Just to keep things in perspective: the Iraq war and occupation, taking eight years, cost 4500 US military lives. The Battle of Antietam, a single day, saw 2100 Union and 1500 Confederate lives lost. The Meuse-Argonne Offensive was about six weeks, and saw 26000 US military lives lost. The Battle of the Bulge was six weeks long and saw 20000 US soldiers die. The entire Vietnam war, a similar timeframe to the Iraq war, saw 53000 US soldiers die.
Somewhere along the way, the US public seemed to decide that it was okay to go to war, but not okay to lose soldiers doing so. 2.5 million US military have served in Iraq, and 4500 is 0.18% of those. Painting a picture of soldiers dropping like flies is misleading - and yet the US still meets its military goals (though failing at the corresponding political ones).
In any case, against that backdrop of success, you're not going to shift the embedded graft keeping the current top dog in place.
While I'd tend to agree with your larger point, when looking at decades- or centuries-old wars it's worth keeping in perspective that the falling death rates have much more to do with improvements in evacuation time and trauma care. Even beyond the obvious improvements in things like antibiotics, soldiers are now living through wounds that would have been fatal to them as recently as twenty years ago.
The cynic in me says that the way that this continues to be reported--as military dead instead of military casualties--is meant to deliberately obscure this fact. How many people returning from these modern wars will need full-time medical care for the rest of their lives?
Indeed. Our troops now also wear really serious body armor, a lot of Kevlar designed to stop fragments and 9 mm bullets, plus at least 2 rifle plates, front and back. Also to a degree I'm not familiar with two small side plates. I've read that the big rifle plates have been saving a lot of lives from normal accidents. And modern helmets are very good, although there's only so much impact one can take without necessarily harming the wearer's head, so we're talking more about grazing rifle hits. But saves also add up---but echoing your point about casualties, they turn some number of deaths into traumatic brain injuries.
The sort of grim side effect of all this is that trauma medicine makes great strides during wars, I seem to remember we've been learning a lot about treating traumatic brain injuries due to the current unpleasantness.
It's not that distorted. Antietam had a wounded:killed ratio of 4:1, Meuse-Argonne was 4:1, Vietnam had 6:1, Iraq had 8:1. Bulge was a particularly deadly sample at 2.5:1 (If you include all allied forces and not just US military, Iraq drops back down to ~5:1). Basically you could convert 4500 US casualties in Iraq into deaths as a pseudocontrol for 'ye olde medicine' to bring the ratio back into line, and it wouldn't particularly change the numbers above.
I also think that total casualties needs to be taken with more care than total deaths, as a casualty is anything from a nicked ear that takes you out for only a day, right on up to an amputation. Death is unambiguous. Casualties are far more mutable - witness the presidential candidate who had a successful smear campaign run against him because he supposedly 'wasn't wounded enough' to merit a Purple Heart...
How many people returning from these modern wars will need full-time medical care for the rest of their lives?
Probably much less as a proportion than previous wars, though it's really anyone's guess. 'Full-time' medical care is a big thing; it basically means hospitalisation for the rest of your life. Remember also that while some soldiers would survive who previously wouldn't, treatment overall is superior - someone who previously would have been left with a lifelong crippling disability may have a much reduced effect in the modern day. It's not like modern medicine improves the lot of only those patients who are at death's door.
"witness the presidential candidate who had a successful smear campaign run against him because he supposedly 'wasn't wounded enough' to merit a Purple Heart..."
You misstate that part of the case against Kerry: in short, he transferred to the riverine force not knowing it would soon be sent into serious combat, and thanks to the three Purple Hearts was able to leave that duty Real Soon after the third, see e.g. http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/service.asp for confirmation of the basic latter facts.
Wikipedia lists [1] under 40K total casualties in Iraq for US armed forces as of 2012. If that is taken at face value, that is a 1.6% casualty rate over a remarkably long duration operation.
To the degree there was a change in US public opinion, the turning point was the attack on the Beirut US Marine Barracks in 1983. An unexpected number of casualties under an ambiguous mission sort of undermined Regan's criticism Jimmy Carter for Eagle Claw [8 dead trying to rescue the hostages in Iran] during the 1980 election cycle. [1] Politically, 1983 was a campaign year for the 1984 presidential election.
