AR vs AK: One is vastly superior, but which one?

[Music] hey guys welcome back so today we're out the range to talk about the ar-15 versus the ak but hold on this is going to be interesting we're going to talk about how these two firearms have evolved over the years and how they've become modern fighting rifles defensive rifles sporting rifles for just shooting paper competitive rifles for shooting in competitions things like that and just take a look at the two systems and how they've evolved and by the end of the video i'm going to tell you which one i strongly believe is superior to the other so before we get started with today's video guys just take a moment to like share and subscribe to the channel a surprisingly small number of you who watch the channel actually take that time to click that subscribe button it helps us tremendously and then also comment down below because it helps with the algorithms with all that being said let's get started with today's video talking about the ak ar how they've evolved and which one i truly believe again is the superior of the two guys please swing by and check out big daddy unlimited bdu they help support us here at the military arms channel with products and things like that so we can continue to bring you content there's a link in the video description down below that'll take you to the mac blog and website please follow that link and from there you'll find a link to big daddy unlimited and try them out just for 99 cents you can see what they're all about in essence they're just like a big online store that has amazing prices so please again check out bdu all right so let's talk about the oldest rifle in the room from a developmental standpoint and that's the ak now the ak when the soviets first developed it they fielded a machined receiver gun because they were struggling with the stamp the stampings that would later become the akm right around 1959 but the gun was introduced into soviet service in 1947 and then again in 1959 they would do the modernized ak which they had figured out how to get the stampings to work and hold up and all that good stuff and that's when the world's militaries really started to focus on manufacturing akms like this one this one is a serbian rifle back when i was a young man there's a country called yugoslavia i have some old hugo aks i featured them here on the channel before now they're serbia and zastava still manufactures rifles and those old hugo aks were considered some of the best and that's one of the reasons why i brought out this gustavo rifle because it's just a simply beautiful akm now the early akms that would have been adopted in the 60s and things like that when they're hitting military service would not have had an accessory rail on them that would come later in the development of the rifle so the early aks were very simple rifles and neither rifles with the exception of the m16 really focused much on on force multipliers and what is the force multiplier well it's any type of accessory that you attach to your weapon that would increase hit probability or make it easier to hit a target easier target identification things like that so things like lights red dot sights stuff like that is what we consider lasers consider to be force multipliers now when both these rifles were developed that wasn't really high on the military's chart of things to do iron sites ruled the day aperture sites and iron sights which the ak here has they ruled the day that's what all the world's militaries used you'd have special use you know of a very specialized optics during vietnam by u.s forces but big army and the marine corps and navy and all those other branches just like the soviet military stuck with really no force multipliers with special operations literally taping things like flashlights to their hand guards but the ak i'm going to focus on the 762 by 39 in this video for whatever reason this is the most popular caliber for aks in the united states maybe it's a 30 caliber thing even though this is a commie cartridge i don't know what it is the 545x39 is my personal favorite i think it's vastly superior to the 762 by 39 but again a wide marge by a wide margin americans prefer the 762 by 39. so that's what we're going to talk about in this video today the 762 by 39 some of the stuff i talk about with regards to ballistics will not apply to the 545 by 39 obviously talking about the 762 version so the ak is very similar in operation to and this is what i've read historically so i'm not gonna uh you know say that this is absolute fact but one of the reasons why the soviets went with the charging handle on the side is because with their mosin nagant rifles they used in world war ii the bolt handle was on the right hand side so they just wanted the operation to be similar whether or not that's true i don't know that's just something that i've read but it's interesting to note that the ak does have a charging handle here on the right hand side nothing over here or on top and certainly no t handles so throughout history pretty much every military that's adopted one of these has stuck with this type of a charging system and the big safety which covers up that slot where the charging handle rides so when you close this it seals up the action of the ak two degrees stuff can still get in underneath dust cover and when you're using the weapon you would just brush the safety down and then start shooting when you're done brush the safety back on easily done but we'll talk about ergonomics here in a moment so to ready the weapon it's a two-point contact system which i do think is superior right so you have to rock and lock it in this magazine is very rigid you'll see guys doing push-ups on their aks do the same thing