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Ahh. One of the big arguments among the small arms community, one that has no beginning and no end and is kept endlessly alive by pints of beer and shots of whiskey. The M16/M4 US issue rifle. Love it? Hate it? Is it any good? Is it reliable? Does it kill people or just piss them off? Obviously, this is two questions – one about the platform, the rifle itself, in all its various guises and configurations, and the other about the little 5.56mm round.
To skip to the end of the story first, I think your children are going to be issued some M16 derivative chambered in 5.56 when they join up. It’s a classic problem you see constantly in the tech world, an unbeatable combination of “good enough” and a massive installed base. Yep. The M16/M4 in 5.56 is Microsoft Windows.
Setting aside for now that fact that dusty, arid environments coupled with high winds and/or helicopters are the worst possible environments for firearm reliability, I think the current M16/M4s are reliable enough, even if you can’t treat them like an AK. If you take appropriate care of it, use quality ammunition and healthy magazines you’ll be ok.
Which leaves us with that pesky 5.56 round. Never has a tiny bit of metal and chemical propellant caused so much Sturm und Drang. And while, again, in this case it’s difficult to see a practical path to institutional change, I definitely come down in the hater’s camp. Given my druthers in a fight, I want to be putting .308s downrange. On the other hand, I’d want plenty of rounds in a fight, and if I had to hump my gear, weapons, water and food all day over all sorts of terrain, more 5.56s look a lot more appealing than fewer 7.62s, even if the latter are significantly more effective. Which isn’t even considering that if I walked into an ambush to start that fight, I’d want to run through at least a couple magazines on full auto, something not recommended with the full power rounds, even if it is a select-fire rifle. So ultimately, I think going to an intermediate power cartridge was a good decision.
But here’s the thing. .223 is derived from varmint rounds. But a man is 200 pounds, more deer than woodchuck or prairie dog. And while I know a lot of people who hunt deer with a .22-250 (my dad, for one notorious example), it would have made a lot more sense to develop a military intermediate rifle round from one of the 7mm class rounds so popular with deer hunters. In other words, .270 Winchester. You still get smaller, lighter rounds that would be controllable on full auto, but you get twice the bullet weight at equivalent velocities, with dependable terminal ballistics and penetration out over 300 meters. And one very good thing you might end up with is the 6.8 Remington, which is impressive in every way the 5.56 is not.
So there you have it. In a perfect world, we keep the M16/M4 design, but chamber it in 6.8 Rem. I know, I know, everybody disagrees. With me and with each other. Individually and collectively. You like the 6.5 Grendel. You HATE the M4. Big rounds. Little rounds. It never ends. If it did, what would we find to argue about? Now, don’t even get me started on defensive handgun calibers…
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“It’s a classic problem you see constantly in the tech world, an unbeatable combination of “good enough” and a massive installed base. Yep. The M16/M4 in 5.56 is Microsoft Windows.”
…Mikey wins the day: +50!
Fill me in since I don’t know what you do. I remember hearing on the Discovery Channel(I think .. but it could be The Learning Channel or The History Channel) that R. Lee Ermey was hosting that they thought the M-16 was the best and that the AK-47 was for chumps. Is that really true?
Nah. The AK does exactly what it is supposed to do, better than anything else there has ever been. See, you don’t want to think of the AK as a professional weapon for professional soldiers. 7.65×39 is every bit the crappy compromise 5.56 is, but for different reasons. The AK is the simplest, most robust, most idiot-proof weapon of war I am familiar with. You can literally pull peasants out of the rice paddies and in a couple of days you can train them to use and maintain the AK. Their marksmanship will be non-existent, their tactics kindergarten basic and their fire discipline embarrassing, but they’ll get rounds downrange and some of them will kill people.
I actually like the old AK. It’s comfortable to shoot, light recoil, points pretty nice and there’s a satisfying mechanical clank when that action cycles. But it’s a tool more than a weapon, one that emphasizes simplicity and dependability over functionality, actually a hallmark of Soviet weapons systems. It’s ideal if you want to raise a peasant army – if you are putting professionals in the field, you wouldn’t want to issue it…
mikey
…cuz they’d laugh at you?
Actually, I’d love to hear you get started on defensive sidearm calibers. The 5.56/M16/M4 debate has been so thoroughly gone through that there are few new arguments. And the windows comparison is perfect–we’ll likely see some upgrades to the current system but all modeled on the existing version so the armed forces don’t need to do anything drastic. Sidearm caliber OTH, one might be able to get some traction on?
Also, have you read the American Rifle? I just finished it on Kindle–while the modern section is a bit short, its an amazing history of the trials and tribulations of American weapon development.
Anecdotal stuff from more than 4 decades ago – late 1969.
We had what we called a “Kit Carson Scout” attached to our platoon. He had been a VC who had “chieu hoi’d” and came over to our side. He told me that the VC were not afraid of our M-16s but that they had been afraid of our M-14s.
One of our squads captured two VC in a bunker. Each had an AK-47 plus they had an M-16. All three rifles were kept in the same environment. Their AKs worked fine. The bolt on the M-16 was rusted in place and we were unable to free it up with the limited resources we had in the field.