Regarding the M14 - is this link accurate?

[Rogerbutthead]

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-Stoner-multi-purpose-rifle-fail-to-become-standard-issue-weapon-by-US-armed-forces-Everything-Ive-heard-about-them-would-suggest-they-were-superior-to-anything-fielded-during-the-Vietnam-War-through-to

This discussion of the Stoner rifle went into the M14 being called a terrible weapon. I have only fired my M1As in clean conditions and have always taken care of them - you with more practical experience - do you find fault with the comments degrading the performance of the M14 in the US military - ?

Someone calling the M14 terrible was new to me, perhaps calling it not as good as a FN FAL - sure, but terrible - ?

[Uncivil Engineer]

I thought this was general knowledge. The m14 wins the bid based on reputation of the Garand. It's suffers from accuracy as it need to be re bedded often. The m16 gets after the air force had been happy with it. Gets done tweaks generally forced on it that are needed (eg forward assist) . McNamara goes ahead with the m16 as the plan is to replace it with some new super, that program ****s the bed. Meanwhile the m16 had all the kinks worked out. The m14 hangs around in small numbers as they still want a 7.62 NATO for things like DMR. But there are flirtations with other AR10 like rifles and piston ARs ala HK.

Now we are seeing yet another new rifle program ngsw with some magical 6.8mm round. I bet this program crashes and burns like the 3, 4? Before it. My guess is someone in Congress will notice the price tag and force them back to something in 556 or 762 NATO. My guess is they might get new projectiles and possibly some new guns but they won't switch the chambering. The supply chain is to big and deep to switch to something that isn't compatible.

[eviioiive]

Author is a hs drop out

[smle-man]

Not this again....

[jarhead714]

The absolute worst thing about the M14 is that The Army approved it for production without possessing sufficient tooling and facilities to produce them in sufficient numbers to equip the American fighting man. That’s it. That’s all that was ever “wrong” or “bad” with the actual rifle. Like the Garand, they were not easy to make.

[Carcassonne]

The M14/M1A was/is a piece of ****, although I wish I had a real full auto M14 because it would be worth a lot of money since there are only a few in civilian hands.

I find it funny that the M14 was selected to fill many rolls including a sub machinegun, but it could not fill any roll even a main battle rifle, but the Stoner rifle could fill multi rolls, so it was rejected. Typical Government/military mentality.


Read this (it has been posted here many times)

https://looserounds.com/2015/01/30/the-m14-not-much-for-fighting-a-case-against-the-m14-legend/

Watch this




.

[smle-man]

Well said. When production ended there still weren't enough M14s to equip all elements of the armed forces. TRW was just getting rolling when procurement was terminated.

[Carcassonne]

The absolute worst thing about the M14 is that The Army approved it for production without possessing sufficient tooling and facilities

Sufficient tooling?

M1 Garand tooling was used. There seemed to be enough tooling to make the Garand.

P.S. The Army didnt make the M14. It was made/produced by private companies.

It is funny how it took 12 years to design the M14, but Beretta came up with a similar rifle (BM59) in less than 2 years.


.

[slamfire1]

I talked to a lot of guys who carried M14's in Vietnam and none of the crap the Nelson McKeeb slings at the M14 has ever been mentioned. I believe he is making things up.

The guys I talked to, the M14 worked fine, just carried half the ammo load of the M16. The 308 round would go through underbrush, the 5.56 would not. None of them were fan boys of either weapon. It was just something they were issued, like their helmet, shovel, boots. Nothing to be excited about.

The reason the Stoner 63 was not adopted, was that DoD had already gone through this once before. They dropped the M14 for the M16, having been lead to believe the M16 was a fully developed wonder weapon. It was not. It was far from a fully developed weapon and books, like the Black Rifle, have been written about the design, materials, manufacturer, ammunition problems that had to be fixed while the weapon was in combat. Lots of good American boys died with defective M16's in their hands, and that caused a lot of controversy, the Ichord hearings for one thing. There are still intrinsic faults with the M16, but DoD spent billions of today's dollars, fixing the things that could be fixed. And they were not interested in going through that again, no matter what Corporate Marketing claimed about the perfection of the Stoner 63. Enough of the old crew were still around to remember the "self cleaning" claims for the M16, and how it was a perfected weapon.

