U.S. Army Has a Better Rifle, But Not for All
By MATTHEW COX
Faced with troubles using the M4 rifle in combat, members of Delta Force worked with a gun maker to come up with a better weapon. The 416 is now considered in many circles to be the best carbine in the world — a weapon that combines the solid handling, accuracy and familiarity of the M4 with the famed dependability of the rugged AK47. But the Army is sticking with the M4 and M16 for regular forces.
March 4, 2002. An RPG tore into the right engine of an MH-47 Chinook helicopter loaded with a quick-reaction force of Rangers in the Shahikot Mountains of eastern Afghanistan. The Chinook crashed atop Takur Ghar, a 10,000-foot peak infested with al-Qaida fighters.
Enemy fire poured into the fuselage, killing Rangers even before they got off the aircraft. Capt. Nate Self crawled out.
“As soon as I got off the ramp, a burst of rounds fired right over my head,” he recalled.
He joined a handful of his men in the open, exposed to enemy fire. An RPG exploded within a few feet of their position.
“We got up and started firing and moving to some boulders 15 meters away,” he said.
Once behind cover, Self tried to fire again, but his weapon jammed.
Instinctively, he tried to fix it with “immediate action,” a drill he’d practiced countless times.
“I pulled my charging handle back, and there was a round stuck in the chamber,” he recalled.
Like the rest of his men, Self always carried a cleaning rod zip-tied to the side of his weapon in case it failed to extract a round from the chamber.
“There was only one good way to get it out and that’s to ram it out with a cleaning rod,” he said. “I started to knock the round out by pushing the rod down the barrel, and it broke off. There was nothing I could do with it after that.”
The Rangers were fighting for their lives. Self left his covered position and ran under machine-gun fire to search for a working weapon.
“I just got up and moved back to the aircraft because I knew we had casualties there. I threw my rifle down and picked up another one.”
Self was awarded a Silver Star for his actions that day.
When even highly trained infantrymen like Self have problems with their M4 it is a sign there might be a problem with the weapon, not the soldier.
The problems had become obvious enough that at the time of the Afghanistan battle, members of the Army’s Delta Force had begun working on a solution. Today, Delta Force is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan with a special carbine that’s dramatically more reliable than the M16s and M4s that the rest of the Army dependsupon.
Members of the elite unit linked up with German arms maker Heckler & Koch, which replaced the M4’s gas system with one that experts say significantly reduces malfunctions while increasing parts life. After exhaustive tests with the help of Delta, the H&K 416 was ready in 2004.
Members of the elite commando unit — formally known as 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta — have been carrying it in combat ever since.
The 416 is now considered in many circles to be the best carbine in the world — a weapon that combines the solid handling, accuracy and familiarity of the M4 with the famed dependability of the rugged AK47.
For the foreseeable future, however, the Army is sticking with the M4 and M16 for regular forces.
The Army plans to buy about 100,000 M4s in fiscal 2008. For this large a buy, each M4 without accessories costs about $800, Colt Chief Executive Officer William Keys said. As part of the contract, though, each M4 comes with a rail system for mounting optics and flashlights, a backup iron sight, seven magazines and a sling — additions that raise the price for each M4 package to about $1,300, according to Defense Department budget documents.
The price of each 416 “will range anywhere from $800 to $1,425 depending on volume and accessories,” said H&K’s CEO John Meyer Jr.
To Col. Robert Radcliffe, the man responsible for overseeing the Army’s needs for small arms, the M16 family is “pretty damn good.” It’s simply too expensive, he said, to replace it with anything less than a “significant leap in technology.”
Since 2000, that leap centered on development of the XM29 Objective Individual Combat Weapon — a dual system featuring a 5.56mm carbine on the bottom and a 25mm airburst weapon on top, capable of killing enemy behind cover at 1,000 meters.
Seven years and more than $100 million later, the 18-pound prototype — three times the weight of an M4 — is still too heavy and bulky for the battlefield.