with an ar but you'll see guys doing push-ups on their aks and things like that with this magazine in place it's very firmly in place the iron sights go back to like the early days of bolt action infantry rifles you have a v-notch in the rear that's set forward and then a front post sight very rudimentary but also very good for keeping both eyes open for situational awareness and it operates much like a pistol in terms of how you align your sight picture all right when the weapon goes dry it's just a click no bang bolt stays home generally speaking it will not lock to the rear you will have yugoslavian magazines or serbian magazines that have a bolt hold open built into the follower the bolt basically rams into the back of the follower but the minute you take the magazine out bolt slams home so reloading the ak takes more skill more time and more effort to accomplish a reload because when the gun's dry you have to knock the empty magazine out to see some people using other magazines to do it i like the way that travis haley does it where you take a magazine kind of flip this one out of the way rock the new one in when you go to reload it you can do the roll like this you can do the soviet style which is like that or you can roll it this way and charge it that way either way it's not as fast or as easy than the ar-15 so let's take a look at the early ar-15 and see how it stacks up to the early aks this is a cult sp1 this would be very representative of early m16s used by the us military that would have adopted them in the 1960s so the ak got started in life in 1947 it wouldn't be until the 1960s that the american military would go to using an intermediate caliber which both the akm and the m16 use what is an intermediate caliber it means it's not as powerful as a full power big bore battle rifle and it's not as weak as a handgun caliber it's somewhere in between and that's where we get inter intermediate caliber uh from and so both rifles shoot that mid-range power level ammunition so it's kind of interesting when you watch the anti-gunners talk about things of how powerful the ar-15 is in reality this thing is a peashooter compared to other calibers on the market used for hunting big game this is a high-powered 22 in essence so when this rifle came into being where the akm made extensive use of stampings america decided to start toying with high very dense polymers and aluminum to make a lightweight rifle stampings can accomplish the same thing the soviets would have used wood in the early days but right out of the bat we started using polymers for lightweight and aluminum versus stampings and later on this would change the entire dynamic of the two weapon systems and where we watch this divergence in their development and and their use so when i said that the akm really had no facilities in the early days for force multipliers that ar15 m16 kinda did right here on the top of the carrying handle you'll see a hole through the the carrying handle that's so you can mount a colt three power scope onto it or later the us military would play around with night vision scopes and stuff like that in vietnam and they would mount it to the top of the carrying handle of the m16 so right out of the right out of the gate this gun was already the designers of this rifle were already looking at force multipliers and increasing hit probability through the use of additional emerging technologies so stamped first is machined this was considered pretty much a first world rifle many countries couldn't manufacture the m16 back in the 60s and they would have adopted things like the ar-18 which came after this and that was intended for countries that didn't have the sophistication of manufacturing something like the m16 out of aluminum this rifle is extremely lightweight and as is the akm but it has aperture sights you have a longer sight radius this has originally a 20 inch barrel where you were looking at about a 16 inch barrel in the akm and yeah the ergonomics everything on this thing is just very familiar now that's coming from an american that grew up shooting this rifle quite literally so naturally i'm going to favor the m16 but i think when we get into this video there are some very distinct differences that's hard to argue that ar-15 doesn't have some advantages in some areas now the ar-15 to load it you take your magazine now this is a single point locking system but it goes into a mag well which supports the magazine quite well and typically you're going to find aluminum magazines which are in in general disposable later we would start using polymers and things like that magazines and that would be inserted into the magazine well it goes straight in versus a rock and lock the charging on the weapon is accomplished via t-handle so you can do it this way just grab with two fingers pull it to the rear and now the weapon is charged unlike the ak that has that big safety on the right hand side the ar-15 has a selector lever right by the shooter's thumb and we'll get into the this control for the bolt and carrier here in a moment so right now the weapon's unsafe and shooting this is uh very pleasant where the 762 by 39 by no means has a lot of recoil but it does have a very uh pronounced recoil impulse that is more than the 5.56 of course it's shooting 123-ish grain bullet and right now we're shooting a 55-grain bullet so we're pushing quite a bit less mass out of this rifle just at a much higher velocity you'll notice when the weapon goes empty the bolt locks to the rear drop the magazine out insert the fresh magazine right here on the left hand side of the rifle you have what we call what i call the ping-pong paddle so when you insert that magazine all you have to do is come up and hit that with