When Big Guns Go Down
Written by Damien Spleeters
November 18, 2015 // 09:00 AM EST
The Fourth of July 2010 was blood and pain for Sean McMahon.
On Independence Day, five years ago, US Army Specialist McMahon was appointed to test a new M2 .50 caliber machine gun recently delivered to his unit a couple hundred yards outside Forward Operating Base Kunduz, Afghanistan, at the firing range. After McMahon fired his original weapon, his staff sergeant had him swap it out for the new one.
As McMahon pressed the trigger, the turret-mounted weapon wouldn’t fire. He removed the ammunition and inspected the gun, preparing it once more for firing. He squeezed the trigger. Again, nothing. Switching from full-automatic to semi-automatic mode, McMahon fired one last time. That’s when the weapon exploded. Shell casing tore through his right leg.
“I looked down and it was just my knee and just a pool of blood,” McMahon remembers. “And the first thing that came to my mind was, ‘Holy crap, I blew my leg off.’”
McMahon was rushed to a nearby hospital before returning to the US for additional treatment. After the incident, McMahon told me his unit refused to use the new M2 machine guns sent over by the Pentagon. His injuries didn’t heal properly, and soon blood clots formed in his veins. He would not be able to run or jump anymore. Diagnosed with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, McMahon retired from the Army in March 2012.
The M2 machine gun is the embodiment of simplicity in a killing machine. Nicknamed the “Ma Deuce,” the M2 is fed with a belt of .50 Browning Machine Gun (BMG) rounds, and has been in use in the US military since the 1930s.
Assuming you have a round in the chamber, and a gunner to press the trigger, the M2's operation is fairly simple. The chain reaction is initiated when the firing pin strikes the primer, causing an explosion in the casing, and pushing the projectile out of the barrel. The recoil caused by the explosion pushes the bolt backwards, extracting the spent cartridge and feeding a fresh one into the chamber.
The bolt is the pumping heart of the gun. If it's damaged, or improperly manufactured, there might be too much room left for a cartridge to be chambered correctly in the weapon, which can result in a rupture of the case, damaging the gun and possibly injuring the operator. That’s potentially what happened to McMahon, who is among a growing chorus of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who say these sorts of malfunctions, stemming from defective critical parts like bolts, pose a deadly danger.
While US Marines and soldiers like McMahon were fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon shipped defective gun parts over to them, according to previously unrevealed records obtained by Motherboard. I’ve reviewed thousands of pages of Department of Defense audits, studies, quality deficiency reports, contracts and correspondence, and court records, and have interviewed dozens of current and former military officials and manufacturers' employees, quality control inspectors, weapons experts, and veterans about the scope of the problem. My research found that tens of thousands of defective machine gun and other firearms parts, including bolts, backplates, firing and extractor pins, and sights have turned up in the field in the last decade, putting soldiers and Marines in harm's way.
Read more: The Pentagon's exploding guns, by the numbers
Moreover, the government failed to test the quality of the critical gun parts it bought and, as issues were being reported from the battlefront, took months to find out where most of the defective parts had ended up. Yet the Pentagon awarded new contracts to the same contractors, waiving new quality tests along the way. Records also show US military contractors made mistakes manufacturing critical weapon parts after the government waived quality tests, and often took months to fix the problems.
The problematic parts affect particularly two of the most important machine gun systems currently in use in the US military: the M249 light machine gun and the M2 heavy machine gun, the model that blew up on McMahon. In 2012, the US Army said it had more than 54,000 M2s in its inventory. About 80,000 M249s had been made as of 2008, according to the manufacturer, FN Manufacturing. When critical parts for these two guns are deficient, the weapons jam. Sometimes they explode.
Today, there are three flesh colored scars on McMahon’s right leg. A few months after the incident, he said he was irritable and isolated. He told his doctors he couldn’t sleep, according to medical records obtained from the Department of Veterans Affairs. The pain in his leg was mild but always there. His ears rang.
Are there other Sean McMahons are out there with shrapnel in their legs? And with so many faulty guns in circulation today, how many troops are at risk of their guns exploding?
Army Specialist Robert C. Oxman's machine gun jammed when he was in the middle of a fierce, close-quarter battle with Taliban fighters in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan in 2009.
“When the gun goes down in a fight, it affects your ability to think,” explains Oxman, who was with the First Infantry Division. He said it’s the worst possible time for a weapon to jam. “You enter a state of panic, you're sweating hard. You have to take your eyes off the target. When you operate a machine gun in a battle, it's not really a good time to take your eyes off the target.”
