>> that is the result of the math and of course, it cannot always be true. [applause]

>> why when we hear the president and others talking about government efficiency from the people, did our founding fathers actually design the government to be inefficient? ask yourself that question. because this is a model for inefficiency. but it was done deliberately. why? because in order to have basic liberties, you have to have the government with

very little power. the more efficient the government is, the more liberty is the individual house to give up to give to them. they cannot do their job efficiently, so have the power to tell you what to do. very interesting. yet to our society today generally believes that we have to have an efficient government because we have been told time after time after time we must make government more efficient. but that is the road to a loss of freedoms.

>> good afternoon welcome to the closing hours of a 2010 texas book festival. i think you will find this session is worth the wait. i am here to introduce someone many of you will know if you have been reading the new york times' coverage of pakistan and afghanistan and the byline c.j. chivers would be well known to you. in fact, he was part of a team of "new york times" staff awarded the 2009 pulitzer prize for international reporting. his new book, it "the gun" is a history of the ak-47 and the weapon insignificant and world affairs. he comes to this book not just based on his experience

as a reporter but also the marines for six years between 1988 and 94 and also worked in asia as the bureau chief of the moscow bureau of near times and was there for years and bureau chief one year. even if you are not a gun enthusiast or knowledgeable you would be familiar with the ak-47 because it is so widely available and so widely used for use of the ak-47 said it and the osama bin laden videos, newsreels from talks soldiers to drug dealers to terrorist it is, the scene. we have a lot to cover today. chris has a boston area code with is phone-number lives

in providence just back from us get -- afghanistan and we're proud to have him here. how did this project get started with the a cave 47? >> sometimes you come across your subject by accident. and 2001 as we were who were came after the attacks on new york and washington those traveling to the countryside and saw the weapon everywhere. it is intriguing but not a new observation. as the taliban was pulling back and the northern alliance that were aligned with the united states moving through the territory a number of times we came to houses and bunkers where they left their documents and i gather them up of the

students of the jihad what are they receiving for their instructions when they went to a training camp? it did not matter what language of our which year the notebooks were dated. they were first class and as i started to observe this, it seems to me a long way from where the weapon originated, a plan the economy on the eastern bloc and how did it break so far away from its roots? with that question in mind, what i found what is what is familiar to us as being very reliable and easy

to use and easy to clean and long-lasting, that is not the reason it is out there. it is not the reason there are so many of them. the reason is that it was linked to a planned economy and made whether anybody paid for them or not whether the workers were paid or not. this was made by a system that could do things different than pretty much any other product out there. no factory in the united states will turn out a product without orders. as i establish that understanding i asked where did it come from? it was connected to a different political system but how do they choose it? i started my clock backwards whistle blower or arms were

used in battle that had reasonably effective rapid-fire arms and followed them forward. the more or less weighed 1 ton. big, heavy, a lot of ammunition and were considered to be artillery. the evolution of this weapon is that it arrived in the stage of miniaturization how you go from a 2000-pound item to something under 10 pounds fully loaded and you could hide it under the jacket i am wearing. then you look this up to a planned economy so there are tens of millions then the government that plan to the economy turned out that they fall apart and lose custody and that is how you are in the situation when i got to afghanistan in 2001. that is who i got started.

>> host: the number i believe 100 million of various vintages are in circulation today compare that to the market economy. >> guest: one say that i did is i wanted to talk to people who were involved in the production. nobody would give the numbers. i don't think they know the numbers. but i am also went to the united states factories the principal manufacturer of the weapon used to counter the ak-47 is the colt of 16 and half a century into this the m-60 line by their estimates of worldwide about 10 million the other estimates are about 10 times

that. that is why they are so commonly seen as a matter of abundance. >> host: let's talk a little bit of your personal experience. you didn't interview earlier this week when you talked about being ambushed by people carrying these ak-47s that led you to discuss some aspects of the effectiveness better not directly related to the functionality of the weapon or some of those questioned. >> there is a lot of measures to power rifle works and they have nothing to do with how they work on the range or a test range but 4290 days we have come under fire but a big part of the job is to cover the ground level experience of the war in afghanistan. i am not spending much time

