PEO Soldier’s recent claims of more than 80 percent soldier satisfaction with the M4/M4A1 stand in contrast to some recent Congressional assertions, which focused instead on what would presumably be the remaining 20 percent.
One example occurred during an April 11, 2013 hearing before the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces, when Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez (D, California) raised the IC program in a question to Ostrowski, claiming that rifle performance remained a major issue of concern among soldiers.
“I understand that we had this rifle even in the 1980s – I get that. And I understand that you have made changes to it. I have no problem with Colt, by the way. I don’t have a dog in this fight.’ My fight is to make sure that to the extent possible we have something that really, really works well on all fronts for our soldier. And when they are telling me [and] when you have a study that says 20 percent of them said that their weapon completely and totally jammed on them – and you have your own study out of the Army that says there’s a more reliable weapon out there, maybe, then I think we need to make sure that we are really checking this and having this competition move forward. And the fact that this has been going on since 1995 tells me that there’s a lot of politics in this. I don’t have a gun manufacturer in my district. I just want the right thing. So are you or are you not truly competing this?”
“I’ve been looking at this for a while,” Sanchez said. “In 1995 we started the Objective Individual Combat [Weapon] program. After 10 years and $50 million we cancelled that in 2005. Then we were stop again, start again, stop again, start again – and this M4 replacement issue has been going on and on. In 2009 we had the study from the Center for Naval Analysis, where they surveyed our troops coming back from Iraq and 20 percent of them said they had a complete and total jam of their rifle. The reason I bring this up is because, over time, when I talk to troops; we identified the [need for] armor early on; we identified the MRAP going on; and this is another one of those issues that, when I talk to our military who have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan, the number one issue that they talk about is the jamming of their rifle. In 2010 the Army did a study at Aberdeen ATC that tested four rifles – the M4, the SCAR, the HK416, and the XM8. It tested them in particular with respect to the dust chamber reliability – i.e. How does our weapon jam? And the M4 was 800 percent less reliable than the HK416. And nobody disputed those facts. So my question is, what are we doing about this? What are we doing to take a look at a more reliable weapon for our soldier?”
The updated M4’s signature difference from the previous version is the switch to fully automatic instead of burst. U.S. Army photo by Spc. Zane Craig
Ostrowski responded by noting that the original M4 design was introduced to the Army in 1990, “and since then we have made over 92 separate adjustments and modifications to that weapon system to improve accuracy, reliability and so forth. Each one of these changes has brought about a much better weapon system that we ever had before. The original requirement for the M4 was a Mean Rounds Between Stoppages of 600 rounds – that’s basically three ‘basic loads,’ seven magazines times three [loads] before you had a single failure. Our recent testing in 2010 with the same weapon with the M855 ammunition revealed 3692 rounds between stoppages. That’s a six times increase over the original requirement of 600 rounds between stoppages. So the weapons that we carried back in 2001, 2003, 2004 are not the same M4s that we’re carrying today in terms of reliability, because of all the improvements that we made on that weapon system.”
Pushing for an answer regarding the status of the IC program in mid-April, Sanchez said, “I understand that we had this rifle even in the 1980s – I get that. And I understand that you have made changes to it. I have no problem with Colt, by the way. I don’t have a dog in this fight.’ My fight is to make sure that to the extent possible we have something that really, really works well on all fronts for our soldier. And when they are telling me [and] when you have a study that says 20 percent of them said that their weapon completely and totally jammed on them – and you have your own study out of the Army that says there’s a more reliable weapon out there, maybe, then I think we need to make sure that we are really checking this and having this competition move forward. And the fact that this has been going on since 1995 tells me that there’s a lot of politics in this. I don’t have a gun manufacturer in my district. I just want the right thing. So are you or are you not truly competing this?”
“We are absolutely competing it,” Ostrowski replied. Reviewing the first two phases of the exploration process, he said then that the selected data was then before a Source Selection Authority to determine whether the program would go into a phase three.