The primary weapon carried by most soldiers into battle in Iraq andAfghanistan performed the worst in a recent series of tests designed to see how it stacked up against three other top carbines in sandy environments. After firing 6,000 rounds through ten M4s in a dust chamber at the Army’s Aberdeen test center in Maryland this fall, the weapons experienced a total of 863 minor stoppages and 19 that would have required the armorer to fix the problem. Stacked up against the M4 during the side-by-side tests were two other weapons popular with special operations forces, including the Heckler and Koch 416 and the FN USA Special Operations Combat Assault Rifle, or Mk16…. “This isn’t brain surgery — a rifle needs to do three things: shoot when you pull the trigger, put bullets where you aim them and deliver enough energy to stop what’s attacking you,” the staffer told Military.com in an email. “If the M4 can’t be depended on to shoot then everything else is irrelevant.” The staffer offered a different perspective of how to view the Army’s result. If you look at the numbers, he reasoned, the M4’s 882 total stoppages averages out to a jam every 68 rounds. There are about 30 rounds per magazine in the M4.
Lowe also notes “some grumbling about the stopping power of its 5.56mm round.” Since Mogadishu, the M4 has been criticized for its lack of stopping power (“Like stabbing a guy with an icepick”) which was detailed in Black Hawk Down, among other places. Little known fact: with the exception of the Browning Automatic Rifle and the M1 Garand Rifle, U.S. infantry weapons have uniformly sucked since the end of the First World War. Almost every decent weapon we have or have ever fielded is in fact derivative of some foreign weapon. The M249 SAW, for instance, is a Belgian FN Minimi. The M60 machinegun is a dumbed-down version of the German MG42 (a weapon that was panned by Aberdeen Proving Ground back in 1943–after it had killed about 10,000 American troops in North Africa and Sicily). I don’t know what it is, but there is something about the Army’s small arms development process that promotes mediocrity.