with the generals. and often out and the worst parts of the country. so you tend to get ambushed now and then. the question, afghanistan is not the ideal weapon perhaps with its durability and easy to use a few are well trained but not very accurate. a lot of times the experience of being ambushed is the rounds go cracking by and nobody is struck does that mean it is not effective? one measure is whether or not you get struck but it influences your behavior if there are large portions of the country if people have local grievances. the parts of the country are often grouped -- of the grid cannot bring and services soared government over much

beyond the experience and there are other ways to measure it. one thain they say the key nature is that insurgents learned over time they get better at what they're doing and if the training is such they cannot hit you, at least not with any consistency they can still use a rifle to influence your actions. walking in a patrol they have a variety of drills to take fire from the right or left or the front or near or far. these are things that are counter intuitive and with the snap of the fingers as the first round goes by, a patrol will break and they run it to the ambush site and may set up a firing position. often been afghanistan you'll see a of a few shots and watched federal on the ground where it is happening

and a few marines may run here or there and then the firing stops for a few minutes later they get up and move on but two or three weeks later they walk through the same ground a few? of automatic rifle fire and they will jump into the droll only this time when they run to that wall or watering hole, it could be booby trapped in there will be an explosive. so it is still influential it may not make the list list, but it is a factor. >> host: when you talk about taking a step back in history it is interesting to note, as the inventor actually thought he was inventing something that

would limit the number of soldiers. i believe he observed the number of soldiers coming back from civil war, the majority were dying of infection or non direct bullet wounds so if he could generate a weapon, the phrase was one soldier doing the work of 100, theoretically it was his intention to limit the warfare. that obviously did not play out. that time or the time since. >> a fascinating character, we know what he said. that more efficient slaughter would save lives if we have a weapon than maybe the other 99 don't need to go to battle but it

did not play out that way. "maxim" took the gatling and it was not the automatic weapon it manually rapid-fire weapon fast and using the excess energy from one expensive rounded year reload and so the maximum would continue to fire without a crank just by depressing the firing mechanism. it is the trigger. it was not framed this way at all. maxim's thought killing the service of the crown was an effective way to execute its power over its subjects. it was pretty clear on that.

at one point* they asked to sign a weapon that could be used against and he said why would i want to make a weapon? and i think if we look back at gatling, would be interesting if we could find out what he really thought as opposed to his sales message. >> host: maybe not so much a clear progression, if you compare that period of time to the competition to create this new generation of weapons, the motivation and then was similar was articulated in a much different way. >> guest: we had gone a long way from the maximum.

automatic weapons had been struck down under 20 pounds but they still cannot be used by anyone of you. they were too heavy. unwieldy, generate a lot of p and tended to break and two or three people needed to use them. what the germans figured out late thirties and world war ii is that if you took a pistol bullet and a rifle bullet and you made some day midway in between that you'd have the intermediate power and if you build a rifle around this it to be manageable by one person even if fired automatically. the germans came up with the i.d.'s and these weapons were rushed out to the eastern front midway through world war ii and the

russians got their hands on them. and they have bent pretty good during the soviet phase to look at the enemy items to adopt the things that they like about them. they do not have extensive intellectual property or a respect for patents and with a society that was agrarian and industrializing at a rapid clip there were more than willing to look at more technologically sophisticated state and it was a conceptual copy it is not item for item it is not piracy, but the core idea was driven and under staal and they decided to put it to their own soviet form under an unusual way and a group of 10 here or there zero or, etc.. and i gave you a deadline to

say i want to meet the design specifications for the rifle it is easy to fire automatically, automatically reloading for the next shot within the apparatus. and then you came back to me a few months later, with a different weapon or a different design on pay per then i would select from this group those that i thought those that were most likely to be effective and then go back to another cycle and at this point* you would play mr. potato head and look at the different rifles and select design features from each that look promising and from all of the designs of previous weapons in your museum or