your thumb and the weapon's ready to go again faster and easier it's easier to train a troop how to operate this rifle in my opinion and experience than it is the ak a lot less is required in terms of effort to reload this weapon it's a very simple process of insert the magazine push the button start pulling the trigger again it doesn't take much hand-eye coordination if you watch people fire an ak for the first time they're kind of messing with that magazine trying to figure out how it all works they're not quite hitting the magazine well straight on and it locks the rear end but doesn't lock the front end that kind of gets jammed you have to bang it out okay you're not going to run into that with the m16 ar15 because it's such a simple mechanism but let's take a closer look at these rifles and how they've evolved now over the years because both of these weapons will have evolved to accommodate the later developments in technology which again i refer to as force multipliers later in the akm's development a pretty big step forward was taken by the soviets who were looking to add those force multipliers to their weapon system because naturally they're going to try to keep up with what nato was doing during the cold war and i'm sure the soviets tried a number of different solutions before they came up with the side rail on the akm which is just a riveted piece on the side that you can put a very various number of different optics on the gun you can put night vision on it this way you can put a red dot sight this is a cobra sight on here you can put pretty much any type of optic on the ak via that side rail that we could do later with our own m16 or ar-15 so that was a pretty important development of the rifle now one other thing that the ak lends itself well to is the ability to have a folding stock so you would see the ak evolve with under folding stocks and side folding stocks but sadly it folds the wrong way in the case of this rifle because you can't fold the stock very well with the optic mounted it would have made more sense when they went to the side rail to fold the stock the other way keeping in mind that the stock is not meant to be folded and the weapon fired in that position folding the stock is merely for by military purposes is strictly for transportation the weapon is not intended to be used with the stock folded so folding it to the right would have made far more sense why they didn't i don't know now i did say that the ak was more difficult in terms of motor skills and things like that to load but let's also be clear that the ak is a very very simple weapon and that's one of the major reasons why it has been successful all over the globe i mean sure the soviets flooded any country that would align themselves with them with weapons like this but a lot of countries voluntarily adopted this weapon because it was so simple to use in concept so with the ak you could probably hand this to somebody that doesn't know a whole lot about firearms and they could figure out how to operate it because it's such an obvious type of firearm you have the magazine you see the bullets the bullets point down the barrel okay i'm gonna stick the magazine in there's this big lever oh okay well this lever has to move so this can come back and voila it can be used so despite not being as refined in terms of the ar-15 and how it loads it still is a very easy weapon to use and i think that lends itself to the popularity of the weapon it's easy to manufacture you'll see them being made in the poorest of countries and it's very very easy to use and generally speaking the guns hold up well to abuse they don't really care if they get rusty or don't have oil on them because of loose tolerances and things like that now this is a krebs custom this has a 16 inch barrel with a pendant weld and it's a slightly shorter than 60-inch barrel with a pin and weld muzzle device on it and then again i have the cobra site mounted via that side mount which is what i really wanted to show you how the soviets had adopted [Music] that by the mid-1990s the united states had adopted the m4 and it would go on to see service in kosovo 1999 i think it was so the m4 introduced something that really changed the dynamic of the weapon as a whole and that was the addition of a pick rail flat top upper with a removable rear sight and carrying handle that quickly evolved from a rail just on the receiver to what we call knight's armament or cack rails that would replace the front hand guards that were still round and then he had started to have rail estate that went all the way out to the front site and now the front sight has been removed on some of these rifles like the one you see here and the rail extends out to the end of the barrel practically and this allows us to mount all sorts of force multipliers on here so i have everything from a white light to a visible laser an ir laser mounted here i still have my backup sights which can be these gloves make things a little bit more difficult can be deployed despite the fact that i still have control of all my force multipliers with my supporting hand and i can co-witness through my red dot sight which is mounted here which is an mro so the m16 once that flat top was introduced the floodgates opened and the m16 became the ultimate rifle in terms of mounting force multipliers you had you could put stuff anywhere you wanted and customize it and it didn't run the risk of interfering with the operation of the weapon so this is an extreme example of what a modern ar-15 might look like and when you talk about special operations and stuff they'll configure their rifles any number of ways but even in the us marine corps and the us army by the time you know you got into the 2000s you