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killerfly128 wrote:Nope. The military will issue him what they've decided he should have, regardless of actual needs, Besides, it is a big no no to carry a personal weapon in a war zone.

Fixed it for you.

Could be they pick an AK to have a weapon that will fire everytime you pull the trigger. Everything since the M16 has had a tendency to jam, misfire and lock up. Got a lot of good people killed or captured. Treat a AK bad and it just keeps working. Combat weapons should be designed to work in the worst of conditions. Another lesson we DIDN'T learn from our Southeast Asian wargames. Of course, this is just my opinion.

Silverhawk wrote:Could be they pick an AK to have a weapon that will fire everytime you pull the trigger. Everything since the M16 has had a tendency to jam, misfire and lock up. Got a lot of good people killed or captured. Treat a AK bad and it just keeps working. Combat weapons should be designed to work in the worst of conditions. Another lesson we DIDN'T learn from our Southeast Asian wargames. Of course, this is just my opinion.

Our government didn't want to win in Viet Nam, Johnson and Nixon didn't like many of the young men at the time. The M16/AR 15 was the solution.

Thats my conspiracy theory and I'm sticking to it. Might sound silly but we sure were drafting and getting a lot of young men killed for a war nobody wanted to win, and no one seemed interested in getting out for many years

Every - and I mean EVERY - malfunction Of an M-16 I ever saw in 7 1/2 years of active duty was caused by a dirty weapon. I can't believe that the old saw about the M-16/ AR-15 being prone to jam is still going around after more than 40 years. If you keep it clean, that platform is absolutely reliable.

bdickens wrote:Every - and I mean EVERY - malfunction Of an M-16 I ever saw in 7 1/2 years of active duty was caused by a dirty weapon. I can't believe that the old saw about the M-16/ AR-15 being prone to jam is still going around after more than 40 years. If you keep it clean, that platform is absolutely reliable.

This might be true today, but the original ones without the assist were called Mattel Jamomatics for a reason, jungle fighting is tough conditions to keep clean for man or gun. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong didn't seem to have the same problems with their rifles.

While I wasn't around M16s much, but I saw them Jam up real tight so that they couldn't be cleared at thew range, All the guns in my units were cleaned and inspected before they were allowed to be put away. the A1s were supposed to better, but a lot of soldiers got killed before they did.., Most Vietnam vets hated the 16 but had a lot of respect for the enemy's rifles.

It isn't the forward assist that makes them more reliable.

The 5.56 mm NATO cartridge is ever so slightly larger that the .223 Remington that it is supposedly identical to. Colt refused to share its engineering drawings with the other manufacturers also contracted to supply the M-16 rifle, so those other manufacturers reverse-engineered the design but built them with a .223 rather than a 5.56 chamber.

Every manufactured item has allowable tolerances + or - however much, rifle chambers and ammunition included. Whenever the tolerances stacked up unfavorably, i.e. a chamber on the small end of the allowable tolerance (that was designed for a smaller cartridge anyway) and a round that was on the large end of the allowable tolerance, that was a recipe for disaster. Compounding the problem, the first M-16s were sold to the government as being self-cleaning so no cleaning kits were purchased or issued.

Small chamber + large round = jam.
Dirty weapon = jam.
Small chamber +Dirty weapon + large round = catastrophic jam.

The millitary soon figured out that cleaning kits were needed and started issuing them. The problem abated somewhat, but the small chamber/ large round issue still existed. Some enterprising armorers figured out that they could polish out the chambers of their rifles (I think they used a peice of brillo pad on a drill) to enlarge them by the few .0001" that was necessary and their problems went away.

Once the engineering and training problems were fixed, the M-16 became an extremely reliable weapon and the American GI in fact came to like it very much. Unfortunately, the rifle's early poor reputation still persists among the uninformed today.