Specialist Oxman's unit manned the Korengal outpost near the village of Wanat, where nine American soldiers were killed and 27 wounded after Taliban fighters attacked their position on July 13, 2008. In public records and a confidential investigation, the Army says several weapons jammed during the fight. The cause of the malfunctions is unknown.
In almost every instance, the government stated it would take steps to tighten controls over problematic contractors. But it seems that bad parts kept on reaching the field.
According to a 2010 Inspector General 16-month audit of M2 machine gun parts, the DoD agency responsible for buying weapons parts and supplying them to troops, the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), failed to inspect many of the critical M2 gun parts it was buying and shipping to troops. As a result, the report notes, “an increased risk was placed on the warfighter.” Furthermore, the logistics agency failed to correctly process most of the quality deficiency reports it received from the field for M2 machine gun parts.
Contacted by email, DLA said that since the DoD Inspector General audit, the agency has incorporated “several process and program enhancements designed to improve quality throughout the acquisition cycle.”
Read more: The DLA is the largest military agency you've never heard of
Still, hundreds of pages of records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act spanning over 10 years give a better insight into the quality issues reported from the field. Some of those issues were critical. In one case, the government, in its internal investigations, stated that the weapons could “stop working as a result of the defect, which could result in operator injury or loss of life, especially in combat.”
Although the government often found that the deficiencies were the result of “poor workmanship,” or that “not all of the manufacturing operations had been completed and not all of the required inspections had been performed,” the military kept buying parts from flagged contractors over the years. Reading through the quality reports, the same names keep appearing linked to quality issues, sometimes up to a dozen times. Some of those contractors produced bad parts while they were waived for some quality tests, and the government only found out about them when a quality complaint was filed later along the supply chain.
In the case of one contractor, Sigma Manufacturing Industries, the same parts were flagged twice for different quality issues. In 2005, a quality deficiency report found that Sigma’s M2 breech locks were too soft. All Army stocks were screened and the vendor reworked the parts and sent them back to the government, only to have troops flag a new issue two years later, this time finding that the holes drilled in the part were too small.
In almost every instance, the government stated that it would take steps to tighten controls over problematic contractors. But it seems that bad parts kept on reaching the field. In June 2009, for example, DoD personnel investigating quality complaints on problematic brackets for M203 under-barrel grenade launchers wrote, “The same (...) complaint was submitted back on 10 Sept, 2008,” and since then more parts were sent “only to have the same problem.” According to the complaint, the grenade launchers could not be attached to the soldiers’ rifles.
On top of the Alternative Release Procedures, the waiver system in which a contractor the government has worked with can bypass some quality tests, defective parts may have reached the field simply because there were not enough people to find them. Several times, around 2006 and 2007, at the height of the war in Iraq, the DoD received quality complaints for M2 machine gun parts but was unable to screen its stocks “due to lack of assets in the supply system.” Several units based in Mosul, Tal Afar, and Kirkuk, Iraq, located bad M2 machine gun parts. Some of those parts, supplied by the same contractor, Grauch Enterprises, had already been investigated in the past, but this time depots could not be screened “due to lack of on hand assets.”
The Pentagon is aware just how dangerous bad gun parts can be. In 2013, a quality complaint notes that a deficient M249 breech bolt that was being investigated could have caused “internal damage to weapon leading to shrapnel discharge.” The same report states that the deficiency was first flagged four years earlier, in 2009, but at the time was considered an isolated case and not investigated further. “All defective stock was supposed to be removed at the time of the previous investigation, but the part referenced in this current report must have inadvertently made it into the supply system,” noted the investigator.
US Army Specialist Robert C. Oxman with a Mk 48 (a light machine gun variant that shares parts with the M249 but is chambered in 7.62 x 51 mm NATO), near the Korengal Outpost, Kunar province, Afghanistan, 2008-2009. Photo courtesy R. Oxman
Deployed troops like McMahon and Oxman faced the consequences of working with deficient weapons, but had to put up with it. In one case in 2009, a unit reported that deficient buffer bodies for XM296 machine guns mounted on OH-58D Kiowa helicopters were flagged for “causing gun malfunctions/jams during critical engagement/functioning of the weapon.” The report notes that the “unit has stipulated that this has been an on-going problem for over a year.”
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http://motherboard.vice.com/read/when-big-guns-go-downBut machine guns parts are cheap, and the “low cost” of the material did not always warrant a full investigation from the government. In 2010, a case of bad M2 machine gun breech locks was closed and would only be re-opened were there “any other quality issues” for the contractor. The contractor, Commercial Machine, was waived for preliminary quality tests.
