On 8/27/2014 3:57 AM, Gunner Asch wrote:

Once upon a time, there were Army Arsenals, and Navy Yards, where
the work got done.

Indeed there were.

It was not all contractors and bids and slush funds

OTOH, we had Springfield Arsenal pushing their own designs when there
were better ones available. The trapdoor Springfield was a scandal long
before the Litle Big Horn, the Krag was redesigned and ended up a weaker
action with an inferior round to the Norwegian original, and the only
thing new and good about the M1903 was the introduction of the 30'06
round. We would have been better off licensing the M98 Mauser.

The Garand was finally a rifle for the next war instead of the last one,
but they still hadn't worked out the bugs by 1940 and it was never an
easy rifle to build. Which is why we built a lot of M1 carbines, easy to
make for a lot of manufacturers and to carry by those who weren't
primarily riflemen.

Then we got the M14, which Congress approved after Springfield lied
about being able to reuse Garand tooling to save costs. And that put us
back to using a rifle for the last war, not the next one.

I won't address the MANY issues of the M16 and its inadequate descendents...

David