Changing something like a service arm is very expensive, the total lifecycle cost of stuff is mindboggling. As an example, I pulled a target next to a man who ran the Chrysler/Daimler transmission plant. He told me, that to seamlessly change 13% of the parts, of one transmission, cost over $600 million dollars. And he was on the production side, he probably did not see the design, test, costs, nor the stocking costs at dealer ships.


Due to corporate influence, DoD had been moving production out of Government facilities to commercial business. A lot of behaviors you see, make sense if you start from the position that the military is there to service the industrial complex. You might think the purpose of the military is National Defense, but actually, that is the selling point. The real purpose of the Defense Department is to take sweet taxpayer money and give it to deserving corporations. That is why we get so little bang for our Defense buck.

Now, at the time, Springfield Arsenal was there mainly to develop manufacturing processes and help contractors solve their production problems. Springfield Arsenal did not adopt the M14, they developed it, but it was in competition with FAL's, for example. Someone else made the decision to go M14. Springfield Armory probably would have set up a pilot production line to make FAL's, learn the tricks, and then let production contracts. The main manufacturer's of the M14's were H&R, TRW, and Winchester. Springfield Armory more or less, kept their facilities busy, as a price and quality check, but it was not politically feasible to have a Government Arsenal making all the rifles when Corporations wanted that business.

And you see, once Colt started making all the M16's, Springfield Armory went away. I have not found whom made the decision, or what factious reasoning supported this, but I am of the opinion, Colt allies got rid of their Government Competition. No chance of SA making any M16's and taking away profit from Colt.

[FeuerFrei]

All too often the military develops weapons based upon experience learned from the last war. The M14 was a result of that.

They were lazy and took a known battle rifle and made it less powerful and added a removable magazine and selector switch.

The Garand and the M14/M1A share many of the same traits and idiosyncrasies regarding accuracy and reliability.

M16 has been is service for 56 years and is old tech too. If the air force hadn't adopted it I don't know what we'd have ended up with for army and mc. FAL, AR18, M??

I own M1A's and a Garand. I really like them for what they are/were. I can live with that.

Here's a great read about the M14. https://miamirifle-pistol.org/wp-con...ion-100815.pdf

[madjack956]

My buddy who served in Vietnam was pissed when they took his M14 and issued him an M-16.

[Carcassonne]

[Verdha603]

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-St...War-through-to

This discussion of the Stoner rifle went into the M14 being called a terrible weapon. I have only fired my M1As in clean conditions and have always taken care of them - you with more practical experience - do you find fault with the comments degrading the performance of the M14 in the US military - ?

Someone calling the M14 terrible was new to me, perhaps calling it not as good as a FN FAL - sure, but terrible - ?

The problem is that it's a messy mixed bag of truth's, half-truth's, manipulated information, and even lies and overt self-embellishment formed from individual anecdotes.

The M14, to put it mildly, was a temporary band-aid made by a board of well-paid general and staff grade officers too busy thinking the next war would be just like the last one, and that had the power to decide what arms would be adopted and issued amongst the armed forces, with more than a little bias in knowing that depending on the company that got the contract they would get money in their pocket for picking certain designs over others.

The US was well behind the technological curve when it insisted on staying with a full-power rifle cartridge, the .308 Winchester, forcing European nations to halt progress on intermediate caliber rifle cartridges while the Soviet's had the SKS, early AK-47, and 7.62x39mm cartridge adopted within a few years after World War II. It would take them almost two decades to finally get with the program that the battle rifle was on the decline and the assault rifle was the new standard for a service rifle.

They also insisted on keeping the M14 for a litany of reasons that would end up being a mixture of self-interest and a refusal to accept that a non-US design could be a better product than their own.

They argued the M14 was better because you could use a majority of M1 Garand parts to manufacture it, making production easier since many parts were already being made, which was proven blatantly false when only about 1/5th of M1 Garand parts were compatible with M14 parts.

They argued the M14 was more accurate, which it frankly wasn't, with rack-grade examples of both the M14 and T48 (aka FN FAL) producing similar results in field tests, with the advantage going to the M14 when they decided to include rifles hand fitted for competition matches as points of comparison instead of just standard issued rifles.

