Was the M14 a terrible service rifle? Why did the US insist on it over the FAL?
Is it true that the US military brass sperged out over the M16 and did everything in the world to frick it?
Was the M14 a terrible service rifle? Why did the US insist on it over the FAL?
Is it true that the US military brass sperged out over the M16 and did everything in the world to frick it?
The FAL and G3 are two of the most overrated guns on this board
How so
Well?
We're waiting..
It was just too fricking heavy and not suitable for the jungle fighting in nam
Because the ordinance department had near a decade and millions of dollars invested in making the best rifle to win ww2.
So they built a rifle that would've roflstomped WW2 but was pretty shit after that? Wow.
Didn't the US bring them out of retirement for a bit during Iraq?
As DMR's. Yes. Not as a "one size fits all" as was originally intended.
Steven's book on the M-14 has the gory details.
Is it at least good as a DMR?
Definitely not as issued - they had to come up with a new stock. And the Garand/M14's gas system is going to be inherently less accurate than an AR-10 equivalent.
Yeah
They made a bubbad up version of it for the current military and it's like carrying a SAW.
Its as heavy as a SAW?
Nah but it's closer than it should be. We had short-barreled SAWs with collapsible stocks. I honestly think a 100round nutsack that upgraded SAW was probably the same overall weight as the M14 EBRs we had.
Not great, not terrible. But adequate.
I wouldn't call it 'terrible' by any stretch. The M-16 as originally issued was bad. The L85 was terrible. The M14 was disappointing. But we went with it because cost had gone into its development, and keeping weapons design & manufacture internal has its perks.
yes, i carried one in Afghanistan for a time in an EBR setup
How was it
Our DM guys carried them like twice and said frick this noise. If we were going out for a short time they'd bring some crazy 300 win mag shit that I don't know the name of and if we were going out for a long time they'd bring the souped up Remmington 700.
Sounds like he was a weak b***h who needed to get PrepHole
He ended up winning the William O. Darby award so he got there.
>i like carrying extra weight pointlessly for extended periods of time becuase...
>i just do okay!!
You don't know the military designation of the rifles you were around constantly on deployment? Or the caliber or the model?
Jesus, dude.
>11b
>2008-2013
>2 deployments
>one in Helmand and 2nd in Kunar
>shot my 2nd deployment at an outpost and couldn't recover enough for military standards.
>bye bye
>doesn't know anything about what the guys he was surrounded with carried.
I'm thoroughly confused.
Not doubting you served but whenever I did I was always on a COB. Getting to know the guys was intimate to say the least. Yeah we did rotations and had new replacements but dammit mane
It was used in the Afghanistan mountains
Ah
Yes but mostly for logistical reasons, not because it was any good.
BoOrd is moronic beyond any fricking measure. short 75mm Sherman, cavalry focused army up until 1935-ish (The Chieftain has good video on it), m14, m16 "self cleaning" rifle, no drop tanks for p-47s
>ordinance
>Was the M14 a terrible service rifle?
Yes
>Why did the US insist on it over the FAL?
Springflied Armory who designed it told the US Army ordnance department that the M14 would be dirt cheap to manufacture. So the Army rigged the tests so that the M14 would win. Springfield's promise turned out to be a complete lie and the M14 was very expensive.
>Is it true that the US military brass sperged out over the M16 and did everything in the world to frick it?
Yes.
>Army rigged the tests so that the M14 would win
Only with the AR-10. The T48 lost fair and square, though the importance of cold weather trials is pretty dubious.
What they did to the AR-10 was an atrocity though:
>longer, more strenuous tests
>much more intense endurance testing
>forced them to use a batch of AP ammo that was rejected by Ft Benning for being too hot
However, the idea that they could reuse the Garand tooling turned out to be complete bullshit.
The EM-2 was shit. The .280 FAL was the best option, and the only thing of the original contenders that came anywhere close to meeting the Army's unrealistic requirements.
The cold weather trials were also rigged. They couldn’t adjust the gas system and had to use the rifle they’d used in the previous tests for the T48. The M14 got a brand new rifle rigged for cold weather. BuOrd a shit.
>The T48 lost fair and square
Please read the part of the trials where they did mud and sand testing.
It's obvious that the results were just made up since the Springfield rifle was rated as being very good in this regard, but we now know that it's terrible in this regard even when compared to contemporary rifles of the same era.
What did they do with the mud and sand testing?
They just pulled the results out of their asses to make the Springfield rifle look better than it really was.
