Are U.S. Soldiers Dying From Inadequate Weapons? No.

I dislike doing rebuttal posts. The temptation is strong to adopt a simple quote-and-refute style, which costs little time and allows me to return to my only modestly interesting but very necessary daily life. This style is only compatible with lazy writing, however, and it's bad form to use it too often. Even so, there is a need for a direct response to some works of "journalism" which rely on sensationalist headlines over content to get attention, and which spread falsehoods, misconceptions, and sometimes even outright lies in the process.

I was asked by a friend what I thought about this hit piece on the M16/M4 platform and the 5.56mm caliber, which I decided offered me an opportunity to write a little more about the subject. As if anyone felt I hadn't already written enough, that is. Interestingly, the piece was written by Tom Kratman - a name I had to google - who is apparently a veteran of the 5th Special Forces Group and of 19 years in regular Army, eventually retiring at O-5 (the same as my father, of a different branch, coincidentally). He also writes science fiction for Baen, the same publisher where the old THR (a major haunt of mine, once upon a time) moderator Larry Correia now writes.

Kratman is then no neophyte as a writer or novice to military thinking, but this in my opinion only lends a hue of bafflement to his two EveryJoe articles. This man was special forces, and an officer, I must keep reminding myself as I read every tired myth, regurgitated piece of gunwriter hype, and mis-remembered factoid.

It is difficult for me to not be critical of the pieces, both from a factual and a writing standpoint. When my inner monologue reads the figures on my liquid crystal display, I am taken back to caffeine-and-pizza fueled spring mornings and afternoons, sitting in one piece chair-desks intended for the tiny Japanese furniture maker who designed them while listening to a youth who hasn't yet learned to shave the few wisps of a Van Dyke growing on his otherwise newborn face wring out a thin argument he decided on a week before. "Write something we can sell," I wonder if that phrase was ever uttered aloud or transmitted via electrons down copper wires during the planning phase of these two articles. Or perhaps Mr. Kratman truly believes in his premature ideas, which are so poorly supported they are in free-fall, about to reach terminal velocity.

"Remember, he was in 5th Special Forces Group, and a Lieutenant Colonel," again.

Let's step back. Many people disagree with me regarding my opinions of the AR-15 rifle family and the 5.56mm cartridge especially. Some of those people, I can hold a discourse with, and present the evidence I have for my position as best I can, to reach a mutual understanding of ideas, experiences, and views which led our opinions to where they are. Some I cannot, because they are too used to fighting the good fight; too zealous for a true mutual discourse.

Many more are too wrapped up in thin premises fed to them via casual reading of the latest issues of tactical magazines in the Barnes & Noble to really have a decent conversation with. It's this last kind that Mr. Kratman most closely resembles, from his escape-velocity exaggeration of the differences in capability of the M4 carbine and M16 rifle, to his mis-placed snark about the vagueness of the ACR program from the 1980s and 1990s. This last plays off an assumption that isn't true - that the ACR program demanded a deliberately vague "100% improvement" over the M16, begetting the almost laughably inane comment: "That means that we will never have a rifle that’s 99% better." In truth, the ACR program's goal was very specific: The winning rifle had to demonstrate a 100% improvement in hit probability during a highly sophisticated course designed specifically to measure that factor with soldiers under combat stress.

None of the rifles even came close. None of the advanced concepts, not burst fire, not caseless ammunition, not four power optical sights, improved the probability of a hit anywhere close to 100% over the M16A2 rifle. Those design elements that did significantly aid the hit probability - most notably optical sights - were incorporated into future AR-15 pattern service rifles and are in use today. To Mr. Kratman, however, the M4A1 with laser, CCO, vertical grip, and light might as well be an M16A2. The degree to which this is true is irrelevant - A G11 might as well be an M16A2 in terms of hit probability, something that Mr. Kratman ignores in favor of the white-noise-esque "they're failing our boys!" drone.

Kratman rounds out the article with more sophomoric whinging dressed as snark, and an off comment about the French. "A Lieutenant Colonel and veteran of the 5th SFG..." Yes, of course, I mustn't forget.

His follow up begins by repeating another half-truth about the M16; that the Army never wanted it and it was all McNamara's fault, a "fact" that ignores that the Army agreed to cancel M14 production in favor of the extremely ambitious SPIW, and McNamara was forcing them to, you know, actually provide rifles to the troops in the meantime. It may be presumptuous of me to think that this is something armies are expected to do, but I'll risk it. Eventually, SPIW crashed and burned, and the surprisingly good M16 became the mainstay of the Army for a half-century. None of this matters to Kratman, of course, since it doesn't make for good copy.

Where some sensationalist gunwriters would take a "back to basics" tack, and suggest re-adopting the M14 in .280 British or some such nonsense, Kratman instead talks about some potential technological improvements that could be in the pipeline for small arms, along with a number of other things that rifle salesmen want you to believe are technological improvements, but actually aren't. His list goes: 1. Intermediate-intermediate calibers, 2. Hyper burst, 3. Carbon-fiber barrels, 4. Electronic ignition, 5. Plastic cased ammunition, 6. Caseless ammunition, 7. A gas piston operating rod, and 8. Optical sights. 2, 3, 4, and 5 fit in with potential technologies that could improve the rifles of the future, 1 and 7 mostly sell rifles, not really offering anything over the 5.56mm cartridge and the AR-15 platform, 6 is all but dead due to technical issues, and 8 has already been implemented, further calcifying my suspicion that Mr. Kratman's technical knowledge of the subject is stuck in 1991.

What's strange is that he doesn't use this list to paint a rosy picture of the future of small arms in contrast to its oft-claimed stagnation; he uses it (in yet another attempt) to bash the M16. As if, somehow, they could have issued rifles then in 1964 that utilized technologies that are just now maturing to a basic level of feasibility. Some early AR series rifles did trial composite barrels and carbon-fiber handguards, features subsequently deleted in later versions because they didn't work very well then. It's as if Mr. Kratman doesn't understand that just having a working prototype doesn't mean you can make ten million rugged, mature, combat-ready weapons.

"A Lieutenant Colonel and veteran of the 5th SFG," I must remind myself.

It's bizarre to read a piece so sophomoric and poorly researched and constructed, only to follow the authorship trail and read a biography that impressive. Simply put, while I do not demand that everything I read reinforce my own opinions and ideas, I do not expect this sort of thing from a Special Forces Group veteran, much less one who's an O-5 rank and who gets paid to write for a living.