American Rifle - Alexander Rose [217]
There were a few hiccups when recruits first received them: a U.S. trainer, according to the Wall Street Journal, “shook his head as several Iraqis gripped the M-16s as if they were AK-47s, causing their bullets to miss their targets by a long shot. ‘This is not a Kalashnikov!’ he shouted, using the nickname for an AK-47. ‘You’re using a precision weapon.’” Nevertheless, after they practiced some more, Master Sergeant Varon Martinez noticed that his once-raw apprentices began to act more like professional soldiers in firefights. “I saw them crouch on one knee and aim the weapon rather than just spraying,” he told the Journal. “It was like, ‘Wait. If I aim I can actually hit something. I don’t need to just spray.’”46
The training does not always “take,” perhaps because recruits tend to receive far less of it than do their American counterparts: the New York Times observed of recent streetfighting that “one big problem is that the Iraqi troops have responded to militia gunfire with such intense fusillades that the soldiers have endangered civilians, American soldiers and even their own forces.” The lack of fire control prompted one American officer to radio in, “They are lighting up everything,” before pleading, “Tell them to knock it off.”)47
Ironically, while this was happening, Senator Tom Coburn’s letter questioning whether the army’s own procurement of M4s was having an effect. In July 2007 the army announced that it had “agreed to conduct testing of four carbine designs in an extreme dust environment.”48
The competition was back on. Pitted against Colt’s M4 would be the Heckler & Koch HK416, FN Herstal’s SCAR, and—resurrected from the dead—the H&K also-ran XM8. In November, after twenty-five hours’ exposure to heavy dust conditions designed to induce jamming and the firing of six thousand rounds through each rifle to simulate extreme combat and measure reliability, the results were in.
First place went to the XM8. Second place went to the SCAR. Third place went to the HK416. And in last place was . . . the M4.
It was, on the face of it, a terrible embarrassment for Colt and the army. The XM8 had suffered just 127 stoppages, the SCAR, 226, the HK416, 233, and the M4, a disastrous 882. Of the latter, 643 had been weapons-related (such as ejection and extraction failures) and 239 owing to problems with the magazines.49Yet all but nineteen stoppages—which would have required a skilled armorer to repair them if they had occurred in the field—were classed as being merely “minor” in character, which means they needed only about ten seconds to clear. By way of comparison, the XM8 suffered 11 major stoppages and 116 minor ones. Percentagewise, therefore, the M4 catastrophically failed far less often than did the winner (2.15 percent of times versus 8.66 percent). The other guns’ major-malfunction numbers were in line with these results: the SCAR failed 16 times and the HK416, 14 times.50
On the other hand, the M4 had jammed once in every 68 rounds compared to the XM8’s once in 472. Since an M4 magazine holds 30 cartridges, the gunners were having to clear the rifle every third magazine or so. These tests were conducted under extreme conditions, however; active-duty soldiers were hardly likely to experience problems to anywhere near the same degree. But still, the apparent disparity between XM8 and M4 performance was troubling.
At base, nevertheless, the test proved nothing decisively one way or another. Even the M4’s poor showing was not clear-cut, since earlier that summer an almost identical test comparing only M4s and M16s had resulted in just 307 stoppages for the carbine.51 Eleven of them were classed as major ones, the same number later suffered by the first-place XM8. The sudden jump in total stoppages made it all