Seriously. These guys are the best at what they do. This isn’t some vague term, as in “they are one of the best,” or “they are pretty good,” or “gee, golly, these guys are neat.” The army Special Forces and Delta operators are the best at what they do.
That being said, why someone with a Meritorious Freeway Driving medal, carpal tunnel and fallen arches is allowed to jerk the tools out of these guys’ hands is just a freaking mystery.

Via the Army Times

The Army has stripped the Asymmetric Warfare Group of its weapon of choice - the Heckler & Koch 416 - saying that its mission requires the unique outfit to carry the standard issue M4 carbine.

The decision reverses a policy that allowed the AWG to buy 416s instead of carrying M4s when it was established three years ago to help senior Army leaders find new tactics and technologies to make soldiers more lethal in combat.

Members of the AWG have declined to comment on the issue, but sources in the

416s, arguing that they outperform the Army’s

community told Army Times that the unit fought to keep its several hundred M4 and require far less maintenance.

I don’t know who finds themselves qualified to argue with these guys about what weapons work best. I’m more than willing to have a discussion about what I do. But if you try to criticize my writing style while being illiterate, yourself, I’m not likely to take you seriously. The guys of Army Special Operations don’t use their weapons in some vague laboratory setting with such and yon variable to determine functionality in this and that environmental condition, they take their boom sticks to far and nasty places and use them to complete their missions and come home.

Having hauled the M-16 (which, internally is the exact same as the M-4) through Kuwaiti dust storms, I can attest to the fact that the damn thing didn’t work as intended. It jammed, it fouled, it would fire, at most, two shots before remedial action was required to get it to go BANG again. The crappy direct impingement gas system, as opposed to piston-driven, simply lacks the reliability to perform in the field. This has been proven and tested time and time again.

More from the Army Times:

This is the latest round of controversy surrounding the M4 since late November, when the weapon finished last in an Army reliability test against several other carbines.

The M4 suffered more stoppages than the combined number of jams by the three other competitors - the Heckler & Koch XM8, FNH USA’s Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle (SCAR) and the H&K 416.

Army weapons officials agreed to perform the dust test at the request of Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., in July. Coburn took up the issue following a Feb. 26 Army Times report on moves by elite Army Special Forces units to ditch the M4 in favor of carbines they consider more reliable. Since then, Coburn has questioned the Army’s plans to spend more than $300 million to purchase M4s through fiscal 2009 rather than considering newer and possibly better weapons available on the commercial market.

This is the same Army full of fire and brimstone for Rumsfeldian “transformation.” How about we worry less about a go-go gadget army and more about the basics, like functioning rifles.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 8:51 am and is filed under Army, defense spending, not-so-hot ideas, old stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.