Thread: Went shooting yesterday....

Originally Posted by Syme

The real question is whether the M16A1's full-auto setting, in and of itself, provided enough fire superiority to save "thousands of lives" despite the 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 setting saved all these lives, then please, show them to me.

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.

Originally Posted by Syme

EDIT: Just out of curiosity, do you have any objections to the AR platform other than it's gas system?

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/

Originally Posted by Bowzer

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Bowzer

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/

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Bowzer

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.

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.

***

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.

I think you entirely missed the point of my previous post. Let's go over it again: You suggested that one the reasons the M4 is popular among the troops is that the people who die due to it's deficiencies aren't around to share their negative opinions of it. I responded that this is absurd because other soldiers notice when their buddies get killed due to the deficiencies of their weapons; it's not like that's something that's only noticed by the guy who actually gets killed. In fact, Sgt. Perales' quote supports this point; he saw his buddy get killed because of an M4 stoppage, and therefore has a negative opinion of it. So your "those who have something to complain about are probably dead" argument doesn't explain why surveys reveal that the M4 is popular among the troops. If lots of soldiers really were dying due to M4/M16 stoppages, the troops would notice and the surveys would reveal that many troops are unhappy with the weapon. Sgt. Perales' story is moving, but I hope you know enough to realize that solitary anecdotes don't prove anything one way or the other about the big picture.

I have no military experience. I don't think it's particularly relevant, since as we all know, military experience provides no immunity against being bone-headed, being obstinately wedded to baseless opinions, or just being plain dumb or uninformed.

EDIT: Speaking of special operations units and the weapons they use, the SAS has pretty much had it with the L85A2 which you praised earlier, and has switched to an AR platform (Diemacos). Same is true of other British special operations units like the SBS. And also, Delta Force is still using an AR platform, albeit one with a gas-piston upper.