“We think that somewhere around 2010, we should have enough insight into future technologies to take us in a direction we want to go for the next generation of small arms,” said Radcliffe, director of the Infantry Center’s Directorate of Combat Developments at Fort Benning, Ga.
“We will have M4s and M16s for years and years and years and years,” he said.“We are buying a bunch of M4s this year ... and we are doing it for all the right reasons, by the way. It’s doing the job we need it to do.”
But many soldiers and military experts say this mind-set is off target now that soldiers are locked in a harsh desert war with no end in sight.
“We are not saying the [M4 and M16 are] bad,” said former Army vice chief of staff retired Gen. Jack Keane. “The issue for me is do our soldiers have the best rifle in their hands.”
Before retiring in late 2003, Keane launched a campaign to modernize individual soldier gear after ground troops fighting in Afghanistan complained that they were ill-equipped for the current battlefield. As part of that campaign, Keane backed another effort to give soldiers a better rifle — the XM8, a spinoff of the OICW — only to see it sink last year in a sea of bureaucratic opposition.
“If we are going to build the best fighters, and put the best tanks on the ground, don’t our soldiers deserve, absolutely hands down, the best technology for a rifle?,” Keane said. “Not good enough, but the best.”
Ever since the Army’s adoption of the M16 in the mid-1960s, a love-hate relationship has existed between combat troops and the weapon known as the “black rifle.”
It’s accurate and easy to shoot. Plus, the M16’s light weight and small caliber helped soldiers carry more ammunition than ever before into battle.
The M16, however, has always required constant cleaning to prevent it from jamming. The gas system, while simple in design, blows carbon into the receiver, which can lead to fouling.
The Army has decided to replace most of its M16s with the newer M4 carbine. The Army started buying M4s in the mid-1990s but mainly reserved them for rapid-deployment combat units. Its collapsible stock and shortened barrel make it ideal for soldiers operating in vehicles and tight quarters associated with urban combat.
Experts, however, contend that the M4 in many ways is even less reliable than the M16.
Special Operations Command documented these problems in a 2001 report, “M4A1 5.56mm Carbine and Related Systems Deficiencies and Solutions: Operational and Technical Study with Analysis of Alternatives.”
The M4 suffers from an “obsolete operating system,” according to the report, which recommended “redesign/replacement of current gas system.” It describes the weapon’s shortened barrel and gas tube as a “fundamentally flawed” design and blames it for problems such as “failure to extract” and “failure to eject” during firing. “The current system was never designed for the rigors of SOF use and training regimens — the M4 Carbine is not the gun for all seasons,” the report concluded.
However, Keys, a retired Marine Corps three-star general, said every M4 made at Colt meets the government’s standards.
“It’s quality, quality, everything is quality. If you don’t have the quality, you don’t get the gun,” Keys said.
Before taking the helm at Colt in 1999, Keys spent 35 years in the Marines. He served as a company commander with the 9th Marine Regiment in the Vietnam War and commanded the 2nd Marine Division during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
“I know what a combat gun has to do in combat because I have been in combat,” he said. “I’m not going to put any out there that doesn’t do the job.”
In the 30 years following the Vietnam War, the Army existed mainly as a peacetime force. The 1991 Gulf War was an armor-dominated fight, lasting only 100 hours. Most soldiers put their rifles to little or no use. But after Sept. 11, 2001, soldiers found themselves fighting protracted shooting wars in the harshest regions on the planet.
M16 rifles and newer M4 carbines no longer were stored in clean arms room racks. They were now a soldier’s constant companion, exposed to the super-fine dust and sand that blow across the desert landscapes of Afghanistan and Iraq. Still, the Army is quick to blame most M16 family malfunctions on soldiers not cleaning weapons properly.
The key to the 416’s reliability lies in its gas system. It looks like the M4 carbine on the outside, but on the inside, H&K has replaced Colt’s “gas-tube” system with the short-stroke piston system. This eliminates carbon being blown back into the chamber, which leads to fouling problems, and greatly reduces parts wear created by super-heated gases used to cycle the weapon. The result, experts say, is that the 416 is more reliable, easier to maintain and has a longer parts life than the M4.
