Colt's Grip on Military Rifle Market Called Bad Deal

yahoo.com ^ | 4/20/2008 | RICHARD LARDNER

[kellynla]

No weapon is more important to tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan than the carbine rifle. And for well over a decade, the military has relied on one company, Colt Defense of Hartford, Conn., to make the M4s they trust with their lives.

Now, as Congress considers spending millions more on the guns, this exclusive arrangement is being criticized as a bad deal for American forces as well as taxpayers, according to interviews and research conducted by The Associated Press.

"What we have is a fat contractor in Colt who's gotten very rich off our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," says Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.

The M4, which can shoot hundreds of bullets a minute, is a shorter and lighter version of the company's M16 rifle first used 40 years ago during the Vietnam War. At about $1,500 apiece, the M4 is overpriced, according to Coburn. It jams too often in sandy environments like Iraq, he adds, and requires far more maintenance than more durable carbines.

"And if you tend to have the problem at the wrong time, you're putting your life on the line," says Coburn, who began examining the M4's performance last year after receiving complaints from soldiers. "The fact is, the American GI today doesn't have the best weapon. And they ought to."

U.S. military officials don't agree. They call the M4 an excellent carbine. When the time comes to replace the M4, they want a combat rifle that is leaps and bounds beyond what's currently available.

"There's not a weapon out there that's significantly better than the M4," says Col. Robert Radcliffe, director of combat developments at the Army Infantry Center in Fort Benning, Ga. "To replace it with something that has essentially the same capabilities as we have today doesn't make good sense."

Colt's exclusive production agreement ends in June 2009. At that point, the Army, in its role as the military's principal buyer of firearms, may have other gunmakers compete along with Colt for continued M4 production. Or, it might begin looking for a totally new weapon.

"We haven't made up our mind yet," Radcliffe says.

William Keys, Colt's chief executive officer, says the M4 gets impressive reviews from the battlefield. And he worries that bashing the carbine will undermine the confidence the troops have in it.

"The guy killing the enemy with this gun loves it," says Keys, a former Marine Corps general who was awarded the Navy Cross for battlefield valor in Vietnam. "I'm not going to stand here and disparage the senator, but I think he's wrong."

In 2006, a non-profit research group surveyed 2,600 soldiers who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan and found 89 percent were satisfied with the M4. While Colt and the Army have trumpeted that finding, detractors say the survey also revealed that 19 percent of these soldiers had their weapon jam during a firefight.

And the relationship between the Army and Colt has been frosty at times. Concerned over the steadily rising cost of the M4, the Army forced Colt to lower its prices two years ago by threatening to buy rifles from another supplier. Prior to the warning, Colt "had not demonstrated any incentive to consider a price reduction," then-Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, an Army acquisition official, wrote in a November 2006 report.

Coburn is the M4's harshest and most vocal critic. But his concern is shared by others, who point to the "SCAR," made by Belgian armorer FN Herstal, and the HK416, produced by Germany's Heckler & Koch, as possible contenders. Both weapons cost about the same as the M4, their manufacturers say.

The SCAR is being purchased by U.S. special operations forces, who have their own acquisition budget and the latitude to buy gear the other military branches can't.

Or won't.

"All I know is, we're not having the competition, and the technology that is out there is not in the hands of our troops," says Jack Keane, a former Army general who pushed unsuccessfully for an M4 replacement before retiring four years ago.

The dispute over the M4 has been overshadowed by larger but not necessarily more important concerns. When the public's attention is focused on the annual defense budget, it tends to be captured by bigger-ticket items, like the Air Force's F-22 Raptors that cost $160 million each.

The Raptor, a radar-evading jet fighter, has never been used in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the troops who patrol Baghdad's still-dangerous neighborhoods or track insurgents along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, there's no piece of gear more critical than the rifles on their shoulders. They go everywhere with them, even to the bathroom and the chow hall.

Yet the military has a poor track record for getting high-quality firearms to warfighters. Since the Revolutionary War, mountains of red tape, oversize egos and never-ending arguments over bullet size and gunpowder have delayed or doomed promising efforts.

The M16, designed by the visionary gunsmith Eugene Stoner, had such a rough entry into military service in the mid-1960s that a congressional oversight committee assailed the Army for behavior that bordered on criminal negligence.

