ak? lack of modularity? because it doesnt have a quick change barrel (never seen a soldier change his barrel on a battlefield) or because it doesnt have a top rail (despite the side rail being just as strong, accurate, retains zero, and the polish rifles even have a top rail)... wheres this lack of "modularity"?
It's true - a lot of the M4's more desirable features can be designed into an AKM platform. Of course, if you're going to engineer the good stuff in, you might as well engineer the bad stuff out - and then you're designing a new rifle. And if you're going to design a new rifle...well, we're beyond both original rifles now.
heck the biggest flaw of the 6.5 grendel and 6.8SPC was that they had to constrain specifically to the AR15 magwell... with an AK you can make a magazine well as long, or as wide as needed, you have the option of a side folding stock, and its reliable
I'm lost here. Perhaps I'm not understanding. Enlarging the magazine well can be done on nearly anything, including the M16 platform. (See Exhibit A: the AR-10.) This is not a bolt-on feature. It's a major redesign. We can make the magazine wells larger on either rifle, so I don't see this as being a valid complaint. The idea with work-around cartridges was to improve the performance of the weapon without changing the fundamental design. Utilizing one of these cartridges would require only a new upper and magazine at worst - something that the AKM can't accomodate, interestingly enough.
so i dont get this "lack of modularity" crap when its capable of doing everything an AR15 can do, and then some, especially with the polish beryl/archer rifle capable of 1 MOA and does in fact have a top rail
Again, we can incorporate the good parts from the M16 into an AKM, but we're basically designing a new rifle at that point. If we're going to design a new rifle, we can do better than either, so why not do better?
"oh, but it doesnt have a bolt hold open feature or a drop free magazine" like thats more important than reliability... i think people are just WAY too enamored with "tacti-cool"
Those features are probably not thought of as being more important than reliability, but they're both desirable features. Agreed on the latter point.
A more important question may be this: if the M16's basic design is unsatisfactory (and by most accounts, it is not), why not adopt something new? This will cost a lot of money, require a lot of training and the infrastructure supporting the training, and will create significant "churn", both operationally and logistically. If the M16's case is any indicator of what will happen, we will be left with a rifle and caliber that we will be using for decades afterward.
The military's stance on it - a stance that I agree with - is that whatever replaces it should be significantly better. It should not be an incremental improvement, but rather a quantum leap. Again, we're probably going to be stuck with it for quite some time, and the rest of the world won't sit still in the mean time. If we apply this line of thought to the question, we can reasonably come to the conclusion that the AKM probably isn't the answer, no matter how many gadgets we bolt on to it or how much we monkey with the design. It must be far better than that to even be worthy of consideration.