{"id":194458,"date":"2008-09-21T06:28:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-21T11:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/09\/21\/replacing-the-m16-m4-and-possibly-the-5-56-round\/"},"modified":"2008-09-21T06:28:00","modified_gmt":"2008-09-21T11:28:00","slug":"replacing-the-m16-m4-and-possibly-the-5-56-round","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/09\/21\/replacing-the-m16-m4-and-possibly-the-5-56-round\/","title":{"rendered":"Replacing the M16\/M4 and Possibly the 5.56 Round"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, this is one of those issues that leads to heated discussions, so let&#8217;s start with my position:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The 5.56 round is just find, and any lethality issues are an artifact that the barrel on the M4 carbine, at 14.5 inches, is too short.  The M-16 with its 20 inch barrel does not have the lethality issues.<\/p>\n<p>The solution is to replace the M4 with a Bullpup design with a barrel length of at least 18 inches.<\/p>\n<p>Such a design will <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">still<\/span> be shorter than the M4, and hence easier to handle in enclosed spaces, such as city warfare.<\/p>\n<p>I would also go with a piston arrangement, as opposed to a gas tube, which to bring too much fouling.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8216;Nuff said.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, the Army is now <a href=\"http:\/\/www.defensetech.org\/archives\/004425.html\">looking at an M4 replacement, and is considering going with something like a 6.5mm or 6.8mm round<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This has all the hallmarks of a fiasco to my mind though.  They are bidding a new weapon <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">and<\/span> allowing for a new caliber at the same time, which means that they will not really be able to compare apples to apples.<\/p>\n<p>It should be interesting on the boards for a while though as various gun religions engage in Jihad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, this is one of those issues that leads to heated discussions, so let&#8217;s start with my position: The 5.56 round is just find, and any lethality issues are an artifact that the barrel on the M4 carbine, at 14.5 inches, is too short. The M-16 with its 20 inch barrel does not have the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1008],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-defense-procurement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194458"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194458\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}