Next Rifle Upgrade Possibility

The other notion behind the M16 was that if you wound someone severely you tie up far more resources of the other side than if you kill the person. Under Safehold conditions, there is much less medical resource to tie up, but those same wounds will after a bit be fatal.

Having trained on the M16A1 (army) my observation was that its range under non-desert conditions was larger than most lines of fire that I ever saw (well, standing up in the middle of a street, in a city with a rectangular grid, has its own disadvantages.)

I'm pretty sure that the notion behind the M16 was that Bob McNamara hated the Springfield Armory and wanted to destroy it, and Kennedy owned stock in Colt, which is why the wonderful black rifle only required three people to lose their jobs over the course of three separate evaluations in order to be fielded, but not until after Armalite divested itself of the patents. It has the highest failure rate of any rifle ever fielded by a professional military, and is used exclusively by countries who can't afford to buy or build their own, so they take the ones uncle Sam gives away, or, in some cases, pays them to take.

The only thing the M16 does well is suck and jam, and only a sustained propaganda campaign makes people believe otherwise.

phillies wrote:The other notion behind the M16 was that if you wound someone severely you tie up far more resources of the other side than if you kill the person. Under Safehold conditions, there is much less medical resource to tie up, but those same wounds will after a bit be fatal.

Having trained on the M16A1 (army) my observation was that its range under non-desert conditions was larger than most lines of fire that I ever saw (well, standing up in the middle of a street, in a city with a rectangular grid, has its own disadvantages.)

Undercover Fat Kid wrote:I'm pretty sure that the notion behind the M16 was that Bob McNamara hated the Springfield Armory and wanted to destroy it, and Kennedy owned stock in Colt, which is why the wonderful black rifle only required three people to lose their jobs over the course of three separate evaluations in order to be fielded, but not until after Armalite divested itself of the patents. It has the highest failure rate of any rifle ever fielded by a professional military, and is used exclusively by countries who can't afford to buy or build their own, so they take the ones uncle Sam gives away, or, in some cases, pays them to take.

The only thing the M16 does well is suck and jam, and only a sustained propaganda campaign makes people believe otherwise.

I'm pretty sure the M-16's reliability issues have been fixed by now. The only time I've ever had problems with one was when I was issued one with a bent barrel that the armorer somehow missed. Even then, it didn't jam; it just sent the bullet tumbling and missing the practice target.

There were multiple reasons for the initial issues of the M-16 to perform badly, including political manipulation (in this case it was Springfield Armouries being cut from the government contract for rifles delivering sub standard ammunition, including a powder formulation that created more fouling), poor training (soldiers being told that M-16s needed no cleaning) and a woeful misinterpretation of SLA Marshal's work "Men Against Fire", which resulted in soldiers being given fully automatic weapons and encouraged to use automatic fire in order to overcome the issue of only 17% to 25% of soldiers actively participating in battle. (Marshal's research suggested that only soldiers who used team operated weapons like GPMG's or had powerful weapons like the BAR were inclined to fire, feeling they had influence on the battle, while soldiers armed with ordinary rifles would take cover and hide).

The main reasons to adopt the M-16 included having much less weight and bulk (important for mechanized and airmobile forces, as well as operating in extreme environments), having smaller ammunition so soldiers could carry more and being much easier to instruct solders in marksmanship, since the rounds had very flat trajectories through their effective range.

The versions of the M-16 that have come out since the 1960's have had decades of evolution, and have little resemblance to the ones issues back then. Even the ammunition is vastly different, so we are talking about an almost entirely different weapons system today.

Thucydides wrote:There were multiple reasons for the initial issues of the M-16 to perform badly, including political manipulation (in this case it was Springfield Armouries being cut from the government contract for rifles delivering sub standard ammunition, including a powder formulation that created more fouling), (snip)

The versions of the M-16 that have come out since the 1960's have had decades of evolution, and have little resemblance to the ones issues back then. Even the ammunition is vastly different, so we are talking about an almost entirely different weapons system today.

While the original M-16 fouled and jammed almost always, especially in muddy Vietnam conditions, the current rifle is almost as good as its hype. With the newest twist rates and much heavier bullet weights it can be accurate at real ranges and pack enough punch in a hit to do the job. Neither of those things were true in its first iterations(which used ammunition more suited to shooting prairie dogs or rabbits than other men.) It is still true in most of the world that if you have an AK you think the M-16 is better, but if you have an M-16, you fear the sound of the AK in an enemy's hands.

I don't know who says the reliability issues have been ironed out, but you couldn't prove it by me. I had been a marine for 8 years before I got 150 consecutive rounds out of an M16 without a stoppage. The first year I got expert I laid with my rounds piled up next to me and I loaded them one by one through the ejection port after each shot. On the rapid fire strings a coach did the loading for me. When I was in Afghanistan,I was essentially firing a single shot rifle. Let me tell you how well that worked out.

All they did was chrome the chamber and add a buffer to slow the action down enough to mask the timing issues inherent with the design. In the 60's the A1s were outclassed by the ak47, today the A4s are outclassed by the ak105. The more thing change the more they stay the same.

Edit: The reason they substituted powders was because the powder the M16 required couldn't be produced in sufficient quantity to support the Vietnam war even without any production issues. As it stood, with only one batch in four passing quality control checks, the army had no real choice.