Although widely used, the M16 was not without its problems.
Here s What You Need to Remember: As U.S. forces streamed out of bases in the United States bound for Southeast Asia, few would have imagined the M16 rifle, which seemed to have such a rosy future, would encounter such controversy. The weapon which had garnered such glowing reports from American advisers and Vietnamese troops would fall victim to fatal, last-minute decisions and rumor that fueled bad choices at the troop level. The M16 rifle was headed into choppy waters.
The M16 rifle is one of the most iconic weapons of the post-World War II era. American fighting men have carried the M16 in one form or another into combat for more than fifty years, from Vietnam to the present day. The story of the original M16, whose descendants the M16A4 and M4 carbine today fight in Syria and Iraq against the Islamic State, goes all the way back to the 1950s and the institutional soul-searching that came after another war Korea.
These nuclear-powered carriers can carry out more sorties (missions) than their smaller predecessors.
Key point: The Cold War was a time of sharp debates over defense spending and the future of carriers. America could have continued with a bunch of lighter carriers, but after much back-and-forth the vision for supercarriers finally won out.
USS Forrestal (CV-59) was the world’s first supercarrier. Rivalled only by the converted battleship HIJMS Shinano and the cancelled USS United States (CVA-58), Forrestal established a new template for maritime airpower. Serving for 38 years, Forrestal provided the model upon which the United States would build its fleet of modern aircraft carriers, all the way down to USS Gerald R. Ford (CV-78).
Getting the large aircraft on the carrier was a feat itself.
Key point: Getting the U-2 where it needed to go, required transporting literally over seas. Here is how it was done.
On May 1, 1960, the Soviet Union shot down a CIA U-2 spy plane and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers. It was an international crisis for America’s intelligence agencies.
This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.
A planned summit between Pres. Dwight Eisenhower and Premier Nikita Khrushchev was scuttled, much to Eisenhower’s embarrassment and to the fury of the Pakistanis, from whose territory the flight had been launched.