They argued the M14 could replace multiple weapons at once, with the Ordnance Board claiming they could replace the M1 Garand, the M3 Grease Gun, the M1 carbine, and M1918 BAR with the M14; the end result was a rifle that proved to be a mediocre replacement for the Garand, a terrible choice for replacing an SMG or carbine when the best they could do was chop the barrel down and put an underfolding stock on it, and the LMG idea went out the window when they realized you shouldn't bother with an LMG anymore if you now issue a General Purpose Machine Gun like the M60.

Combined with their being teething problems with getting the production lines up and running during the initial production run of M14's and a litany of quality control issues made for a rather poor showing of the rifle, which would have been even worse if it weren't for the fact that SecDef MacNamara rushed the M16 into adoption/production and opted to cut corners on necessary features/items for the rifles, leading to the M16 haven't an abysmal initial performance in Vietnam that would leave a black mark on the M16 that is still commented on today while allowing people to gloss over many of the M14's problems because it was at least more reliable than the first batches of M16's in the mid-60's.

I would also attribute it's the M14's positive reputation to being considered an excellent competition rifle for service rifle matches in the 1960's and 70's, proving that a hand-fitted M14/M1A was an accurate and reliable rifle that wouldn't face significant competition until the arrival of match grade M16A2's in the mid-80's (a reputation I would consider comparable to how the M1903 Springfield was still the favored child by the military even after the M1917 proved the better rifle in WWI and yet the latter was mothballed into reserve use and foreign export while the 1903 continued to serve another 18 years as the service rifle of the US).

Problems that arose in those early M16's included:
- The decision to not use Eugene Stoner's recommended powder in the 5.56mm ammunition, opting instead to use the same powder used in the .30-06 and 7.62x51mm ammunition currently in military use, which was a poor choice due to causing increased chamber fouling compared to Stoner's mix, leading to an increase in malfunctions.
- The decision to not chrome-line the barrels, which led to rust and pitting issues in the barrels when the M16's were taken into the humid jungles of Vietnam.
-In an attempt to save money cleaning kits were not issued with the M16 under the false premise that the rifle was so new and fantastic that you didn't need to clean them. Frankly I don't care what firearm you trot out to be the latest and greatest, if you made a claim that it doesn't require any cleaning, your head deserves to be on a chopping block for it.

The GI's that died because of those decisions left a negative reputation for the M16 while elevating the M14 because it didn't have those issues. Even then the M14 wasn't without issues, the most common one being that they frequently had to be zeroed due to the wood stocks continually swelling and contracting in the humid environment, which required M14's assigned as marksman/sniper rifles to be fitted with plastic/polymer stocks to avoid this problem.

So was the M14 terrible? I wouldn't call it terrible, but I wouldn't call it great either. The FAL, G3, and heck even the AR-10 rifles were arguably the better battle rifles of the time, and it was frankly a poor choice to give to a standard riflemen in comparison to a Kalashnikov or a later M16A1. As a range rifle/competition rifle I enjoy them, but tell me I have to go anywhere near a combat zone with one and it would definitely not be one of my first choices, even back in 1957.

[Mojaveman]

Interesting how some of the M-14 haters never served in the military.

It wasn't a perfect rifle but it wasn't a terrible one either. It was used in Vietnam by some Marine units all of the way through the first quarter of 1968.

Trained with both the M16A1 and the M-14 and if I had my choice I'd carry the former mostly because of the weight of the weapon and the weight of the ammo. If the M14 was all I had though I'd confidently carry it into battle but with more than the basic load of only five magazines.

The M-14 will do some serious damage in the right hands.

[Spaffo]

We had M14s in basic training at Ft. Ord in 1969. Loved to shoot it, hated to run with it. Never shot the M16 until VN POR school at Ft. Riley in 1971 (I was a X-ray tech/medic). Got sent to Germany where all the GIs in the (7th) Evac Hospital were issued M16s, which we carried but never shot. E-5s and above carried 1911s. It really torqued the West German civilians to see us walking around with Red Cross armbands and slinged rifles.