"David R. Birch" wrote in message
...
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

Did you get that from "Misfire"? Hallahan's technical understanding is
lacking, to be generous. He printed all the dirt he could dig up
without sifting it, for an uncritical scandal-seeking audience.
-jsw