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By Root 1915 0

1958 budget, an omission that cost the M14 project critical momentum and allowed its rivals time to catch up. Already behind schedule, Ordnance officials rejected five requests by Springfield Armory engineers to draw up a detailed preproduction study—for a single weapon, the package might consist of thirty-five pounds of drawings and associated materials—of how to most economically mass-manufacture the rifle. By collecting all the available technical material at the outset and planning the manufacturing procedures, such studies caught potential bottlenecks, helped ensure quality control, and saved time later on during the pilot-production process. Ordnance officials in Washington, however, were more concerned with getting a move on now and gambled that the old M1 production lines were up to snuff. That the M14 could be made using already existing tools and equipment was what they had long assured the army, but as soon as work began, it was apparent that much of it dated from the late 1930s. Antiquated and worn out, nearly all the machine tools had to be purchased anew and refitted. Yet more time dripped away.

Not until March 1958, ten months after Brucker’s announcement, did Ordnance admit its mistake and authorize the armory to carry out a preproduction survey. Now becoming distinctly alarmed at the delays, Ordnance stipulated that the engineers finish their report within six months rather than the typical twelve. To save time, they were ordered “to make only the most important changes to the drawings” and to leave out the small stuff. Ordnance should have sweated it, for as Harry Lynch of the armory’s industrial division warned, there would be an “adverse effect on interchangeability and supply” if, as his superiors in Washington were demanding, such “minor” components as magazine improvements, rivets, pins, screws, and nuts were overlooked.77 He was right. Even as the army blithely promised “plans... for a $35,000,000 program for quantity production,” months passed by as armory engineers were forced to iron out unnecessary complications caused by Ordnance’s corner-cutting.78

During hostile, closed-door interrogation by the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Lieutenant General Arthur Trudeau, chief of army research and development, admitted that “money can buy many things, but it can’t buy time—time lost through lengthy administrative procedures, deferred decisions, lack of vision, timidity, complacency, misdirected or fruitless effort, or through inadequate funding.” Funnily enough, none of this self-criticism was directed at any of the technical departments, let alone the army. The culprit, instead, was the Eisenhower administration’s budgetary process and its “attempt to keep defense spending always within fixed limits.” The committee chairman, George Mahon, a Texas Democrat, cheerfully and opportunistically agreed and said he looked forward to President Kennedy’s arrival in the White House. That was when, presumably, all these annoying budgetary restraints would vanish.79

It didn’t happen. Before World War II much of Springfield’s manufacturing capacity had been farmed out to private contractors in order to focus on engineering and research, so mass production of the M14 hinged on arranging terms and assuring quality control among the outside firms.80 Ordnance, making the best of a bad deal, wanted just one company to make the M14, but the government stipulated two: the lowest bidder for the contract, and for pork-barrel reasons, a small firm situated in “a surplus labor area.”

The winner of the low-bid contract was the Winchester-Western Division of the Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation, which had claimed it could build the rifles for $68.75 each. Quite aside from Olin’s very cozy relationship with Ordnance—the company already made the ball powder used for the weapons—the lowness of the bid should have raised suspicions that something did not quite add up. The average bid of the other leading eleven contenders was, after all, $108.73, nearly one-third more than Olin’s figure.81 As government regulations