American Rifle - Alexander Rose [214]
This kind of legal battle had been part of America’s gun-making tradition ever since Dr. William Thornton, the head of the Patent Office, had defrauded the inventor John Hall back in about 1811. Colt president William Keys now played his expected role admirably by dismissing the Heckler & Koch product as a “knockoff” and reminding everyone that it was a German, not an American, firm.23
Leaving aside Heckler’s spot of legal bother, Larry Vickers, a former Delta man who helped develop the gas-piston system, remembered that his colleagues were so overjoyed at the sight of the HK416 that they purchased the first five hundred right off the assembly line. Before letting the weapon see action in Afghanistan and Iraq, the arms-maker and Delta put “a quarter-of-a-million rounds through it,” according to Vickers. “It had the right kind of testing—endurance firing to 15,000 rounds with no lubrication. It runs like a sewing machine.”24
Given the real-world, proven quality of the HK416 and the SCAR, as well as the ubiquity of the M4, the prospects for the still-experimental XM8 were looking less rosy by the day. Ever since the XM8 had been split off from its airburst-munitions component three years before, some $33 million had been spent, attracting the attention of Pentagon auditors.25 On May 27, 2005, the Department of Defense’s inspector general issued a memo directing that the XM8 program be put on hold until the army offered more definitive proof that it needed a new rifle, particularly since it would cost more than $2 billion to purchase 800,000 of them when the time came to retire the M16 and M4.26 Two months later the army complied, “temporarily suspending” further work on the XM8.27 Just afterward, revealingly, Colt was awarded a contract for another 50,881 M4s (worth $52,509,192).28
In early October the inspector general submitted an exhaustive report on the project, devastatingly finding that his office could not be “assured that the OICW [XM8] satisfies warfighter needs, with measurable improvements to mission capability and operational support, in a timely manner.” It also found manifold instances of financial mismanagement, faulty paperwork, and noncompliance with standard acquisition procedures.29 By the end of the year the entire XM8 program had been shut down and ignominiously canceled.30
With this dangerous competitor unexpectedly taken off the board, 2006 turned out to be a fantastic year for Colt and its M4.That June the company received a rifle order worth $243 million, and in December an army-commissioned report by the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) made for a wonderful Christmas present.31 Despite what Colt’s critics might say, and notwithstanding the HK416 and the SCAR lurking in the wings, the troops fighting in Iraq were cock-a-hoop over their M4s.
The CNA team interviewed 2,608 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who had fought in at least one gun battle. Of all their weapons, they were “most satisfied” with the M4 (89 percent of soldiers agreeing). They also reported the highest levels of satisfaction overall with their weapon’s accuracy, range, and rate of fire. Over half of them never suffered a stoppage of any kind (failure to fire, failure to feed, failure to eject or extract) with the M4s and M16s during their entire deployment in theater.
All welcome news to Colt, but the report also contained a few worrying remarks. About 20 percent of respondents did report incidents of stoppage with their M4s during a firefight. Now, while more than four-fifths of them were cleared almost immediately, one in five were not. The men carrying these M4s were either out of commission for a lengthy period or even had to withdraw.32 In such life-or-death situations, surely Colt’s opponents were justified in demanding a 100 percent nonstop-page rate?
The tide began turning against Colt in the New Year of 2007. The most damaging attack came from the Army Times in a lengthy exposé uncompromisingly titled, “Better than M4, but you can’t have