American Rifle - Alexander Rose [213]
Yet the XM8 was doomed for reasons beyond anyone’s control or ken. Had the Iraq War ended at that moment, chances are that today American troops would be carrying “M8” rifles. But the war did not end—notwithstanding President George W. Bush’s ill-starred decision to land on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003, with a “Mission Accomplished” banner fluttering behind him, or his equally ill-judged challenge to Sunni and Shi’ite guerrillas that July to “bring on” the fight. At the time it had seemed probable that U.S. soldiers would soon be coming home, where they would hand in their M4s and eventually be handed their new, high-tech rifles while waiting for their microprocessor-controlled airburst-munitions XM25 launcher to come online.
As it was, however, they urgently needed more M4s now to combat the terrorists who were planting IEDs by the roadside and to eliminate the gunmen infesting the alleys and backrooms of Baghdad. In August 2004, for that reason, another 125,804 M4s and M4A1s worth about $123 million were ordered from Colt.18 The M4 was fast becoming the M16’s de facto, if not de jure, replacement. To the chagrin of those who had for so long criticized the M16 as underpowered or prone to jamming, this creeping takeover by the M4 was the worst possible scenario.19 Given that the M4 was merely an abbreviated M16, its apparently assured ascent to the throne was as terrible to contemplate as an ailing tyrant’s son inheriting his crown.
But was the M4’s sudden ascendancy as inexorable as it first appeared? As in some Wars of the Roses intrigue, powerful factions within the Pentagon were eager to play kingmaker for themselves. The most independent of these was SOCOM, which in November 2004 contracted with FN Herstal to manufacture a rifle niftily called the SCAR (Special Operations Combat Assault Rifle).20 SOCOM was not answerable to the army and was able to demand and fine-tune its own specifications as it searched for a replacement for its M16s, M4s, and M14s.21
Beginning in September 2003, FN Herstal had worked hard to design a gun in record time: a folding sight requested by SOCOM, for instance, was added overnight and a push-button lock for it took just another few hours.22The SCAR would come in several versions, but the most important were the SCAR-L (for “light”) and the SCAR-H (for “heavy”).The SCAR-L was a 5.56mm rifle whose standard barrel could be easily swapped out for one either longer (for sniper missions) or shorter (for close-quarters fighting).The SCAR-H, intended for longer-range work, was virtually identical apart from its caliber—7.62mm—which could handle the AK-47 ammunition common in Iraq and Afghanistan. Special Operations troops would thus be able to live off the land for long periods of time. The SCAR lacked the gorgeous lines of the XM8, but it worked magnificently.
Other elite units, such as Delta Force—which was answerable to the army—similarly, if more circumspectly, went their own way during the Afghan fighting. Delta Force was satisfied with the M4 but felt its gas-tube system was unfixable. Like SOCOM, for a solution they approached an outside contractor—Heckler & Koch, a specialist at making broken guns work. (Its troubleshooting of the troublesome British SA80 rifle had been a notable success.) In 2004 the manufacturer perfected a modification to the upper receiver that replaced the gas-tube operation with a short-stroke gas piston like the one used in the SCAR.
The adaptation, which prevents carbon from being pushed back into the chamber, greatly reduces fouling (and therefore jamming) as well as wear and tear on parts. The modified gun was initially called the HKM4, but Colt launched a lawsuit in April 2004 charging the company with “trademark infringement, trade dress infringement, trademark dilution, false designation of origin, false advertising, patent infringement, unfair competition, and deceptive trade practices.” So Heckler & Koch redubbed it the HK416—a cheeky