On the other hand, the big shift has been in military doctrine from valuing equipment and expending personnel to valuing personnel and expending equipment. And that has come about as the military has increasingly emphasized training. Gone are the green divisions that suffered heavily in the Ardennes in the winter of 1944-45. US military doctrine does not view soldiers as warm bodies so much since the suspension of conscription in the 1970's.
In my opinion, public opinion has followed doctrine, not the other way around. Not that the public ever thought that US soldiers dying was good, but rather that they never saw Blackhawk Down type casualties as tragic until the government raised it from the level of an unfortunate cost of war.
USMC OIF vet here. A lot of great comments here but most appear to be missing one key idea: the primary purpose of the infantry rifle is not to kill, it is to suppress. When infantry tactics are properly executed, irrespective of clime and place, most of the actual killing will be done by belt-fed weapons (machine guns such as the M249, M240, MK48) and high explosives (hand grenades, mortars, artillery).
If you were to make an analogy to boxing, the M4/M16 is the infantry squad's jab, and machine guns and grenades are its power punches. The point of suppression is to keep the enemy's head down so that you can both close with him and force him into geometries that make it easier to kill him with more powerful weapons. It is true that a 5.56mm round does not have a lot of stopping power, but it is designed for point-target accuracy up to 600 meters, and a well-maintained M4 with good optics can put rounds through a window (eg, suppress the enemy) at 800 meters. It is also important to note that a 5.56mm NATO round weighs about a third as much as a 7.62mm NATO round; my kit in OIF was about 100 lbs including body armor and would have been around 120 had I been carrying a rifle chambered for 7.62 and the same number of rounds. Also, another important thing to note about stopping power is that anything worth shooting once is worth shooting many times. Stopping power definitely matters when we're talking about sniper rifles, less so for an infantryman's primary weapons system.
With all that said, the M4 is not a great weapon for reasons others have enumerated in these comments. I agree that the HK416 is a beautiful rifle and barring the development of something better should be the primary weapons system for the infantry rifleman, but the procurement / acquisition system is completely screwed up so I'm not holding my breath waiting for that one to happen.
"the primary purpose of the infantry rifle is not to kill, it is to suppress"
Isn't this a chicken and egg issue? After WWII, where the snide might note that the only country employing such infantry rifles lost (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StG_44 and I know it was not for that reason, and that the StG 44 was not evolved for the mission, e.g. no straight line recoil), first the Soviets adopted this concept (I gather after experience with a submachine gun and such tactics), and then a purely political decision forced the AR-15 and 5.56x45 on our Army and Marines (the Air Force loved it for guarding their planes, very much not the same mission).
IF we had a better cartridge (but certainly not 7.62 NATO, including for the reasons you cite), and more emphasis on individual marksmanship, might tactics shift a bit? Not a lot, I understand the concept (to the extent someone who's eyesight kept him out of the military might), I just think we went too far with it. Especially since a fair amount of this was motivated by fraudulent research (SLA Marshall).
Let me also bring up the issue of our past, current and no doubt future "dirty" wars: rifles are potentially more discriminating than those more powerful weapons, so potentially less "collateral damage" and harm to our own.
Then there's the morale issue: how many of our men trust their rifle to save their lives when they're depending entirely on it? I've heard way too many accounts, including
forca's on this page, about 5.56x45's lack of stopping power, and seem my comments on Martin Fackler's elucidation of how it works, or doesn't.
Then again, and echoing all of our comments on the completely screwed up procurement system, the failures to stop he cited would be less common with 20 inch barrel M16s instead of "Made By Colt" 14.5 inch barrel M4s. And because of that screwed up system, and $$$, this discussion is academic at this time, we should have done the right thing in the '50s :-(.
It's not really a chicken / egg issue, and the tactical logic of fire and maneuver long predates WWII. Yes, the StG 44 was a revolutionary weapon and certainly influenced the AK and Stoner designs, but I'm not sure I buy the argument that it influenced tactics per se.
FWIW, the story I've heard behind the introduction of the 5.56 round is that it was designed to wound, not kill. Supposedly the generals in charge of doctrine in the 50's surmised that wounding Soviet soldiers would be a better way of slowing their advance across the Fulda Gap than would killing a similar number.
