Sam Adams
Member
BigG
That is truly doubtful. More correct would be that nothing has come along that is so technically superior that it would induce the Fed.gov to cough up the dollars necessary to replace the M16 family (including the M249). This inertia is exactly the thing that prevented the M1 Garand from using a .276 cartridge that Garand himself thought superior to the .30-06. Inertia is a bureaucratic specialty, as well as one of their imperitives - innovation means risk, and bureacraps are against that sort of thing (no matter what the opportunities involved).
Again, there's no need to scrap the M-16 as a whole - all of the lowers could be saved and used, and the mags could even be retrofitted (though it would probably be better to sell them to the public after 9/13/04 for enough money to replace them with new Grendel mags). There's no need to re-educate millions of soldiers, reservists and NG on a different weapons type, thereby saving on costs, because the Grendel (and the 6.8 SPC) were specifically designed to be retrofitted as uppers in order to save on money.
As far as the superiority of the M-16 family is concerned, I have questions about the combat effectiveness of a rifle that "****$ where it eats." We've been lucky to avoid conflicts in the past 40 years where the great mass of our front line soldiers don't have the chance to clean their rifles regularly - if we did, the malfunction rate would likely be higher. Volumes have been written on this subject by people that know this and other actions far better than I do, and you should look them up.
Anyhow, despite my desire for a change in caliber and my dissing of the current rifle, I do own a civilian version. I, however, wouldn't use it first if I faced combat - I have other rifles better suited for that purpose, which shoot larger cartridges and haven't ever had reliability problems.
Something said about the US form of govt could also be applied to the M16: It's the worst imaginable - except for all the others. In other words, nothing has come since the M16A1 that has been technically superior. Sorry, but that's the juice.
That is truly doubtful. More correct would be that nothing has come along that is so technically superior that it would induce the Fed.gov to cough up the dollars necessary to replace the M16 family (including the M249). This inertia is exactly the thing that prevented the M1 Garand from using a .276 cartridge that Garand himself thought superior to the .30-06. Inertia is a bureaucratic specialty, as well as one of their imperitives - innovation means risk, and bureacraps are against that sort of thing (no matter what the opportunities involved).
Again, there's no need to scrap the M-16 as a whole - all of the lowers could be saved and used, and the mags could even be retrofitted (though it would probably be better to sell them to the public after 9/13/04 for enough money to replace them with new Grendel mags). There's no need to re-educate millions of soldiers, reservists and NG on a different weapons type, thereby saving on costs, because the Grendel (and the 6.8 SPC) were specifically designed to be retrofitted as uppers in order to save on money.
As far as the superiority of the M-16 family is concerned, I have questions about the combat effectiveness of a rifle that "****$ where it eats." We've been lucky to avoid conflicts in the past 40 years where the great mass of our front line soldiers don't have the chance to clean their rifles regularly - if we did, the malfunction rate would likely be higher. Volumes have been written on this subject by people that know this and other actions far better than I do, and you should look them up.
Anyhow, despite my desire for a change in caliber and my dissing of the current rifle, I do own a civilian version. I, however, wouldn't use it first if I faced combat - I have other rifles better suited for that purpose, which shoot larger cartridges and haven't ever had reliability problems.