[kellynla]

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

[golfisnr1]

Keep Congress out of it.

[SpaceBar]

So what’s Coburn got in mind? Norinco? Kalashnikov?

[DoughtyOne]

This pretty much seems like a hit piece on Colt. If there are problems with the gun, by all means fix it or put out another bid for design and price and replace the thing.

Keep production in the United States.

Someone is always belching about a corporation making money of the U.S. Government and wars. That’s the way it works. If you put out a good product, you should get fair return. A healthy company makes for a good source when quality merchandise is required.

Since when is it a business concern to give product away, just because the purchaser is the federal government.

[Cicero]

according to interviews and research conducted by The Associated Press

I almost stopped reading right there. Maybe there's something in it, and maybe there isn't. But I don't trust AP, and I don't much trust congresscritters either, until I know who's paying them off.

The weapons jam in the sand? Well, weapons tend to do that. But is it a design flaw, or just a necessary consequence of using any weapons in a country with frequent sand storms?

[gunnedah]

It being in Connecticut is reason enough to get away from it. The New England States are the Cesspool of America,just after San Fran and NYC.

[Joe Brower]

It would be enlightening to know exactly what is delivered for $1,500 a copy for the M4, assuming that's the actual price to start with. This is the ignorant and arrogant MSM, after all.

[chainsaw]

"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.

"William Keys, Colt's chief executive officer, says the M4 gets impressive reviews from the battlefield.

Which is it. someone is not being truthful

[mylife]

Colt is overpriced. So is HK and FN

[ProtectOurFreedom]

... pushes hot carbon-fouled gas through critical parts of the gun, according to detractors.

Well, there's the problem right there! The carbine has a serious carbon footprint problem. If a more sustainable, non-carbon technology were used, everything would be alright.

[IronJack]

Maybe we should give the contract to the Chinese. They make everything else we use. And I’m repeatedly told what a wonderful weapon the AK is.

[JoeSixPack1]

M14’s could go mud diving, and the M16 had a total sand phobia.

7.62 was nice too.

But I’m just an ancient kinda guy that saw that stupid move first hand and I always liked 8oz workout gloves punching the heavy bag. :-)

Semper Fi

[clee1]

You can buy quality M4 knock-offs, with better gas systems, from American companies; all day long for less than $1100.00 per copy. Much less, I’d imagine, if you ordered in governmental quantities.

Time for Colt to bite the big one.

[ANGGAPO]

By all means lets go offshore and buy our weapons. That nasty Colt is getting rich by making American arms. Perhaps we can find a better weapon someplace, maybe Russia?

[Carbonsteel]

Magpul Masada....nuff said.

[300winmag]

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.

The controlled tests of the Colt, H&K, and FN showed the M4 coming out on the bottom in reliability in sand, with one stoppage in every 600 rounds. The other two were a bit better, but all three clustered around the 98% reliability rate. Most stoppages were quickly cleared, as troops are trained to do. "Catastrophic" stoppages were rare on all three.

All of these weapons are just about as close to perfect reliability as is possible to get. Tinkering at the margin to get another .1% costs lots of money, with no detectable difference to the troop.

Frequency of maintenance is a factor, but no professional soldier wants to abuse his rifle just for the hell of it. In the cavalry, you take care of your horse before yourself. For infantry, it's your rifle. Both are your only personal means of salvation.

The FN and H&K can both be considered evolutionary improvements of the M16/M4. All use the M16 magazine, although I'll admit the H&K version is the Rolls Royce of M16 mags, and the most expensive. Both are attempts to move away from the gas-tube system of the M16, which was revolutionary in that it cut down on moving parts, and therefore costs. It also brought hot chamber gas deep into the bolt carrier.

All three are fine weapons, and if I had the money, I'd buy one of each (in semi-auto only, of course). When I have to consider millions of weapons and parts already in the field, I'd have to be much more cautious, since I don't want to cause an upheaval over weapons systems that come within a few percentage points of each other.

Another thing to consider is that all three are priced about the same. Anybody who knows anything about manufacturing will tell you that there are only so many ways of milling aluminum, forging steel, and molding plastic. I can't speak to anybody's profit margins (or R&D costs), but none of them are the "magic bullet" that brings the cost down to the $17 it costs Chinese slave labor to make a AK47. Also, the price on all of them seems to include some sort of fancy optics, where the real weapons progress has been made in this war. These sights, with proper training, allow our troops to drop the bad guy further and faster than the sh!thead can even conceive.

[2111USMC]

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.

"General Sorenson has not demonstrated any incentive to consider a salary reduction" 2111USMC wrote in a April 20, 2008 post.

[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.

[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>

[bmwcyle]

ping