bobdina
07-08-2010, 11:29 AM
Examining the Complaints About American Rifle Reliability
By C.J. CHIVERS
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Since late last year, At War has looked at issues surrounding small-arms choices and performance in the Afghan war, by American units and insurgents alike. We’ll continue this theme with two quick posts in the next few days: one serving as a follow-up to the continuing conversation about American rifle reliability, the other a closer look at the small arms that Afghan fighters have been wielding against Marines and government forces in Marja.
First, that perennial subject: the reliability of modern American infantry rifles. Throughout the Afghan and Iraq wars, questions have circulated about the performance of the principal rifles issued to American troops. The arms in question – both M-16 assault rifles and their shorter offspring, the M-4 carbines — are descendants of rifles first introduced to American service in Vietnam. They are the longest-serving general-issue rifles in American military history, and yet they have not quite fully shed some of the poor reputation that the original M-16 earned during its bungled introduction in the 1960s.
Are latter-day concerns about the rifles warranted?
It depends on what you mean about concerns. We previously examined complaints about M-16 and M-4 performance that had circulated on blogs, in news stories and in government reports, as well as in an independent survey of veterans (See “How Reliable Is the M-16 Rifle?” and “The M-16 Argument Heats Up Again”). And we visited Colt Defense L.L.C. (See “The Making of the Military’s Standard Arms,” Part I and Part II), the world’s principal manufacturer of the M-16 line, and watched the rifles being made. The complaints about Colt’s rifles have been varied. Some covered reliability (accounts of a tendency of the rifles to jam or overheat during extended firing), others covered range (concerns that the rifles are not effective at the longer distances between combatants in rural desert fighting), and others criticized the weapon’s lethality (the so-called stopping power of the rifles’ bullets, as in, their ability to incapacitate a struck man).
The Reliability Question
The reliability questions interest me most, for two reasons. First, a rifle’s range and lethality are moot points if the rifle will not fire when a soldier needs it to fire. And second, effective range and lethality are related in part to allied cartridge choice for all NATO forces and to bullet composition — two decisions that are beyond a manufacturer’s purview.
So far this year, the photographer Tyler Hicks and I have spent roughly three months in the field in Afghanistan with American troops, many of whom are engaged in some of the most regular and intensive fighting of the war. As part of our work, we have been observing rifle performance and querying soldiers and Marines about their experiences in combat with what is arguably the most important piece of equipment they carry.
The question before us was simple: How do the reliability complaints about M-4s and M-16s we hear in the States line up against what we see and hear in the field, where the war is being fought? Put another way, could we verify the troops’ reported dislike of the rifle because of its reliability, and demonstrate the nature of any problems behind the reported disaffection?
The answer was a surprise: The M-4 and M-16 were not seen to be suffering from reliability problems, at least not among people whose paths have crossed ours.
Simply put, in observations in many firefights in harsh conditions, and in the experiences of Army and Marine grunts queried this year, the issue of rifle reliability seems much less pressing than it has appeared in accounts of widespread worries about or dislike of the M-4 and M-16.
An Informal Survey
Are there limits to such an informal survey?
Of course. I queried not quite 100 infantrymen in conversations over many months, and we witnessed intensive small-arms engagements on perhaps a dozen different days. For a war fought in varied conditions and terrain, and with more than 90,000 American service members now on the ground, any slice of that size has its limits. But it still bears consideration. The ground covered included some of Afghanistan’s worst for firearms: the agricultural areas of Helmand Province, where weapons are often coated in a fine powdered sand (the troops call it “moon dust”), and where many firefights result in Marines jumping into irrigation canals. This means that rifles are dusty, then often wet and covered in mud. Moreover, some of the firefights lasted a few hours, resulting in several expended magazines for each grunt. I found only one report of a jammed rifle — a mud-coated M-16 that failed to fire one time after a sergeant climbed out of a canal midfight. The sergeant cleared the weapon and chambered a fresh round, and the rifle resumed firing without further hitch.
Given these conditions, while we can’t draw definitive conclusions about the current performance of the M-4 and M-16 lines, it is nonetheless a jolt to find no accounts of significant weapons failures and then to read blog posts that declare that the weapons are either a disaster or at least widely loathed.
This is more so given the account of Chief Warrant Officer Joshua S. Smith, the Marine responsible for weapons training and performance in the Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, which is engaged in daily fighting in Marja. “We’ve had nil in the way of problems; we’ve had no issues,” he said of the M-4s and M-16s. The battalion has about 350 M-16s and 700 M-4s, he said.