Stoner's lighter, more accurate rifle was competing against a heavier, more powerful gun the Army had heavily invested in. To accept the M16 would be to acknowledge a huge mistake, and ordnance officials did as much as they could to keep from buying the new automatic weapon. They continually fooled with Stoner's design.

"The Army, if anything, was trying to sideline and sabotage it," said Richard Colton, a historian with the Springfield Armory Museum in Massachusetts.

Despite the hurdles, the M16 would become the military's main battlefield rifle. And Colt, a company founded nearly 170 years ago by Hartford native Samuel Colt, was the primary manufacturer. Hundreds of thousands of M16s have been produced over the years for the U.S. military and foreign customers. Along with Colt, FNMI, an FN Herstal subsidiary in South Carolina, has also produced M16s.

Development of the carbine was driven by a need for a condensed weapon that could be used in tight spaces but still had plenty of punch. Colt's answer was the 7 1/2-pound M4. The design allowed the company to leverage the tooling used for the M16.

In 1994, Colt was awarded a no-bid contract to make the weapons. Since then, it has sold more than 400,000 to the U.S. military.

Along the way, Colt's hold has been threatened but not broken.

In 1996, a Navy office improperly released Colt's M4 blueprints, giving nearly two dozen contractors a look at the carbine's inner workings. Colt was ready to sue the U.S. government for the breach. The company wanted between $50 million and $70 million in damages.

Cooler heads prevailed. The Defense Department didn't want to lose its only source for the M4, and Colt didn't want to stop selling to its best customer.

The result was an agreement that made Colt the sole player in the U.S. military carbine market. FNMI challenged the deal in federal court but lost.

And since the Sept. 11 attacks, sales have skyrocketed.

The Army, the carbine's heaviest user, is outfitting all its front-line combat units with M4s. The Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and special operations forces also carry M4s. So do U.S. law enforcement agencies and militaries in many NATO countries.

More than $300 million has been spent on 221,000 of the carbines over the past two years alone. And the Defense Department is asking Congress to provide another $230 million for 136,000 more.

Keane, the retired Army general, knows how difficult it is to develop and deliver a brand-new rifle to the troops. As vice chief of staff, the Army's second highest-ranking officer, Keane pushed for the acquisition of a carbine called the XM8.

The futuristic-looking rifle was designed by Heckler & Koch. According to Keane, the XM8 represented the gains made in firearms technology over the past 40 years.

The XM8 would cost less and operate far longer without being lubricated or cleaned than the M4 could, Heckler & Koch promised. The project became bogged down by bureaucracy, however. In 2005, after $33 million had been invested, the XM8 was shelved. A subsequent audit by the Pentagon inspector general concluded the program didn't follow the military's strict acquisition rules.

Keane blames a bloated and risk-averse bureaucracy for the XM8's demise.

"This is all about people not wanting to move out and do something different," Keane says. "Why are they afraid of the competition?"

As Colt pumps out 800 new M4s every day to meet U.S. and overseas demand, the company is remodeling its aging 270,000-square-foot facility in a hardscrabble section of Connecticut's capital city. New tooling and metal cutting machines have been installed as part of a $10 million plant improvement.

Many of the old ways remain, however. Brick-lined pit furnaces dating back to the 1960s are still used to temper steel rifle barrels.

"Modernizing the plant while trying to maintain quality and meet deliveries has been a challenge," says James Battaglini, Colt's chief operating officer.

Within military circles there are M4 defectors. U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., was one of the carbine's first customers. But the elite commando units using the M4 soured on it; the rifle had to be cleaned too often and couldn't hold up under the heavy use by Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs.

When the M16 was condensed into an M4, the barrel and other key parts had to be shortened. That changed the way the gun operated and not for the better, concluded an internal report written seven years ago by special operations officials but never published. Dangerous problems ranged from broken bolt assemblies, loose and ruptured barrels, and cartridges stuck in the firing chamber.

"Jamming can and will occur for a variety of reasons," the report said. "Several types of jams, however, are 'catastrophic' jams; because one of our operators could die in a firefight while trying to clear them."

Pointing to the report's unpublished status, Colt has disputed its findings. The M4 has been continually improved over the years, says Keys, the company's chief executive. The M4 may not meet the exacting standards of U.S. commando forces, he adds, but it fills the requirements spelled out by the regular Army.

