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By Root 2024 0

acquired an unfortunate reputation for being a “bad” gun, though it wasn’t. The M14 was far more accurate than either, and though it was condemned for being “uncontrollable” or for “kicking like a mule” when firing on automatic, with practice a soldier could accustom himself somewhat to the action. A correspondent for the New York Times who fired one at a demonstration in 1957 confirmed that “fully automatic fire with the new weapon is a fear-some business the first time. It fires at a rate of 750 rounds a minute, and the weapon leaps fearfully,” but “after a second or third clip, however, the shooter, even a light one, can control the weapon’s tendency to push steadily back and to the right.”74 On prolonged autofire, however, the M14 was too wild to control so easily, so much so that it was issued with a “selector lock” that permitted only semiautomatic fire—a rather odd state of affairs.75

The tragedy of the M14 was not that it was a peasant enthroned as the king of rifles, but that it was a competent prince unexpectedly de-posed by an abler heir exploiting his realm’s turmoil. Because the M14 was destined to have the shortest lifetime of any army service weapon (even the Krag), historians have had an unfortunate tendency to portray its overthrow as inevitable. It is true that both the ORO and BRL’s reports on smaller calibers had eroded the M14’s rationale and subverted Ordnance’s long-held assumption of expertise based on centuries-old experience. Hitherto, even after the humiliating experience of paying the Germans for the Springfield Model 1903 patents, Ordnance officers had cruised on their almost Masonic reputations as supremely competent technicians privy to the arcane secrets of ballistics and technical design. When a high priest of Ordnance emerged from his conclave and declared a particular rifle as the new service weapon, his Solomonic judgment could not be questioned.

Thanks to the ORO and BRL findings, however, everybody else was not assuming that any longer. The era had passed when Major Mordecai could survey Europe’s gallimaufry of weapons and insist that the American way was superior, so much so that it should properly be the only way. No longer would patriarchal, airily superior attitudes like that of Civil War Ordnance chief James Ripley (“The United States musket, as now made, has no superior arm in the world”) go entirely unchallenged by the public and the press simply because he, a lordly general, declared it so (“I say this with confidence, from my entire familiarity with the manufacture of these arms.”)76 In these modern times, by way of contrast, the BRL/ORO reports hinted that the development of the rifle did not necessarily follow a single track determined by the intelligent designers at Ordnance but could instead split off and evolve along diverse paths. Who was to say which was best, until the fittest survived? It was possible, nonetheless, that Ordnance’s historical insistence on One Caliber, One Rifle, One Cartridge—a congenial worldview perfectly exemplified by the M14—would have, in the end, prevailed over its competitors. If BRL/ORO weakened Ordnance’s foundations, what finally toppled the edifice and crushed the M14 was a factor that few had foreseen: Vietnam.

Quite aside from the accidental (Vietnam) and intellectual (ORO/BRL) issues that contributed to the M14’s early demise was Ordnance’s own mishandling of production. All might otherwise have been well, but Ordnance’s flaws did much to persuade McNamara and his allies that the department was no longer capable of carrying out its duties. Once its credibility was shot, the end of Ordnance was surely nigh. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Everything looks permanent until its secret is known.”

Problems with the M14 production system arose almost immediately—rarely a good omen. Because Ordnance officials did not get even the preliminary paperwork ready for a month and a half after Brucker’s approval in May 1957 and then languidly waited until November to finalize the rest, it was too late to include any estimates in the fiscal year (FY)