American Rifle - Alexander Rose [209]
But what had caused the jamming? Were the weapons inherently flawed, or were the soldiers partly to blame? The report gently concluded that these “malfunctions may have resulted from inadequate individual maintenance in a desert environment.”1 In other words, the M16s had not been kept properly cleaned and lubricated. Nevertheless, it remained an open question whether these guns, originally developed for jungle fighting in Vietnam, could handle the dust and sandstorms of the Middle East. Even with excellent maintenance, could the M16 be counted on to work? Surely, thanks to improved technology, there were rifles available that did not require the rigorous, twice-a-day cleaning demanded by the M16 for optimum performance. Was it time for the United States to wave good-bye to the M16 after four decades of service?
The An Nasiriyah debacle reinvigorated a long-running debate over the future of the M16. Since the end of the Vietnam War the M16 had continued to suffer a reputation for underpoweredness (its 5.56mm round was thought inferior in knockdown ability to the M14’s and AK-47’s 7.62mm), and a vocal faction of soldiers, veterans, and gun experts had long demanded a bigger-caliber weapon to replace it. The memory of some early models’ disastrous failures in the middle of firefights was also not allowed to die. Nevertheless, there was never any chance that the army would ditch the M16, especially after subsequent modifications rectified many of the Vietnam version’s flaws.
In any case, there was little call and less need for such a wholesale upgrade. Between the mid-1970s and the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in the spring of 2003, M16s had not been used in heavy, sustained combat. The ground phase during the first GulfWar, for instance, had lasted but one hundred hours, and the operations in Panama, Grenada, Beirut, and Somalia had been small-scale. The Kosovo War in 1999, remarkably, had not even involved any ground troops. Over -shadowed by more glamorous acquisitions like aircraft carriers, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and advanced fighter aircraft like the F-22 (budgeted at $122 million each), the dull-as-dishwater M16 was considered perfectly satisfactory for the foreseeable future.
Instead, the army decided to postpone replacing the M16 until improved technology enabled a “great leap forward.” In this scenario, instead of incrementally modifying the M16 in fits and starts as minor issues arose, the service’s next weapon would be a superadvanced, twenty-first-century rifle—the modern equivalent of the Ordnance Department’s decision to cease patching up the old, sturdy Springfield .45 and adopt in its place the radical Krag rifle, which used the new .30 smokeless ammunition.
The prospect of just such a paradigm-smashing gun arose in the early 2000s with the advent of the Objective Individual Combat Weapon (OICW) project. As envisaged by its developers, Alliant Techsystems (ATK) and Heckler & Koch, what would be dubbed the XM29 was a dual 5.56mm rifle and 20mm airburst-munitions launcher that would allow the soldier to choose between firing a bullet directly at the enemy at close range and attacking him from up to a thousand yards away if he were in “defilade” (hidden behind a wall or other cover).Thanks to a programmable ballistics computer and range finder integrated into the titanium-composite weapon, the 20mm shell would explode at precisely the right distance and height to obliterate the foe. It was truly a Buck Rogers rifle that would shoot “above” corners, if not around them, though owing to its gigantic size (it was known as the “someone watched Predator too many times” gun), towering