With regard to SLAM being a fraud -- there is indeed debate as to whether his stats about what % of men in WWII fired their weapons are accurate. However, to the extent that any of SLAM's writings influenced the rollout of the M16, it was Soldier's Load, the TLDR version of which is, "our gear is too heavy". He had a point there, and we shouldn't ignore the significance of the 5.56mm round's light weight, and not just for the M16. Being able to carry 5 drums of SAW ammo on patrol can come in handy.
"the story I've heard behind the introduction of the 5.56 round is that it was designed to wound, not kill. Supposedly the generals in charge of doctrine in the 50's surmised...."
The story you've heard is dead wrong on many particulars:
The '50s "generals" were fixated on creating 7.62 NATO and the M14 upgrade of the M1 Garand (and BTW it was another TFX/JSF one long arm to do everything semi-debacle). The AR-10 (the parent of the AR-15 that used 7.62 NATO) was part of the "competition" that somehow ended up selecting the Army's very own M14, through expedients like replacing screws and/or pins with coil springs while the rifles where in the custody of the Army.
An early limited use of the AR-15 in Vietnam produced outsized reports of extreme stopping power and lethality, explained by the very high velocity of the the 55 grain bullets of the time (3,250 fps in something I just looked up, which matches my memory). From my research, before the civilians in the DoD forced it on the Army and Marines, mere wounding was never a selling point, that sounds more like excuses after real experiences showed how bad it really was.
SLAM was a fraud, his schedule could not have produced the data he claimed to have collected then, a scholar reviewed his appointments calendar and noticed the discrepancy. It appears he did a limited number of bullshitting sessions and pulled his results out of his ass. Read e.g. the completely unrelated Hackworth About Face for a bit more on his feet of clay, in Vietnam.
My counterpoint to the soldier's load argument is that the tradeoff went too far, e.g. I've read some accounts of SAW operators who really wished the round was more effective. I submit there's a case to be made for fewer but more effective rounds, but not battle rifle level. E.g. would 3-4 more effective drums do as well or better?
Thanks for setting me straight, do you have any sources for the account of what happened in the 50's? I'm a history nerd and would love to read up on it.
For the '50s, nothing off the top of my head, although it's really just a synthesis of a bunch of things I've observed and learned over decades:
First is the obvious, that the M14 is a Garand with a detachable box magazine and a much better gas system in the front end, but it still has an op rod and the same exposed bolt on top. Compare to the other major designs of the 50s:
The AR-10 wasn't exactly, except it inspired the AR-15, then there's the FNH FAL and the H&K G3/91: the only exposure the action gets is the necessary ejection port.
And of course the M14 officially won the US competition. The corruption in that should be searchable both directly (e.g. search for "sabotage" of the alternatives, but you'll also find hits alleging sabotage of the M16), and indirectly in the much studied history of the adoption of The Black Rifle, as one of the major books on it is titled. Some of those accounts should detail why the civilians in the DoD took this out of the Army's hands (and I gather terminating with extreme prejudice that unit of the Army, and of course closing down Springfield Armory in 1968; the M60 debacle probably also played a role).
It's also self-evident that something major happened to establish 7.62 NATO. E.g. I just read in Wikipedia that the British were going forward with their own rifle design using their own intermediate .280 British (which looks to be noticeably better than 7.62x39, a bit hotter than 6.8 SPC but probably wouldn't travel as far), then Labour lost the 1951 election...: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FN_FAL
Its interesting that its completely absent factual data, all persuasive arguments. Fairly obviously, someone hoping to sell a new rifle is paying him to write, but who?
(Oh and edited to add a computing analogy, his argument is basically Microsoft Bob both sucked and needed debugging a couple decades ago, and there are only minor geeky technical changes between Bob and today's Windows, therefore we need a new OS, because new things never need debugging)
There are a number of excellent gas piston rifles that are much more reliable and not far from the cost of ARs (especially with mass production) - the SCAR, ACR, HK416.
There is nothing wrong with a Gas Operated AR15. It has _less_ moving parts than an ak47 in that regard. While you do get some chamber fowling, it's inconsequential since the bolt carrier rides with minimal contact with the chamber walls. Contrary to popular belief, an AR15 does _not_ require careful maintenance, but this seems to be beaten into deployed personnel.
