The AF pulled M-16s out of storage and issued them to us in Desert Storm. We still had problems with them. They didn’t work well in an environment with fine dust. The first magazine that I fired had numerous failure to feed and failure to ejects.
I’m kind of old fashion, so I really prefer the 30-06 or 7.62 to the 5.56 for the type of environment that we were in. The few firefights that I experienced were at ranges of 300 yards or better.
At distances over 300 yards I would prefer trained marksmen with a Remington 700 in 30-06 or 338 with a good 4-12X scope and some with M14s.