There Are Few Things…
By Mitch Berg
…more irritating than armchair generals barbering about things about which their only actual knowledge is gathered at second or third hand.
But after forty-five years of reports that the M-16/M-4 series of rifles are M extremely unreliable and susceptible to jamming in any conditions that are less than optimal (Vietnam’s humidity, Afghanistan’s pervasive dust)…:
In the chaos of an early morning assault on a remote U.S. outpost in eastern Afghanistan, Staff Sgt. Erich Phillips’ M4 carbine quit firing as militant forces surrounded the base. The machine gun he grabbed after tossing the rifle aside didn’t work either.
When the battle in the small village of Wanat ended, nine U.S. soldiers lay dead and 27 more were wounded. A detailed study of the attack by a military historian found that weapons failed repeatedly at a “critical moment” during the firefight on July 13, 2008, putting the outnumbered American troops at risk of being overrun by nearly 200 insurgents.
…perhaps it’s time for the US military to cut the crap in its procurement system and break down and buy a rifle that leave our servicepeople with an overpriced, underweight club when the heat is on.
Just saying.
October 12th, 2009 at 7:03 am
My guess is that the Tavor would be a better choice. The sand problem appears to have been handled.
October 12th, 2009 at 7:12 am
Yeah, but can you imagine a congressman proposing buying an import?
October 12th, 2009 at 8:09 am
I read the article, but what’s on the short list for a replacement?
I don’t think we’d buy imports, but I could see buying the manufacturing rights.
October 12th, 2009 at 8:14 am
Sig Sauer 556
October 12th, 2009 at 8:17 am
Build something off the AK platform so it’s a bit more accurate beyond 100 yards?
October 12th, 2009 at 8:27 am
Short list for replacments:
1) The Heckler and Koch HK416; it’s actually an adaptation of the existing M4, with a gas piston operating system in place of the direct gas system the M4/M16 uses. Isolates the heat from the bolt/bolt carrier, which cuts down on the “overrheating’ jamming noted in the article.
2) The FN SCAR – similar.
Both the above are heavily used in US special forces units that have their own funding streams (Seals, “Deltas” and so on).
3) any number of other 5.56mm rifles that are already in production; the SIGs (as Fingers noted), the HK35/G50 used in the German army…
The bigger story; we’ve been working on a replacement for the M16 for almost 40 years. The procurement system IS that much of a mess.
October 12th, 2009 at 8:30 am
Oh, yeah; the military’s answer to suggestions that we buy something like the HK416 or the SCAR is that they’re “too expensive”; indeed, they do lost a lot more than an M16/M4. But they’re all limited-production weapons, while the M16 family’s been in mass production for a couple of generations now. If they had the “push” of a major buy, like the US military, the price would come down plenty fast.
And I wonder what an M16 would cost if you added in the billions we’ve spent on R’nD for the various weapons that were supposed to replace it over the past 40 years – the SPIW in the seventies, knockoffs of the G11 in the ’80s, and the AICW for the past ten years?
October 12th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Yup; no question — the Tavor is an import, and it’s much more expensive than the M4. But I don’t have any reason to doubt that it could be manufactured under license in the US, and that the price could be brought down. Granted it — like many other options — suffer from the NIH problem, but if (and I do mean “if”; I don’t know that this is the case) it’s the right choice, I think the obvious counter is that the men and women we put in harm’s way on our behalf are worth it.
Heck, there’s even something to be said for something built on a modified AK engine. Not capable of become nearly as accurate as the M4 is, but they’re almost absurdly reliable.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:02 am
OK, I know NOTHING about weapons, so take this with many salt grains: I was struck in the AP article about the recent Afghanistan battle with the disclosure that our guys weapons overheated because they were fighting so many attackers and had to keep shooting to avoid being overrun. Would any of the weapons you cite have worked better under the conditions? I welcome your expert opinion, Mitch and others.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:22 am
Golfdoc,
My only credentials in the area are:
1) I’m a shooter, and know a little bit about how cyclic systems (“Automatic” and “Semi-Automatic” firearms) work, and…
2) I read a lot, especially a lot about what servicemen say about our firearms.
