http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,563883,00.html

In the chaos of an early morning assault on a remote U.S. outpost in eastern Afghanistan, Staff Sgt. Erich Phillips' M4 carbine quit firing as militant forces surrounded the base. The machine gun he grabbed after tossing the rifle aside didn't work either.
When the battle in the small village of Wanat ended, nine U.S. soldiers lay dead and 27 more were wounded. A detailed study of the attack by a military historian found that weapons failed repeatedly at a "critical moment" during the firefight on July 13, 2008, putting the outnumbered American troops at risk of being overrun by nearly 200 insurgents.
Which raises the question: Eight years into the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, do U.S. armed forces have the best guns money can buy?
Since it hit the news this morning, lets open up the age old debate.
Is the AR-15 platform inherently unreliable, only unreliable with no maintenance, or perfectly reliable? Or somewhere in between, pretty darn reliable just like everything else, but possibly not quite reliable enough for heavy usage in one of the worst environments possible on this planet?