The AK-47 is an assault rifle that was developed by Mikhail Kalashnikov in 1947, seeing action in the Soviet Union and several other Warsaw Pact nations. The AK-47 is rugged and reliable and cheap to manufacture, so the weapon has seen widespread use among Third World countries and former communist states, with guerrilla forces adopting the AK-47 as their weapon of choice. 75,000,000 copies of the AK-47 have been produced and 100,000,000 AK-47 family weapons, including the AKM and Type 56.