The real problem is the 5.56mm cartridge. It's under powered, especially in sub-sonic applications, and it can't do crap for penetrating barriers. It should be replaced with the .300 AAC blackout which offers better terminal ballistics and offers an effective sub-sonic option for silenced applications. The coolest part about this cartridge is that ALL M4s and M16s could be upgraded with just a barrel change. The mags, bolt, bolt carrier, lower, and upper chambers are all 100% compatible. That could reduce the cost of the upgrade significantly.
What do you think of the 6.8mm SPC, which at first glance looks like it'll be better at long range (splitting the difference between 6.5 and 7mm was a compromise between range and damage)?
From the Wikipedia article the "[300 AAC] purpose is to achieve ballistics similar to the 7.62×39mm Soviet cartridge in an AR-15 platform while using standard AR-15 magazines at their normal capacity." Surely we can do better than that, 7.62×39mm is not a terrifically great round either.
6.8mm SPC is an incredible cartridge. It's far superior to .300 AAC in range and terminal effects. It offers a wide variety of loads including an effective subsonic load. There are a few quibbles about efficiencies (powder and materials): The standard infantrymen doesn't really need long range cartridge.
However, the big reason I wouldn't suggest 6.8mm as an upgrade to the 5.56mm is the upgrade path is more expensive. While the 6.8mm _can_ work with the standard buffer tube spring, it's best those get upgraded for accuracy and shooter comfort. The 6.8mm requires a new bolt and barrel in the upper receiver. The 6.8mm also requires new magazines (to be used at full capacity). The 6.8mm requires new brass and new loading dies, so your ammo production lines have to change significantly. Finally, the chamber pressure increase in the 6.8mm may introduce reliability issues in certain models of the AR15, especially in the gas impingement system. And personally, I the recoil from the 6.8mm kinda sucks.
The .300 AAC requires _merely_ a barrel swap. Everything else in the upper is compatible. The brass from 5.56mm can be cut down to make .300 AAC brass (yay for recycling) and existing loading dies can be used to load .300 AAC. The existing magazines can be used at full capacity.
While the 6.8mm may be a superior round, I think the .300 AAC wins in terms of practicality. Just my opinion :)
Something that we don't mention enough - the m16 lower might be the best ergonomic piece ever made. All controls accessible without breaking cheek-stock weld. The boing-boing-boing of the buffer spring is a bit annoying. I left the service before the A3 saw wide deployment so not sure about the 3 round burst mech.
Change the upper receiver to a piston-type which for civvies is about 1000 USD and you essentially have a Galil. Israel got religion about the AK after the '73 war. They have a good record of learning from their military mistakes.
What I'm not sure about is a new cartridge. A heavier projectile will maintain momentum for longer distances, but to have the same muzzle velocity, you will need to add more propellant. My hand loading experience with .223 says it's possible, but maybe not desirable. And I think to move beyond the 62 grain projectile you will have to increase bore size. Once you move out of the .223 / 5.56 envelope, you're looking at new magazines, ammo pouches, etc.
I like the idea of adding reflex sights, as no iron sight really allows for quick target acquisition. But not sure how long anything with glass will last in combat.
I've read, but never had adequately confirmed, that the 3 round burst mechanism absolutely destroys the semi-auto ergonomics. Specifically, each pull has increasing weight until the 3rd resets it back to the first pull's weight.
As I understand it, 6.8 SPC requires new magazines but the rest of the form factor is the same, so no new pouches etc. I've just read that .300 AAC can use the same magazines, although it was claimed in Wikipedia it was designed to essentially be a 7.62x33mm clone, with of course subsonic provisions.
I gather that if you really want to do it right, you want something in-between a full power battle rifle cartridge and an assault rifle one, like the interwar .276 Pedersen or post-WWII .280_British (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.280_British). But that would require replacing too much stuff today, we really should have done it in the '50s when we had the money, everyone else needed to change their service rifles, and everyone but the Germans needed to procure General Purpose Machine Guns. But we just went with a nearly pointless shorted .30-06 with a beefed up rim for better semi- and full auto reliability, got everyone else in the West to adopt it, then screwed them over with the M16/5.56x45 debacle.
6mm rounds seemed to be common in pre-War II era: Swedish Mauser, Arisaka, Carcano (aka "JFK assassination rifle"). Interestingly enough, the Fedorov Avtomat -- the first select fire rifle -- used the 6.5 mm Arisaka round (from the captured Japanese stockpiles after war of 1905).