collection and gradually put together a weapon of different components and different prototypes this would come together over the course of 18 months and several cycles and a product that we would test and exactly through the process how it came to the early in 1948, it was this what been designed in 1947 thus the name ak-47. >> host: it has continued to evolve over the years but as you pointed out, the early models still work more or less. >> guest: think of it as a rifle or the idea or a platform for further refinement professor as a weapon was pushed out into the world through the planned economy which brought factories to other socialist countries, they

rework did some significantly but it changed it. it changes the waves the difference between a chevy nova or the buick skylark. the same car but not quite. something similar happened but o population of rifles tens of millions we call them all ak-47 but only a few of them are. of the original few made in central russia, i routinely find on every trip to afghanistan, original from the early 1950's often they are dented and banged up or they looked more sober and the black but they still work. we don't know yet how long

it will last for the we have no idea because it is an interesting point* because i could ask all of you would you have you used in the last week that is that old that is 50 years old? twenty years old? the laptop? cellphones? the car or the bus? microwave oven? home phone? toilet? do have anything? that is not a fair question some of these did not exist 50 years ago. would you have now that you think you will still use in 10 years? anything? anything more sophisticated than a garden tool or baseball bat? a few examples. maybe musical instrument. those and rifles last a long time and stay very effective for one century or more. there is a good one other people say electric light i

will give you that but then take it back because most electrical lamps have been rewired. this is pretty incredible something that old that is still out there mayonnaise quantities which is why we will talk about this rifle long after i am dead. >> host: you can estimate easily may be another 20 or 40 or 50 years. no telling. >> guest: i would say probably longer than that. these rifles are out there now and difficult to get back. they move like narcotics but they are not consumable. only thing that takes them away is when they are broken one by one. back over by cars, lost, stuck in a ground by people who were hiding them then don't retrieve them because they are dead souls fall out of circulation but the originals are still out

there. >> host: there is more we could talk about any questions we want to entertain or discuss? >> [inaudible] it. >> host: had an incident where a young man had the ak-47 and took it to a campus and did not kill anyone but himself, but i think the only thing is addressing the availability and how widespread they are there issues 51 when that happened i was then afghanistan i will not pretend to know the facts but generally it is an interesting fame. a. k. means automatic there

are very few automatics and united states but automatic if -- automatic kalashniikov is like a machine gun but in the united states weapons that fit that description have been banned from public ownership since the 1930's the law was passed by congress which restricted the ownership of fully automatic weapons but in the red in states we have kalashnikov like objects that looked exactly the same they are semiautomatic. we have a big discussion of gun-control and kalashnikov plays a prominent role but the weapon that is overseas made in big quantities the

military assault rifle then they lost custody, that has a switch and as you press it down those from safe to automatic to semiautomatic. those sold and united states are called ak-47s really are not. they do not have the automatic feature. people will quarrel with me on this. i don't want to be shocked if i had to choose, ak-47s would be high on my list. it fires and we empowered to round almost always fully encased in the metal jacket that was designed to limit the wounding to the combatants would be much better to be shot by that then some of the ammunition to shoot to game animals. i am not taking a pass but i don't know the facts of that

was really the automatic or a rifle that looked just like it. but looking at these weapons in the automatic form circulating in large quantities. >> host: do have a follow-up? [inaudible] >> guest: the adm of unintended consequences. [inaudible] >> guest: starting with that this will save lives

the whole thing if you read it on the surface is about unintended consequences. i talk about those rifles and i often will find these old kalashnikov original ak-47 in the hands of the afghans and often those who are in the american can employ. i don't think if you really handed these things out more than stalin he died fairly early in the cycle. i don't think he foresaw there would be carried by an american and sponsored military. in his unintended consequences. i don't think when we issue them back in the '80s to see them as propaganda devices

after 9/11. the whole story is unintended consequences both sides of the border have them. >> host: who was at kalashnikov? >> guest: he is still live. he was day russian cossack and born near kazakhstan that does not make sense what is he doing out there? under the czar, families had been relocated to populate and his father had taken an incentive to move felt there and had a homestead out there he was born about the time the revolution was

