Few issues are more personal to soldiers than the question of whether they can trust their rifles. And few rifles in history have generated more controversy over their reliability than the American M-16 assault rifle and its carbine version, the M-4.
In recent weeks, a fresh round of complaints about weapon malfunctions in Afghanistan, mentioned in an Army historian's report that documented small-arms jamming during the fierce battle in Wanat last year, has rekindled the discussion. Are the M-16 and M-4 the best rifles available for American troops? Or are they fussy and punchless and less than ideal for war?
Don't expect a clear answer any time soon. Expect several clear answers at once – many of them contradictory. This is because when talk turns to the M-16 and the M-4, it enters emotionally charged territory. The conversation is burdened by history, cluttered with conflicting anecdotes, and argued over by passionate camps.
This much is indisputable: Since the mid-1960s, when at Gen. William C. Westmoreland's request an earlier version of the M-16 became the primary American rifle in Vietnam, the reputation of the M-16 family has been checkered.
This is in part because the rifle had a painfully flawed roll-out. Beginning intensely in 1966, soldiers and Marines complained of the weapon's terrifying tendency to jam mid-fight. What's more, the jamming was often one of the worst sorts: a phenomenon known as "failure to extract," which meant that a spent cartridge case remained lodged in the chamber after a bullet flew out the muzzle.
The only sure way to dislodge the case was to push a metal rod down the muzzle and pop it out. The modern American assault rifle, in other words, often resembled a single-shot musket. One Army record, classified at the time but available in archives now, showed that 80 percent of 1,585 troops queried in 1967 had experienced a stoppage while firing. The Army, meanwhile, publicly insisted that the weapon was the best rifle available for fighting in Vietnam.
The problems were so extensive that in 1967 a Congressional subcommittee investigated, and issued a blistering rebuke to the Army for, among other things, failing to ensure the weapon and its ammunition worked well together, for failing to train troops on the new weapon, and for neglecting to issue enough cleaning equipment – including the cleaning rod essential for clearing jammed rifles.
A series of technical changes sharply reduced (but never eliminated) the incidence of problems. Intensive weapons-cleaning training helped, too. But the M-16 has struggled over the decades for universal and cheerful acceptance. Some soldiers and Marines have always loathed it, and its offspring, too.
To their critics, the M-16 and M-4 are ill-suited for Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike the Kalashnikov rifles carried by insurgents, they are too sensitive to sand and fine dust, they say. They overheat quickly and in the worst battles are prone to fail.
Critics also complain about the weapons' relative lethality. Their lightweight bullets lack knock-down power, they say, especially when fired by the M-4, because the reduced barrel length of the carbine results in a reduced muzzle velocity, which lessens the severity of many wounds.
A discussion about the mechanisms of wounding could be a full post. One day I'll take that on. But any discussion about M-4 and M-16 lethality would be incomplete without mentioning an essential variable: bullet composition.
The most commonly used round today, the M855, has a steel penetrator core and was designed to pass through Soviet body armor; some soldiers complain that when it strikes a man wearing only a shirt it can travel through him like an ice pick. Unless it strikes bone squarely, they say, it tends not to dump adequate kinetic energy inside a victim.
Moreover, unlike the former round, the M193, the metal jacket of the M855's bullet tends not to fragment. This reduces the wound channels and energy transfer into a victim, too.
First translation: the M855 is not the best cartridge for shooting lightly clad insurgents; it is a cartridge designed for a different war. Second translation: some complaints about M-4 and M-16 lethality are likely related to the ammunition, not the rifles.
If all of this seems complex, it's only the background. Tomorrow we'll discuss the performance data from surveys of veterans and from reliability tests, and share the Army's position.
Do American troops deserve a better rifle-cartridge combination? If yes, how to define better? More lethal? Greater range? More reliable? What rifle and what cartridge combination would work best?
