Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!cbnews!military
From: gwh%typhoon.Berkeley.EDU@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (George William Herbert)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: early bad press may be justified
Message-ID: <10178@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 13 Oct 89 02:39:49 GMT
Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM
Organization: ucb
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From: gwh%typhoon.Berkeley.EDU@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (George William Herbert)
In article <10145@cbnews.ATT.COM> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
re. Reliability
>
>This depends on who you talk to.  M-16 reliability has gone from superb
>(original Stoner AR-15) to dreadful (US Army "improves" design to produce
>original M-16) to barely passable (later variants).  I haven't heard a
>recent report on the M-1.  Do remember that the Army has a large vested
>interest in portraying its decisions as correct and its weapons as great.
>It's not uncommon for off-the-record interviews with actual users to tell
>a very different story than that found in the official press releases.

The M-16A2 is MUCH better, as good as the AR-15.  Or so I hear, and this is
from people who used or were exposed to both.  The M-16 (usaf variant) was
a renamed AR-15; the M-16A1 was the army 'improved' variant which caused a
lot of problems.  It didn't help that they told the soldiers at first that
the gun didn't need cleaning.  (It needed MORE than the M-14 it replaced...)
This was an institutional failure more than a equipment one, but the -A1 
model did have more problems.

The Abrahms M-1 and M-1A1 (120mm sans 105mm main gun) are now fairly 
reliable.  Except for certain problems inherent with moving a tracked 
vehicle as fast as the M-1 moves, it's as reliable as any other Main
Battle Tank.  There were some breaking-in problems, but those have
been ironed out.

A lot of the disagreements in reliability can be also attributed to lack
of connectiveness in what each side is testing.  For instance, the recent
Bradley snafu was mostly caused by a fundamental lack of understanding
about what it was.  People often fail to realize thet the armed forces will
put an improvement in reliablility as good, even if the baseline of 
comparason was poor...


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George William Herbert  UCB Naval Architecture Dpt. (my god, even on schedule!)
maniac@garnet.berkeley.edu  gwh@ocf.berkeley.edu
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