Troops left to fend for themselves after Army was warned of flaws in rifle

Army Senior Warrant Officer Russton B. Kramer, a 20-year Green Beret, has learned that if you want to improve your chances to survive, it’s best to personally make modifications to the Army’s primary rifle — the M4 carbine.

Warrant Officer Kramer has been dropped into some of the most ferocious battles in the war on terrorism, from hunting Islamists in the mountains of northern Iraq to disrupting Taliban opium dealers in dusty southern Afghanistan. He was awarded the Silver Star for his bravery in Operation Viking Hammer to crush the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam in Iraq.

The warrant officer said he and fellow Special Forces soldiers have a trick to maintain the M4A1 — the commando version: They break the rules and buy off-the-shelf triggers and other components and overhaul the weapon themselves.

“The reliability is not there,” Warrant Officer Kramer said of the standard-issue model. “I would prefer to use something else. If I could grab something else, I would.”

“The Beretta BM 59 in my book is the finest battle rifle ever made. Never had a failure and accuracy is downright scary.”
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I have the semiauto Nigerian model, Love it, shot a couple of high power matches with it. The thing could shoot better than I could hold. Things were fine until a range master/ match director decided that the grenade launcher was was a muzzle brake so I had to go back to the Garand, O well

The 7.62 X 39 used in the AK 47 is almost identical ballistically speaking to the 30-30. Although the AK is reputed to be inaccurate, I have fired several private, clean, tight AKs at 200 yards, and they are semi-reasonable for a military rifle, that is you can easily hit a square foot target somewhere. They are also reputed to be impervious to dirt and function well with '0' maintenance/abuse in Third World hands.

Army blurbs claim that the 5.56 with a the newer 70 grain bullet is killing people at 5-600 yards with excellent accuracy. But there's a problem. Seems to be that if you miss the kill shot, the wounds can be sustainable and the bad guys keep shooting. If they are behind even minimal cover, the bad guys are pretty safe, especially at longer ranges. That's in the open. In any kind of vegetation, the 5.56 is easily deflected and the M16-M4 series is indeed a bear to keep clean and yes, it is still reported jamming when most needed. And yes, troopers do buy and mount aftermarket parts to improve reliability.

Tests are underway with 6.5 and 6.8 ammo, with very impressive results. BTW, seems Army marksmanship has improved 1000% since the spray and pray tactics of Vietnam. In regard to "light weight:" by the time the Army finished modifying the original M16 to the point where it would sort of work most of the time, its weight difference with an M14 became less obvious. The big weight saving was due to the 5.56's much lighter weight, so a soldier can carry many more rounds. Also, there's no more "spray." Three round burst on auto.

We have more than enough operational data to support everything that you've said and more. The problem is, that the system we have in today's DoD isn't interested in the best possible equipment for the troops - just maintaining their jobs and LOOKING like they're doing something. Most of all, the long-term GS managers have emotional investment in "their projects" and fight tooth and nail to prevent anything to replace them. And industry is just interested in making money with the big-buck (and largely useless) projects. Ammunition is a big deal because it is expensive in the volumes needed for training and combat and because we have massive stockpiles of existing stuff they want to keep using. Similar to the near-fielding of the superior .276 Pederson cartridge in the 1930s (which would have given the Garand a 10-round capacity) that was blocked by the army Chief of Staff, Douglas MacArthur because of all the costs of replacing .30-06 stockpiles.

As we get further down the "all-volunteer" road and the people who serve in the armed forces are just "somebody else's children", don't expect any greater efforts to find and field better weapons. They don't care.

I remember discussing the new "digital" uniforms with some of the managers at Natick before they fielded that grey lashup and they told me (with a straight face) that "this color combination will conceal soldiers in any battlefield environment". When I asked them why there wasn't any black in the pattern, they said "black doesn't exist in nature".

Does anyone wonder what kind of idiocy we have entrenched within of acquisition and R&D system?

These are the same kinds of idiots who insist that "all of their computer lethality models show that 5.56mm is more lethal than any other caliber".

Picatinny, Natick, Aberdeen, Benning, and many other defense research and engineering agencies need strong flush and reorganization to come under experienced combat veteran leadership.

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