Troubled Service Rifle

Much has been recently written about the M14 and it's troubles.

The timing of the trouble and the availability of the, recently adopted by the USAF, M16 caused Robert SPIT MacNamara to put his shoulder to replacing the problematic M14 rather than putting the effort into fixing it.

Congress was agitating at the same time and wanted heads to roll over the fiasco.

Heads did indeed roll and when the dust had settled, the M14 was replaced with the M16A1 and The Springfield National Armory was shuttered.

Without that congressional agitation, it's likely we would have seen an M14A2 or some such with some further rationalization towards making it easier to manufacture and/or the problems with QC effectively addressed along with changes made to fix deficiencies discovered in the field.

If Armalite had not successfully courted General LeMay, the gun that replaced the M14 could very likely have been an inch pattern FAL.  H&R and High Standard had already shown they could make them (which is funny since H&R had a lot of trouble making M14s), and FN was very effective about getting licensed manufacturers past the initial start-up.

Woulda coulda shoulda...

But Springfield dug its heels in on the M14 and fought every attempt to find the cause of the quality problems, let alone get to fixing them; besides it doesn't matter because SPIW is going to be replacing everything Real-Soon-Now®.

Honestly, nobody should have been surprised that the M14 had some failings.  I am not sure we've ever had a service rifle introduction that went smoothly.  The vaunted M1 Garand did not enter WW2 as originally type classified.  The changes made during the war are nearly legion, to the point that they marked the revision number on the parts.

The M14 was a fairly young weapon when things started going all wrong, it's not certain that all of its problems are inherent in the design.  The M16 was barely out of prototype when it started full rate production as the XM16E1 and received wide issue to troops in the field.

It should be noted that the M16A1 known to the retro heads as a "late R603" had been truly sorted out; just in time for the end of our involvement in Vietnam.

Why was the effort expended to fix the M16 where it wasn't with the M14?  Because Colt and Armalite were responsive to fixing the problems and in several cases proactive about suggesting fixes.  A couple of those fixes were resisted strongly by the Army because of logistics issues, by the way, like the extractor spring.

Had Colt decided to stonewall, we'd likely have Rifle .30 Caliber M17 aka FAL and H&R would probably be a bloated defense contractor...