21-06-2013, 20:42
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חבר מתאריך: 13.11.04
הודעות: 16,823
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ומה החיילים האמריקנים חושבים על ה M4?
The Army’s M-4 Carbine: Background and Issues for Congress
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RS22888.pdf
Soldier Weapons Assessment—Operation Iraqi Freedom In July 2003, the Army published a report to assess small arms performance during Iraqi Freedom. Army personnel interviewed over 1,000 soldiers to assess what “worked well and what did not.” The assessment was generally favorable toward all small arms examined and did not employ any discernable analytic metrics. The assessment stated that the M-4 was “by far the preferred individual weapon across the theater of operations” and recommended in the “near term replace the M-16 with the M-4 as the standard issue weapon.”But without any corresponding analytical data, some might question the validity of the Army’s assessment.
Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) Study on Small Arms in Combat
In December 2006, the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) published a survey and study at the request of the Army’s Project Manager-Soldier Weapons of 2,600 soldiers who had returned from Iraq and Afghanistan and who had engaged in a firefight using a variety of small arms. Some of the M-4-specific observations were as follows:
· Over 50% of soldiers using the M-4 and M-16 reported that they never
experienced a stoppage [malfunction] while in theater, to include during training
firing of the weapons (p. 2).
· Frequency of disassembled cleaning had no effect on the occurrences of
stoppages. Variations in lubrication practices, such as the type of lubrication used
and the amount of lubrication applied, also had little effect on stoppages. Using a
dry lubricant decreased reports for stoppages only for M-4 users (p. 3).
· Of soldiers surveyed who used the M-4, 89% reported being satisfied with their
weapon (p. 11).
· Of M-4 users, 20% recommended a larger bullet for the M-4 to increase lethality
(p. 30).
· Regarding M-16s and M-4s, many soldiers and experts in theater commented on
the limited ability to effectively stop targets, saying that those personnel targets
who were shot multiple times were still able to continue fighting (p. 29).
Although M-4 critics cite this report as evidence of unsuitability of the M-4, it might also be
interpreted as a favorable report on the M-4’s overall reliability and acceptance by soldiers. The “larger bullet” recommendation for lethality purposes may, in fact, be a valid recommendation based on observations from Iraq and Afghanistan, but the “bigger bullet debate” has been a source of contention for many small arms experts ever since the Army adopted the 5.56 mm M-16 during Vietnam in lieu of the 7.62 mm M-14 rifle
מבחן האמינות שהקונגרס הזמין... ואולי בדיעבד הייתה טעות לעצור את פרויקט ה XM8?
Congressionally Requested M-4 Test
In April 2007, Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) sent a letter to then Acting Secretary of the Army Peter Geren questioning why the Army planned to spend $375 million on M-4 carbines through FY2009 “without considering newer and possibly better weapons available on the commercial market.”25 Senator Coburn’s letter also cited M-4 reliability and lethality concerns and called for a competition to evaluate alternatives to the M-4, citing a need to conduct a “free and open competition.” The Army initially agreed to begin the tests in August 2007 at the Army Test and Evaluation Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, but then postponed the test until December 2007.26 The test evaluated the M-4 against the HK-416, the HK-XM8, and the FNH SCAR, with each weapon firing 6,000 rounds under sandstorm conditions. Officials reportedly evaluated 10 each of the four weapons, firing a total of 60,000 rounds per model resulting in the following: XM-8, 127 stoppages; FNH SCAR, 226 stoppages; HK-416, 233 stoppages; and the M-4, 882 stoppages.27 On December 17, 2007, when the Army briefed Congress and the press, the Army reportedly claimed that the M-4 suffered only 296 stoppages during the test, explaining that the stoppage discrepancy from the original 882 M-4 stoppages reported could have been due to the application of the Army Test and Evaluation Center’s post-test Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability (RAM) Scoring Conference.This process attributes failures to such factors as operator error or part failure and, as an example, if evaluators linked 10 stoppages to a broken part on a weapon, they could eliminate nine of the stoppages and count only one failure for reporting purposes.
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