The m-16 has a place and purpose. It was built to be used in wooded or jungle areas. It was intended to be used against large numbers of troops and to wound primarily as that will remove other troops from battle to deal with and move the wounded. It was designed to use ammo that could be carried in large amounts. It was designed with a flat trajectory so that within 300 yards a straight shot at a man sized target would require no elevation adjustment.

This was the weapon that was designed to shoot at hundreds of thousands of communist soldiers when world war three came along.

Since 2000 it has been extensively used in the desert where it was not designed to be used. It does not carry a killing punch past 300 yards. It doesn't handle dry and gritty firing conditions well and it lacks punch for body armor.

It is still a fine weapon and can be used to great effect in most situations but desert warfare is suited for a longer range rifle with a larger round. It's just that simple.

It doesn't need to be replaced. That's what politicians do when they are going to get a big kickback from a big arms contract.

It simply needs to be replaced or augmented in troops who are deployed in areas with long distance shooting.

We don't need to reinvent the wheel every time a tool has a limitation. We simply need to use common sense when deploying troops and provide them with proper tools at the proper time.

Originally posted by seagull
That's more because of an emphasis on quantity of firepower rather than quality. The which you know far better than I. All the former military in my family, which dates from wwII to present day, all say the same, one round on target is better by far than a thousand that hit nothing, or the wrong target.

I was always taught the same thing, that one shot on target is more important than a thousand shots off target.

It hit home when I read an FBI Report on Automatic Weapons and Gangland Violence. It concluded that there were relatively no instances where Automatic Weapons in the hands of gangs were actually deadly to their intended targets, but rather almost all causalities at the hands of gangs armed with Automatic Weapons were collateral, being unintended victims of bullets gone astray. It made me realize that the same is probably true of our soldiers, which would explain the unusually high number of "friendly fire" instances and civilian casualties in modern War Operations that have occurred since Vietnam.

Automatic certainly does not equal Surgical.

However, it has been said many times over that our M-16/M-4 is meant to convey a sense of fear, more so than to be an effective killing weapon. The rapport of an Automatic weapon, especially of the loud M-16, creates more panic and fear than anything else. In Urban Combat, when your enemy doesn't line up in a row in the open, or charge in a codified unit, but is under cover and widely spread out, generating fear is a good defensive strategy. The sound of constant suppressing fire keeps your enemy pinned down in one spot, too fearful to poke out from behind cover to take a shot at you. It may not kill an entrenched enemy, but it keeps our troops from being targets while they are firing. It buys our troops time until another unit can flank the enemy position, or an Airstrike arrives. For that, a thousand bullets sprayed from an M-16 are worth their weight in lead.

I can tell you from experience that one grain of sand in the extractor mechanism can render an M-16 useless.

Finicky is not a good attribute for a combat weapon.