The AK47 is one of the iconic images of the past 100 years. More than 100 million AK-series rifles have been built - the vast majority of them serving the militaries of totalitarian dictatorships,the private guards of warlords and thugs,and “revolutionary” groups around the Second and Third Worlds from the 1950s to today. It’s the AK-series that served everyone from the guards at Red Square to the Viet Cong to the militias of Mogadishu. The AK was romanticized by the Americans as the villains weapon and has been demonized for the same.It developed a substantial mythology that largely obscures the political and social aspects of its design; rugged and easily maintained by illiterate peasants.It is the very antithesis of the tradition of marksmanship. But this is not about the AK.
The west never developed a counter-icon with the counter-culture romance of the AK-indeed, since so much of the survival of the west involved refuting the idea of the romantic totalitarian hero, that’s completely appropriate.But if the west did have a counter-icon, it’d likely be the FN-FAL.
The Fusil Automatique Léger (Light Automatic Rifle) or FAL is a 7.62x51mm NATO self-loading,selective fire rifle produced by The Fabrique Nationale de Herstal (FN) during the Cold War, and adopted by many NATO countries. It has also been adopted by many other nations for their armed forces and has proven to be a popular civilian rifle for hunting and sport shooting. The FN FAL was also produced under license in many of the adopting countries. Because of its prevalence and widespread use among the armed forces of many Western and other non-Communist countries during the Cold War, it was nicknamed "the right arm of the Free World".
It’s powerful - unlike the AK with its short 7.62×39mm “intermediate” round, it fires a full-powered 7.62×51mm round.It’s accurate in a way the AK never could be. It’s a marksman’s rifle; while it could spray automatic fire. It’s rugged like the AK, but it wasn’ “simple”; where the AK was a cheap specimen that could be manufactured in any third-world machine shop, the FAL was the product of old-world European craftsmanship, painstakingly machined to fairly tight tolerances. And yet, in battle after battle around the world for fifty years, when the forces of “revolution” and thuggery took to the field with their AK47s, they were more often than not faced with troops with the FAL. As the USSR and NATO stared each other down from the fifties through the ’80s, many of the NATO troops that stared back across the border - the Dutch, the Belgians, the British and Canadians and many others - carried the FAL. As did the US - almost:
The FAL is falling out of front-line service with the world’s marquee armies; the Brits traded the SLR in for the space-age looking IW; the Dutch, Belgians and Canadians,the Australians, the Austrians and even the Irish traded theirs in for more modern weapons.And yet the FAL soldiers on around the world, in places like India and Brazil and South Africa and, in places like Zimbabwe and Venezuela, alongside its old nemesis, the AK.
Since the late 1950s, the Indian armed forces had been equipped with a FAL variant alleged to be reverse-engineered, which is designated the 1A SLR (Self Loading Rifle). This copy is considered to be a distinct weapon (although certainly not an original design) which has features from both Commonwealth inch-dimensioned versions as well as metric FALs. It was the mainstay rifle of the Indian Army for almost 45 years, and first saw combat use during the 1965
war with Pakistan. The variant manufactured in India is restricted to semi-automatic fire like the British and Canadian Versions. The replacement for the 1A is the INSAS family of rifles,carbines and light machine guns - partially derived from the SLR but also with AK features, but in 5.56 mm. Considerable number of SLRs continue to be used by constabulary and police forces of India. Indian 1A SLRs have been provided to Nepal.
