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It's interesting reading about the changes to the M7 rifle that lead to the XM8 rifle that are based on troop feed back.
Almost exactly as if the M7 was a prototype that did troop trials and resulted in a production version!
And troop trials is something that's been sorely missing from weapons procurement since, at least, the Johnson administration.
When you skip handing a new weapon to a private, you lose a lot of important information about how the gun will get treated, used and abused.
Why did we stop troop trials?
The troops keep preferring the wrong gun. That's why the M14 is a T44 not a T48 (aka FAL). That why so many pistol competitions led to the M1911 being retained. It's among the reasons the M4 carbine kept trucking on.
Troop trials find flaws in designs and that leads to politically connected companies not getting contracts! Gods forbid a congressman not get feathers to line their nest!
Troop trials take time and, sometimes, you need to get something out the door in quantity and fix it on the fly. You do this too many times and you get to thinking this is the normal way of things.
This happened when production problems with the M14 led to MacNamara saying, the troops need a rifle, the M16 is a rifle and the Air Force is happy with it, therefore the Army will be happy with it too (even if I have to order them to be!)
It's actually astonishing, considering the political pressure being brought to bear that the Army got a different version of the M16 from the Air Force AND that it got to the troops, as the XM16E1, as quickly as it did.
Vietnam served as the M16's troop trial.
I seem to recall that rollout was a bit bumpy...
I get very weary of that quote about "the military-industrial complex," but there've been too many cases of politically connected companies getting contracts to provide second-rate equipment to the armed forces for me to dismiss it entirely. Pity most people don't understand what DDE was driving at.
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