[HorseSoldier]

MY MOS brought in the M16A4 and it's better than what you guys have on every level ( IE you dont train past 300 meters in Marksmanship and we do 500m for everone). If you want data just come and ask I'm the Officer in Charge of range control at Marine Corps Base Hawaii!!!. Also the RCO or ACOG is better that anything you have a red dot M68 is crap. our sight can do so many thing's and so Many sights have spawned off it IE (SDO,MDO). CQB is done at our CQB school (Security Force Reg ) something the army does not have......MOUT on the other hand is what you are talking about is done with a Rifle/Carbine my last choice would be a pistol (effective use of a fmj no expanding 115 grain bullet for terminal ballistics vise a SOST)

A) Just to clarify where I'm coming from when I hurt your feelings, I have 18 years in service, four and half of them as a support guy in an SF unit where I spent all that time directly assigned out to an ODA. Whatever you think I was trained to do under your understanding of army doctrine and a couple bucks might be barely adequate to get you a beverage at Starbucks.

B) Reading comprehension in the USMC must be fairly substandard if even the zeros can't grasp that my previous post praised the ACOG. I had an issued TA01 when the RCO was still a distant glimmer in an optimistic Gunner's eye, and mass issue of the TA31 is about the only thing the USMC has done right about small arms in a decade or more.

C) Sorry -- M16A4 is a wrong answer for every question the gunfighter asks about how to score okay on USMC Table 1 and do D&C -- precisely the two real reasons why the USMC picked it over the M4. Every marine enlisted guy I dealt with while issued an M4A1 was universally critical of the M16A4 for actual combat, said the M4 wouldn't be as good for Table 1, and would have traded their mother for an M4 and to be rid of their musket.

D) Whatever you think soldiers do or don't get in terms of weapons training, I personally was trained to shoot out to 600 with my issue M4, ACOG, and decent ammo (Mk 262) and make consistent hits. Our flawed qual course involves shooting to 300 meters, your fetishistic antique festival that passes for a basic qual course involves shooting to 500. Yippy skippy. Since no one has produced any data I've ever seen that actually shows marines making more hits under combat conditions I'm underwhelmed by the allegations of superiority.

and I'm a grad of HRP/Gunslinger school and a few other Marine corps schools for actions with a pistol. Please before you knock another service be in for more than 4 years and have some MOS street creed to back it up. Our M27 smokes anything you have in General Service and it might be our new Service rifle if we can get the cash for it.

The M27 is . . . like the M16A2/A4 a bunch of wrong answers for what it is supposed to do. As a base of fire weapon/automatic rifle it's going to get troops killed. Period. But it's sexy as hell. If you're an HK fanboi or live in the shadow of CAG and SEAL Team 6.

Yes that means every Marine would have a piston Carbine/Rifle that has a Heavy floated barrel that does sub MOA work....nothing the army has on the Table for there SF can beat that...How do I know welllllll I work with them.... I had a ODA team on my range last week and this week they will be back and they are blown away with what our basic guys do and what my scout sniper school does out here.

Having been in that community and seen the USMC by comparison, I have to credit the ODA you worked with for their politeness. Nobody I was ever around was overly impressed with what the USMC brought to the gunfighting table. Not bad, but notably good.

As for the M27 -- wow, so they've fixed the accuracy issue HK416s had? When the M27 was still making people scratch their heads at its T&E victories over better actual base of fire weapons, the HK416s some of our ODAs were actually running operations with were 4-5 MOA weapons (charitably) with green tip, and still 2.5-ish with Mk 262.

Maybe the 27s have fixed the crap accuracy issue, but the fact that the USMC bought a weapon with a mag well that won't accept PMags so guys can better use a Starsky & Hutch SWAT team front-of-magwell grip . . . well it demonstrates that decision makers who don't even know the right questions certainly won't get the right answers, will they? Garbage in-garbage out, as the computer types say.

(Most of our guys that got 416s issued at the team level? Ditched them and either went back to stock M4A1s or M4s with shorter direct gas uppers. One of the good parts of SF is that the works/doesn't work decision cycle happens at a much lower level, for the most part, efforts to ditch the M9 notwithstanding. Once the chicks dig it factor wore off, the 416 mostly got tossed. Lance Corporal Schmuckatelly in a line infantry unit in the USMC won't have the benefit of being able to do the same thing until someone with a lot of stars on their shoulders owns up to their mistake, which takes a whole lot longer -- if it ever happens at all.)

The amount of times a primary weapon has failed a Marine in the Global war on terror is so low we cant even find numbers for it in our Marine Corps lessons learned branch. we clean our weapons!!! we teach this in boot camp check any movie , we dont use the M4 as a machine gun and burn up the barrels and make the chamber so hot rounds cook off. I have read after actions of this from the army MANY!!!!. so a back up is for tier one operators who have a mission to use one. Ie guys trained in CQB......witch take a long time and a ton of ammo.

It's awesome you (over) clean your weapons, since the primary failure point in the M16/M4 weapon system is bad mags. I kept my M4 running for a good long time with no more cleaning than wiping the BCG down with an oiled gym sock and soaking the bolt with oil. And using good mags. Big Boy Rules and all that -- my gun always went bang when require to, and I didn't have under-employed and underqualified NCOs trying to justify their existence to senior officers but working above their level of competence.

From the perspective of my training and experience absolutely nothing demonstrates systemic leadership failure like watching Joes try to scrub the parkerizing off parts of their weapons to satisfy officers and NCOs who know pitifully less than they should about absolute basics and fundamentals.

As for not using the M4 as a machinegun -- no, as an institution you've made a collective decision to deprive the infantrymen of effective base of fire and suppressive weapons. You've made the decision to replace a belt felt weapon with one that runs on 30 round magazines, firing the same cartridge as the standard service rifle. Congratulations -- 70 years late, but you're reinvented the Bren Gun or BAR. And actually that's charitable, since at least the Bren offered a fire power differential next to bolt guns that the M27 simply doesn't provide. (And, as a side note, both those weapons came up woefully short against belt fed squad machine guns circa 1944 -- maybe the USMC never learned this lesson since they were never on the wrong end of an MG34 or 42, but since I know for a fact marines have been on the wrong end of PKMs I'd think if the people running the show were half as smart as they think they are they'd have connected the dots.)

Oh but you'll suppress via precision fire. Holy Jesus, where do I get the quality of narcotics issued to me that the decision makers who hit on that plan were smoking, shooting, and/or snorting? Was there like a gunnery sergeant convention where they were crushing Oxycontin, cooking it in a spoon, and injecting it directly into their eyeballs as they contemplated weapons procurement I never heard about?

Your not doing CQB by definition in Iraq or Afghanistan you are doing MOUT. Look it up in your FM 90-10,FM 90-10-1 , FM 3-06 FM 3-21.8,FM 7-8, FM 7-85, FM7-92

Doctrinally, you don't know what I was trained or tasked to do, so before you split hairs maybe you should also see if you can peruse a syllabus for SFAUC, SFBCC, and the like.