There are a number of factual errors in this article. It may be presented as fact, but it is mostly an opinion piece with facts wrapped in. I'm speaking as a veteran; my MOS was 13F (forward observer), and I was regularly attached to infantry units.
First, in training up for Iraq, soldiers were trained on house-to-house clearing operations and urban warfare operations -- not in the long distance 'open field' operations the author seems to indicate.
While the Army does have large scale operational training (at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, CA), soldiers also went through a Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Fort Polk, which emphasized urban operations. These operations take place in much, much smaller distances than needed for a long rifle; and any soldier carrying an M16 wished for an M4.
As far as not having the same amount of accuracy -- the author is correct, but at 300+ meters, most line soldiers (including infantryman) can't hit the target but 2 times out of 10 anyway. We simply do not train to try to hit a target at 300+ meters. The silhouettes we would shoot at even depict an enemy soldier standing up at 300 meters, which tells you how ludicrous such a thing is. "Someone's firing at me, let me stand up!"
That's the first factual error the author makes; claiming 'most' engagements take place at long distances (read: "an especially serious disadvantage in modern combat, which is increasingly taking place over long ranges."). Even with an M16, a soldier does not want to engage something that far away and waste their ammunition -- at best they'll lay suppressing fire and try to get in closer and flank the enemy.
The author then goes on to blame the weapon's issues on its construction -- he's right. It does need to be cleaned and maintained. We were always told, if you have five minutes, clean your weapon. Clean it. Clean it. Clean it.
The author then states that an AK47 can fire at twice the rate an M4/M16 an. He's right. That would be a problem if the American soldier were trained to fire indiscriminately; but they are not. They're trained in firing precisely; and only to fire extraneous rounds when needed (like to lay covering or suppressive fire).
The author points out that "today's soldier" wants a modular weapon. Rails systems are really cool; and they're really useful -- but not every soldier needs such a thing, and even infantry soldiers don't need One Weapon To Rule Them All. That's what got the JSF in trouble -- it tried to be everything to everyone.
Soldiers need different weapons for different purposes; yes it's "Cool" to be able to swap out parts between weapons (and in battle, probably a requirement) but it's folly to think that one soldier would even be issued parts that weren't directly necessary for their MOS and position in their unit.
A soldier isn't saying, "Man, I wish I had a 7.62 because I'd love to fire 400+ meters", they're saying, "Man, I wish I had a 7.62 because I want to make sure when I hit something, it's dead." The author again plays the distance card -- that's not on the minds of your average soldier (if it were, more soldiers would use telescopic scopes).
There are good reasons why soldiers don't use computerized sights -- they break. Invariably they break at the wrong moment, like when you just fell into a hole you didn't see at 3am on a moonless night, when you were issued single sight Night vision goggles because the binocular NVGs are only given to squad leaders.
The author is correct about the problem: We need a new weapon that is durable and able to be modularized. The author just gets the details wrong.
"First, in training up for Iraq..." is about training, not what happened or could happen on the ground. Which leads to the observation that the US Army gave up on marksmanship in the '60s or thereabouts (in part based on SLA Marshall's fraudulent WWII "research"). Of course you aren't trained to take advantage of weapons capabilities available to mid-19th Century soldiers when your issue weapons are very weak in them.
That you make the best of a bad weapon system and round does not say anything about what could be achieved with better ones, and more emphasis on personal marksmanship, something I'm told the Marines never gave up on. And aren't rifle rounds a little more discriminating than the alternatives?
(My background, BTW: only JROTC in the late '70s due to eyesight, but my Senior Army Instructor was an Infantry officer who mentioned he fired around 10,000 rounds as part of the effort in fixing the original issue M16s and their ammo, and was a great rifle team instructor. The rest is based on growing up with guns and hunting, and studying this issue immediately after the Vietnam War when I wondered how things had gone to hell in the previous decade and a half while I was too young to really follow or study them, and preparing for a stint as an infantry officer that was not to be.)
