The military has accepted over 40,000 M4 Remington rifles for its troops after the United States-based manufacturer replaced the defective parts of more than 20,000 rifles.
The Armed Forces of the Philippines said the 44,186 rifles – which were delivered in two batches – have been accepted as of August 30 by the Defense Acquisition Office.
The AFP public affairs office chief, Col. Noel Detoyato, said the first batch of 24,300 rifles were already accepted and would soon be issued to the troops of the Philippine Army.
The second batch of 19,886 rifles will be subjected to ballistic tests before these are issued, according to Detoyato.
“All the rifles are corrected already and have been accepted. The date of acceptance was July 30 but the documents signifying the acceptance were received by the DAO on August 13,” Detoyato said.
This means that the Remington Firearms Company had already corrected the defective rifles, which had unstable rear gunsights, prompting the military to return the rifles to the manufacturer.
The military earlier returned some 22,000 firearms to the supplier so that the defective parts could be replaced at no cost to the government.
Of the 27,000 M4 rifles initially meant for the Philippine Army, only 5,000 were without defects and equipped with optical gunsight and have been already distributed to the Philippine Marines.
At first, the Technical Inspection and Acceptance Committee withheld the acceptance of the 22,000 rifles as the rules provided that defects must first be corrected before the units could be accepted.
“This was not about the procedure in the procurement, but it was the lapse of the supplier. They had to correct this before the TIAC could give the go-signal to accept,” the military official said.
Detoyato said the defects were discovered four months ago when the TIAC conducted a random sampling test of the delivered rifles and noticed that the rear sight of the rifles were unstable.
“It’s a defect by the supplier so the supplier had to shoulder and correct the discrepancy before (the guns) could be accepted,” the military official said.
Some rifles distributed to the 7th Infantry Division were also recalled since these were only “ceremonially distributed.”
The latest batch was the part of the delivery of around 60,000 rifles meant to replace the old M16 rifles. The 60,000 rifles cost the government around P2 billion. (Julie M. Aurelio, Philippine Daily Inquirer)