gathering the domestic momentum in the 1930's his family suffered as the homestead was taken away and moved into the wilderness and moved northward into siberia lived in exile he fled to kazakhstan and allegis living as a clerk at a real o yard when roadwork two broke out. his father had died in exile his brother was arrested and his family was ruined by the experience of the great patriotic war as it is called in russia, world war ii we experienced his relationship with the government and joined the

army when world war ii broke out when they were in faded into the ukraine or the soviet union or russia and move to the front participated and tank battles which means he was wounded then he began to design weapons and was part of a broad constellation of soviet arms design centers. the soviet union did not make a good toilet or elevator or escalate you would not want to wear a soviet pacemaker but they invested intensely in arms design they make an excellent helicopter and still do them very good rifles and he became part of the consolation of designers and from there he was have a participant to make this rifle reusing good german

ideas giving soviet form. he was credited with the design. if you look closely at the russian records, it was a process, not like edison and his label, not like software entrepreneur at home, he was part of a very big team and a government machine making a lot of decisions for him. and credited with designing the rifle and is still alive. it gave him a lot of material and social security. it did not make him rich but he has done quite well and is celebrated to this moment as a national hero. the great example of the russian mind. >> host: over there.

[inaudible] >> host: how has the abundance of kalashnikov affected the warfare of current production? >> guest: every gathered all of the kalashnikov today and melted them to turn into paperweights there would still be war tomorrow. the kalashnikov do not create more and there will be war after they are gone. no matter how long it takes. people will still be fighting. does the kalashnikov make more take a different form?

i would say it certainly does. maybe not conventional army. but it does give form to all sorts of local anger and other groups that otherwise could not go toe to toe and combat with government forces and whoever they are fighting. it makes human-rights abuses possible then they would otherwise in occur. very significant in a crime not so much on this country country, it is very influential. vietnam was probably the first in which a local force that was not sophisticated and not well trained, was not backed by a powerful economy, could go firefight by firefight into battle

against the most sophisticated western force on the planet and pushed them back for years. this is a battlefield leveller. this had not happened before and it was the expeditionary detachments from originations to exert their influence over a small number of soldiers but a lot of firepower and the local people did not have the weapons or ammunition or the means to get them. they were not intuitive in their use but the kalashnikov change that. one example, the lord's resistance army about 25 years old was the descendant of a previous group that did not have rifles and and a great numbers and did not know how to use them and that group did not last very

long. and rounded than a very quickly. the group made a point* of gathering kalashnikov and they are still in the field so it is very influential. how many are there? how many are coming out? the great puzzle of production are made by countries that are not transparent. unless they fall apart we get a decent run of numbers for germany, but many others we don't know. it is less now than it was but the chinese continue to make them. although the russian plants are not open every day sometimes i feel like they switched the lights on when the journalist is there otherwise it is idle. they're making more but i cannot give you a number.

nobody can. it is not clear the people involved in the production that they even know how many they have made as the information was compartmentalized. [inaudible] [inaudible] >> host: the question is how it does the of 16 compare made in the u.s. historical a and in a contemporary sense in the afghan war? [inaudible] >> like this question i hope

i don't talk too long but the early of 16 was a disaster the way it was designed or manufactured. it did not have the adequate protective coating and did not have a carona chamber and barrel. if you take a weapon like that into the jungle and do not issue much cleaning gear which they did or did not train people very long which they didn't you will have problems, which they did. it had some design issues. they change in manufacturing standards but it took them too long because of too many lives but they made a lot of changes to the rifle and by a the late fifties or early '70s it was significantly

different. when i was in the marines it was utterly different second generation, i carried it with our is using live ammunition and blanks. user during the reagan and bush years. i never had one gm but a curious experience. i was assigned to attend the army rangers school one year i was lucky enough to be one of them. at the end of now they have changed the course of a live fire training point* lasting 12 for 14 days. out of the grounds in utah and issued me in the vietnam era m-16 and i could not make it work. i did not have one single-day i could get through a single magazine without it double feeding and i could not make it work. a completely different weapon. take it forward.

