This article enraged me. Entitled, "US uses bullets ill-suited for new ways of war," the article revealed that the M16--the main automatic rifle of US Armed Forces since 1964 (photo at R)--remains often inferior in performance to the M14. Note I wrote "remains" inferior, and therein is a hint as to why I'm so angry.
As a child in growing up in Iowa, I had the leisure time to pursue an interest that I can no longer indulge as an adult (in part because of projects such as--oh....maintaining a blog!), which is military arms and armaments. As far back at the1980's, I remember not only first-hand accounts of Vietnam veterans but numerous articles written in various firearms-related publications, that in Vietnam the M16 often seemed ill-suited for the tasks at hand: close-range firefights against relatively smaller and lightly armored human targets usually in jungle environments. Specifically, M16's were easily broken (they had plastic stocks), jammed a lot, and--more importantly--fired the 5.56mm standard US/NATO rounds that had no stopping power. The rounds would often slice right through their human target, failing to inflict fatal damage (at least not quickly) or immediately arrest the activity of an enemy combatant.
I made a mistake in the intervening years: I gave the Pentagon the benefit of the doubt. Because our Armed Forces were still using the M16 and the 5.56mm round so extensively, I assumed that they'd found good reasons to do so. In a sense, they had: after Vietnam, the attention of the US military switched back to the threat supposedly posed by the Soviet Union. Also, to switch to a new type of bullet would have meant a very expensive NATO-wide replacement. But now, the same problems plaguing our troops during Vietnam--those of the 5.56mm round and to some extent the M16 itself--are now evident in Iraq (and Afghanistan, I assume).
Now as then, the solution seems to be placing more M14's in the hands of the troops. The M14 (at R) is a rifle dating from the 1950's, but the prototypes and ancestors of it date back into the 1940's. It fires a 7.62mm round--as a joint US and NATO standard caliber--that has a fair amount more powder in the cartridge than the standard US/NATO 5.56mm round does. This means it has punching power: not only does it do a better job of stopping an enemy combatant, but it can do more damage to (and thus more easily pass through) light cover, such as wood, plaster, and thin metal.
Don't get me wrong: the M14 has its problems, too. For starters, it's longer and heavier than the M16. In full-automatic mode it is for all intents and purposes uncontrollable. So it requires the firer to be a good shot with 2 rounds, each fired manually. (It has a fast second-round capability.) But most US soldiers aren't that great of shots, actually. (I think that new variants of the M14, such as the M21, have 3-round burst features. Three-round bursts are much more controllable than fully automatic fire.) Thus, the rapid fire, shorter barrel, and lighter weight of the M16 can be advantageous in many--perhaps most--infantry-intensive firefights. But not in all such situations. I think the US Armed Forces should make M14 variants more widely available to our troops, or at least set up careful field tests.
