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Originally Posted by Raellus
Ah, the classic AR v. AK debate continues!
I'm curious as to your sources for this claim. Everything I've read or seen on this particular subject says the exact opposite.
The AK-47 series is legendary for its robustness and ability to operate reliably even when filthy. I once saw a video of South African special forces recovering an AK that had been buried for years in a guerilla cache in Mozambique. They literally dumped a can of motor oil over it (not even close to a proper cleaning), and then immediately fired off a 30-round magazine on full auto with no problems. I've never seen an M-16 do that.
The early M-16 had a deadly reputation of jamming under adverse conditions. In Vietnam, hundreds of US soldiers and Marines were KIA when their first-gen G.I. M-16s jammed during firefights. To be fair, this was corrected in subsequent versions but, AFAIK the AK still operates more reliably under adverse conditions (mud, sand, water, etc.) than the AR-15.
True, but these days, those AR "flavors" are more-often-than not look-alikes rifles like the HK416, which uses a different, more reliable operating system. It looks like an AR-15 but, ironically, its innards are more similar to those of the AK.
The 5.56mm round performs really well in ballistics tests, but it falls short of 7.62x39mm when it comes to penetrating anything tougher than soft tissue. I've also read multiple battlefield reports of the 5.56mm round lacking "stopping power", and of human targets of fighting through multiple 5.56mm round hits.
That all said, what I've read/seen on the subject definitely confirms that the ergonomics, operating controls, recoil, accuracy, mod-ability, and ammo weight of the AR-15 is superior to the AK and its variants.
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Mostly from running both platforms in mud comps and on the job for the past 20 years. There's modern mud tests that bear this out, though. Outside of "legendary" claims and lingering fuddlore regarding the original production model's faults in Vietnam, essentially anything that shuts an AR-15 down is going to shut down an AK as well. About the only thing they do better - assuming both weapons are well-lubricated - is run better in deep freeze conditions, and if your AR isn't running in Bridgeport at 12,000 feet, well, you're using the wrong lubricant.
If you're not running the thing dripping, put plainly, you're doing it wrong. CLP is cheap, and there's not a thing in the world will seize on if you've got the operating system essentially swimming. Ran the thing through the Dynamic Assault Course and a couple dozen critical incident courses over the years, and through most competition, and whether shooting compromised or flat range, she runnin', as long as you keep the thing wet.
As far as the actual mechanics of it, the popular claim that an AK runs better because of "loose tolerances" is bunk. That's why the thing ingests so much environmental contamination, and why you can get so much large particulate in the chamber and even down into your magazine, even if the weapon is loaded. If your safety isn't on, the side of your weapon is open and able to ingest. Like, not just moisture, or water with particulate in it, but talking chunks, and straight into your operating system. The bolt also doesn't self-clear the way an AR does, blowing gas though the starboard side of the bolt carrier group; you're generating a high pressure environment that exits through the path of least resistance with every shot, and you can literally see it blowing mud out of the ejection port during the firing cycle. Whole thing stays more or less closed off, as well, whether the ejection port cover is open or not (better to keep it closed after charging a round anyway).
Your anecdote about dumping a can of motor oil into and onto a weapon isn't surprising at all. Motor oil, as it turns out, and as you may imagine, is an utterly fantastic lubricant, and as I've attempted to make clear, if a weapon is well-lubed, it'll generally fire, no matter the make or model, so long as it's not got a gross physical stoppage already in play that requires clearing to allow cycling the operating system.
As to the early M16 part, I couldn't really tell you other than agree with the reports, but we're not really talking about early M16s with jacked up operating and maintenance instructions, poor barrel finishing, and engineered failures.
As to the variant operating system, it's more reliable than the in-line internal gas piston of traditional ARs in certain circumstances, but it's not an across-the-board thing, and there are trade-offs with it, as there are with any design choice in a firearm; there ain't no such thing as a free lunch in any engineering field, and internal gas piston vs. an offset short stroke is no different. Also, for what it's worth, the system you're referring to shares little with an AK, as it's derived directly from G36's system in function, which itself is derived from the AR-18; the Germans basically re-skinned a Stoner design for their own operating system, and later put it back into an AR-15 form factor. There's a fairly straightforward lineage to this. As to the 416 mention, prior to their rolling that out, most of the ARs in use by the special operations forces mentioned were simply product improved Colt designs from licensed manufacturers, and still used the in-line internal gas piston.