“It was a phenomenal gun,” said former Delta member and current H&K consultant Larry Vickers. “In my opinion it has the best gas system on the market for a shoulder-fired autoloading weapon. It’s lightweight, very efficient; it’s clean and has minimal heat transfer.”
Vickers retired as a master sergeant in 2003 after serving 15 of his 20 years on active duty with Delta. He played a major role in the development of the 416 while working as weapons research and development sergeant for Delta.
Vickers has stayed connected with the special operations community as a weapons trainer since his retirement. He remembered that Delta leaders were so happy with the 416 they bought the first 500 to come off the assembly line.
It was in Iraq in no time, but not before H&K and Delta put “a quarter-of-a-million rounds through it,” Vickers said. “It had the right kind of testing — endurance firing to 15,000 rounds with no lubrication. It runs like a sewing machine.”
At Colt’s plant in Connecticut, a government inspector pulls samples from each lot of M4s and performs a 108-point inspection to ensure they meet the Army’s specifications. M4s are also routinely subjected to endurance firing, but only to 6,000 rounds.
it’s the Army that sets the standard, Colt officials say.
“We make to their specs,” said Keys, the Colt CEO. “We are not authorized to make any kind of changes; the Army tells you what changes to make.
“If we have a change that we think would help the gun, we go to the Army … which is not an easy process, by the way. We spent 20 years trying to get [an extractor] spring changed. They just said ‘well, this works good enough.’”
Like Colt’s CEO, the head of H&K is a career military man with combat experience.
Meyer, a retired Army major general, said he thinks that the fact that soldiers are fighting with basically the same weapon he used four decades ago as a military police captain in Vietnam shows the Army places a low priority on small arms.
“This will sound parochial but I’m also an ex-soldier and I think it’s very shortsighted that we have a weapon that we are using now for 42 years,” Meyer said.
Meyer concedes H&K has a potential stake in any Army decision to replace its main personal weapon, but said his company’s position is “don’t buy HK, just have a competition … and if that 42-year-old weapon beats out all the competition, you will never hear a complaint from HK.”
The Army, however, isn’t interested in the 416 or any other current rifle technology.
“We will hold on trying to replace the small-arms fleet, and we will search for technologies that might give us significantly greater capabilities in … the next 10 years or something like that,” Radcliffe said.
Among those greater capabilities is what the Infantry Center refers to as “counter defilade technology,” but right now that only exists in the 18-pound OICW prototype known as the XM29. Fort Benning officials still want this airburst weapon, “not only to be able to shoot the enemy in defilade but to overcome soldier aim error,” said Jim Stone, deputy director of Benning’s Directorate of Combat Developments.
“Soldier aim error is not going to go away … you can reduce aim error through training, better optics and shooting techniques. There are a lot of things you can do to reduce aim error, but you will never take it out.”
The major problem with XM29 is that the combined weight of the carbine, airburst launcher and fire-control system was six to eight pounds heavier than the goal of a 10- to 12-pound system.
“So in addition to costing more than we wanted to pay and being bigger and bulkier and not meeting weight, the technology wasn’t there,” said Stone.
One Army general tried to salvage the stagnated program by developing the components of XM29 separately. Ret. Gen. James Moran transformed the XM29’s carbine into the XM8, a new family of small arms intended to replace the M16 family.
After spending three years and $33 million, the Army canceled the program in October 2005 amid mounting opposition in the joint world.
Fort Benning officials maintain the XM8 wasn’t really needed since soldiers are happy with the M16 and M4, according to “post combat surveys,” in which Army small-arms officials routinely interview soldiers on how their weapons have performed in combat.
Benning officials would not release the survey data, but said the results showed no negative trends in the performance of soldier weapons. Army Times has requested the information through the Freedom of Information Act.
Army Times obtained a copy of Project Manager Soldier Weapons Assessment Team’s July 31, 2003, report, a similar survey that Infantry Center officials participated in along with other members of the Army’s small-arms community.