To be clear, any weapon that does fail in combat because of the normal strains of infantry use — the heat that builds up in extended firing; the intrusion of water, mud, dust or sand; or any other reason — can be a disaster to the grunt and the unit involved. History offers a guide: The experiences of the troops with early M-16s that failed them in Vietnam are some of the most harrowing tales of American war.
To be equally clear, no sample of 100 or so grunts is enough to settle any longstanding argument. But after years of carrying an M-16 (the A2 version, in the 1980s and 1990s) and years of observing them in the field, often in firefights, I have yet to see a modern M-16 or M-4 fail in the ways described in others’ reports, and I have not found significant reliability complaints from troops using the rifles in trying environments. (Interestingly, two Web sites that closely follow military equipment decisions, www.military.com and www.defensereview.com, reported late last month that the special operations community had dropped its program to replace M-4s with a rifle colloquially known as the SCAR, in part because the SCAR was not living up to its early billing – a common trait among rifles in development – and because it was not regarded as offering an upgrade on the M-4 that was worth the investment.)
Does that mean that M-4s and M-16s have not failed in combat, and are not still failing?
No. But it is curious that the Army’s examination of the battle of Wanat, which was part of the fuel on the latest controversy, did not find systematic problems with weapons. And it is hard not to notice, as we have tried to examine the issues, that many of the complaints about M-4 and M-16 reliability are almost impossible to trace because they are either anonymous or do not include essential information, including the unit’s name, and the date and location of the failure. This makes the complaints of the last few years much different from the complaints of the mid-1960s, when the din from the field was such that a near deluge of angry veterans spoke openly of the problems, and the rifle was overhauled, as the early M-16 needed to be. If there are widespread problems with the rifles, then they should be detectable in units in heavy fighting.
At War, for now, will draw no larger conclusions than this: Whatever the merits of the concerns about the M-4 and the M-16, on the matter of latter-day reliability, the complaints that have boomed on the Web feel out of proportion to what can be documented in the field, and may well be overstated, even hyped. If we’ve got this wrong, or have been looking in the wrong places, help us out (my e-mail address is chivers@nytimes.com). But from what we’ve seen and heard, the energy behind the worries about rifle reliability and the urge to swap out M-4s and M-16s for another rifle might be better expended in finding ways to counter improvised explosive devices, or other actual and readily discernible dangers and disaffections in the Afghan war.
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/examining-the-complaints-about-american-rifle-reliability/?hp
By C.J. CHIVERS
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Since late last year, At War has looked at issues surrounding small-arms choices and performance in the Afghan war, by American units and insurgents alike. We’ll continue this theme with two quick posts in the next few days: one serving as a follow-up to the continuing conversation about American rifle reliability, the other a closer look at the small arms that Afghan fighters have been wielding against Marines and government forces in Marja.
First, that perennial subject: the reliability of modern American infantry rifles. Throughout the Afghan and Iraq wars, questions have circulated about the performance of the principal rifles issued to American troops. The arms in question – both M-16 assault rifles and their shorter offspring, the M-4 carbines — are descendants of rifles first introduced to American service in Vietnam. They are the longest-serving general-issue rifles in American military history, and yet they have not quite fully shed some of the poor reputation that the original M-16 earned during its bungled introduction in the 1960s.
Are latter-day concerns about the rifles warranted?
It depends on what you mean about concerns. We previously examined complaints about M-16 and M-4 performance that had circulated on blogs, in news stories and in government reports, as well as in an independent survey of veterans (See “How Reliable Is the M-16 Rifle?” and “The M-16 Argument Heats Up Again”). And we visited Colt Defense L.L.C. (See “The Making of the Military’s Standard Arms,” Part I and Part II), the world’s principal manufacturer of the M-16 line, and watched the rifles being made. The complaints about Colt’s rifles have been varied. Some covered reliability (accounts of a tendency of the rifles to jam or overheat during extended firing), others covered range (concerns that the rifles are not effective at the longer distances between combatants in rural desert fighting), and others criticized the weapon’s lethality (the so-called stopping power of the rifles’ bullets, as in, their ability to incapacitate a struck man).
The Reliability Question
The reliability questions interest me most, for two reasons. First, a rifle’s range and lethality are moot points if the rifle will not fire when a soldier needs it to fire. And second, effective range and lethality are related in part to allied cartridge choice for all NATO forces and to bullet composition — two decisions that are beyond a manufacturer’s purview.
So far this year, the photographer Tyler Hicks and I have spent roughly three months in the field in Afghanistan with American troops, many of whom are engaged in some of the most regular and intensive fighting of the war. As part of our work, we have been observing rifle performance and querying soldiers and Marines about their experiences in combat with what is arguably the most important piece of equipment they carry.
