Failure of the AR15/M16 (in the M4 configuration) the biased testing, coverups, and kickbacks taint the entire process and the participants.
The soldiers said their weapons were meticulously cared for and routinely inspected by commanders. But still the weapons had breakdowns...
Battlefield surveys show that nearly 90 percent of soldiers are satisfied with their M4s, according to Brig. Gen. Peter Fuller, head of the Army office that buys soldier gear.
Fuller said he's received no official reports of flawed weapons performance at Wanat. "Until it showed up in the news, I was surprised to hear about all this," he said.
A lie like that should be embarrassing!
This is not a new problem!
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.
“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.
A rod zip tied to the side of the rifle is not a sign of a well preforming rifle - they are EXPECTING a problem!!!
“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.”
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.”
Just wait until this turns into a political storm...
From the very beginning the weaknesses of the Stoner designed M16/AR15 derivative of the AR10 came to the forefront and were documented.
Because there is so much "patriotic romanticism" mixed in with lots of service training mental conditioning that has spilled out into the public this has become a problem AGAIN and AGAIN we see more similarities to Vietnam. They call Afghanistan the "Graveyard of Empires" they called the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan "The Soviet's Vietnam" is this all that hard to understand?
Too much cheerleading crap like: "We are the best and have the best stuff because we are the best" is and was simply marketing. Reality is reality, perception can be flawed.
Failure to maintain the weapon meticulously can lead to jams, especially in sandy or dusty environments. Kalashnikovs may not have a reputation for accuracy, or lightness – but they do have a well-earned reputation for being able to take amazing amounts of abuse, without maintenance, and still fire reliably. The Israeli “Galil” applied these lessons in 5.56mm caliber, and earned a similar reputation. Colt’s M16 and M4 have never done so.
The M4 finishes dead last, with more than 3.5x more jams than the 3rd place finisher. But the US Army publicly says that it doesn’t care. Meanwhile, single-source contracts to Colt continue…
- Defense Industry Daily
There are mountains of information about the problems and design flaws in the current exceptionally overpriced M4 and some realistic solutions, like the FN SCAR project and the HK 416 upper modification.
But as I have stated before our current political leadership is more concerned in making sure favored contractors get highest dollar rather than give the soldier the tools he should have...
And all of you fanboy war-hawk types that say "well if they just keep it clean it is the best, they are obviously are just sloppy and incompetent" should be ashamed of yourselves, you always talk about supporting the troops and you say crap like this! Go pound sand you pathetic little shits.
To be honest the fact that more than $13 billion in Iraq aid has been classified as wasted or stolen. Another $7.8 billion cannot be accounted for $1.4 billion in overcharges from Halliburton, and that is JUST Iraq - imagine, (and the numbers are fluid from month to month as there are changes) there are (from what I can find on the internet) 130,000 soldiers in Iraq and 29,950 in Afghanistan...
So that translates to $5750 or more for each soldier for new rifles that would work like they should - if we just did not let contractors screw the taxpayers...
Iraq fraud
“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.
Hey Radcliffe, why don't we just get Halliburton to return their fucking overcharges by stocking up the ENTIRE ARMY with new rifles!
No, because the politicians are letting them tie us to a barrel and have at us (the country) without lubrication, and our people are paying with their lives over an amount of money that they say is simply an "accounting error”.
No comments:
Post a Comment