today it has a different m-16 and the carbide which is a shortened version and if you read the internet there seems to be a loss of complaints although in the field i have never seen one j.m.. have never heard any significant complaints for those involved and firefight about the liability. there are a lot of complaints if it is the right weapon. not reliability based in a more. every war is different. vietnam was a perfect war for the kalashnikov but the worse for the m-16 because of dense vegetation vegetation, complete mismatch. but the range tends to

stretch out and people were fighting americans know that they have, the new forces, have very good optics, communication, weapo ns, and they tend to issue debt good distances and don't like to get in close to. they tend to hang back so lot of the american soldiers are in a fight that is in a dissonant range and the grounds are used by the forthcoming it might not travel that far with enough punch in the eyes of those who were shooting them. significant conversation over 10 years of they should have a different cartridge which means you have a different rifle. meaning if it is ideally suited for its conditions but nothing like they were in vietnam with reliability. they don't wonder if it will work. >>

[inaudible] >> guest: there is a great problem is in world war i where the germans have machine does by the tens of thousands and the british had 1200 and there were being slaughtered in the trenches and minister of munitions before he was the premier and he wanted to say why aren't we making more weapons are ordering more machine guns? wiry severing this horrible imbalance? and he was not interested in

machine guns even though he had used them on expedition in africa and could see what they could do but boy george later wrote anybody who sees the strange tale who has no idea or appreciation of the fanatical hostility against the military leaders to any new ideas. that is part of it. i know what to overstate that. but nowadays the united states is not in a position to choose its own partridge under the rules of made no. it is supposed to be a consensus. they learned from world war ii that most patients have a different cartridge for all rifles essentially meant to do the same thing. so now with nato we have one cartridge. >> we cannot make the switch.

>> also a 1950's coming out of world were two and also like what the russians and germans would do stand depending but the troops needed for vietnam. it is very complicated more than one case reacting but bit chips are very frustrated a lot of new -- nimble thinking out there. >> one comment on the economics of the m-16 and africana and the rebels clearly they have their

hands on the ak-47s and in the third-world by and large they are portable. how does that work? >> based on the availability >> guest: what you will hear is that they are almost free. it is nonsense it does not cost the same as a chicken are sack of wheat. no less than the secretary general of the united nation has made these comparisons. they typically cost and have tracked the prices, up 2500 through $900. that is where tensions are high and they think they need to be armed but when it cools down the price falls they're less likely to

stockpile arms and when prices fall they are bought up and moved to other conflicts. pick up an item at $200 and a move it somewhere else and is selling five or $600 it is worth it especially if you get a bunch of them. that is still pretty cheap. the united states is the largest known recirculate air of kalashnikov over the last 10 years of redo have price information on the wholesale side as the united states buys them from the eastern european arsenals and reissues from afghan afghan -- afghanistan and iraq and we don't know all the prices but we can see the bids and contracts. eric delivered kalashnikov ample from central europe to the kabul airport denies

states government bought several thousand cost roughly $200 apiece or less. some have bought up a big stocks $100 per rifle that is what they cost wholesale retail and is much more expensive and they will last a long time out there that you think of how much money that is to resell when you are done is still pretty cheap. >> keira tar to the industrial engineer? how much the m-16 cost or the cost for each plant to

produce those? >> guest: i do not know what cold spends to make their m-16 they are a privately held company. i know what they sell them for. to the u.s. commitment the aftermarket items feigns that will light and optics and handgrips makes the rifle more tricked out. lot of people don't like that stuff park ave think it will use the weapon down. that cost $1,100 to the u.s. government. how much does it cost to make them? i don't know. i would not expect colt to tell me. >> maybe enough to get the industrial engineer to look at it to do the analysis.

