Stoner 63
light machine gun
The Stoner 63 is a 5.56×45mm NATO modular weapon system. Using a variety of modular components, it can be configured as an assault rifle, carbine, top-fed light machine gun, belt-fed squad automatic weapon, or as a vehicle mounted weapon. Also known as the M63, XM22, XM23, XM207 or the Mk 23 MOD 0 machine gun, it was designed by Eugene Stoner in the early 1960s. Cadillac Gage was the primary manufacturer of the Stoner 63 during its history. The Stoner 63 saw very limited combat use by US military units during the Vietnam War. A few were also sold to law enforcement agencies.
History
Development
Soon after leaving ArmaLite, Eugene Stoner, one of the United States' most prolific modern military small arms designers, responsible for the design of the ArmaLite AR-15/M16 assault rifles, ArmaLite AR-10 battle rifle and Armalite AR-7 survival rifle, among others, devised a concept for a modular weapon that would be built around a common receiver and certain interchangeable components and could be transformed into a rifle, carbine or various machine gun configurations by simply fitting the appropriate parts to the basic assembly.
Stoner managed to solicit the help of Howard Carson, in charge of Cadillac Gage's West Coast plant in Costa Mesa, California (where Armalite was also located), in convincing the company's president, Russell Baker, of the feasibility and commercial potential of his new weapons system. Baker obliged and Cadillac Gage (a subsidiary of the Ex-Cell-O Corporation) established a small arms development branch in Costa Mesa. Stoner then recruited his two principal aides at Armalite: Robert Fremont and James L. Sullivan (who would later design the Ultimax 100 light machine gun for the Chartered Industries of Singapore).
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This entry incorporates text from “Stoner 63” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.