American Rifle - Alexander Rose [211]
Nevertheless, as predicted by the rival diehard school of officers, and as the army would find in the trenches of France during the First World War, the eternal nature of battle did not change so much as the dreamers had imagined. The fog of war remained as murky as ever. Likewise, an element of millennial utopianism crept into much of the Beltway rhetoric involving “force transformation” and the liberating power of technology in the years before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Modern diehards were less than impressed. “Bytes of information can be very valuable in war, but it’s bullets that kill enemies,” grumbled Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper.7
As Washington discovered in the aftermath of its superrapid, supertech toppling of the Taliban and its extraordinary military triumph in Iraq, it still needed boots on the ground—worn by 150,000 or so combat troops engaged in close-quarters urban gunfights against a gruesome array of insurgents and car bombers. It was a form of diehard, distinctly low-tech warfare that could not spare the time to perfect an experimental XM8. Indeed, the ever-shifting facts on the ground began overtaking the XM8’s pace of progress. So while the original plan was to let the XM8 mature and eventually replace the M16, the M16 found itself losing out to competition from a most unexpected rival: its own cousin, the Colt-made M4 carbine, a virtually identical weapon to the M16 apart from its greatly shortened barrel.
The M4 had been introduced by Colt in 1991 and was adopted by the army three years later as a personal-defense weapon for support personnel (clerks, vehicle crews, staff officers). It was never intended to be anything more than a limited-distribution gun (rather as the M16 had once been envisioned as a Special Forces firearm). In 1996, for that reason, the army ordered a distinctly modest 9,861 M4s and 716 M4A1s (a version that allowed full autofire).8
In 2001, thinking that its compactness might serve admirably in certain types of mission, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) tested out the M4 but rejected it as unsuitable. It cited its “fundamentally flawed” and “obsolete” gas-tube system—based on that of the M16—as the main reason. The M16’s gas system, which recycles the excess energy left by the bullet as it leaves the muzzle in order to prepare the next round for firing, has always been one of the weapon’s weak points. Simple enough in concept, in practice the system blows dirty carbon, vaporized metals, and other impurities back into the receiver, thereby necessitating the constant cleaning for which the M16 has become notorious. The SOCOM report specifically linked a worrying “failure to extract” and “failure to eject” to the design. Though the army and Colt quickly took steps to reduce the problem, SOCOM remained adamant that the M4 was “never designed for the rigors of SOF [Special Operations Forces] use” and looked elsewhere.9
Nevertheless the M4 enjoyed a growing fan base. As early as April 2001 there were prescient warnings that the M16’s length (39.5 inches, compared to the M4’s 29.75 with its buttstock closed) was a hindrance when it came to clearing the enemy out of buildings. At such close ranges a carbine would kill just as efficiently as a full-size rifle.10 More -over, if urban combat—such as that experienced in Mogadishu—were to become more common, the M16 would prove irksome inside the cramped confines of a Humvee or Bradley, as soldiers sought a convenient, safe place to hold their weapons while the vehicles bounced over rocky roads or rounded tight corners. The M4 would be perfect