started to see the marines using a 20-inch rifle with pecks on them and you know their their rco magnified optics which is basically a trijicon acog the army same thing red dots acogs they they adopted the m4 pretty quickly ditched the 20-inch barrel the marines eventually ditched the 20-inch barrel went to the shorter 14 and a half inch barrel now they're messing with hk's but i'm not going to get off in the weeds there the biggest thing that happened to the m16 was that 1913 pick rail on top which then evolved into all of this making it one of the best weapons in the world in terms of being able to mount anything you can dream up to it from night vision to you know with infrared lasers and all the crazy stuff it just lends itself well to doing that it's very ergonomic to operate with all the extra equipment let's get that out the window now i'm shooting that gun quickly and hitting a steel target 100 yards away because this gun in essence has almost no perceived recoil when it comes to recoil management the m16 ar-15 has evolved so far that there are very few rifles that can compete with it in terms of controllability even on full auto at you know say 15 yards you can do a mag dump if you're experienced with the weapon and put 30 rounds into a very small group extremely controllable still quite lightweight even with all this stuff on it and just simply an amazing firearm a couple of differences also with the ak and the ar let's talk about suppression the ar15 lends itself to suppression very well right out of the box pretty much every ar-15 mod that's manufactured today is going to have threads that are concentric to bore which means when you screw a suppressor onto the end of the gun it the the opening and the suppressor is going to line up perfectly with the bore so when you fire it the bullet isn't going to strike the silencer so suppression these things rock for that the direct gas impingement system works nicely for suppression uh there's a whole bunch of different suppress suppressor accessories out there from adjustable gas blocks and things like that to tune your gun or just run a flow-through can like an oss the point being the ar lends itself quite well to suppression the ak can be suppressed the russians did it they had a little suppressor called the pbs1 which was a really bad suppressor design it had a big rubber puck inside of there and then a few baffles if you will out on the end and it can only be used for you know a few rounds it was intended for special operations used then you have to replace that big rubber puck now dead air makes a wolverine suppressor which looks like the pbs1 but it's a modern suppressor but the reason the pbs1 is quite a bit different is the opening on each baffle inside of the can gets larger and larger and larger as you get towards the end of the can that's because pretty much every ak manufactured overseas is going to have threads that aren't necessarily concentric to bore because most those countries don't run suppressors on their aks the ak makes a horrible host for a silencer it vents a lot of gas up here you get a lot of piston pop you're just not going to make these things very quiet so most militaries don't bother threading their barrels in such a way that it lends itself to suppression usa made aks like kusa kalashnikov usa or palmetto state armory are going to use us-made barrels and they're going to make sure those threads are concentric to bore but if you get something from romania bulgaria russia china any number of the ak countries out there those threads aren't going to be concentric you're going to want to run something like the wolverine on it because if you put a regular can on there you're going to blow it right off also accuracy with aks it's all over the place it's match 762 by 39 is not really a thing sure there's some of it out there but most people just run regular steel case russian ammunition and accuracy varies wildly across the various rifles out there you can get one rifle from uh ismash that shoots lights out you get another rifle from ishmash that just it's meant to demand at best in terms of accuracy so the barrels and the accuracy is all over the place and that goes to the construction of the guns too you can get really poorly made guns uh even imports like some of the romanian guns are just wonky but you can even pay for a higher end gun i i've had an arsenal that i simply couldn't zero because the the front sight was canted so much i couldn't zero the gun and that's an expensive rifle so even with import aks from countries that manufacture and use them for their own militaries or for export you're going to find varying quality just all over the place i think that quality gap is narrowing now with the introduction of high quality built usak's again from kalashnikov usa and from palmetto state armory the ar is typically going to be what we call a lego gun you can build this from a box of parts but you can also get into trouble doing that there's such thing called tolerance stacking and so i typically buy my ars so that they're built by the same company with the internals of the same company i don't go out and buy you know a delton upper and a bcm lower and you know jp bolt and then somebody else's carrier and mismatch those parts because every single ar-15 i've seen choke has been somebody's home brew that that they just stuck a mismatched bunch of parts into it thinking they're all high-end parts and the tolerance stacking just wasn't in such a way that the gun would actually run right so i i highly recommend buying bcm daniel's defense things like that and you're going to get a good quality high you know ar that's going to operate very very well so in terms of build and things like that yes there are