Special Operations Command is replacing the M4s and several other rifles in its arsenal with FN Herstal's SCAR, which comes in two models: one shoots the same 5.56 mm round as the M4; the other a larger 7.62 mm bullet and costs several hundred dollars more. Both SCARs can accommodate different-size barrels allowing the weapons to be fired at multiple ranges.

The SCARs are more accurate, more reliable and expected to last far longer than their predecessors, said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Marc Boyd, a command spokesman.

"SOCOM likes to be different," says Keys of Colt, using the acronym for the command. "They wanted something unique."

With the SCAR not yet in full-scale production, Heckler & Koch's HK416 is being used by elite units like Delta Force, the secretive anti-terrorism unit. The command would not comment on the HK416 other than to say there are "a small number" of the carbines in its inventory.

A key difference between the Colt carbine and the competitors is the way the rounds are fed through the rifle at lightning speed.

The SCAR and HK416 use a gas piston system to cycle the bullets automatically. The M4 uses "gas impingement," a method that pushes hot carbon-fouled gas through critical parts of the gun, according to detractors. Without frequent and careful maintenance, they say, the M4 is prone to jamming and will wear out more quickly than its gas-piston competitors.

"A gas piston system runs a little bit smoother and a lot cleaner," says Dale Bohner, a retired Air Force commando who now works for Heckler & Koch. "If the U.S. military opened up a competition for all manufacturers, I see the 416 being a major player in that."

The top half of the Heckler & Koch gun — a section known as the upper receiver that includes the barrel and the gas piston — fits on the lower half of the M4. So if the military wanted a low-cost replacement option, it could buy HK416 upper receivers and mate them with the lower part of the M4 for about $900 a conversion, according to Bohner.

Yet outside of Special Operations Command, there seems to be no rush to replace the M4.

Brig. Gen. Mark Brown, head of the Army office that buys M4s and other combat gear, traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan last summer to get feedback from soldiers on Colt's carbine.

"I didn't hear one single negative comment," Brown says. "Now, I know I'm a general, and when I go up and talk to a private, they're going to say everything's OK, everything's fine. I said, 'No, no, son. I flew 14,000 miles out here to see you on the border of Afghanistan. The reason I did that was to find out what's happening.'"

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., says the troops may not be aware of the alternatives. He wants the Pentagon to study the options and make a decision before Congress does.

"Sen. Coburn has raised a good question: 'Do we have the best personal weapon?' And I don't know that we do," Sessions said. "We're not comfortable now. Let's give this a rigorous examination."

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[mylife]

I understand that Gov oversight adds to the burden of price, hence $900m brass hammers for working on ordnance.
Still, Colt is over priced

[mylife]

Bushmaster seems to make a very good weapon for the price.
They seem to be the popular favorite for the money.

Stoners design is not good for sand and silt period.But this carbon build up argument is a joke.

[300winmag]

I’ve always wondered if a heavier caliber, perhaps in the .30 range, might not be a better investment.

This gets us into the area of tradeoffs again. Since WW1, it's been accepted that the full-power rifle round was more than the individual soldier needed, or could use. Aimed rifle fire beyond 300m was rare, but still the price was paid in terms of a more powerful, more expensive round, and a longer, heavier weapon. The Germans pretty much proved that in WW2 with the MP44, firing the 8mm kurz round. It was the world's first assault rifle (sturmgewehr was Hitler's own term, adopted after he finally approved the concept), and it was so good at killing Russians that the USSR started a crash course to develop their own equivalent.

In both cases, they stayed with a lighter bullet, but still the same diameter as their full-size round, 7.62mm for the soviets, 7.92mm for the Germans. It was a good, safe move, and served them well.

Gene Stoner, in a blank-sheet-of-paper design, looked at smaller, high-velocity .22 varmint and target rounds. At the range of 300m, the .222 Remington could still penetrate a GI steel helmet, which was one of the criteria. He redesigned the round a bit, and the .223 Remington was born.

The smaller, lighter bullet meant a flatter trajectory, lower recoil, and less cost. It also meant that the total system weight of rifle, magazines, and ammo could be made lighter.

