Summary and Key Points: The M16 rifle, designed by Eugene Stoner and adopted by the U.S. military in the 1960s, has remained a staple due to its reliability, modularity, and effectiveness.

In Part One of this series, we discussed how the U.S. Army came to dump the M14 battle rifle for the M16 assault rifle. The M16 promised light weight and greater lethality, but was it all it was ...

The standard U.S. infantry rifle in Vietnam is the M16. There have been stories of men getting killed because their M16s jammed in battle. My ad­vice is to ignore these tales. I have carried at ...

An Army captain's critique of the service’s new XM7 rifle has experts and soldiers split on the issue of magazine capacity.

The Marine Corps’ long, sometimes twisted, relationship with the M16 rifle is slowly coming to an end. On Monday, the Marine Corps Times reported that the rifle is only a few signatures away ...

The widespread issue of the M16 rifle to troops in Vietnam, beginning in the mid-1960s, was fraught with problems. As reports of M16s failing in combat began to filter in, the U.S. Army scrambled ...

It would become the standard-issue rifle—renamed the M16, for the prosaic “Model 16”—just in time for the rise of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. A U.S. Marine holds his M16 rifle alert after ...

Editor’s note: this post first appeared in April 2018 Decades before the U.S. military transitioned away from the M16 assault rifle in favor of the lightweight M4 carbine, the Army eyed an ...

When the Army ordered its now standard M4 carbine in 1993 from firearms maker Colt, it saw the rifle as a lighter, more agile alternative to the Vietnam era M16 with similar punch at short range.