http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/Vie...Item=123673525Originally Posted by Syme
Wastage? I can give you hard facts of thousands of lives that were saved due to FIRE SUPERIORITY in Vietnam.
http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/Vie...Item=123673525
Wastage? I can give you hard facts of thousands of lives that were saved due to FIRE SUPERIORITY in Vietnam.
Wow, and only $9000! Great find, definitely a better buy than one of those stupid overpriced ARs. Why would anyone waste their money on an AR when they could get one of these for only nine times as much money? The fact that it has no advantage over an AR except for a somewhat more reliable gas system (as well as having several disadvantages compared to an AR) definitely justifies the extra $8000 on the price tag. Especially since we all know how much time civilian rifle shooters spend in harsh, sandy combat environments!
Give me a break. Yeah, I suppose it's not technically "impossible" for a civilian to get a semi-auto G36, because there are a small number of ultra-expensive NFA-regulated SL8 conversions floating around the market. I think I can still stand by my claim that a semi-auto G36 is not a reasonable alternative to the AR15, and is not available to the average civilian shooter (both because of price, and because of the very small number of these conversions that exist).
Also, this doesn't change the fact that some of the other weapons you listed--such as the XM8--really are completely unavailable to civilians (the XM8 isn't available to ANYONE, actually--the program was cancelled). So I say again: It doesn't make a lot of sense to tell a civilian sport shooter than the AR is a bad choice, and then say that a better choice would be a rifle that's completely unavailable to civilians.
Well yeah, we can all agree that "fire superiority" in general saves lives. That's obvious. The real question is whether the M16A1's full-auto setting, in and of itself, provided enough of a fire superiority advantage to offset the unfortunate fact that troops using it tended to rip through their entire magazine in a second and a half without hitting anything. If you have facts proving that the M16A1's full auto provided such a fire superiority advantage, then please, show them to me. Personally, I doubt such facts exist--because the Army reached exactly the opposite conclusion when it reviewed the lessons learned from Vietnam--but if you have these facts, then let's see them.
EDIT: Just out of curiosity, do you have any objections to the AR platform other than it's gas system? Because if not, you can easily get a gas-piston AR for a lot cheaper than a $2500 SCAR or a $9000 SL8 modification, or even a $2000 AUG sporter clone. And of course it will have much better aftermarket support in terms of parts, accessories, etc.
Last edited by Syme; 03-08-2009 at 09:52 PM.
Suppression fire saves lives. The point of fire superiority and suppression fire is not necessarily to hit the enemy, but to deter them from aggression all together. A great deal of military doctrine is based upon this principal.
The feeding sucks and it jams all the time. I have frequently been failed during peak moments and firefights in training missions no matter how well my M16 was maintained. The worst part about is that there are much better weapons on the market using the same round and that would require little retraining for our military.
EDIT:
For further reading: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/1...sttest_071217/
Last edited by Bowzer; 03-08-2009 at 09:50 PM.
Yeah, I know. Again: The question isn't whether fire superiority provides an advantage in a firefight. Obviously it does. The question is whether the fire-superiority advantage provided by giving every soldier a full-auto assault rifle is enough to offset the fact that it tends to result in them burning through their ammunition very quickly and wastefully. Getting the absolute greatest volume of suppressive fire out of each infantry squad is not the only imperative that drives infantry equipment design. There are countervailing factors to be considered too. You are over-simplifying the issue if you just say "Well the more suppressive fire the better, and suppressive fire comes from full-auto weapons, so every infantryman should have a full-auto weapon".
It's instructive to note that today, even armies that do issue their troops with full-auto-capable rifles (such as the Brits) generally train them only to use that setting only when clearing rooms and trenches; suppressive fire is generally left to the machine-gunners, because if every infantryman uses his rifle to provide full-auto suppressive fire, they go through ammunition very quickly. This is stated by the guy in the Yahoo Answers page that you yourself linked to earlier, btw.