This is a subject that is endlessly debated in gun and military circles. This is one position on one end of the spectrum. There are good points on all sides, much of which is complicated and ambiguous. HN is no place to get into such an involved subject. Suffice it to say, whole books have been written about military weapon choices by experienced soldiers.
yes the debate between 5.56mm and 7.62mm crowds is hot enough to rival a .Net/Java debate LOL. Still I am glad to see it. How many soldiers lost their lives because of faulty M-16's in Vietnam? How many lives were lost because of faulty equipment in WW2? I have two friends who are active duty military and if they come under fire I want to make sure that their equipment does what it needs to do when they need it. So a little spot light on these issues doesn't hurt.
The basic service rifles and carbines of WWII were reliable. So was the BAR light machine gun by then.
We're talking about the reliability and effectiveness of the very most basic weapons issued to our troops.
Heck, when counting effectiveness, the current Europellet (9mm) pistol, which has to use FMJ ammo, is much less effective in stopping than the old M1911 (the latter of which just happens to be the design I carry every time I exit my dwelling).
I agree. As a veteran myself, I often wondered about the decisions to move from the proven 7.62 to the not-so-effective 5.56. Back in WWII, if a German soldier took at .30-06 in the chest from an M1, he wasn't getting up from it. Even the British Enfield and Vickers guns using the venerable old .303 (7mm) would put a man down reliably with a solid hit.
I personally know troops who have shot insurgents several times with M4s at lethal ranges (less than 200') and they took the hits and kept fighting long enough to return fire. Those same insurgents hit with a 7.62 slug would be DRT. Full stop. There is a reason quite a few Marines and soldiers carried .357 revolvers in Vietnam. The reason was the stopping power. The 125 grain .357 traveling at 1400 FPS boasts 96% one shot stops on human torsos that are not armoured. The .357 is still the gold standard for handgun stopping power. Like you with your 1911, I'm a .357 guy. If I cannot do it with six, I need something belt fed. Plus, like a lot of guys I know, I favour a New York reload anyway.
Although I quibble that I'm a Facklerite instead of a Marshall and Evans type, so I don't trust their .357 results, I'm specifically and convincingly told their data is just not of high enough quality to support their conclusions (I haven't investigated for real because since I was a teen the M1911 has fit my hand like a glove, so it's weapon choice/shot placement first, followed by the natural choice of .45 ACP over .38 Super, which I'll note is not the equal of .357).
The Martin Fackler camp believes that at service pistol velocities killing scales with the number of holes poked in a person, stopping scales with the area of the bullet. And all things being equal, .45 is a lot bigger than .357.
However I note that that famous .357 load has a nominal velocity that's twice as high as .45 ACP, so maybe it really is disproportionately effective (note that only the 10mm has really duplicated or rather substantially exceeded its ballistics, even .357 SIG doesn't quite reach the .357 Magnum).
One thing that got me to wondering in this direction is the "unreasonable effectiveness" of ~.30 caliber ball (FMJ) ammo (e.g. including the .303, German 7×57mm and Russian 7.62×54mmR). Absent construction like the relatively fragile West German 7.62 NATO round, like e.g. AK-47 rounds it's going flip, at least partly, before exiting without fragmentation, and without dumping much of its energy unless it hits solid bone or the like.
Fackler's general thesis about wounding is that permanent crush cavity counts, "hydrostatic shock" and the like don't much or at all, soft tissue by and large gets pushed out of the way and snaps back. Note that he got his start in this in Vietnam field surgery....
But when I look at the temporary effects of a high power 7.62 or thereabouts slug, I note that in most any torso hit their radius is going to encompass the spine. So I've been wondering if their proven effectiveness on the battlefield is a combination of a potentially temporary shock effect on the CNS via the spine (plus of course the direct effects), followed by bleeding out etc. before sufficient medical care can be rendered. The first being the "put down", the second being the "stay down", or at least weak enough not to get back up and be effective.
For what it's worth, I believe the original specifications for 9mm NATO involve a higher pressure than standard commercial 9mm (effectively +P, i.e., probably not something to fire a C&R WWI Luger, but again not quite a .357 magnum).
Let's me echo just about everything the author is saying:
In theory and practice, the Stoner direct impingement system where gas is vented directly into the receiver requires vastly more maintenance than piston based designs. To my knowledge, no one who isn't accepting large numbers of donated M16s uses this design in their service rifle, with Canada an obvious exception to the rule. Absolutely no one.
