Courtesy of the Army Times:

Delta Force worked with a gun maker to come up with a better weapon. The 416 is now considered in many circles to be the best carbine in the world, but the regular Army is sticking with the M4 and M16.

After many bad experiences with the M4, and it’s predeccessor the M16, in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, members of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) worked with Heckler & Kock, makers of fine weapons, to come up with a better version of the venerable weapon.  The 416 reduces malfunctions, and increases parts life, while maintaining the same basic look and feel of the weapon.

The 416 is now considered in many circles to be the best carbine in the world — a weapon that combines the solid handling, accuracy and familiarity of the M4 with the famed dependability of the rugged AK47.

Sounds like an American Ideal, doesn’t it?  Improve on an existing design, making it more reliable, and, thereby, making the soldier more effetive, and saving lives.

Too bad the Army refuses to buy it, except for SOCOM.

For the foreseeable future, however, the Army is sticking with the M4 and M16 for regular forces.

The Army plans to buy about 100,000 M4s in fiscal 2008. For this large a buy, each M4 without accessories costs about $800, Colt Chief Executive Officer William Keys said. As part of the contract, though, each M4 comes with a rail system for mounting optics and flashlights, a backup iron sight, seven magazines and a sling — additions that raise the price for each M4 package to about $1,300, according to Defense Department budget documents.

So what does the 416 cost?

The price of each 416 “will range anywhere from $800 to $1,425 depending on volume and accessories,” said H&K’s CEO John Meyer Jr.

Hmmm.

To Col. Robert Radcliffe, the man responsible for overseeing the Army’s needs for small arms, the M16 family is “pretty damn good.” It’s simply too expensive, he said, to replace it with anything less than a “significant leap in technology.”

“We think that somewhere around 2010, we should have enough insight into future technologies to take us in a direction we want to go for the next generation of small arms,” said Radcliffe, director of the Infantry Center’s Directorate of Combat Developments at Fort Benning, Ga.

“We will have M4s and M16s for years and years and years and years,” he said.“We are buying a bunch of M4s this year … and we are doing it for all the right reasons, by the way. It’s doing the job we need it to do.”

And therin lies the major problem with the US Military today.  The Procurement system is driven by career bureaucrats, for the most part, not trigger pullers.  The interest is in new, spiffy, multi-million dollar, decade lead time projects, that can assure an appartchiks tenure in their position.  The combat lifespan of the individual soldier is of much less importance to the “perfumed Princes” (as COl. David Hackworth used to call them) of the Pentagon, than keeping fellow paper pushing officers emplyed.

So, the Army will NOT buy a better weapon for our troops, that requires no major change in training and orientation, or ammunition changes, because they are waiting for some new weapons system due next decade.

“We are not saying the [M4 and M16 are] bad,” said former Army vice chief of staff retired Gen. Jack Keane. “The issue for me is do our soldiers have the best rifle in their hands.”

“If we are going to build the best fighters, and put the best tanks on the ground, don’t our soldiers deserve, absolutely hands down, the best technology for a rifle?,” Keane said. “Not good enough, but the best.”

The 416 has also been torture tested buy the guys that know how to do that:

(Delta member and current H&K consultant Larry Vickers) remembered that Delta leaders were so happy with the 416 they bought the first 500 to come off the assembly line.

It was in Iraq in no time, but not before H&K and Delta put “a quarter-of-a-million rounds through it,” Vickers said. “It had the right kind of testing — endurance firing to 15,000 rounds with no lubrication. It runs like a sewing machine.”

What testing does the Army mandate for the M16 and M4?

At Colt’s plant in Connecticut, a government inspector pulls samples from each lot of M4s and performs a 108-point inspection to ensure they meet the Army’s specifications. M4s are also routinely subjected to endurance firing, but only to 6,000 rounds.

it’s the Army that sets the standard, Colt officials say.

And as to the Army’s willingness to make improvements to the current models?

“We make to their specs,” said Keys, the Colt CEO. “We are not authorized to make any kind of changes; the Army tells you what changes to make.

“If we have a change that we think would help the gun, we go to the Army … which is not an easy process, by the way. We spent 20 years trying to get [an extractor] spring changed. They just said ‘well, this works good enough.’”

And Col. Radcliffe adds:

The Army, however, isn’t interested in the 416 or any other current rifle technology.

“We will hold on trying to replace the small-arms fleet, and we will search for technologies that might give us significantly greater capabilities in … the next 10 years or something like that,” Radcliffe said.

And of course, the last refuge of the scoundrel is Cost.  “The Budget won’t allow us to field a weapon that will save the lives of soldiers in combat” is the translation of this:

“The truth is, to change out a fleet takes a tremendous amount of money,” Radcliffe said, referring to the task of outfitting a million soldiers with new weapons.

Experts say it would cost approximately $1 billion to replace the Army’s M16s and M4s with an “off-the-shelf” weapon like the 416.

Well, I ran some quick numbers, and 200,000 of the 416 rifles would cost about $300 Million. Since that is more than needed to replace the M16 and M4 units in the desert combat regions, I would think that would be sufficient to start with.

Though it probably is cheaper to pay for some funerals and survivor benefits.