Pat Rogers did a lot of testing on ARs and saw somewhere over 500K rounds down range a year for 20+ years. What he found was that they had to be wet to run reliably under hard use. At less than 200 rounds, a dry AR would start to malfunction. I doubt I've gone more than 1500 rounds without a strip and wipe, but that's just me being anal. Pat had rifles that had a ton of rounds down range with only lube. (Filthy 14 for one had well over 40K rounds downrange without a cleaning.) He admitted that this was solely for testing and that he would have cleaned a rifle he was using for serious purposes. Note that he was not using marginal rifles - most of the ones I saw at class were Bravo Company.

Not every platform is like that. Some pistols should have very sparing amounts of lube on them.

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NHI, 10-8.