http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/02/atCarbine070219/
Better than M4, but you can’t have one
By Matthew Cox – Staff writer
Posted : Friday Feb 23, 2007 5:27:44 EST
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, but the regular Army is sticking with the M4 and M16.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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Well, General, (General, Gen Real, Generally Unreal), I’d say they were. I’d probably call them POS. That’s what they are. And, I’d like to hear what you’d say if you were in a fire fight and had the thing stop shootin on you! Betcha we could NOT print it here or put it on the tv news for the family! Ahh, yes, and we also have another good post office bureaucrat Colon-el (Head up his?) looking for the “perfect” answer. He’ll get it around 2010 when he retires to go work for a politically connected gun maker!?!
No, the issue isn’t to have the “best one”! It’s to have a “working one”!!
Is it any reason that the front line troops ALWAYS refer to the REMFs?
Hopefully, they can survive these idiots.
Reinke Faces Life 