Most of the feed problems in military service are the fault of the STANAG magazines, not the rifle itself. As civilian AR shooters who use good magazines can tell you, the AR can feed extremely reliably when not used with shitty STANAG mags. As for jamming, what kind of jams are you talking about? Most of them would probably be addressed by a gas-piston AR design, so again, it makes no sense to condemn the AR and say we need a new rifle when all we really need to address your criticisms are gas-piston uppers for existing ARs. And again, you seem to be flip-flopping back and forth between talking about the AR15 as a civilian sporting rifle, and talking about the M16 as a military assault rifle.
I do know about the dust tests. Notice that at the end of the article, it mentions that surveys of troops in the field reveal that they are satisfied with the M4s performance.
Last edited by Syme; 03-08-2009 at 10:30 PM.
I believe that every soldier's rifle should be capable of laying down aggressive, fully automatic suppressive fire. If the shit hits the fan any soldier needs to be able to lay down a good base of fire to make a withdrawal for themselves and their buddies.
Infantrymen generally are outfitted with a double basic combat load. Using one or two mags to lay down suppressive fire to maneuver into position is nothing. And while automatic rifles and machine guns usually make up 70% of a unit's organic firepower, they may not always be available for hasty support.
When you do not know that there are much better weapon systems out there, you're probably not going to complain. Those who do have something to complain about are probably dead. 882 jams for 6000 rounds is completely unacceptable, especially when another weapon system only jammed 127 times in extreme dust conditions.
Well, obviously we just disagree about the suppressive fire issue. I'll side with the Army's post-Vietnam conclusion, which was that while full-auto suppressive fire from every infantryman's rifle may be a nice thing to have in theory, the advantage it provides is less significant than the disadvantage caused by the fact that men with full-auto rifles tend to burn ammo too quickly. It's all very well to say that they would only use one or two magazines out of their combat load and only when truly necessary, but the facts learned in Vietnam say differently.
I'm also unclear on why rapidly squeezing off three-round bursts is an unacceptable alternative.
This strikes me as an attempt to evade the facts. The question put to combat troops wasn't "Can you think of a better rifle than the M4?", it was "Are you satisfied with the M4's performance?". You don't have to know that there are better rifles out there in order to decide whether you're satisfied with your existing one; if it had some feature that you found unsatisfactory, you would still find that feature unsatisfactory even if you didn't know about the SCAR or whatever. The Army's happy with the M4, the troops are happy with the M4; 882 stoppages per 6000 rounds in extreme dust conditions may seem unacceptable to you, but obviously to the combat troops and the decision-makers disagree.
And this "those who do have something to complain about are probably dead" nonsense is just silly. Please. You're seriously going to try to claim that troops are being killed off in large numbers because their M4s jammed on them, but no-one knows about it because they're dead, and everyone who's alive doesn't have any complaints about the issue? I think you and I both know that if an item of equipment is having problems (especially the kind of problems that get people killed), the fact will quickly become known to more than just the troops who are personally affected by (or killed because of) those problems.
Also, bear in mind that the previous dust test (summer of 2007) showed the M4 only having 307 stoppages per 6000 rounds, which is not that much more than the 200-some stoppages reported for the SCAR or HK416. The Army is still trying to figure out what they did differently between the two tests to cause the number of stoppages to increase to 882 in the more recent test (fall 2007). You should probably wait for that discrepancy to be resolved before trumpeting the 882 figure as evidence of the M4's drastic inferiority.
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Anyhow, we've now gotten completely onto the topic of military rifles. Weren't we talking about civilian sporting rifles originally? As I recall, this all got started because you complained that Anonymous D and his range buddies had too many ARs/AKs, and stated that you would never waste your money on an "overpriced" AR (and would instead recommend a nice, affordable, non-overpriced $2500 SCAR or $2000 AUG sporter, or a nonexistant semi-auto XM8/L85/Tavor/etc.). Now somehow this discussion has veered into the merits of the M16/M4 as a combat rifle in a dusty environment, and the merits of having full-auto in an infantry rifle. That stuff's all irrelevant to civilian shooters.
Last edited by Syme; 03-09-2009 at 11:19 AM.
SOCOM has pretty much had it with the M16 platform.
Btw, what kind of military experience do you have?
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