American Rifle - Alexander Rose [215]
Sensing danger, Colt and the army quickly retaliated with a three-pronged attack. First, Colt’s chief operating officer dispatched a missive on March 26 ravaging the Army Times’s contention that the M4 was fatally flawed. Then on March 29 the army insisted that with 225,000 of them already in the inventory and many more to be procured, the M4 was the “primary individual combat rifle for Infantry, Ranger, and Special Operations forces.” Finally on April 6, just to make the point unmistakably clear, Colt received a $50,775,745 contract for M4s and M4A1s.35
Despite the bravado, the Colt letter implicitly acknowledged (but did not explicitly admit) that the M4’s gas-tube system could be improved if necessary. In a possible attempt to forestall a patent-infringement suit by Heckler & Koch, Colt (accurately) said that there was nothing new about the company’s gas-piston operation for the HK416; some of the experimental semiautomatic rifles of the 1920s had used them, and indeed Colt itself had “proposed” just such a system in the 1960s. “Today Colt Defense has the ability and expertise to manufacture in great numbers piston system carbines of exceptional quality should the U.S. military services initiate a combat requirement for this type of weapon.”
The ball, then, was in the army’s court. Given the word, Colt would junk the gas-tube version of the M4 and neutralize the HK416 threat by manufacturing its own piston-operated M4. By any estimation, this must have been unwelcome news at Heckler & Koch, now facing a second loss in the great carbine wars following the cancellation of its XM8.
The entry of Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) into the debate evened the score. On April 12 the senator sent acting army secretary Pete Geren a letter questioning the service’s plans to spend $375 million on nearly half a million M4s using Colt as the sole provider. “Considering the long standing reliability and lethality problems with the M16 design, on which the M4 is based, I am afraid that our troops in combat might not have the best weapon,” Coburn wrote. “A number of manufacturers have researched, tested and fielded weapons which, by all accounts, appear to provide significantly improved reliability.”36
Coburn’s reference to the M16’s alleged “lethality” problems and the vague intimation that the M4 had inherited them briefly reopened the controversy over the M16/M4 family’s killing ability. The 2006 Center for Naval Analyses report had mentioned that 20 percent of M4 users had said they wanted more lethality in their rifle (some hopeful souls even requested hollowpoint bullets, which are illegal for military use) but had not gone into more detail.37 That left four-fifths of all soldiers satisfied with the M4’s lethality, a conclusion borne out by a finding three years earlier.
At that time, according to the 2003 Soldier Weapons report, “the majority of the soldiers interviewed that voiced or desired ‘better knockdown power’... did not have actual close engagements.” In contrast, when soldiers adhered to their training during close-quarters combat and landed what are known as “controlled pairs” (a chest and head shot, for instance) in vital areas, they had, in the bloodless words of the rapporteurs, “defeated the target without issue.”38 Subsequent laboratory testing concluded that though the M4, being a carbine, fired at a somewhat lower muzzle velocity than did the M16 (2,848 feet per second compared to 3,155), there was no significant difference in terminal bullet performance at the closer ranges—which is where most urban fighting takes place. Only at greater distances could one notice an increased degree of lethality in the M16’s favor.39 Even so, the compilers of the 2003 report specifically declared