garbage ars out there but even the worst of the ars out there typically run pretty good aks i've seen some that were not even zeroable so it's gonna vary there are two major differences between the ar-15 and the ak the ar15 is what we call a lego gun meaning you can just put all sorts of parts on it the uppers and lowers are two separate pieces so your fire controls are in the bottom with the magazine well then in the upper half of the gun you have your bolt carrier and barrel that means this gun can switch between calibers very easily you can just buy six five grendel upper a 6.8 upper 224 valkyrie upper and just swap it on to your lower the lower is considered the gun in the united states and you have a completely different caliber also you can go so far you don't even have to use an upper you can just take your 556 barrel off there and put a 65 grindel or 300 blackout barrel on there change a bolt and you have a completely different caliber rifle so you can either just swap uppers or you can just very easily take the barrels off which you can do with tools at your home it doesn't require any special tools to do that other than just an armors wrench the barrel's automatically head space all that good stuff so this gun lends itself to modification and swapping calibers very very well looking at the ak whatever caliber you buy it in that's what caliber it's in unless you're a gunsmith and you can press a barrel in and out of the receiver so it's not going to swap calibers very easily they do exist in six five grindel they do exist in other calibers but they're not very popular i've never seen one in 6.8 spc i've seen them in grendel the veprs is the last one that came in they had some in n65 grindel but again it's not a simple matter of swapping an upper it's a matter of pressing a barrel out and that takes special tools and skills to accomplish also the build quality on these things is going to vary wildly they're going to you can get guns that are completely so out of whack they're unzeroable they're unreliable they have all sorts of problems and this is from countries that manufacture the darn things for their own military it does seem that the united states market has stepped up and so gun companies like kalashnikov usa and palmetto state armory are making higher quality aks than countries like romania in my opinion and that is true um and that's i'm sorry that's absolutely that's actually kind of a relatively new development before that we've had nothing but garbage made usa aks so the americans are finally starting to figure it out the ar-15 is generally speaking more accurate than your average ak granted there are aks out there that shoot extremely well i have one of them which is a definitive arms 308 that shoots lights out but as a general rule the ar is going to walk all over the ak in the accuracy department now when you get into the 545 by 39 you generally see better performance in terms of accuracy the 762 by 39 and the ak itself both kind of lend themselves to being inaccurate versus being accurate the 556 and the ar-15 shoot extremely well together when you're talking about ballistic performance at closer ranges a 762 by 39 is going to have an advantage at extended ranges the 556 is going to have an advantage because of its accuracy potential and a much higher ballistic coefficient and faster moving bullet so you're going to have to weigh those differences for yourself when trying to decide which one you prefer so what it boils down to is of course personal preference but if you take a look at the attempts to modernize the akm versus the attempts to modernize the ar-15 the ar-15 in my opinion is better all the way around first of all you have a lot more real estate that's easily put on the rifle for mounting of all sorts of different accessories i believe that the fire controls and ergonomics are vastly superior on the ar-15 versus the ak now you're talking about a guy that ran an ak for close to two years an sgl31 that had tricked out with all the accessories back in the day if you go way back in my videos you'll see that rifle but i ran that and i tried to see if that was really something that i felt could be a replacement for the ar-15 m16 and at the end of the day i came back to this and that's again because it has better recoil management far better ergonomics a lot more accessories that you can make this gun truly ambi there's no need for a folding stock i've never had a need for one you can collapse the stock for storage and then extend it for use it's just an amazing weapon system and it's because it was manufactured from machined aluminum and doesn't have a sheet metal top cover this gun lent itself to evolving over time to where it is today without completely redesigning the ak this is about as good as it gets fellas you still have that you know sheet metal top cover you can't really mount anything directly to it the israelis came up with a way to do that they put the rear sight on the top cover the fins did the same thing with the valmet but in terms of accessories and big optics and night vision there's no way you want to mount that to just a sheet metal top cover you have to do it through some other means and about the best way to do it is what the soviets ultimately came up with and that was the side rail and it's less than ideal again it makes the gun very thick adds unnecessary weight but still the gun is very light and not much heavier than the ar-15 again we're limited out here with the gas tube so we're having to put accessories around it if you want the accessories to last for any length of time and then the ergonomics on this gun they're good they've evolved nicely we have hand stops and you know you're able to control your force multipliers out