The executive summary said that M16s and M4s “functioned reliably” in the combat zone as long as “soldiers conducted daily operator maintenance and applied a light coat of lubricant,” the summary stated. The report also stated, “While keeping the weapon clean in this environment was a continuous requirement, it was not considered to be a difficult one.”
The stack of anonymous soldier comments that accompanied the report paints a different picture.
Though there were plenty of positive comments about the M16 and M4, soldiers weren’t shy about criticizing the weapons’ reliability.
A 3rd Infantry Division soldier wrote, “The weapon malfunctions in rough conditions/hard to keep clean.”
Another 3rd ID soldier wrote, “I know it fires very well and accurate [when] clean. But sometimes it needs to fire dirty well too.”
A 25th Infantry Division soldier wrote, “The M4 Weapon in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan was quick to malfunction when a little sand got in the weapon. Trying to keep it clean, sand free was impossible while on patrols or firefights. Sometimes we spend more time cleaning the weapon than firing it.”
An 82nd Airborne Division soldier wrote, “The M4 is overall an excellent weapon, however the flaw of its sensitivity to dirt and powder residue needs to be corrected. True to fact, cleaning will help. Daily assigned tasks, and nonregular hours in tactical situations do not always warrant the necessary time required for effective cleaning.”
Elite forces also had similar criticisms of the M4.
A member of the 75th Ranger Regiment wrote, “Even with the dust cover closed and magazine in the well, sand gets all inside; on and around the bolt. It still fires, but after a while the sand works its way all through the gun and jams start.”
Self, the former 75th Ranger Regiment officer who had his weapon jam in Afghanistan, told Army Times that his unit routinely kept its M4s covered in a tent to protect them from dust and sand.
“I think it’s the sand” in Afghanistan, he said. “It’s a big problem.”
Infantry Center officials label these criticisms as purely anecdotal, and argue that there is no statistical data that shows reliability problems with the M16 or the M4.
That’s not exactly accurate, according to the Marines.
The M4 suffered significant reliability problems during Marine Corps testing in late summer 2002. According to briefing documents, Marine officials said the M4 malfunctioned three times more often than the M16A4 during an assessment conducted for Marine Corps Systems Command at Quantico, Va.
Malfunctions were broken down into several categories, including “magazine,” “failure to chamber,” “failure to fire,” “failure to extract” and “worn or broken part,” according to the briefing documents. During the comparison, the M4 failed 186 times across those categories over the course of 69,000 rounds fired. The M16A4 failed 61 times during the testing.
The Army conducted a more recent reliability test between October 2005 and April 2006, which included 10 new M16s and 10 new M4s. Testers fired 35,000 rounds through each weapon in laboratory conditions. On average, the new M16s and M4s fired approximately 5,000 rounds between stoppages, according to an Army official who asked that his name not be released.
By comparison, the 416 fires 10,000 to 15,000 rounds between stoppages in similar test conditions, Vickers said.
U.S. SOCOM would not comment on any aspect of the 416’s performance, Air Force Maj. Ken Hoffman, a spokesman for the command, said.
In addition to Delta, experts say the 416 is also in use by other specialized Army units, including the Asymmetric Warfare Group, as well as the Navy’s elite SEAL Team 6.
Infantry Center officials said it’s much easier for special mission units to find the money for new weapons.
“They can buy 50; we have to buy 50,000,” Stone said. “We are wise to watch them and follow them and see what we can learn from them, but that doesn’t mean that every time that they get a new pair of boots that we need to get a new pair of boots.”
Replacing the M16 family right now would cost too much money, Benning officials say.
“The truth is, to change out a fleet takes a tremendous amount of money,” Radcliffe said, referring to the task of outfitting a million soldiers with new weapons.
Experts say it would cost approximately $1 billion to replace the Army’s M16s and M4s with an “off-the-shelf” weapon like the 416.
