M14

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?

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The FAL and G3 are two of the most overrated guns on this board

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      How so

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Well?
      We're waiting..

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It was just too fricking heavy and not suitable for the jungle fighting in nam

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Because the ordinance department had near a decade and millions of dollars invested in making the best rifle to win ww2.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      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?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        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.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Is it at least good as a DMR?

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            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.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Yeah

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            They made a bubbad up version of it for the current military and it's like carrying a SAW.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Its as heavy as a SAW?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                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.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Not great, not terrible. But adequate.

            https://i.imgur.com/XSnSBCu.jpg

            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?

            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.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        yes, i carried one in Afghanistan for a time in an EBR setup

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          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.

          How was it

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            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.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Sounds like he was a weak b***h who needed to get PrepHole

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                He ended up winning the William O. Darby award so he got there.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >i like carrying extra weight pointlessly for extended periods of time becuase...
                >i just do okay!!

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >i like carrying extra weight pointlessly for extended periods of time becuase...
                >i just do okay!!

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              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

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        It was used in the Afghanistan mountains

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Ah

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Yes but mostly for logistical reasons, not because it was any good.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      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

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >ordinance

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >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.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >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.

      https://i.imgur.com/pVgqEJv.jpg

      >EM-2 in .280 British
      What could have been

      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.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        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.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >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.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          What did they do with the mud and sand testing?

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            They just pulled the results out of their asses to make the Springfield rifle look better than it really was.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              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.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                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.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                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).

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    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.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >EM-2 in .280 British
      What could have been

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >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.

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    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.

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >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.

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >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).

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Speaking of nam, what was the French using when they were there?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Mas36 and m1 carbines

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Good shit.. don't know about being used in the jungles though. How did that go?

        FAL is a worse and SVT Tokarev copy

        The FAL and G3 are two of the most overrated guns on this board

        Still waiting as to why

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    FAL is a worse and SVT Tokarev copy

  12. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Italy did it better

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