I still remember the criticisms of the M-16 when it was first adopted. It was clear that the WWII mentality was still at work.
1. The handle was too high exposing too much of the soldier’s head if fired above a barracade.
2.The magazine was too long making it impossible to use in the prone position.
3.Too light to be used in a bayonet charge. The buttstock too flimsy to be used to hit after the bayonet thrust.
4. A full auto blast would empty the firearm too fast causing a waste of ammo(shades of “that old fogey” Ripley).
In other words, excuses, excuses.
2) Who EVER shoots prone in the field without finding SOMETHING to use for a rest? (And to take cover behind, if someone's shooting at you?)
4) Load more.
3) My favorite: "As long as I've got a round in the chamber, there ain't gonna be no bayonet fight."
I prefer my FAL or M1A1 to my AR for excuse #5, the 5.56 won't penetrate obstructions on its way to the target (cinder blocks, small trees, mud walls. And excuse #6, I might want to put something down at 500 yds.
I went into the Corps in early 72 and we used the M-14 in Boot then switched to the M-16 after that. The 16 seemed like a toy but it only had 20 rounds then also
Not really: I was with the infantry at the time we got those pieces of crap and we lost a lot of good people because they weren't ready for actual combat use.
1. Their extractors often tore off the back of the cartridge case and left the remainder of the cartridge in the chamber, then shoved a new cartridge into it, jamming the damn thing up. Because it was crappy design, you can't access the chamber to remove the stoppage, so we had to carry assembled cleaning rods to try to shove the mess out and get the weapon running again, like having a muzzleloader. Try that while people are shooting at you with perfectly functional AKs. A lot of our guys died by their broken-down M-16s.
2. On the early M-16s, the safety detent was too deep and when some geniuses higher in the chain of command demanded that we carry them on Safe, the stupid thing stayed locked on Safe. We had to hammer on them with a rock or a Kabar butt to get them off Safe. Needless to say, we avoided using the safety after some of those incidents - or found an M-14 (my own solution).
3. The front and rear sights were ridiculous to try to adjust - required a bullet tip and lots of shooting to adjust to any kind of accurate zero and of course, we had to learn to wind the front sight down to make the bullet go up. The end result was a lot of missed VC for a while.
4. The finish on the early M-16s flaked off, giving a charming "leopard spot" look that didn't give us much confidence that the quality control was all it should have been.
That was the upshot of our impressions of the M-16 in early 1967: we had a "least bidder weapon" as kind of a final insult to the few of us who had had the gumption to face fire for our country.
Other than that, no hard feelings.