It has two advantages that I'm aware of: the front of the rifle is lighter in weight, and has better inherent accuracy since nothing in the front is moving. However the Swiss, who care infinitely more than the US Army about marksmanship, didn't find the latter to be an issue when they developed their own 5.56 NATO rifle. (The Marines still care about marksmanship, but don't have any choice in their service rifle, except in rejecting the M4 and sticking to the 20 inch barreled M16).
5.56 NATO is a lousy round for stopping people, although the exact details were not elucidated until Martin Fackler did the research in the '80s. At low velocity, all things being equal the round just travels straight through, doing one flip to exit backwards (what happens when a bullet changes media like this). If the velocity is high enough, the round breaks at its cannelure (a crimped indentation that mates with the end of the cartridges brass to keep the bullet in place during rough handling and firing of other rounds), creating two pieces. At higher velocities, the back end will fragment. As a rule of thumb, for every inch chopped off the barrel, you loose ~50 yards of effective range due to this mechanism. Which causes one to wonder why the Army switched to the M4, sacrificing ~275.
The answer I see to that is the total, and I mean total, corruption of this part of US Army procurement in the post-WWII era. The Army did OK with the 1903/6 Springfield bolt action rifle (a copy of the 1898 Mauser), and superbly with the M1 Garand semi-auto rifle for WWII and Korea. But after that the procurement process was totally corrupt, as in samples of other designs were physically sabotaged so the M14 could be adopted. It's a Garand with a better gas system and a detachable box magazine, both good improvements, but outside of a good trigger pull it's probably the worst design adopted in that era because it leaves so much of the action unprotected from the elements.
The situation was so bad the Robert Strange McNamara's DoD of Vietnam infamy forced the AR-15 onto the Army, which as mentioned in the article totally screwed up the procurement of it (and one is allowed to suspect sabotaged it by e.g. not properly supporting the cleaning of the rifle). As the author mentioned, a lot of good men died in Vietnam due to unreliable M16s, which, I'll agree with the others, has been kludged to a barely acceptable state. But again, I'd say it's the worst of the currently issued rifles, except perhaps for the Heckler & Koch G36, a rifle that's infamously issued to armies that don't actually it in war.
Continuing with the procurement corruption, what prompted the move to the M4? Uncharitable people like me believe it's likely the fact that Colt lost the M16 contract to Fabrique Nationale d'Herstal (National Factory of Herstal, Belgium), which despite its name and origin has had a tight relationship with Americans and America since at least the '30s. So Colt came up with the propitiatory M4 and lo and behold, the Army switched to it.
Except now Colt has also lost that contract to FNH, and their factory in South Carolina is even more busy (they also at last count provided all the barrels for our machine guns, plus manufacture Winchester and Browning guns; in history, John Moses Browning (PBUH) first worked with Winchester before moving mostly to working with FNH).
Interesting. Although IMHO deciding on an Europellet dispenser caused it to be fatally flawed from inception. (IMHO it ought to also be single action, but realistically a smooth DAO would be the best that would also be acceptable to our ridiculously risk adverse officer corps).
I should also mention that the M60 was the worst General Purpose Machine Gun (GPMG) ever adopted by a major military. Details as reported by a M60 operator in Vietnam on request, but it was vastly inferior to the FNH, German and Soviet designs, witness our almost complete later adoption of the FNH design.
I'd like a source on the author's assertion that combat is taking place at longer ranges. A 20" barrel is harder to wield in an urban environment than a 16" barrel, that has always been my presumption on why the military has opted for the M4 over the M16.
It's a 20 inch to 14.5 inch change, and while it might have made sense for Iraq, I gather that long range engagements in much less urban Afghanistan are so common this is a big problem. And even in urban combat it's obviously inconvenient to not have an effective long arm for longer ranges. Losing 275 yards is not trivial.
As I see it, it's favoring an optimization for urban combat over raw effectiveness in field combat. And it's not "the military", it's the Army. The Marines, who have seen plenty of action in Afghanistan, still use 20 inch M16s.
Somewhere along the way, the US public seemed to decide that it was okay to go to war, but not okay to lose soldiers doing so. 2.5 million US military have served in Iraq, and 4500 is 0.18% of those. Painting a picture of soldiers dropping like flies is misleading - and yet the US still meets its military goals (though failing at the corresponding political ones).
In any case, against that backdrop of success, you're not going to shift the embedded graft keeping the current top dog in place.