"The M4 has served us well but it's not as good as it needs to be,
From My Way
WASHINGTON (AP) - In the chaos of an early morning assault on a remote U.S. outpost in eastern Afghanistan, Staff Sgt. Erich Phillips' M4 carbine quit firing as militant forces surrounded the base. The machine gun he grabbed after tossing the rifle aside didn't work either.
When the battle in the small village of Wanat ended, nine U.S. soldiers lay dead and 27 more were wounded. A detailed study of the attack by a military historian found that weapons failed repeatedly at a "critical moment" during the firefight on July 13, 2008, putting the outnumbered American troops at risk of being overrun by nearly 200 insurgents.[...]
The soldiers said their weapons were meticulously cared for and routinely inspected by commanders. But still the weapons had breakdowns, especially when the rifles were on full automatic, which allows hundreds of bullets to be fired a minute.
The platoon-sized unit of U.S. soldiers and about two dozen Afghan troops was shooting back with such intensity the barrels on their weapons turned white hot. The high rate of fire appears to have put a number of weapons out of commission, even though the guns are tested and built to operate in extreme conditions.
Cpl. Jonathan Ayers and Spc. Chris McKaig were firing their M4s from a position the soldiers called the "Crow's Nest." The pair would pop up together from cover, fire half a dozen rounds and then drop back down.
On one of these trips up, Ayers was killed instantly by an enemy round. McKaig soon had problems with his M4, which carries a 30-round magazine.
"My weapon was overheating," McKaig said, according to Cubbison's report. "I had shot about 12 magazines by this point already and it had only been about a half hour or so into the fight. I couldn't charge my weapon and put another round in because it was too hot, so I got mad and threw my weapon down."
The soldiers also had trouble with their M249 machine guns, a larger weapon than the M4 that can shoot up to 750 rounds per minute.
3 comments:
In my book, the weapons didn't "fail", they were abused. Light machine guns, such as the M4 and M249 were never intended for continuous full auto fire. Even the venerable "Ma Deuce" M2, which is designed for that purpose, is equipped with quick change barrel assemblies to cope with this challenge.
While we definitely need to examine armament and tactics as a result of this episode(i.e. is Vietnam era "spray and pray" really how we want our soldiers using their resources in this environment), blaming the weapons is not really useful. If we're asking our soldiers to do a job that their weapons weren't designed for, then they don't need another weapon of the same type. They need a diffent type of weapon.
Regardless, I'm sure we'll see a fresh batch of "M4 vs. [insert your favorite here]" debates come from these reports.
Defense Tech has a good post up on this.
From the next to last paragraph:
"And what about weapons tactics training? There's a scary line in the report that quotes one of the Soldiers saying he was unprepared for such an Alamo style fight. You'd have thought since Blackhawk Down we'd be teaching how to hold off wave attacks with superior fire."
indeed....that was my first thought too. Maybe it was a case of the carpenter blaming the tools.
Our soldiers should be prepared for anything. I'm guessing that that the army is still not teaching how to hold off wave attacks with superior fire after the latest incident in Afghanistan that killed 8 of our men.
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