>> guest: then you add taxes and local cost and utilities and how you negotiate labor because labor cost is different in the northeast and in the south but i don't know the answer. >> host: was there ever a discussion about copying at the time the ak-47 first came out did it have any level of discussion? >> guest: the united states has not been interested in the kalashnikov system initially regarded as a tool of dade crude soviet conscript beneath of haircut and had no interest in it and sneered at it. later when issued in vietnam against american forces they desperately wanted something to counter that is how we got into the m-16. but there was never a discussion about fielding

kalashnikov for large-scale use some soldiers trained on them but it is not a general issue weapon and probably never will be. there is some question of the ammunition but not big quantities. >> host: you are describing the academic exercise of what is the cost? >> not at all but the basic industrial engineering question. [inaudible] >> guest: here is the problem if you want to be a kalashnikov manufacturer today, you face the glutted market is very hard to sell your product. today's cost of commodities and transporting and sales force cost add up fast. if you could buy the kalashnikov fully functional out of wholesale $95 apiece

you cannot compete with that the older weapons were made in situations they did not have to pay for the cost they were so heavily subsidized even the soviet union, even latter-day russia if there kalashnikov plant cannot produce or sell their weapons because there are no customers to buy them at the current cost that they could make them at and make a profit. if you go to russia to say i would like a big batch of kalashnikov they will sell you the older stock that is cheaper. >> [inaudible] >> guest: but there is so many out there it is a special case you compete against a full market and today's cost is what they are it is hard to beat the

price. >> could you talk of the instrument of a proxy war? >> guest: if the proxy is not especially sophisticated you don't have time to train your proxy because it is cheap and a training costs are pretty loud and that is why it is so widely used in that role. [inaudible] >> guest: the first part first what is the united states using to train the afghans? it is a jumble the mishmash.

they handed out kalashnikov initially to the army and police and different kalashnikov to both then they decided they wanted to bring in the army on the day's show standard weapons so as afghan battalions are made at the rate of two or three a month right now, they will go into the field with m-16 and a whole host of weapons associated with those grenade launchers and others the police still carry the kalashnikov and it is creating confusion of how you supply them because they have different ammunition needs and the mission of the magazines you start incompatible if ever in a firefight together. and there is talk of point* the police on to a bed made no standard weapons although i don't know if there is money for it and doing it if

they can come to the decision to do the police. this is a confused system that you have the situation of and compatibility sell whatever they want to do it? there is money in this game and the afghans have kalashnikov look the same ammunitions as the taliban. some of that leaks and comes back to the afghan forces. if you switch to m-16 might not supply the insurgency in the short and medium term with the equipment they could use to kill your forces. it becomes a puzzle how you do it then you decide how

much is it worth? does it cost a lot of money or take a lot of time? [inaudible] >> guest: i have been writing in "the new york times" about rifles i tend to inventory taliban equipment when i get my hands on it to figure out what they are using. it will not be another book but it is useful to understand why because some of the rifles being used by the afghan forces are approaching a century age. they're still working and wife -- rifles well made last and last and they are hard to break, a well-made rifle if you take care of it. see this as the old

expeditions into afghanistan still being used very effectively against western troops when century after the weapons were first made. i found that one to go under the western front, being used against american marines and helmand province and we don't know how long these rifles will last the have not come to the end of their lives yet. and probably not long after i'm gone to 71 or two more. just a reminder he will sign books in about 10 or 15 minutes in the tent. one more question. [inaudible]>> guest: the questis

the m-16 is being reworked there's a bunch of different systems to make the automatic rifle work without getting into the details you have to make to reese's and cold is a manufacturing prototype rifles and make its way into american military use. i don't know. american military looks at replacements for the current lineup of rifles. the army is doing and marines doing something separately with their friend

automatic weapons to issue in the future. there are different camps out there talking about rifles to enter a thicket of conflicting opinions and heated arguments that can turn mean-spirited everybody got said different rifle and every rifle has the camp and american military because they can make anyone rich and very quickly if they decide to incorporate their design into general issue is endlessly approached by sales people who have new and better things and they sort through this costly and have meant 100 years or more. i would not say any system would find its way in news. think the conversation they have now is a lot like the conversations in the past and at some point* they will make a replacement but it is

hard to predict when and with what. she four . . thinking when i this book back in the end o t why are white pe c