"EF-88 vs M4"

[Slater]

A five-part article written by an Aussie on why the EF-88 is superior to the M4. For anyone with some time to kill:

https://cove.army.gov.au/article/the...nd-more-part-5

[dwhitehorne]

I just skimmed over it. My two takeaways are the author is a logistics officer. Not the type of MOS I would go to for long gun advice. The comment about their SF has disdain for the EF88 could be the bull pup design all together. It seems to me most units that have an option on weapon selection are still picking a M4 type for good reasons. David

[SteyrAUG]

Well the AUG (as fielded by Austria and I think Ireland) might have some advantages over the M4, the M4 remains the more practical of the two and the Australian AUG is a substandard piece of junk with a long history of failures.

Two things give the Austrian AUG a bad name, the SA80 and the F88 when those rifles are confused with the Austrian rifle.

[sundance435]

For better or worse, there is a substantial and vocal minority of Australian Regular Army soldiers and officers who fiercely advocate that the AUG is a horrible platform that should be replaced as our service rifle with something like the M4A1, yesterday. This is a complex social phenomenon and includes some individuals who demonstrate a very poor understanding of strengths and weaknesses of the various weapons and provide invalid or indiscernible justification for their view, as well as some who have a very good understanding and who tend to legitimately very highly value certain characteristics in a weapon that the M4 possesses. This section will attempt to explain the existence of the phenomenon and to validate the assertion in the preface that in a majority of use cases relevant to the Australian Army that M4 derived designs aren’t particularly better than the EF88.

I'll save everyone from reading the whole thing. The above is all of the context you need. I'm going to guess the "substantial and vocal minority" is also disproportionately guys who have to use their rifles regularly.

Edit: Further reading does, indeed, indicate it was guys using them in real life who preferred the M4.

[markm]

I'll save everyone from reading the whole thing.

Thanks. Yeah... one of our "been there, done that" members made the point a year or two back that no (at that time) serious Special Forces type units run a bull pup variant.

The AUG is cool and stuff... but when it's time to cut the crap, it's the M4.

[C-grunt]

I got to run inner security for a HVT raid by the SAS in 2005. They were running M4 variants.

[chuckman]

I reached out to a buddy in the Aussie SASR, he was like "what? All I've used in the M4".

[SteyrAUG]

In 1977 the AUG brought some revolutionary concepts to the small arms world. And IF the M-16 remained the M-16A1 there would be more than a few scenarios where the AUG might have been the preferred tool for the job, particularly in some special applications where compact weapons were needed in a rifle caliber and the XM177 was deemed too unreliable.

The problem is the M-16/XM177 design continued to evolve and concepts from the AUG were borrowed and applied to other rifles. The AUG is still fine for very specialized applications but unless you are a country like Austria it's not practical as a general purpose firearm.

And quite honestly, so long as Aussie special forces continue to be able to be supplied with M4 rifles and the like, Australia can probably keep getting along with the F-88 even though it's a substandard AUG. The country that really needs to finally ditch their primary rifle is England, they actually play army quite a bit with us and the SA80A2 really isn't up to the task. Even Canada runs a superior rifle for godsakes.

[titsonritz]

I'm done at "Bullpup". Everyone talks about replacing the M4 but the reality is more and more continue to adopt it.

[lowprone]

As much as I like the concept of the bull pup carbine it really should be relegated to the security forces of the traditionally unarmed branches
of national air forces, cooks and bakers.