There is a Product Cult around the AR15 and so anyone that criticizes the thing has to face the ire of angry Cultists.
By the way, here is a class on how to create a Product Cult.
There are good reasons why no other Nation State has copied the M16 or adopted it unless it was given as foreign aid, and I believe some of those issues are addressed in the article. Every service member I ever pulled a target with would agree the M16 was a maintenance heavy rifle. A Marine Reservist said in southern Iraq they were cleaning their M16's/M4's three times a day because they were unreliable in the dusty environment. And he expressed amazement at how much sand they could pour into a AK47 (with its top cover off) and the thing would still go bang. A Green Beret bud of mine told me a VC/NVA was found buried in the mud by a bulldozer scraping the road. Bud went over, pulled the AK out of the mud, racked the bolt, and the weapon functioned!
I total agree with this statement,
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales said, "American penchant for arming troops with lousy rifles has been responsible for a staggering number of unnecessary deaths…They died because the Army’s weapon buying bureaucracy has consistently denied that a Soldier’s individual weapon is important enough to gain their serious attention.”
Regulatory capture is true of Government agencies. Now I offer a model of the military industrial complex that is counter intuitive, butthe purpose of the Military agencies is not National Defense, but rather the primary of the Military is to maximize the profits of the industrial complex. Weapon acquisition is profoundly political and expensive, and it is the Defense Contractors who bring the bacon home from Congress. And once a weapon is adopted, Government managers do everything they can to maximize the profits of their Prime Contractor, thus protecting their own Governmental organization. Government managers are Corporate sock puppets, and they accept this as long as their jobs, perks, and positions are maintained by their contractor on Capital Hill.
An M16 story: early M16's worked well with the original "stick" propellant. However once the Government told the powder supplier to qualify their production, that is guarantee each lot made would meet requirements, the powder manufacturer told the Government to pound sand. Pressure curve tolerances were actually tighter than state of the art production processes could hold. So the Government used M14 ball powder. God knows why alternatives were not examined, but it was the path of least resistance. M16's fired with the ball powder cartridges had a high malfunction rate. Troops in Vietnam were issued the ball powder cartridges and were having lots of malfunctions in combat, which got many good American boys killed.
However, the Army Ordnance Bureau reserved what was left of the stick powder cartridges and sent them to Colt Manufacturing. Colt used these cartridges in acceptance testing of their M16's. If Colt had conducted function tests with the ball powder cartridges, their malfunction rate, and thus, reject rate, would have gone up. The Ichord Commission more or less considered this criminal conduct by the Army Ordnance Bureau, but no one got in trouble. Because to do otherwise would have reduced the profits of Colt Corporation.
Something else, rifle budgets are chump change. In fact, I can't find a rifle program for 2022. The Next Generation Squad weapon pg 3-5,
https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/FY2022/FY2022_Weapons.pdf three year program cost, including development and production, $165 million. By comparison, the
F35 fleet, $1.7 trillion.
Since what would replace the M16/M4 would not be 100% better, and the size of small arms budgets, the forcing function for replacement is small. And it won't come from inside DoD, as DoD's incentives are all about protecting existing contractors. It takes an act of Congress to kill a dysfunctional, massively over budget and over schedule program.