One of the benefits of the 416’s piston rod design is it saves money on spare parts over time. SOCOM found that it doesn’t blow heat into the receiver as the M16 family’s gas system does. Heat dries out lubricants quickly and inflicts extreme wear on weapon parts.
It’s not as simple as moving to a piston rod gas system, though, said Col. Carl Lipsit, project manager for Soldier Weapons, explaining that the Army would have to hold a competition if it wanted to make such a change.
“You should always look at improving a weapon anytime you can. That said, when you do major changes to the form, fit and function, it may drive you to do a competition,” he said.
The 416 isn’t the only new weapon out there that’s found success with a piston rod design.
Delta’s move to the 416 prompted U.S. SOCOM to raise its standards for small-arms reliability. The command is developing a new group of weapons that will replace all those from the M16 family.
In November 2004, SOCOM awarded a developmental contract to FN Herstal to develop its new Special Operations Combat Assault Rifle.
The SCAR has a short-stroke, gas piston operating system, similar to the M1 carbine from World War II and the Korean War.
H&K officials now describe their decision not to enter the 416 in the SCAR competition as a “strategic mistake,” Meyer said.
If all goes well, that program is scheduled to go into full-rate production late this year, said FN officials, who hope to build up to 20,000 weapons for SOCOM.
Colt, meanwhile, has developed two M4-style prototypes with the piston rod design.
“Does it shoot better? I don’t know if it shoots better; it has different characteristics than the [M16 family’s] design,” Keys said. “For some reason, some of the military think that is the way to go. We could do either one … We want to be ready for any requirement that comes down the road. We will do whatever it takes to satisfy the customer.”
To Keane, holding a competition is the only way for the Army to make sure soldiers still have the best weapons available.
“The fact of the matter is that technology changes every 10 or 15 years and we should be changing with it,” he said. “And that has not been our case. We have been sitting on this thing for far too long.”
Perhaps the most well-known incident of M16s failing in battle involves the 507th Maintenance Company in 2003 during the opening days of the ground invasion of Iraq.
Enemy forces ambushed 507th soldiers outside Nasiriyah, killing 11 and capturing six, when the unit became separated from a supply convoy.
Several of the 507th soldiers later complained that their M16s, and other weapons, failed them during the March 23 ambush.
The Army responded by revamping Basic Training to make sure soldiers knew how to better maintain their weapons and perform malfunction drills.
What’s not so well known is how then-Pfc. Patrick Miller earned a Silver Star for keeping his M16 from jamming long enough to take out an enemy mortar position.
“We were taking fire from everywhere,” Sgt. Miller recalled in a recent Army Times interview.
Enemy fire had knocked out his five-ton truck, forcing him to fight on foot.
He dove for cover behind a dirt berm and spotted an Iraqi soldier manning a mortar position across the road.
“It looked like he was trying to drop the shell in the tube. That is when I fired the first shot and the guy went down.”
When he pulled the trigger again, nothing happened.
“After the first shot, the round ejected. When the next round went to go in, it froze up,” he said. “It didn’t feed all the way into the chamber.”
Miller pounded on the forward assist, a tiny plunger on the M16’s receiver designed to manually push the weapon’s bolt into the chamber.
He fired his rifle once more, and it jammed again. Miller tried the immediate action drill he learned in Basic Combat Training — he slapped the bottom of the magazine to reseat it, pulled the charging handle back to look into the chamber. When he released, the bolt wouldn’t chamber the next round.
Changing magazines didn’t work either.
“After the third magazine I decided it took longer to change mags than to beat on the forward assist,” he said.
That worked, but his weapon would only fire a single shot and jam again.
“I was beating that thing with the palm of my hand four or five times for each round,” he recalled.
Miller managed to fire about eight times using this frantic sequence under enemy fire.
It was a valiant, but futile, effort. His fellow soldiers were trying to fight, but their weapons failed them as well.
Miller turned around and shot at a target behind him.
“When I turned there were about 40 Iraqis that had moved up on the road” approaching his position, he said. “At that time there was not much else I could have done.”
Miller put down his rifle and surrendered.
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