One magazine is never enough. I mean, we are GunMag Warehouse, so maybe there is an implicit bias there. Anything involving guns, especially gun fighting, should have a bias towards more ammunition than less. Spare mags, extendos, and drums are all ways to have more ammo than less ammo, but so is the fine art of mag coupling – whether you’re using a mag coupler or just good ole’ fashioned tape.
Mag coupling (you may have heard it referred to as “Jungle Style”) isn’t when two mags fall in love and decide to make a family. It’s the art of taking one magazine and making it stick to another. This can be done with tape, dedicated coupling devices, and the magazines themselves. Mag coupling provides a simple solution to the age-old problem of wanting more ammunition and wanting it right now.
History Of Jungle Style
Mag coupling is, like most things, the product of a need. The first war where we saw a massive shift to box-fed magazines was World War 2. American forces especially came to the war with box magazine-fed guns like the M1 Carbine, the Thompson, and later the M3 Grease Gun. Unlike previous wars, magazines were issued en masse, and your average soldier could reload faster than ever.
Maneuver warfare became the small squad tactic of the day, and that required suppressive fire. Suppressive fire required, well, more fire. Reloads had to be fast because not only did your life depend on it, but so did your squadmate who was boot, scoot, and boogying around the battlefield.
G.I.s do what G.I.s do and began modifying what they had to work better. They utilized a range of materials, from tape to inner bicycle tubes, to fasten two magazines together. This became the modern process of mag coupling. Soldiers packing box-fed weapons famously began the process. This process seemed to be purely American, which might’ve been due to our weapon design.
Audie Murphy famously loved couple magazines and did so many times. The M1 Carbine he carried in World War 2 featured coupled magazines, and in films, he did the same with a Thompson gun, adding a sense of realism and pragmatism to a Hollywood production.
Since then, mag coupling has been the norm, and it’s crossed the world with pictures from Ethiopia, Israel, Poland, England, and beyond. Why is mag coupling so popular? Because it’s practical.
Magazine Coupler Practicality
Mag coupling gives you an instant on the gun reload. Reloading in a gunfight is critical, and being able to do so on the fly can’t be overlooked. Mag coupling allows you to pop out an empty mag and pop in the fresh one with hardly any movement necessary.
For a soldier, the benefit is not just a quick reload but a slower lull in fire when laying down suppressive efforts. Also, it allows your average Marine or Soldier to lay down the hate and establish fire superiority with nary a break in fire. That first minute of a firefight can be a critical time to establish those fires and get after it.
Mag coupling also works tremendously well for the average gun owner. If you wield a rifle or PCC for home defense, you can couple a couple of mags together and have extra ammo on hand without issue. I imagine most of us don’t have time to grab a plate carrier or battle belt with reloads on board. As such, having some extra ammo on the gun is a huge benefit to mag coupling.
Anytime you need your firearm, you can have double the ammunition. Now, why would you use a magazine coupler instead of extended magazines or drums? Well, extended magazines can make it tough to go prone, or your gun might not offer a reliable extended magazine option. Drums are great but often expensive, and very few work well. Two 15 dollar PMAGs offer you sixty rounds at a fraction of the cost of the Magpul drum. However, the Magpul drums work extremely well.
Downsides to the Magazine Coupler
There is no free lunch, and of course, mag coupling offers a few downsides. First, it makes your weapon a fair bit heavier. That’s not a downside for home defense, but on mile 18 of a 20-mile patrol, you’ll feel that extra weight.
Another downside is a slightly wider gun, which isn’t huge but notable when clearing the tight quarters of a ship or middle eastern house. Depending on how you couple your magazines, you could also be exposing the rounds to the dirt with an inverted coupling.
Also, if you do a straight offset mag coupling, you’ve effectively extended the length to that of an extendo and lose your low prone capability.
A big issue we ran into in Afghanistan was that after our guys fired the sixty rounds from their coupled mags, it was tough to retain them. It’s a big wide chunk of metal and plastic that barely fit in a drop pouch. Forget about trying to fit them into a mag pouch, either.
Current Incarnations
The early ways of mag coupling still work perfectly fine. Some tape of a rubber tube, and you’re good to go. It’s caveman-like but efficient. I recommend a side-by-side coupling with something sitting between the magazines to separate them just enough to make reloads easy. The inverted style works but has its own set of issues.
Magazine couplers made by actual mag manufacturers are my favorite go-to method (like the Lancer Cinch magazine coupler). They are cheap and efficient. They make it use to uncouple the mags should you choose to. Overall, this provides a simple and cost-effective way to live your mag coupling dreams. However, these aren’t made for every magazine or platform, and that creates a challenge.
Finally, we have magazines built to be coupled. ETS makes AR 15 magazines with built-in mag couplers, Ruger has the BX-25X2, as does HK for the G36 and Sig for the 550 series or rifles. Sadly these aren’t super common.
Coupled Up
Mag coupling has been practiced prolifically with box-fed guns. On-the-fly reloads have never been faster. Mag coupling leaked from World War II to the Global War on Terror and everything in between. Soldiers love the practice, and it’s stuck around for a reason. They leaked into our cultural subconscious, and pictures of Malcolm X cemented the idea into the larger American culture. Mag coupling is a simple solution to a big problem and provides an inexpensive fix to a life-risking proposition.
Do you couple your mags? If so do you use tape, a manufactured magazine coupler, or something else?
When I was younger I worked with a couple of real viet nam veterans who told me that some of the actual reasons that the m-16 received so many complaints was that guys were taping their magazines together and that they would go prone and subsequently slam their guns into the mud and then during a mag change insert a gob of mud and grit into their rifle.
These were real viet nam vets , the ones with the visible and not so visible scars, this was during the late 70’s. They still had their dog tags, unit tattoos and other memorabilia.
Oh , and they liked their m-16’s , they way preferred them over the m-14.
“Too heavy, too long , combat ineffective in close jungle environment “
I believed them over the stories I read.
Look how Audie Murphy, has Both mag ends UP.
What’s that got to do with taping two magazines one up one down with an
m-16?
In order to do that you would have to have a block in between magazines.
The new magazine dual clip together holder wasn’t in circulation yet in the late 60’s early 70’s.
These guys were combat vets with scars and were scary.
I was just a kid listening in on their stories.
They weren’t talking to me.
They were talking amongst themselves about guns and artillery pieces.
One of the other guys was a half deaf korean war veteran who was on a howitzer team.
I don’t think they were trying to impress me. They didn’t even know I was there.
It was more of a veterans decompress session.
I doubt that they were lying.
Did you ever see the cheevh and chong movie “Up in Smoke”?
One of the guys could have been the person whom they used to make the character “Strawberry”.
He was seriously touched in the head!
I have used tape to couple magazines, now I use magpul couplers. They work great. I will say it makes the old carbine a bit heavier. I can’t see where I will ever need 60 rounds absolutely NOW, anytime in my life. But it is fun. A mag dump takes a little longer and a little pricier.