Most of the weapons I cited above – and the Tavor, an Israeli piece that Joel cites – are noted for their reliability under awful conditions. The Russian AK-series weapons (AK47, AKM, AK74) are noted for being able to continue shooting even if you never ever clean them. Partly because they are built to very loose tolerances as a design objective; there’s room for dirt in the action. This, however, makes AKs quite inaccurate; a “tight” gun will be more accurate, all other things being equal.
The other guns in the list, as well as many others – the Finnish Valmet, the Israeli Galil (both of them AK-series knockoffs built to tighter tolerances), the German G-3 (and Norwegian AG3) and G36, the Belgian FN-CAR, the French FA-MAS, and many others – split the difference to various degrees, combining high reliability and high accuracy.
To answer your question, Golf – and again, remembering I’m an amateur – the answer would seem to be “yes, they would”. The M15/M4’s action uses a jet of gas from the explosion in the barrel to push the bolt carrier back through the operating cycle – which introduces residue from the explosion, as well as lots of heat, directly into the receiver (the part of the gun where all the action takes place). The others either use a gas piston (all AK-knockoffs, the HK416, the SCAR, the SIGs) or the blowing-back of the cartridge case itself (the G3/G36), all of which keep the heat and gas isolated from the receiver.
And that’s a crucial difference, or so I’fve read.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:32 am
“I don’t have any reason to doubt that it could be manufactured under license in the US,”
The Ukrainians build the Tavor under license for their military.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:35 am
AK’s have outperformed M16/M4 in every theatre for four decades. AKs are cheap, plentiful, available world-wide, and as Joel says, absurdly reliable. They’re the Honda Civic of the gun world. Why can’t American gun designers catch up? I don’t know but frankly, I’m thinking its about time we started thinking about licensing them here. We already buy Beretta pistol. Why not AK’s? National pride and trade balances are a hell of a price to pay for dead Americans. I’d be willing to give up a little pride if it meant our people using the Best weapons instead of Almost As Good.
Second: our 20 guys held off 200 of their guys. Good the them; but in doing so, our guys fired their weapons till they overheated. I’m no expert, but that sounds less like 200 aimed shots and more like 200 magazines of “spray-and-pray.” I am NOT criticizing the men in the field, I’m wondering about the training before deployment. Is there an argument for more basic marksmanship? American troops certainly had large-scale engagements with prior arms in Korea and WWII; did better marksmanship with the M-1 or the BAR help overcome slow rates of fire?
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October 12th, 2009 at 9:40 am
Mitch-
the Army was set to roll out the XM-8 next year, but they based the design on lighter weight polymers being available ‘in the future’, and when they never materialized, the weapon was shelved because of the weight (18 pounds unloaded).
But I don’t agree with the notion that the M-4 is useless. It doesn’t work well in dusty environments, which is unfortunately where we happen to be fighting right now. But neither does the MK-19 automatic grenade launcher, or the 240B heavy machinegun. Each of these weapons relies on having a layer of oil or lubricant between moving parts, but that oil is what the dirt and sand adheres to. We could take 3 years fielding a new rifle only to wind up in a war with North Korea or Iran (or even Russia) and then wish that we still had the more versatile M-4.
The biggest problem I have with the M-4 is that the Army could very easily replace the upper receiver of every weapon we have now and get rid of most of the problem. In English, what an M-4 does is use the explosive gasses from the bullet being fired to push the bolt back and cycle a new round in place. The SCAR, which you mentioned above, uses a piston rod along the top of the barrel to cycle the bolt back and forth. What it means is that the majority of the gasses (and the carbon residue that comes with them) are ejected out the muzzle, rather than back into the chamber.
Lastly, remember that an accurate weapon is a deal breaker for the Army. We train to engage targets out to 300 meters, about the length of a good drive for Tiger Woods. The AK-47 is nowhere near accurate enough for that.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:55 am
Dave,
The biggest problem I have with the M-4 is that the Army could very easily replace the upper receiver of every weapon we have now and get rid of most of the problem.
That, indeed, is pretty much what the HK416 is; a new, gas-piston upper-receiver on an M4.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:03 am
You make another good point, Dave: “Reliability” means different things in different places. The M240G (which is an american knockoff of the Belgian FN-MAG, which is used in pretty much every non-German, non-former-Warpac military in the western world) is renowned for spectacular reliability everywhere but in the middle east, for many of the exact attributes that make it reliable everyplace but the Middle East.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:05 am
If you require oil, use the teflon bike oils that don’t get dust.
