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Giving M4 failures ‘an alibi’?

Army weapons officials briefed members of Congress and reporters on M4 carbine performance numbers that excluded more than half of the embattled carbine’s failures in a round of reliability tests.

Army testers threw out hundreds of M4 carbine failures from a reliability test this summer, causing the number of Class 1 and Class 2 stoppages, those that soldiers can clear themselves, to drop from 678 to 296, according to an Army briefing document.

Since late last year, test officials at Army Test and Evaluation Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., have performed three reliability tests, in each test firing 60,000 rounds from the M4 and other weapons in extreme dust conditions.

The first two tests, one in late 2006 and one in July, involved just M16s and M4s.

Dust test three, which was completed in November, compared the M4’s performance to the Heckler & Koch XM8, the FNH USA’s Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle and the H&K 416.

Army weapons officials praised the M4’s performance before members of Congress and reporters Dec. 17, emphasizing that the weapon experienced only 296 stoppages during dust test two this summer.

Discrepancy a concern

By comparison, the results of dust test three show the M4 suffering 863 of the same kind of stoppages and finishing last in the test. Brig. Gen. Mark Brown said Army officials are concerned over this gap of 567 stoppages since the test criteria for both tests were the same.

“You can see that if you look at the performance of the M4 in dust test two, the results would have put it right in the shot group with the other three weapons for Class 1, 2 and 3 stoppages — no mathematically statistical difference,” Brown, the commander of Program Executive Office Soldier, told reporters Dec. 17. “The problem is at this point in time, at this stage of the test analysis, we don’t know what caused the difference on performance between dust test two and dust test three.”

But in a July 23 story, Army Times reported that the M4 suffered 678 of these failures in test two, citing the test briefing document a congressional source said he received from the Army.

‘Giving jams ... an alibi’

The congressional source said the discrepancy between the 678 failures the Army briefed to members of Congress initially after the test this summer and the 296 included in the Dec. 17 briefing, a difference of 382 stoppages means “the final report is not telling us how many times the weapon jams. It’s giving 50 percent of the M4’s jams an alibi and not reporting them.”

Army officials explained that the 382 M4 stoppages not included in the results could have been discarded when ATEC officials finalized the results of dust test two in October through a process known as the Reliability, Availability and Maintainability, or RAM, Scoring Conference that is part of every such test, said Col. Carl Lipsit, project manager for Soldier Weapons.

The 863 stoppages reported in the results of dust test three represented the final number after the RAM process, Lipsit said.

ATEC officials did not provide test three’s initial number of failures and said the command “stands behind” the 296 stoppages in dust test two that are in the final report, said ATEC spokesman Tom Rheinlander.

RAM is considered in all acquisitions and is part of any system evaluation. The RAM Scoring Conference attempts to evaluate and classify each kind of failure in a test and to attribute each failure to a particular cause such as operator error, part failure or the system itself, Lipsit said.

For example, if testers link 10 stoppages to a broken part, they could throw out nine of those stoppages and count only one failure in the final report, Lipsit said.