Thread: Went shooting yesterday....

Originally Posted by Syme

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".

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.

Originally Posted by Syme

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Syme

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Syme

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.

Originally Posted by http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/the-usas-m4-carbine-controversy-03289/

Sgt. Charles Perales of Fort Bragg, NC had this to say in a letter reprinted by Defense News:

“My unit – B Company, 2nd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment – was deployed to Afghanistan from April 2005 to March 2006. While there, we were attached to Special Forces at Camp Tillman on the Afghan border…. I saw first-hand what happens when your weapon jams up because of the harsh environments we have to call home there. An 18B weapons sergeant was shot in the face due directly to his weapon jamming. I just can’t believe that after things like this happen, the Army is still buying more M4s.

SOCOM has pretty much had it with the M16 platform.

Btw, what kind of military experience do you have?

I can tell you that the surveys are almost always guaranteed to be biased. US service members have the M16/M4 shoved down their throat and get almost no exposure to any other individual weapon systems. Yeah the M4 is the best rifle they have ever used... but the thing is they have never ever held another rifle. For instance, one of my buddies went to the Ukraine with his unit for training with the Ukrainian military. While he was over their, he was able to use a G36. His and his entire unit's opinion changed towards the M4 after using a G36.



By the way, an 18B is a special forces weapons sergeant if you didn't know. They are trained to be experts in using and maintaining a plethora of weapon systems, both foreign and domestic.

Disclaimer: I am just a lowly grunt with seven years experience in Infantry tactics, and no formal knowledge outside of my own experiences.

That out of the way, I have yet to place a weapon on burst outside of playing OPFOR. Every Infantry squad has two M249 Squad Automatic Weapons. Tactics used when the Army adopted the M14 and later the M16A1 were that two men per squad would act as automatic riflemen. In a firefight they would fire on auto while everyone else took aimed single shots. In practice, green Soldiers would panic, switch their weapons to auto and pray they hit something with all the noise they made. As a SAW gunner I carried either 100 or 200 rounds in my weapon. I was trained to conserve ammo and never fired cyclic or even rapid during my time in Iraq. I would fire sustained bursts as I was trained and eventually perfected. The average service rifle holds 30 rounds. It fires just about as quick as a SAW, lacks the control-ability, and is equipped with a thin permanently fixed barrel. Not everyone has the discipline I have learned, and I have seen plenty of weapons start smoking just being fired on burst rapidly.

The more expedient side of me says that we Infantry must work with what we have. That 18B that was shot in the face either wasn't behind cover or was nose-to-nose with the enemy. Me, I had a plan if my open-bolt SAW malfunctioned during room clearing, as Murphy's Law dictates any open-bolt weapon will do (which is why an ambush is never initiated by a belt-fed). If Haji came around a corner, I squeezed the trigger and heard "KERCHUNK", that M249 Squad Automatic Weapon was going to become its own projectile. I had a spare barrel, ASP and MKII knife that was a backup. Never could get the pistol I felt I should have had. We are already better trained and equipped than any enemy we currently have or will have in he foreseeable future. If we adopted a better service rifle, we might get penalized for cheating.

Originally Posted by Bowzer

I can tell you that the surveys are almost always guaranteed to be biased. US service members have the M16/M4 shoved down their throat and get almost no exposure to any other individual weapon systems. Yeah the M4 is the best rifle they have ever used... but the thing is they have never ever held another rifle.

Yeah, I'm just not really convinced by this line of reasoning. I would agree that many soldiers are unaware that other rifles may be more reliable than the M4, not really having any experience with rifles outside of the Army, but I don't think that makes the surveys meaningless. If the M4 really did have a crippling deficiency that was getting soldiers killed all the time, as you claim, I think soldiers would be able to notice that problem even if they've never fired a SCAR or whatever; I think soldiers are capable of noticing crappy equipment even if they don't have first-hand experience with better equipment. Frequent jamming is not a problem that you need to have fired a G36 in order to notice. I think your dismissal of the surveys on this grounds is disingenuous.

And by "shoved down their throats", do you mean... issued to them??