Might have to look up the Galil….
October 12th, 2009 at 10:14 am
I know the Army wants an accurate weapon, Dave, and during slow fire on the target range that makes sense. But is your camp in danger of being over-run if the enemy is 1/4 mile away? If they are, can you empty enough magazines fast enough to melt the barrel . . . and still hit anything?
I’m back to wondering about marksmanship. I’ve seen people at the pistol range with match quality weapons who can’t make a hole in the black. There may be some truth in the old stories about sending Young Johnnie out hunting for dinner with his dog, his gun, and his bullet (yes, one – bullets are expensive, making every shot count is important).
It’s the same question I ask about the police change-over from 6-guns to autoloaders. Cops today routinely carry an entire box of ammo on their belts (17 in the weapon and 34 more in two mags). It’s not uncommon to read of cops firing 30 rounds and hitting nothing at all. Glocks are very accurate weapons and the air is full of lead . . . but we can’t hit anything? Not accuracy, not quantity – marksmanship.
As I say, I’m NOT military, I wasn’t there, I’ve never been in combat, and I’m not criticizing those who were: I’m wondering if emphasizing marksmanship over gee-whiz might help.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:29 am
Nate,
Leaving aside the cultural emphasis on marksmanship (the Kentucky rifleman is part of America’s heritage), I’ve been told that there IS ample reason to stress it; if you see a group of bad guys gathering 400 yards out to try to overrun you, there’s a benefit in being able to start breaking that attack up before they get practically into grenade range.
When the Army switched from the M14 to the M16, I recall seeing angry letters from Korea vets who noted the very real experience of having to start firing on Chinese “Human Wave” attacks 700 yards out, trying to pare the attacks down so they wouldn’t get overrun by sheer momentum. Couldn’t do *that* with an M16.
I know the Army and Marine infantry train to eschew full-automatic fire – but when your aim is to keep a bunch of bad guys’ heads down, sheer volume is the name of the game (as, indeed, it was before WWII when the US adopted the M1 Garand, the first generally-issued semiautomatic rifle; volume of fire was important, even if you stressed accuracy as well).
October 12th, 2009 at 10:31 am
AK platform….after the BG is killed you can supplement your ammo with his.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:38 am
nate
I agree making each shot count is important.
If you’ve never shot a gun before on a regular basis, in 6 months you can get pretty good on a range but marksmanship under stress takes years of practice – something young people don’t have access to on a regular basis any more.
Hunting is nowhere near as intense (for you, for the prey its the ultimate experience) as combat but it does teach you how to practice target acquisition under sudden, less than optimal conditions, with varying unknowns needing instant resolution. Wild boar hunting in Texas with a bolt action rifle is a good training venue for instance, cause if you don’t anchor the boar he’s going to come after you and kill you if he can.
Urban youth do not have the opportunity to develop the patience, self-discipline, and focus the hunting teaches.
October 12th, 2009 at 11:04 am
“Urban youth do not have the opportunity to develop the patience, self-discipline, and focus”
You’re not kidding
http://tinyurl.com/yzpsc8k
October 12th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Mitch, thanks for the mini-seminar on weaponry. I am always fearful of government purchasing being driven by political forces rather than what is best in terms of end results. If the decision to go ahead with a particular weapon is based on buying American products even if the foreign competition is better, I am outraged. That’s why I own a Japanese car: they are better than what American companies produced in terms of my driving needs. That may piss off some people, but they don’t drive me to work every day.
October 12th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Wild boar hunting in Texas with a bolt action rifle is a good training venue for instance, cause if you don’t anchor the boar he’s going to come after you and kill you if he can.
That was the interesting part of reading the story of Vasilii Zaitsev, the Soviet sniper whose story was dramatized in the movie Enemy At The Gates (with Jude Law and Ed Harris and, speaking of dramatization, Rachel Weisz). He learned marksmanship hunting wolves in Siberia with a bolt-action Moissin-Nagant M92. I’ve shot M-N’s; if you are adapted to the smoothness of the Lee-Enfield action, give up all hope. It’s like crank-starting a Ford F150 in comparison.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
golfdoc50: by and large, these things have tradeoffs. Reliability and accuracy are kind of a classic pair. There are ways to ease the tradeoffs, when it comes to firearms — the Galil, at least arguably, is designed to be an accurate AK; and there’s stuff that can be done with a better-fitted bushing in a 1911-style semiauto that improves accuracy and doesn’t harm reliability, just to pick two examples — but it’s pretty fundamental.
