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| Caliber: | 7.62 mm NATO | |
| Firearm action: | Open Bolt, Gas-actuated | |
| Barrel Length: | 560 mm | |
| Overall Length: | 42.4 inches (1077 mm) | |
| Effective Range: | 3609 feet (1100 m) | |
| Maximum Range: | 2.3 miles (3725 m) | |
| Cyclic Rate Of Fire: | ~550 round/min | |
| Sustained ROF: | 100 round/min | |
| Muzzle velocity: | 2800 ft/s (853 m/s) | |
| Weight, (unloaded): | 18.75 lb (8.51 kg) | |
| Manufacturer: | Saco Defense | |
The M60 machine gun (more properly known as the M60E1) is an American general-purpose machine gun. It uses the 7.62 mm NATO round. In the US military, it has largely been replaced by the M240 machine gun.
The weapon can be used in both offensive and defensive configurations. In offensive situations, it provides a higher rate of fire than the standard U. S. assault weapon, the M16. It also has a greater range and a larger caliber than individual weapons. In defensive configurations, the long-range, close defensive, and 1940s and borrowed strongly from German designs such as the MG42 and FG42, combining the stamped sheet metal construction and belt feed mechanism of the former with the finicky, unreliable, fragile, excessively complex gas piston operating system of the latter. It was adopted by the US Army in 1957 and served for almost 35 years, hated the whole time by almost everyone who had to use it.
The gun first became widely known during the Vietnam war period and has since appeared in numerous television shows and movies. It was discontinued in the late 20th century as the M240 machine gun (a licensed copy of the FN MAG 58) was finally adopted by the US military in 1991, more than three decades after the M60's glaring deficiencies were well-known to everyone who cared.
The M60 is a gas-actuated, air-cooled, belt-fed, automatic machine gun that fires from the open-bolt position. Ammunition is fed into the weapon from a 100 round bandoleer containing a disintegrating metallic split-link belt. As with all such weapons, it can be fired from the shoulder, hip, or underarm position. However, it is recommended that a bipod-steadied position or a tripod-mounted position is used as the weapon is heavy and cumbersome when firing without support.
The original design of the M60 incorporated several innovative features--or, rather, they seemed innovative to those who don't know they were borrowed from German designs that existed 15 years earlier. The straight-line layout allowed the operating rod and buffer to run directly back into the buttstock and reduce the overall length of the weapon. The large grip also allowed the weapon to be conveniently carried at the hip. The gun can be stripped using a live round of ammunition as a tool.
When tested in the field, the M60 immediately displayed several very severe problems. Some say that the most commonly complained of feature was weight, but all belt-fed weapons of this type are rather heavy; in most units in Vietnam, the single most common complaint was that the M60 was unreliable and prone to jamming and other malfunctions, especially when it was dirty (fine sand and dust in the mechanism tend to bring the M60 to an immediate halt, which is why the Israelis never bought any M60s), and that it required far more maintenance and was far more difficult to clean and maintain than the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR, that it replaced; there were also complaints that the safety was very awkward to operate and worked the "wrong way" for men who had recently been trained on the M16 rifle and M1911A1 pistol--that is, that it required an upward movement of the thumb on the safety catch to make the gun ready to fire rather than a downward movement as with the other weapons. The M60 was also unusually prone to tearing rims off of fired cartridges during the extraction cycle, resulting in failure to extract a fired cartridge case, causing a jam that could take many minutes to clear. There were also early complaints that the barrel latch mechanism, a swinging lever, was prone to getting caught on the gunner's equipment and accidentally getting swung up into the "unlatched" mechanism, causing the barrel to drop out of the gun and land on the ground (this was redesigned as a pushbutton catch mechanism that was less prone to this problem, but many of the swinging-lever latches are still on guns in inventory, forty years after this problem was discovered). Likewise the grip / trigger housing assembly is held in place with a rather fragile leaf spring clip instead of the captive pins used in other designs, and the spring clip has been known to be prone to breakage since about five minutes into the first trials at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Duct tape and cable ties are often seen put on M60s in the field, just in case that clip breaks.
Early production runs of M60 machine guns were also very fragile, as some critical parts, such as the receiver cover and feed tray were made from very thin sheet metal stampings and very prone to becoming bent or broken; heavier parts were eventually forthcoming, after 1970. Early production M60s also had driving spring guides, and operating rods that were too skinny and gas pistons that were too narrow behind the piston head in an attempt to save weight; this made them very prone to bending and breakage (some suggested at the time that metallurgical problems also played a part, always a problem when weapons are made by the lowest bidder), but after 1970 a slightly heavier part was designed and slowly put into the supply chain. US Marines especially despised the M60 and in many units they held onto their BARs until 1967-68. Weight was reduced somewhat and reliability was improved slightly in the M60E3; the M60E3 variant was designed in the mid 1980s for the US Marine Corps. Users also complained about the quickly-overheating barrel. After approximately 200 rounds had been fired within one minute, the barrel had to be removed and replaced. Unfortunately, this occurred most often during combat situations. In order to replace the barrel, a crewman had to don heat-resistant asbestos mittens, further slowing down the process. In the M60E3 variant, this problem only got worse as the previous 200 rounds per minute limit was reduced to 100 rounds per minute due to the lighter barrel, though the M60E3's barrel has a wire and plastic handle near the breech end and can theoretically be changed safely without the asbestos mittens.