For terminal performance, yeah, 7.62x39 knocks through a lot of light cover better, but you get better AP performance through body armor (especially more modern designs, as 7.62x39 designers failed to keep up with Western ceramics) with the tungsten core munitions at the higher velocities that the 5.56 cartridge generates, even out of M4-length barrels, compared to the AK. If you're sitting there trading rounds with someone through cover, though, few hundred yards away, where this sort of thing is usually taking place, you're doing yourself a disservice by sitting there and not making use of the rest of the weapons in your squad to fix, flank, and tenderly caress that hostile element that's engaging you. For what it's worth, though, you can wallbang just fine with 5.56 though most residential structures. If you're trying to sit there and wallow out a block wall, you're not going to achieve that with either rifle, unless you've got a firing squad. And generally speaking, if you're behind cover that I can't penetrate with my rifle, but COULD penetrate with a 7.62 round, I'm going to set your corpse on fire with a copper jet from an HEDP round or slamming a LAW into you, cuz it's no skin off my ass, and I brought three, because only an idiot fights fair.
There's no perfect weapon, again, and with any of them, you're working in other areas to counter shortcomings. ARs simply don't require a multitude of sacrifices.
As to the humans fighting through multiple 5.56 round hits, there's nothing surprising about that. You see similar with many other cartridges, all the way up to .300 WinMag. Ugly truth of it is that any hit not in the ten ring is gonna be a long an ugly death if you're looking at torso hits. If you don't blow the heart and lungs out, it's gonna take an uncomfortable amount of time for your target to die, period. Sometimes you see someone go down quickly from the traumatic psychological shock of the event, but it's unpredictable and absolutely cannot be counted on, even if you slammed a 7.62x51mm round into their chest. You can blow someone's heart and both lungs out with a hit, and worst case scenario, they've still got about 8 seconds on their feet they can kill you with. That's why you fire until your target is hamburger, no matter what system you're running. If you don't get a good spinal, or blow out the heart and lungs, or get lucky and tag someone in the domepiece, you're going to have to shoot them more. There's a reason it's a good idea to get a machine gun into a house, and it's not just cuz of fire superiority. 9mm, 5.56, 7.62, doesn't matter. If you can shoot your target half a dozen times and destroy every functional organ they have, they're going to bleed out and go down from hypovolemic shock that much quicker, and you've got more of a chance of clipping the strings with a good spinal hit with every shot that nails them, or blowing out the pelvis, or getting a similarly good structural hit that physically prevents the human body from working the way it's supposed to.
Stopping power in and of itself is a literally non-existent concept born largely out of fuddlore and the operators of a weapon not understanding the actual principles of what's taking place when they smoke someone, and weighing their perceptions of a fictional understanding of how gunfire kills people against an uncompromising reality of what happens when a bullet hits an organism that is wired from the ground up to stay alive until the brain shuts down from lack of oxygen and that is fully capable of killing you even after lethal injury unless you completely disassemble it or clip the strings.
Also, sorry for the whole post quote. I haven't used forum markup for years and am utterly terrible at it, and was unsure of how badly I'd bork the formatting if I tried getting clever or fancy.
PS: I should add that none of this is a straight repudiation of the AK platform as a whole. But the takeaway should be that there's nothing particularly legendary about it other than how widely available it was and how much better it was than most systems in use by the countries and non-governmental forces that adopted them in its early days of widespread popularity; the landscape didn't offer a lot of breadth in choice back then, and its competitor hadn't sorted out teething issues. The "reliability" of an AK is literally nothing more than you can achieve out of essentially any rifle platform in existence. We just don't see many other countries' designs in constant use through decades of conflict, because most countries don't spend decades at war or directly supplying conflict forces the way the US and USSR did. Like, no one's going to have an enduring memory of the L85 other than UK servicemembers. Everyone's seen an AK, and after Vietnam, just about anyone except folks who run both platforms regularly and in a variety of operating conditions is typically exposed to a great deal more myth than reality.