here you do have the ability for a side folding stock if you want but when it comes to being left-handed you just have to get used to working with it the way it is you're not going to put a left-handed safety on here or anything like that when you're left when you're lefty you're going to have to operate the gun with your right hand and all that other stuff which some lefties may like the ar15 that selector is very easily set up so it's not present on both sides the t handles ambi by its very nature so yeah i think in terms of how the the two weapons have evolved i think the biggest limiting factor with the ak is the stamped sheet metal receiver with the stamped top cover held on in the way that it is and then you're rather limited on how you can get extended rail space out here without negatively affecting accuracy and things like that so at the end of the day in my opinion there's there's little argument against the ar-15 m16 this is still by my measure the absolute best infantry rifle the absolute best home defense rifle the absolute best sport shooting rifle you're going to see an awful lot of these things in competitions and very few aks that's for a reason these things are just superior in every measurable way and that even comes down to reliability some folks are going to say well the ak is more reliable than the ar-15 i would differ with you i've done tests over the last decade we have one video out there where i'm literally pouring handfuls of dirt into the ejection port of the ar15 and it still works i take the bolt and carrier group and roll it around in the dirt stick it back in the gun the gun works just fine i have another test out there that's multi-series it's episodic where we run so far seven thousand rounds to a bcm without even a drop of oil and the gun is still functioning flawlessly 7 000 rounds fired with no maintenance whatsoever and not a single malfunction so you can't say that the ak is superior to the ar-15 in terms of reliability ar-15 is an extremely reliable weapon but so is the ak but if you go and watch some of the mud tests that which are not realistic of course but they're interesting that end range has done the ar-15 beat the ak and the mud tests because the ak has a lot of openings and stuff that allow access to debris into the trigger mechanism itself the ar15 with its port cover closed completely seals the weapon system up from the ingress of any type of debris so in the end the ar-15 is the clear winner i do want to point out though it's pretty interesting that thunder ranch put out a rifle this is a thunder ranch rifle you can see the logo here on the gas block this is made by century arms it's a vishka and this was put together together i think under the advice by clint and um i don't understand it this this is set up as a modern fighting rifle it does not have an accessory rail on the side so you're not going to be able to put any red dot sights on it it comes with wooden stocks this wood is known to break down over time you know you're far better off with synthetics it just has standard iron sights no night vision or night sights i'm sorry of any type it just uses standard sights so in low light in an inclement weather and poor conditions outside these sites are less than ideal a red dot sight is infinitely better for you and then they put an rs regulate mount on here which is probably one of the smarter things to allow the one force multiplier this gun is capable of having and that's a white light but you can't put the white light over here because it interferes with the sling swivel and this is the thunder ranch sling that comes with the gun so now you're left to operating the light like this or you know whatever pushing on it with your index finger um this this i don't understand at all we'll do an entire video on this gun but this is being offered as a modern fighting rifle to compete with the ar-15 and i think it's just poorly designed overall so in looking back over everything we've talked about this afternoon i look forward to your comments down below because i know some of you are going to disagree with me but there's just not it's very very hard to get around the fact that the m16 ar15 has evolved to be a as time goes on it it diverges more and more and becomes superior more superior to the ak in my opinion so again i look forward to your comments down below guys if you like to support us here at the military arms channel the best possible way to do that is to become part of our patreon family we have a great group of folks over there there's a link down below we've got a great community built you get early access to videos you get blog posts for me and private videos and i answer all pms and private messages that are sent to me i talk to everybody and that takes priority over all other communications so please consider becoming part of our patreon family also right here on youtube there's a little join button underneath the video player you're watching right now give that join button a click and become part of our family right here on youtube and last but not least guys please swing by and check out coppercustom.com thank you for 13 years of support we'll talk to you guys soon

Channel: Military Arms Channel

Views: 256,645

Rating: 4.8285713 out of 5

Keywords: firearm, rifle, pistol, review, iraqveteran8888, forgotten weapons, demolition ranch, military arms, military, small arms, call of duty, video game, movie, gun review, firearms review, testing, firearm testing, gun testing, ar15, ak47, akm, ak74, m16, ar vs ak, m16 vs ak47, firearms training, firearms expert reacts to escape from tarkov, 5.56, 7.62x39, 5.56 vs 7.62x39

Id: EQEnTgy5QoA

Length: 35min 41sec (2141 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021