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From: gwh%earthquake.Berkeley.EDU@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (George William Herbert)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: M-16 reliability (was Re: early bad press may be justified)
Message-ID: <10308@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 18 Oct 89 02:48:31 GMT
Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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From: gwh%earthquake.Berkeley.EDU@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (George William Herbert)
In article <10259@cbnews.ATT.COM> cmr@cvedc.Prime.Com (Chesley Reyburn) writes:
>In article <10181@cbnews.ATT.COM> gt0818a%prism@gatech.edu (Paul E. Robichaux) writes:
>>... (just don't get me started on the Beretta 92F!)
>
>Please do comment. I am curious about this weapon's abilities,
>reliability, etc. Is it a piece of junk? Is it able to leap
>tall buildings at a single bound?

	It works fine.  There have been 5 (five) structure failures
out of ~150 thousand guns, all of which have been traced to the US 
Army's use of REAL HOT 9mm ammo, which is way outside the commercial
specifications.  There is a structural redesign in the works to change
failure modes to noninjuring ones.

	Common army tactic, btw: if the ammo breaks the gun, redesign
the gun :)

[mod.note:  To which I'm sure many readers will respond, "wouldn't
	it have been better to design a gun to handle the specified 
	ammo ?"   Seems to me that there must be a NATO standard for
	9mm, that being, supposedly, why we dropped the .45.  Does
	the US use a more powerful load ?  - Bill ]

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