Army Chief Content With Improved M4

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11 years 7 months ago #22997 by OleCowboy
Army Chief Content With Improved M4 was created by OleCowboy
Army Chief Content With Improved M4
May 08, 2013
Military.com| by Matthew Cox and Brendan McGarry

U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno would not confirm if the service has decided to cancel the Improved Carbine competition, but said he “feels very good” about the upgraded version of the M4 carbine.
For the past five years, Army weapons officials have been trying to improve the existing M4, and at the same time, search for a possible replacement for it.
In a May 2 story, Military.com reported that Army weapons officials are in the process of canceling the competition for a new carbine and reprogramming $49.6 million in the proposed fiscal 2014 budget to buy 30,000 improved carbines, according to a source familiar with the effort.
The service embarked on the search for a replacement to the M4 carbine in 2008 after a handful of commercial carbines outperformed the M4 in an Army reliability test. Program officials launched the formal competition in 2011 and just recently wrapped up Phase II of a three-phase competition.
Now the Army is rethinking how to use what amounts to more than $300 million the service budgeted for new carbines through 2018.
Odierno said Tuesday that the Army hasn’t yet decided whether to cancel the carbine competition.
“We haven’t made that final decision,” he said in response to a question from Military.com at a Defense Writers Group roundtable. “We’re getting close.”

Read more:
www.military.com/daily-news/2013/05/08/a...d-m4.html?ESRC=eb.nl

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11 years 7 months ago #22999 by OleCowboy
Replied by OleCowboy on topic Army Chief Content With Improved M4
As I wander the aisles of the NRA show looking at more AR by more companies than there are flavors of jelly beans I see a lot of small tweaks and mods that APPEAR to make the AR platform a better weapon for the end user. P-Mags, improved charging handles, ejection switches etc etc.

What I would like to see is some comprehensive feed back studies from real end users and this is our soldiers not just on the killing fields, but time spent in the bloody arena itself. User feedback is critical to improvements and to the improvement process itself.

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11 years 7 months ago #23000 by faawrenchbndr
Replied by faawrenchbndr on topic Army Chief Content With Improved M4
Quite a bit of the equipment in our branches of Military are very old and dated.
It all boils down to money.....we can not buy new weapons when only 46% are paying taxes.
We can not buy new aircraft when we are carrying millions of illegal-alien immigrants.
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11 years 7 months ago #23001 by OleCowboy
Replied by OleCowboy on topic Army Chief Content With Improved M4

faawrenchbndr wrote: Quite a bit of the equipment in our branches of Military are very old and dated.
It all boils down to money.....we can not buy new weapons when only 46% are paying taxes.
We can not buy new aircraft when we are carrying millions of illegal-alien immigrants.

I certainly agree with that and add to that the lack of understanding what the needs of the end users are.

There is a term called "stovepipe system" and as a IT guy I heard this from many, many end users that had seen the results of someone from the top shoving a system down their throats that does not make their job better but only more difficult...

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11 years 7 months ago #23002 by Dabu
Replied by Dabu on topic Army Chief Content With Improved M4
:dry: Everyone I knew that carried an M4 during my time overseas hated the M4.

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11 years 7 months ago - 11 years 7 months ago #23003 by Siscowet
Replied by Siscowet on topic Army Chief Content With Improved M4
Dabu, I would be interested to know what they disliked about it. The biggest issue I heard about was that the M855 round didn't develop enough muzzle velocity in the short barrel to be an effective man stopper. Apparently the famous yawing of the 5.56 round didn't happen when you shortened the barrel and switched from the 55 gr. M193 round to the 62 gr. M855 round. The issue on that, was that all tests on the M855 were done through with an M16A2 with a 20 inch barrel, long before the M4 was adopted into inventory. Now they have the MK 262 Mod 1 which supposedly was adopted because of these issues. I would be interested in knowing the other issues. I know I never liked the looks of it, for some reason.
Last edit: 11 years 7 months ago by Siscowet.

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11 years 7 months ago #23004 by jtallen83
Replied by jtallen83 on topic Army Chief Content With Improved M4
I don't understand why they are not going the direction of the special operations guys, more choice for the individual soldier. Back in the day they needed everything the same, it took for ever to re-tool an assembly line, supply chains were less efficient. Today that isn't near the factor so lets open things up and give the troop more choices, let them shoot what he or she is comfortable with, taking skill and mission into account. I'm betting if they gave each troop a certain budget to equip themselves with out of an approved group of weapons you would see some serious competition. That is hundreds of thousands of customers to satisfy versus the winner takes all policy we have now. This would spur more start-up businesses trying to get their product approved for the list. They would make the product as cheap as they could so it fit the troops budget. it would also help with all that stuff that gets issued but never used or even needed in the first place.
This is essentially how the north won the civil war. Many individual units equipped themselves for combat. This did lead to some bad experiences with poor equipment but competition ran inferior equipment out and provided a huge leap forward in technology.
But here I go again thinking that anyone in charge even knows our history........ :twocents:

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11 years 7 months ago #23006 by faawrenchbndr
Replied by faawrenchbndr on topic Army Chief Content With Improved M4
We were old school........carried an A1 in Desert Storm.

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11 years 7 months ago #23008 by Siscowet
Replied by Siscowet on topic Army Chief Content With Improved M4

faawrenchbndr wrote: We were old school........carried an A1 in Desert Storm.

Wasn't the A1 the Vietnam era M16? I thought by then they had transitioned to the A2? You would know better than me though.

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11 years 7 months ago #23010 by Dabu
Replied by Dabu on topic Army Chief Content With Improved M4

Siscowet wrote: Dabu, I would be interested to know what they disliked about it. The biggest issue I heard about was that the M855 round didn't develop enough muzzle velocity in the short barrel to be an effective man stopper. Apparently the famous yawing of the 5.56 round didn't happen when you shortened the barrel and switched from the 55 gr. M193 round to the 62 gr. M855 round. The issue on that, was that all tests on the M855 were done through with an M16A2 with a 20 inch barrel, long before the M4 was adopted into inventory. Now they have the MK 262 Mod 1 which supposedly was adopted because of these issues. I would be interested in knowing the other issues. I know I never liked the looks of it, for some reason.


Though they liked how the M4 was lighter and easier to move around with, they mostly complained about how it malfunctioned 1 out of 100 rounds, no matter how well you cleaned it. They also cried about muzzle rise, muzzle flash and a bit more recoil than the M16. Of course this was my marine corps, where we could only use stantag mags and m855 green tip rounds.

Maybe the new fancy rounds and pmags fixed the issue, I don't know.
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