In 1991 the M60 was finally officially replaced with the Belgian-designed FN-MAG-58 machine gun, which in US service is called the M240. Even in 2004 many M60s remain in inventory, though most of them are now used by Army Reserve and National Guard units, and it is as universally loathed by American soldiers in 2004 as it was in 1967.
The M60 family of weapons are capable of firing many different kinds of ammunition. Most common among them are the M61 Armor piercing, the M62 Tracer, the M80 Ball, the M63 Dummy, and the M82 Blank; the new depleted uranium M995 Armor piercing ammunition can be used with the M60 as well, though it did not enter service until long after the M60 was withdrawn from service in active-duty units. When firing blanks, the M13 or M13A1 Blank Firing Adapter (BFA) is necessary in order to get the weapon to cycle full-auto with blanks. All of these ammunition types are delivered to the gun via a NATO-standard disintegrating metallic split-link belt. The standard combat ammunition mix for the M60 is a four ball (M80) cartridges and one tracer (m62) mix. The four to one ratio theoretically allows the gunner to accurately "walk" the fire into the enemy. A skilled machine gunner also knows that tracer bullets do not always fly quite the same trajectory as ball, and weapon's sights must be used --particularly at ranges in excess of 800 meters, where 7.62 x 51 mm tracer bullets usually burn out and are no longer visible (which is a problem with all weapons in this caliber; smaller-caliber tracer bullets, such as the 5.56 mm used in the M249 Automatic Rifle, hold even less tracer compound and are even more different in weight from ordinary bullets, and so fly trajectories even more different from non-tracer bullets and burn out at only 300 m or thereabouts.
Many different variants of the M60 have been developed over the years. Most of the revisions have been aimed at rectifying problems with earlier designs however two versions (the M60C and the M60D) are modified for use in aircraft; the US Marine Corps also used the M60C as the coaxial gun in the USMC version of the M60A1 tank, but in combat in Vietnam it proved to be so unreliable and so prone to jamming, parts breakage, and other problems (amusingly, the M60s used by infantrymen had to be at least a little dirty before they would jam, but the M60D will jam even when it's perfectly clean, if the thickness of the sheet metal feed links is even a tiny bit outside a very narrow range of specifications--requires a couple of armorers with all their tools half an hour or longer to get it working again, too; this is rather odd because the M60s issued to infantrymen were not prone to this specific malfunction), that most Marine tank crewmen pulled out the M60C and replaced it with an old Browning .30 machine gun; in many Marine armor units in Vietnam that used the M60A1 tank, they also pulled out the gunner's rangefinding telescope, which was useless in close jungle combat, and replaced it with a second Browning .30 in a jury-rigged second coaxial mount. US Marine tankers hated the M60C even more than they hated North Vietnamese troops with RPGs.
The first variation on the M60 is the M60E2. It was most commonly used as an external weapon on armored fighting vehicles.
The M60E3 was fielded circa 1986 in an attempt to remedy problems with earlier versions of the M60. It is a light-weight version intended to reduce the load carried by the gunner. Unlike its predecessor, the M60E3 has several updated modern features. It has a receiver-attached bipod (for improved stability), ambidextrous safety, universal sling attachments, a carrying handle on the barrel, and a simplified gas system. However, the aforementioned modern features also caused almost as many problems for the weapon as they fixed. The light weight barrel is not safe for sustained fire of 200 rounds per minute without catastrophic failure of the barrel, though some say they've seen it done but it's only the stellite superalloy barrel liner that makes it possible and the barrel will be glowing cherry red at the end of that 200 round belt. The reduced-weight components also reduced the durability of the weapon, making it more prone to rapid wear and parts breakage than the original. Most infantry units in the US Army and US Marine Corps have now switched over to the M240 as their general-purpose machine gun, which is far more reliable (particularly when dirty) and is very well-liked by the troops despite the fact that it weighs five or six pounds more than the M60E3.
The M60C is an aircraft-mounted or coaxial version of the standard M60. The main difference between the standard M60 and the "C" designation is the electronic control system and the hydraulic swivel system used. It could be fired from the cockpit by the pilot or copilot. It was also the coaxial gun on M60A1 tanks produced for the US Marine Corps before 1975. It is an electronically controlled, hydraulic powered, air-cooled, gas-actuated, link-belt fed weapon. Before being replaced by the M240 system, it used the M2, M6, and M16 armament subsystems and was mounted on the OH-13 Sioux, the OH-23 Raven, and the UH-1B Huey.
The M60D is a vehicle-mounted version of the standard M60. It can be mounted on boats, vehicles and as a pintle-mounted door gun in helicopters. When used in aircraft, it differs from the M60C in that it is not controlled by the pilot, rather, it is mounted in a door and manned by a crewman. Like the rest of the M60 family, it is a air-cooled, gas-actuated, link-belt fed weapon. Unlike other models however, the M60D normally has spade grips and an aircraft ring-type sight or similar armored vehicle) and an improved ammunition feed system. A canvas bag is also affixed to the gun to control ejected casings and links, preventing them from being sucked into the rotor blades or into an engine intake. The M60D was equipped on the UH-1B Huey (using the M23, XM29, M59, and the Sagami mounts), the CH-47 Chinook (using the M24 and M41 mounts) in both door and ramp locations, the ACH-47A "Guns-A-Go-Go" variant of the Chinook (using the XM32 and XM33 mounts), and on the UH-60 Black Hawk (using the M144 mount).
No information is available at this time on the operation of the M60.
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