It’s been a busy week. I saw this Wall Street Journal article on the competition for a new U.S. Army battle rifle, but let it slide due to the fact that it’s going to take approximately eighteen years for them to make up their minds. (It’s supposed to take two, but that’s eighteen in Internet years.) Meanwhile, there’s been a surfeit (surf it?) of gun news on the web. And there’s not a lot about the M4 limitations that TTAG’s Armed Intelligentsia doesn’t already know: reliability issues, piss-ant caliber, yada to the third power. Not to mention “In parallel with the contest for a new rifles, the Army is considering additional improvements to the M4, including ambidextrous controls.” In other words, the Army will probably green-light a more accurate direct impingement M4 and call it good. Next?
M-14, or M-4?
M4. Why?
Because the original version (still showing in my RSS feed, I checked) said M-14 in the title, and twice in the article–instead of just once as the version showing at the moment has.
Huh. I wonder how that happened. And I don’t see it in the body copy.
Eighteen years? We can only hope. If Nostradamus is right it will never happen.
Do you think we can get them to OK a .338 Lapua with a 16″ barrel and an overall length of 30″, a 20 round magazine and a shoulder thing that goes up?
(Note: 6″ of the stock would be rubber recoil buffers)
Our friends at Armalite notwithstanding, it is neither fad nor coincidence that the rest of the world’s militaries are moving away from opereating systems that fill their rifles’ receivers with filth and blast away their lubrication at the same time.
It is the bureaucratic inertia of our military-industrial-congressional complex that keeps our citizen-soldiers equipped with superseded, if not quite obsolete, small arms.
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