The M16 Assault Rifle family, developed by Colt, is one of the more widely recognized assault rifles today, serving as the counterpoint to the AK-47. Firing the 5.56 mm (.223 Caliber) round, which is derived from but not identical to the .223 Remington cartridge. Being made mostly of plastic and aluminum, along with it's distinguishing black color, straight profile and long fore-grip.
When the XM16E1 was fully deployed in Vietnam war in 1965, it didn't perform so well, the plastic parts made the gun much more fragile and the operating system caused the M16 to have feeding problems. Also, in order to adapt the atmosphere in the Vietnam, the military added a lot of dehumidifier sprays to the M16 plus without proper instructions on the M16. Thus, performance suffered. In 1967 they had major revisions on the M16 and the rifle was given chrome lined chamber and a comic book was given as a manual on proper maintenance.
The dust cover on the ejector port of the weapon did not seal it against dust, which got into the loading mechanism and as a result, it jammed quite often without regular cleaning. Through various versions of the weapon, attempts were made to solve this problem, with little success. Another problem was the quality of the gunpowder in the casings, causing an incredible buildup of residue unless it was cleaned often. And since Colt had promoted the weapon as 'self-cleaning', the initial weapons did not have cleaning kits, and as a result, many soldiers threw away their M16A1s for enemy AK-47s, at the risk of being shot by their own troops.
Nowadays, military-issued M16s have a basic cleaning kit in the buttstock of the weapon.
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