That said, while there’s nothing inherently bad in issuing a rifle to regular infantrymen that’s capable, say, of one-inch groups at 400 meters, as a practical matter, few (well, close to no) non-specialists will ever be in a situation where they’ll get any advantage from that, and even fewer will be able to take advantage of that kind of accuracy. (Snipers can and do reach out a lot further than that, but that’s kind of a specialty role, and requires a whole lot of training.)
How much trouble/effort/money would getting that be worth? Doesn’t much matter, actually, as there’s that tradeoff thing, again — a semiauto that’s that accurate probably is going to have such tight tolerances that reliability would be horrible.
Like Mitch, I’m an amateur, but I’ve read some on the subject, as well. As to the massed visible bunch of bad guys at 400 meters — entirely possible in the desert, sure; it can get kinda flattish there — that’s really what the crew-served weapons, like the SAW and other machine guns are for. (The SAW is intended to be effective up to twice that distance.)
October 12th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
So Joel, are you arguing in favor of more reliable, passably accurate, and above all – better aimed weapons?
Couldn’t agree more.
.
October 12th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Mitch, that “Kentucky rifleman” bit isn’t just a legend, it was real life right here in Minnesota, not that long ago.
Most of Minnesota had no electricity until the 1940’s. People 50 miles from Minneapolis lived little different from their economic cousins in the hill country of Kentucky.
A boy, a dog, and one .22 round for his rifle isn’t myth; I met that man. He’s old now but he remembers clearly the bitter shame of a missed shot and the family’s meager supper because of it.
By the same reasoning, if you hump your own ammo into the field, are you more careful than if they chopper in ammo by the pallet? If your weapon only fires single shots or 3-round bursts, do you aim better?
I’d like to see an experiment: take two groups of soldiers at boot camp, train one the usual way, train the other the same but add a requirement to qualify as expert marksman. See which group does better in combat.
.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
The M-249 SAW and the 240B are the weapons we use for volume of fire, not the individual rifle. The reason for that is because both weapons are designed for automatic fire and come with bipods, which is the only way you can accurately fire an automatic weapon.
Even a 5.56mm M-4 will kick the muzzle upward after the first 3-4 rounds of automatic fire, and the 7.62mm AK-47 kicks even more.
But back to the subject of the post. The Army should probably bite the cost bullet and use a rifle in Iraq/Afghanistan that can handle the environment. A battalion’s worth of SCAR’s or modified M-4’s would be a great test of the reliability question.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
The M-249 SAW and the 240B are the weapons we use for volume of fire, not the individual rifle.
I understand that – but then, there was a reason the Army opted to give individual rifles full-automatic capability, too.
As a side note, I’ve heard about the disengagement drills units use on patrol; even in units that pride themselves on a high degree of marksmanship (USMC, USSOF, UK SAS), how much those disengagement drills rely on blasting away on full automatic (or three-shot mode) in the enemy’s general direction; controlled, certainly, but lots and lots of fire.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Interestingly, the M16 was developed (at least according to Wiki’s sources) to increase the volume of fire above that which could be delivered with an M1 or M14. They took measurements of actual kill rates, and the regressions said “get more, lighter bullets out there.”
And so you’ve got an interesting mix of tight tolerances in the M16 for accuracy along with lighter bullets intended to “increase the amount of lead particles in the air”. Little bit of engineering tension there…..
October 12th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Nate: yup.
There’s an argument — I’m not sure I buy it — that infantrymen would, by and large, be better off with single-shot accurate rifles (the whole Scout Rifle concept, for those familiar with it). It would, basically, come close to getting rid of the whole notion of “suppressive fire” (shoot at people not particularly to kill them, but to keep them from doing much of anything) by rifle infantrymen, leaving thaat role to the volume-fire weapons, which are just plain better at that task, anyway. Note that that’s what the BAR guy and the guys hauling around the machine guns did in WWII, a whole lot.
Would that work better? I dunno. But there was a time that’s barely within living memory when whole armies did use similar systems — when “machine guns” were used for that, and the basic infantryman was armed with a single-shot-per-trigger-pull rifle, and it did seem to have its benefits.
