American Rifle - Alexander Rose [188]
Springfield soon began rejecting Harrington’s rifles on the grounds that they were shoddily produced. Harrington had foolishly used non-specified steel to make its receivers, and as a result they disintegrated. Olin was also suffering major delays. In June 1960 it was noticed that Olin had not yet delivered a single rifle, and by mid-1961 only 12,894 M14s had been completed out of the initial order for 35,000 and no progress had been made on the follow-up order for 81,500.83 Four years after the M14 had been adopted, just a single rifleman in ten was carrying one.84
This time when the Senate Appropriations Committee hauled up Defense Department officials in April 1961 to ask when these fabled M14s would be showing up, politicians were rather less sympathetic to the military’s finger-pointing. General George Decker, the army chief of staff, blamed Olin’s inability to set up a working automation line. Having recently received a $5 million contract to make 7.62mm NATO ammunition and under the impression that the army was looking out for their interests, Olin executives were livid at the betrayal. The company’s vice president and general manager, W. Miller Hurley, lashed out at Decker by claiming that production lags were caused by his “delays in delivering of Government-owned equipment, plus difficulties in converting and rehabilitating this equipment, difficulties in obtaining certain materials specified by Army Ordnance and specification changes since the original contract.” Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Republican of Maine, blamed both army and Olin equally for what she saw as collusion: “I don’t want to see plants and concerns that don’t produce and reasonably meet production schedules have their contracts perpetuated” so as to protect “a Democratic state that voted for a Democratic President.”85 The M14 was turning out to be a military-political fiasco.
Army secretary Elvis Stahr promised the committee that deliveries would be up to par by the end of the year even if the army would not be completely outfitted for another four years. In that case, one newspaper pointed out, if a war broke out anytime between now and 1965, the army would be sent to fight with a mixture of old and new rifles.86 The Senate hearing could not have gone worse for the administration. In late July McNamara stepped into the ring and told the Senate Preparedness Committee that he thought “it was a disgrace the way the project was handled.” No one could be left in any doubt that the secretary of defense was planning a root-and-branch purge of the Ordnance procurement and production system along Whiz Kid principles. “This is a relatively simple job, to build a rifle, compared to building a satellite or a missile system,” he declared, “and yet this project languished for months—years, actually. I see no reason why we should expect it should be tolerated in the future.”87
Soon afterward McNamara detailed Brigadier General Elmer Gibson to investigate the bottlenecks and inefficiences affecting mass production. He was ordered to knock some sense into the contractors. Gibson reported that he believed introducing a third competitor would stimulate Olin’s and Harrington’s juices, especially when coupled with a reform of the bidding process. There would be no more fixed-price bidding—a technique that had so often resulted in fabulously low initial figures, soon raised to fabulously high ones—and in its place would come “competitive negotiations” to arrive at a suitable