Optimized Caliber

[LRRPF52]

There's a lot to be said for a design that keeps all the moving parts isolated from external debris as much as practically possible. Once you locate critical components outside and exposed to fine & large sand particles, you're asking for the system to cough. Not to say that the DI system won't choke in the worst of conditions, but I feel that it prolongs the inevitable more than an op-rod driven gun.

Out of 10 years in the Army spending most of that time either in the field or forward-deployed, I had very few malfs with my issued M16A1's, M16A2's, M4's, and M4A1's. The very few malfs that I did have involved one of these scenarios:

1) A 30rd magazine that was so old, the aluminum had turned orange, with the spine splitting and feed lips all jacked up
2) No lubrication on a recently command inspection-stripped dry M4
3) Mega dust storm where the weather front covered an area spanning from Eastern Turkey to Northeastern Egypt, and swept eastward through the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Arabian Peninsula like a massive hurricane that hits the Eastern US Seaboard-only with dust replacing the rain. Not even our M24's or breacher shotguns could chamber a round in that environment, so good luck with any self-loader.