Expecting an infantryman’s rifle to be a tack driver, bullet hose, and reliable, though, seems to be something that hasn’t happened, and is unlikely to. There’s no question that the AR-15/M16/M4 platform is capable of great bullseye shooting; variants dominate certain kinds of targets-what-don’t-shoot back competitions. But there’s at least some good reason to believe that other platforms may be better for different uses.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Nate,
take two groups of soldiers at boot camp, train one the usual way, train the other the same but add a requirement to qualify as expert marksman. See which group does better in combat.
On this one, I’ll defer to actual soldiers, especially officers and NCOs that actually have to train and lead people.
But as I understand it, leaving out the occasional recruit that’s a highly experienced shooter, and the occasional prodigy (I knew a guy who’d never shot before, who qualified “expert” on his first crack), training “experts” is a hockey stick curve, with effort on the vertical and skill on the horizontal axes. Your returns diminish the higher up the scale you go; you have to put more and more effort into making better and better shooters…
…and index that against the fact that *shooting* is only one of many skills an infantryman has to learn; patrolling, ambushing, making and breaking contact, assaulting, defending, and on and on. Given that you can’t keep troops in basic and infantry training forever, and you have to send ’em into the field sometime, there’s an aspect of getting the best return on the Army’s investment of time and resources.
Bear in mind that not only does not everyone has the innate talent to be a dedicated sniper, it wouldn’t even be advisable if it were. You need guys who can (with immense training) hit a guy at 1000 yards; you need lots more who (with moderate and, hopefully, effective training) hold their position, go on patrol and find the enemy, take their position, and keep the bad guys from taking it back long enough for them to beg for peace – as Liddell-Hart put it, “to winkle the other bastard out of his hold at bayonet point and drag him to the surrender ceremony”.
Which was, as Bubba notes, part of the impetus behind adopting the 5.56mm weapons like the M16 and, especially, the AK series, which is designed for untrained, illiterate peasants to be able to blast away at an enemy to keep their heads down long enough to close to grenade range AND be so easily maintained that it’d take no training or preventive maintenance. Less money and time spent on training = more troops in the field, which, according to the math the USSR (and its many satellites and proxies did) was what really won wars.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Just to refocus here; the topic isn’t so much “which kind of training and and outlook on shooting is best” – the US military seems to split the difference fairly well – and more “are our troops getting a weapon that’s reliable enough for the environment they’re in?”
Dave (who I should point out for all non-locals is a vet of at least one tour in Iraq) proposes a battalion-scale service trial of HK416 or FN-SCAR. It’s worth noting that Special Operations Command (which includes the “Deltas”, SEALS, “Green Berets” and Rangers) actually had a very active role in designing both weapons, and are using their independent funding to buy either/both as fast as they can for service in the Middle East, precisely because of the difficulties they had with the M16/M4 series.
It’s also interesting to note that the old M14s have been brought out of mothballs for service in Iraq because of…greater range and accuracy in the desert!
October 12th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
I should also point out that I’m amazed Fingers didn’t say “M61″…
October 13th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Accurate, reliable…..but just too damn heavy for a grunt to carry!!!!
October 13th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Just to note after a very good discussion. ALL guns have issues with over heating when fired for extended periods. Note the water cooled machine gun barrels used on all sides during WW I and II. Even those guns would overheat when enough cool water could not be provided and where even noted to boiling off the water during particularly intense use. At some point you need to balance the ability to carry the weapon, ammo and other supplies.
October 13th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Mitch Berg Says:
October 12th, 2009 at 7:12 am
Yeah, but can you imagine a congressman proposing buying an import?
Yes the Beretta 92/ M9 replaced the 1911.
The M-4/16 problems listed in the article could happen to any weapon. 8-30 mags through any rifle is going to cause heat problems.
The .223 round isn’t as hard hitting as a .308 but it’s about 1/3rd the weight making it a lot easier to hump large amounts.
October 13th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
One tour in Iraq with Afghanistan on deck, but that doesn’t make me an expert, just more experienced (read: flat-footed) than most.
Interestingly, military.com has a story from last just last week about a lighter and more reliable machine gun being fielded in the Afghan theater-
http://www.military.com/news/article/new-machine-gun-for-joes-in-afghanistan.html?ESRC=army.nl