-writers grasped the symbolic weight of what was happening: imperial troops were using weapons and tactics associated with ‘uncivilized’ warfare. The racial and moral hierarchies that justified imperial violence were collapsing. The Ministry’s response was an attempt at geographical containment. Internal correspondence specified: ‘This rifle has been introduced as a special to theatre weapon and, in our view every effort should be made to confine it exclusively to FARELF [Far East Land Forces].’11 The directive was clear: ‘none will be retained in the UK’.12 The weapon belonged ‘over there’, in South-East Asia. Britain itself had to remain untouched by this irregular, guerrilla-style warfare.
The Technical Problems of Domestic Unrest
This geographical containment, however, proved impossible to maintain. By 1970, an MOD working group reviewing the Army’s role in ‘internal unrest’ made the transfer explicit. They wrote about adapting experience ‘gained in a colonial context against largely unsophisticated opposition’ to ‘the situation in Northern Ireland and examples of internal unrest in the United States’.13 Northern Ireland was described frankly as a ‘convenient cover’ for thinking about expected student protests and domestic disorder.14 Against the backdrop of anticipated left-wing unrest, these planning documents reveal an attempt to reconfigure the relationship between state power and civil engagement. Among the various tactical and operational questions addressed by the working group, one issue proved particularly significant: the long-established but increasingly controversial practice of shooting selected ‘ringleaders’ and ‘troublemakers’ during demonstrations. For this practice, the working group identified what they described as a technical problem with the Army’s standard rifle, though their concern was less ballistic than optical, and less about lethality than legitimacy: ‘the SLR lacks the degree of selectivity necessary to ensure that only the person at which it is aimed will be damaged (e.g. the 7.62mm round will pass right through a man at short ranges). The ideal is a round . . . which does not penetrate nor make a wound of dreadful appearance.’15
The eventual introduction of comparable weapons systems into British service during the 1980s cannot be reduced to these considerations alone; such procurement decisions always emerge from multiple institutional, technological, and strategic factors. Yet the debates surrounding the Armalite capture something more significant than a single choice of weapon: a fundamental reorientation in British military thinking. The paradigmatic scenario of armed conflict was shifting from large-scale conventional warfare between regular armies to irregular confrontations in urban settings.
The Object as Vehicle
The Armalite was more than a rifle. It was a vehicle carrying American industrial modernity, Indonesian guerrilla tactics, and racialized assumptions about warfare into British forces, thereby fostering a distinctly post-imperial form of violent subjectivity. When British soldiers adopted it, they acquired not merely superior firepower but new ways of moving, thinking, and fighting. The weapon enabled practices that blurred the line between imperial troops and insurgents, between ‘civilized’ and ‘irregular’ warfare.
Geographical containment of materiel may be achievable, but the knowledge and practices such objects enable cannot be similarly confined. Bodies that learned to ‘shoot and scoot’16 in Borneo carried that knowledge with them into the murky wars of decolonization and, eventually, into the planning documents for domestic operations. Officers who praised ‘cat-burglar’ skills redefined what it meant to be a good soldier. Institutions that initially recoiled from ‘uncivilized’ weapons eventually found them suitable for operations on British streets.
The documents in the National Archives narrate this transformation obliquely, across dispersed archival traces: procurement memos attempting to manage anxieties, field reports documenting tactical transformations, civilian letters expressing horror at what seemed like civilizational collapse, and ministerial correspondence trying to maintain boundaries that were already dissolving. Read together, they reveal how imperial power transforms through contact with those it fights—not through grand strategy, but through the mundane circulation of weapons, techniques, and embodied practices.
The Armalite’s trajectory through British archives maps a cultural shift that institutions and individuals alike proved unwilling to articulate directly. Modern technology in ‘uncivilized’ hands taught imperial troops to fight like guerrillas. And in learning to ‘out-guerrilla’ their enemies, they became uncomfortably similar to them.
Featured image: Indonesian Soldiers walking through the river during war, 25 June 1962. IMS Vintage Photos, unknown photographer. Public domain.
- J. F. Kenyon to T. J. Richardson, 6 Jan. 1964. The UK National Archives (hereafter TNA), DEFE 24/644. [↩]
- FARELF G (Operational Requirements and Analysis) Branch (March 1965): A Summary of Evidence from the FARELF trial of the AR 15 rifle (Armalite). TNA, WO 291/2507, Annexure B, p. 3. [↩]
- Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 (New York, 2023), 92. [↩]
- Advanced Research Projects Agency (1962): Field Test Report, AR-15 Armalite Rifle. Enclosure: Final Report, OSD/ARPA Research and Development Field Unit—Vietnam. Washington DC, p. 7. [↩]
- Lionel Caplan, Warrior Gentlemen: ‘Gurkhas’ in the Western Imagination (Oxford, 1995), 148. [↩]
- E. D. Smith, East of Katmandu: The Story of The 7th Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Rifles, vol. ii: 1948–1973. With a Foreword by Sir Walter Walker (London, 1976), pp. xiv–xv. [↩]
- Grischa Sutterer, Die Privatisierung des Krieges: Private Military Companies und die postimperiale Neuordnung der Welt (Berlin, 2024), 187–218. [↩]
- Ibid. p. xvi. [↩]
- Graham Dawson, ‘The Blond Bedouin: Lawrence of Arabia, Imperial Adventure and the Imagining of English–British Masculinity’, in Michael Roper und John Tosh (eds.), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London, 1991), 113–44, at 120–3. [↩]
- These letters are preserved in TNA, DEFE 24/644. [↩]
- Colt AR-15 Rifles for FARELF (4 May 1965). TNA, DEFE 24/644. [↩]
- 5.56mm Rifle Armalite (30 Mar. 1965). TNA, WO 32/20815. [↩]
- Paper by CDI(A) on Future Tactical Doctrine and Equipment Requirements for Operations in Support of the Civil Power (31 July 1970). TNA, HO 325/132, p. 1. [↩]
- E. D. Wright to E. Mark: Internal Security Tactical Doctrine Working Party, 10 Aug. 1970. TNA, HO 325/132. [↩]
- Paper by CDI(A) on Future Tactical Doctrine and Equipment Requirements for Operations in Support of the Civil Power (31 July 1970). TNA, HO 325/132, p. 10. [↩]
- 22 Special Air Service Regiment (31 Aug. 1964): Annex B to 22 SAS Ops/90: PTL EQPT for 14 Day Ptl. TNA, WO 305/4292, p. 2. [↩]
The text only may be used may be used under licence Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Benedikt Sepp (January 26, 2026). The Enemy’s Weapon: Learning Guerrilla Warfare Through an American Rifle. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved February 12, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15k3j