Care to elaborate? From the Collector Grade FAL book that throws around a lot of the paperwork from the trials, there's nothing to suggest those particular trials were biased by design, at least from what the book shows.
The design of the mud and sand testing wasn't the problem. The problem was that the Springfield rifle was quite clearly never tested, or they just ignored the result and wrote down whatever they wanted, because the "results" of the test are not compatible with reality. Under no circumstance should the Springfield rifle have been rated as better at resisting mud and sand than the T48 and the AR10. Both of those rifles are known to be good or at least decent under muddy or dusty conditions. Meanwhile the M14 is known to jam catastrophically at the slightest contamination.
Makes sense for the T48 - the Brits found different things in their testing, though there were problems (hence the sand cuts that would show up later).
The AR-10 was a completely different case, where the tests were clearly designed to kill the rifle. They didn't even test it alongside the M14 in that test, because the M14 would have performed just as bad (other than the barrel exploding part).
The M14 was the result of the Ordnance Dept's autistic requirements that were wholly unrealistic:
>replace Garand, BAR, M1 Carbine, and Submachineguns
>use a cartridge no less powerful than 30-06
>under 7 lbs
As originally envisioned, the Army was about to adopt the pants-on-head T25 rifle. Meanwhile, the Brits, who were about to adopt a more forward thinking design, jumped in and asked that maybe we do some trial before unilaterally adopting this. During those trials, they compared:
>T25 in the T65 cartridge
>EM-2 in .280 British
>FN Carbine in .280 British
All were unacceptable, but the T25 literally caught on fire during trials and was the least workable design. Only after these trials did they drop the dumb idea entirely and go back to a normal design, which was the Garand-derived T47.
The short version is that the T47 faced off against what became the FAL in trials, and it was roughly even in performance. The FAL had the advantage of modern ergonomics, but both the M-14 and the FAL made use of manufacturing techniques and basic design elements that rapidly became obsolete.
>EM-2 in .280 British
What could have been
>Was the M14 a terrible service rifle?
It's the shortest serving one in US history for a reason.
>Why did the US insist on it over the FAL?
The Ordinance Department
>Is it true that the US military brass sperged out over the M16 and did everything in the world to frick it?
Yes, basically the Ordinance Department realized they massively fricked up and were all going to lose their jobs if they didn't sabotage the M16. So they did sabotage it. And it still wasn't enough. And they did all lose their jobs.
M14 was too cheap in terms of cost of production so they went with outside the US weapons to funnel some of the money into their own pockets since Vietnam was nothing but a warmonger's wet dream until Afghanistan occured.
>Was the M14 a terrible service rifle?
I mean it keeps getting dragged out of armories and put into service time and time again so good enough. It will do what is asked of it.
> Why did the US insist on it over the FAL?
Because Europeans suck, are smelly and fricking weird.
>Is it true that the US military brass sperged out over the M16 and did everything in the world to frick it?
A little but mostly they were just being moronic, even when the Army adopted the M16 their moronation ruined its initial introduction into Vietnam by not correcting the misconception it was self-cleaning and disregarding the first batches of 5.56 did not match the specifications set by the fricking guys that made the rifle.
I like the M14 it's a pretty rifle and a good shooter, I can shoot my cheap-ass dressed-up M1A better than my AR it just feels like a good battle rifle my only gripe is that I bought a fricking Springfield M1A I had to adjust the front sight post all the way to the right and still move my windage 3 clicks left instead of saving up for a Bula Defense M14 like i'm doing right now. The amount of hate this rifle gets is kinda moronic it's almost as if half the FAL & G3 owners that b***h and moan about it are a bunch of noguns euros coping that they aren't American.
>Was the M14 a terrible service rifle?
No, however there were arguably better options available at the time. The premise of a "do it all gun" was terrible, and the idea that it could be made using existing tooling didn't pan out either. The battle rifle concept was also dated.
It was unsuited for close quarter jungle ambushes in nam, especially compared to the Ak47. Wood stock wasn't a great option for the jungle either, but they did issue fiberglass stocks to remedy this.
Finally, the issue everyone seems to harp on -weight. The thing is, when comparing apples to apples, all the other battle rifles basically weighed the same (yet nobody b***hes about the fact that the FAL was slightly heavier than the m14).
Speaking of nam, what was the French using when they were there?
Mas36 and m1 carbines
Good shit.. don't know about being used in the jungles though. How did that go?
Still waiting as to why
FAL is a worse and SVT Tokarev copy
Italy did it better