The question before us was simple: How do the reliability complaints about M-4s and M-16s we hear in the States line up against what we see and hear in the field, where the war is being fought? Put another way, could we verify the troops’ reported dislike of the rifle because of its reliability, and demonstrate the nature of any problems behind the reported disaffection?
The answer was a surprise: The M-4 and M-16 were not seen to be suffering from reliability problems, at least not among people whose paths have crossed ours.
Simply put, in observations in many firefights in harsh conditions, and in the experiences of Army and Marine grunts queried this year, the issue of rifle reliability seems much less pressing than it has appeared in accounts of widespread worries about or dislike of the M-4 and M-16.
An Informal Survey
Are there limits to such an informal survey?
Of course. I queried not quite 100 infantrymen in conversations over many months, and we witnessed intensive small-arms engagements on perhaps a dozen different days. For a war fought in varied conditions and terrain, and with more than 90,000 American service members now on the ground, any slice of that size has its limits. But it still bears consideration. The ground covered included some of Afghanistan’s worst for firearms: the agricultural areas of Helmand Province, where weapons are often coated in a fine powdered sand (the troops call it “moon dust”), and where many firefights result in Marines jumping into irrigation canals. This means that rifles are dusty, then often wet and covered in mud. Moreover, some of the firefights lasted a few hours, resulting in several expended magazines for each grunt. I found only one report of a jammed rifle — a mud-coated M-16 that failed to fire one time after a sergeant climbed out of a canal midfight. The sergeant cleared the weapon and chambered a fresh round, and the rifle resumed firing without further hitch.
Given these conditions, while we can’t draw definitive conclusions about the current performance of the M-4 and M-16 lines, it is nonetheless a jolt to find no accounts of significant weapons failures and then to read blog posts that declare that the weapons are either a disaster or at least widely loathed.
This is more so given the account of Chief Warrant Officer Joshua S. Smith, the Marine responsible for weapons training and performance in the Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, which is engaged in daily fighting in Marja. “We’ve had nil in the way of problems; we’ve had no issues,” he said of the M-4s and M-16s. The battalion has about 350 M-16s and 700 M-4s, he said.
To be clear, any weapon that does fail in combat because of the normal strains of infantry use — the heat that builds up in extended firing; the intrusion of water, mud, dust or sand; or any other reason — can be a disaster to the grunt and the unit involved. History offers a guide: The experiences of the troops with early M-16s that failed them in Vietnam are some of the most harrowing tales of American war.
To be equally clear, no sample of 100 or so grunts is enough to settle any longstanding argument. But after years of carrying an M-16 (the A2 version, in the 1980s and 1990s) and years of observing them in the field, often in firefights, I have yet to see a modern M-16 or M-4 fail in the ways described in others’ reports, and I have not found significant reliability complaints from troops using the rifles in trying environments. (Interestingly, two Web sites that closely follow military equipment decisions, www.military.com and www.defensereview.com, reported late last month that the special operations community had dropped its program to replace M-4s with a rifle colloquially known as the SCAR, in part because the SCAR was not living up to its early billing – a common trait among rifles in development – and because it was not regarded as offering an upgrade on the M-4 that was worth the investment.)
Does that mean that M-4s and M-16s have not failed in combat, and are not still failing?
No. But it is curious that the Army’s examination of the battle of Wanat, which was part of the fuel on the latest controversy, did not find systematic problems with weapons. And it is hard not to notice, as we have tried to examine the issues, that many of the complaints about M-4 and M-16 reliability are almost impossible to trace because they are either anonymous or do not include essential information, including the unit’s name, and the date and location of the failure. This makes the complaints of the last few years much different from the complaints of the mid-1960s, when the din from the field was such that a near deluge of angry veterans spoke openly of the problems, and the rifle was overhauled, as the early M-16 needed to be. If there are widespread problems with the rifles, then they should be detectable in units in heavy fighting.
At War, for now, will draw no larger conclusions than this: Whatever the merits of the concerns about the M-4 and the M-16, on the matter of latter-day reliability, the complaints that have boomed on the Web feel out of proportion to what can be documented in the field, and may well be overstated, even hyped. If we’ve got this wrong, or have been looking in the wrong places, help us out (my e-mail address is chivers@nytimes.com). But from what we’ve seen and heard, the energy behind the worries about rifle reliability and the urge to swap out M-4s and M-16s for another rifle might be better expended in finding ways to counter improvised explosive devices, or other actual and readily discernible dangers and disaffections in the Afghan war.
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/examining-the-complaints-about-american-rifle-reliability/?hp