The M-16 is a Good Rifle
BY Herschel Smith
1 month ago
This is an oldie from American Rifleman (via WiscoDave).
From the time I came to Vietnam in May 1967 to date, I have been on 82 patrols as an infantry unit commander and have been shot at on 38 separate occasions. From this experience I have several observations which may interest readers of THE AMERICAN RIFLEMAN, especially those who may be slated for combat duty in this area. The standard U.S. infantry rifle in Vietnam is the M16. There have been stories of men getting killed because their M16s jammed in battle. My advice is to ignore these tales. I have carried at different times two M16s as well as two of the stubby little CAR-15s. The CAR-15 is simply an M16 with a short, carbine-length barrel and telescoping stock. With these four arms I have never experienced a jam in 18 months of combat. If given the same care as a .22 rimfire semi-automatic rifle, the M16 will not fail.
[ … ]
I have knocked out Communists at ranges from 50 feet to 750 meters and have yet to use full-automatic fire. There are two reasons why I stress semi-automatic fire. First of all, it is just wasteful of ammunition. The average G.I. carries from 10 to 20 18-round magazines (21 rounds can be squeezed into the M16 magazine, but overfilling can cause jams. One can fire off 20 magazines of ammunition in from 5 to 10 minutes, but then there are likely to be problems.
You can read the rest at American Rifleman.
Of course the M-16 / M4 and AR-15 variants today are good rifles, the current suite of AR-15s even better (in most cases, assuming you don’t buy a “rack” or budget AR).
Here is another image that’s helpful.
All of the initial changes were made by the Army against the advice of Eugene Stoner, and all of the changes you see in the image above were made back to what Eugene Stoner had originally designed.
It remains today an awesome weapon. Personally, I don’t think the DoD should ever have gone with the new ceramic cartridge design. The only change that should have been considered is a re-barrel to 6 mm ARC. It is a awesome cartridge – I know from hunting with it.
John Moses Browing and Eugene Stoner are the greatest weapons designers America ever produced.
On February 3, 2025 at 3:50 pm, X said:
I was WAY too young to have been there, so this is just hearsay, but my understanding is that M-16 jams in Vietnam were real, but they were ammunition-induced and the problem had been rectified by 1967 when this guy says he was there.
On February 4, 2025 at 2:00 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
Small sample size, but twenty or so years ago I knew a half-dozen or so guys who were combat veterans of the Vietnam conflict. One or two former 101st A/B paratroopers, some Marines, and one Navy FMF Corpsman. These men were at a BBQ/party to welcome home the son of one of the paratroopers, who’d just gotten home from a tour in Iraq. This was in the mid-late 2000s.
I turned fourteen in 1975 and was too young to have been in that conflict, so these are men who are somewhat older than I was. Being the armchair general and military historian than I am, over some cold beers I asked them to weigh in on the old M-14 versus M-16 debate. And boy, did they ever!
The joke was on me, because I got an absolute storm of invective, blue language, profanity, creative insults and soldier talk. To a man, all of those old grunts absolutely hated – with a capital “H” – the M-16, which they called “the black rifle,” “the Mattel gun,” that “worthless POS,” and “the poodle shooter,” amongst other things I’d better not mention here.
The M-14, on the other hand, those guys simply couldn’t say enough about it. They absolutely loved the rifle. A couple of them said that they fought tooth-and-nail to keep theirs when it came time to switch. They said that when you shot someone with that .308 (7.62mm) round, they “stayed shot,” and that it turned “cover into concealment” very effectively.
So, the coda to the story is that along comes the son, the honoree of the party, so we grab him, hand him a beer and asked what he thought. He said that he’d never used an M-14 in Iraq, but knew guys who had and they liked them, and that his issue weapon, a 20-inch barrel full-length M-16 – one of the latter versions – always did well for him and didn’t let him down.
I asked the guys why they disliked the M-16, and they said that it was not reliable and could not be counted upon to work when it was needed. The same was said of the fragile 20-round magazines, which if they got the least bit damaged or bent, wouldn’t work well. Most guys had to get twenty magazines to be assured of having ten that worked. Problems with corrosion, lack of proper cleaning tools and supplies.
Anyway, that’s my story about the M-14 and M-16….
It is germane to note that there are men with impeccable military credentials on both sides of the M-16 debate:
Lt. General Hal Moore, famous as the CO of the 1st Cav troopers who fought at Ia Drang in 1965, called the rifle “superb” and credited the new M-16 with saving the lives of a lot of his men in that engagement and others around that time.
On the other side, Colonel David L. Hackworth, one of the most-respected war-fighters in the U.S. Army over his much-decorated career, and a noted counter-guerilla warfare specialist, despised the M-16 and instead preferred the AKM/AK47, which he would famously bury in the mud, and then dig up a week later and then fire w/o problems in front of his troops.
It is also interesting to note that a variety of high-caliber and elite forces adopted the new M-16 family of weapons, and did very well with them, i.e., Army Special Forces, MACV-SOG, Navy SEALS, etc. whereas other formations did not have much success with them, such as certain line Army and Marine units. Why the disparity? Training? Better TTPs?
