This is a copy & paste from the Army Times, reporting on a small arms evaluation mandated by Congress. Looks like our 40 year old rifle is showing its age.
Newer carbines outperform M4 in dust test
Army Times
By Matthew Cox - Staff writer
Posted : Monday Dec 17, 2007 6:42:21 EST
The M4 carbine, the weapon soldiers depend on in combat, finished last in a recent “extreme dust test” to demonstrate the M4’s reliability compared with three newer carbines.
Weapons officials at the Army Test and Evaluation Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., exposed Colt Defense LLC’s M4, along with the Heckler & Koch XM8, FNH USA’s Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle and the H&K 416 to sandstorm conditions from late September to late November, firing 6,000 rounds through each test weapon.
When the test was completed, ATEC officials found that the M4 performed “significantly worse” than the other three weapons, sources told Army Times.
Officials tested 10 each of the four carbine models, firing a total of 60,000 rounds per model. Here’s how they ranked, according to the total number of times each model stopped firing:
• XM8: 127 stoppages.
• MK16 SCAR Light: 226 stoppages.
• 416: 233 stoppages.
• M4: 882 stoppages.
Reading further down the article...
Out of the 60,000 rounds fired in the tests earlier in the summer, the 10 M4s tested had 307 stoppages, test results show, far fewer than the 882 in the most recent test.
in the recent tests, the M4 suffered 643 weapon-related stoppages, such as failure to eject or failure to extract fired casings, and 239 magazine-related stoppages.
Who knows how biased or if the test was biased, but here are the numbers as far as I know.
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