Some of the current "faults" of the 5.56mm round result from the rifle-and-ammo combination being an over-achiever, and doing more than it was intended. With a good scope, a good infantryman can hit targets out to 600m. Accurized M16s/AR15s with match ammo are used at 1000 yard matches, and are beating the M14-type rifles.

The "problem" is the M16/5.556 combo is inherently accurate, allowing targets to be engaged far beyond the original intent of the specs. But the lightweight (even the current M885 ammo) bullet lacks quite a bit of lethality at that range. You can reliably hit, but the target does not reliably die at those longer ranges.

There are classified programs to develop a round midway between the 5.66 and the 7.62 in size and weight to address this specialized need. Not-for-attribution comments say the results are fantastic.

Even without a different weapon (some of the prototypes are based on M16 components), it would introduce another caliber of ammo into the supply system. The 5.56mm round cut back on the demand for 7.62mm NATO, but did not eliminate it, since it's still in demand in the machine gun role.

The US now has a 40+ year history for the M16 and its ammo. The M16 series has become the longest-serving rifle in our history. Other western nations have 20 or more years invested in their 5.56mm systems. Not one country has said, "the 5.56mm is crap, we're going back to 7.62".

Oh, and with all those M1913 rails demanded on all current weapons, here's something you could do to your M16 (I think), but not recommended:

[mylife]

Lets face it. Kalashnikov’s win hands down for for functioning in slop

[mylife]

Well said. I use .223 at 400 yds on steel gongs, but I use .308 and 7.62x54 as well and you know witch on I would ditch in real life at that range?

[ExSoldier]

"There's not a weapon out there that's significantly better than the M4," says Col. Robert Radcliffe, director of combat developments at the Army Infantry Center in Fort Benning, Ga. "To replace it with something that has essentially the same capabilities as we have today doesn't make good sense."

At the risk of being indelicate what a load of crappola. Not only are there significantly better weapons out there but there are better calibers available as well. To start with the H&K 416 is significantly better to the extent that SOCOM used their discretionary funds and bought a bunch for their "operators." But before the superiority could be firmly established in the records, the army brass caught a foul wind of the issue and forced SOCOM to hand them all in based on the necessities of good logistics or something like that. In reality it was to save their political a$$e$. No doubt the decision will cost some lives among the contingents of operators forced to use inferior weapons, but that has never deterred the Pentagon brass in the past, even when the first generations of the M16 were first fielded in Vietnam and their shortcomings caused many deaths.

[P8riot]

At 1500 somalians, is the M4 the “best bang for the buck?”

At 1500 somalians per simolian it is a question worth asking.

[driftdiver]

The AK47 works well in slop and is very easy to maintain. It requires little training to use or clean. Works well for the Russian and Chinese armies who are generally less well educated and trained than western armies.

[mylife]

Built for joe everyday?

Now here is a concept..

Take a Russian RPK, and chamber that in .308 and marry it to an accurised barrel

I bought one for $355

[mylife]

Gimme a yugo M76

[mylife]

passive light gathering system

No signiture

[headstamp 2]

Is the M4 what was called an CAR-15 “Shorty” back decades ago?

[300winmag]

Is the M4 what was called an CAR-15 “Shorty” back decades ago?

It's the "grandson" of the CAR-15. Lots of major and minor changes since then. But still the same concept of making it shorter and lighter than the standard rifle. In urban fighting in Iraq, a shorter weapon is appreciated. Afghanistan has much more open range, there the demand is for supplemental weapons with more reach, like .308 and above.

[Blood of Tyrants]

You can buy a US made civilian version of the M4 for about $700. Why is the government paying over TWICE as much?

[headstamp 2]

Thanks for the info.

[TC Rider]

You can buy a US made civilian version of the M4 for about $700. Why is the government paying over TWICE as much?

It's that $800 select fire switch.

[oyez]

The only thing I can think off to improve an M-4 is make it in .308

[oyez]

Panther™ LR-308AP4. Oyeah!

[Blood of Tyrants]

Must be.

[Constitutionalist Conservative]

And since the Sept. 11 attacks, sales have skyrocketed.

<tinfoil>Ah, HA! Follow the money! Sept. 11 was a defense industry conspiracy to boost profits!</tinfoil>