On February 4, 2025 at 3:47 am, sykbill said:
10-4!!!!!!++++”
skybill
On February 4, 2025 at 3:29 pm, Latigo Morgan said:
I started my Army Infantry career with an M16A1 and finished with a M16A2. I liked them both. While the A2 is the better rifle, my fondness lies with the A1. The bugs were worked out of the platform by the time I joined, so I never had any problems that were not attributable to damaged/worn mags or defective ammo.
On February 6, 2025 at 7:40 pm, Jon said:
How many times did he go on a mission without a belt fed nearby? Never. Air support uses automatic rifles and cannons. Vehicles always have them to include waterborne. They are so useful people put up with the weight of a 240 or 249 in the Afghan mountains because it’s USEFUL. All infantry tactics support machine gunners. They are almost as important as a medic.
Automatic fire matters. If you don’t have one, the option for a closed bolt magazine fed machine gun is better than none.
Agree with his sentiments on the AR as a general weapon other than that one. Stoner complained about burst and HATED it.
The second the Army had an option to go back to automatic fire and get rid of burst, they did. Then the Admin side said it was a waste of ammo and put burst into the M4A1. Then they started issuing more machine guns per platoon.
Chicago has insane gun statistics for deaths from shootings. And they are rocking auto glocks like they’re going out of style.
I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir on this last point but just as silencers/suppressors, should be removed from the NFA on 2A grounds, so should machine guns and any restrictions on manufacturing them.
On February 7, 2025 at 10:31 am, george 1 said:
I have some experience with the M-16 and M-4 platforms. Nowhere near that of some of the military folks and certainly not in combat, but some. When talking about small arms and specifically PDWs (personal defense weapons), the testing and history say the M-16 is still an outstanding weapon. It still checks all of the boxes that are most needed for this type of platform. The M-16 as compared to other PDWs today:
1. Reliability-still hard to beat, see the military summary channel’s testing of the BCM with no cleaning through many rounds.
2. Durability-still hard to beat.
3. ease of maintenance-still hard to beat.
4. lethality- debatable but all one needs to do is switch the platform to another caliber if this is a concern.
5. Accuracy of weapon-very good and it benefits, like any weapon, from more modern optics.
JMHO.
On February 8, 2025 at 2:46 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
Eugene Stoner’s genius is evident not just in his successes, but in his “failures”… I am referring to the AR18, a design which has been termed “the most-successful ‘failure’ in firearms design history”…
After designing the AR15, Armalite Corp. faced a period of lean economic times which saw them sell the rights to the design to Colt Repeating Arms Corp. In retrospect, Colt made out like bandits on the deal; they sold the design to the U.S. military and reaped the financial windfall which resulted. Armalite got some cash upfront and residual payments which didn’t amount to much.
Somewhat later, in the 1960s, Eugene Stoner found himself in an unusual position of having to compete in the marketplace with the M-16, a weapon he and his colleagues had designed, but which was owned by a competitor.
Faced with this task Stoner did what he did best – he rolled up his sleeves and innovated. Another challenge is that he had to compete with the patents held by Colt, he could no longer use the features Colt owned, even though he had designed some of them originally – at least not without paying them royalties. The problem became one of how to design a ‘better’ AR15 without infringing on Colt’s patents.
The original AR15 used a substantial amount of forged aluminum which was then machined to size/fit. Stoner elected to use a great deal more welded sheet metal stampings in his new rifle, after the fashion of the German G3 and various submachine gun designs.
The AR15 used direct-gas impingement, specifically modified direct-gas impingement, as the operating system of the rifle. Stoner et al. reverted back to a gas-piston operating mechanism, similar to many other military-spec rifles and carbines then in use,such as the M-1 Garand, M14, AK47, etc. The short-stroke system proved to be robust and durable.
The new rifle employed a recoil spring and buffer ahead of the butt-stock, which allowed the stock to be hinged for folding and compact storage.
Dispensing with the rear-mounted T-handle charging handle, the rifle used a more-conventional side-charging handle.
The rifle was chambered in 5.56x45mm – the same cartridge as the AR15.
By 1963, Arthur Miller, the new chief designer of Armalite, had taken over Stoner’s work after the latter departed the firm.
Armalite did not have much success in selling the AR-18 to military contracts, and in time it was
marketed to Howa of Japan, and Sterling Armaments Corp. of the UK to produce semi-auto models known as the AR-180. Later, the rights to the design were sold to a firm in the Philippines.
The AR-18 attained notoriety for being one of the favorite arms of the Irish Republican Army or IRA, during “The Troubles” in N. Ireland in the 1970s-1980s. Indeed, a song was even done, “My Little Armalite,” extolling its virtues.
Although a failure in financial and marketing terms, the AR-18/AR-180 design had lasting impact on the design of dozens of modern assault rifles and related small arms. In particular, its short-stroke gas piston system has emerged as one of the standard designs of its kind, alongside the direct-impingement of the AR15 and the long-stroke gas piston of the AKM/AK47.
Modern designs which hearken back to the AR-18 include the British SA80 assault rifle, the Austrian HK36, FN SCAR, Howa Type 89, Steyr AUG, and many others.
In the sporting marketplace, Brownells, Inc. has released their BRN-180 complete upper assembly line, which are based upon the AR-180 in many features.