We’ll try this again. Click this link. If it doesn’t work, just google PS Magazine and it will be like the third link.
I kinda think the M14 gets a degree of unfair disdain because it’s always described as heavy and hard-to-control as reasons why it was replaced with the M16.
It’s actually a sweet rifle in a great many ways, but it is a bit heavy and unwieldy relative to the more modern assault rifles. But if you don’t need a modern assault rifle, a M-14 is probably an excellent choice.
It was more or less the same weight as the Garand.- and the 1903 Springfield.
Its weight is why I liked it for the longer range match shooting. It always felt rock-solid in prone position, while the M-16 felt like the slightest breeze would take you off target. Just personal preference, I guess.
… Because it’s smaller and lighter ? 
Exhaustion is a killer. It’s also why NATO moved to a smaller cartridge - less “killy”, but doesn’t weight as much which means a patrol can either go further on the same ammo load ; or carry more rounds if they expect Shit.
Yes. It’s hard to overstate the quantity of ammunition made during WWI; billions of rounds at least. The British were looking at a .276 calibre round in the period just before World War I and again during the inter-war period as well, but WWII happened and they stayed with .303 calibre.
And if you think they made a lot of ammo during WWI, you should see how much was produced for World War II - they made so much of it you can still find it for sale on the surplus market today with a bit of looking around.
You wouldn’t want to fire it, though - the British and Russian ammo is highly corrosive due to the primer chemicals and will rust out a rifle barrel if you don’t clean it in fairly short order after firing.
As I said, ‘Personally’ and ‘To me.’ 
7.62 NATO/.308 WIN (I usually shot the former, as surplus was cheaper than commercial) had much less recoil than .30-06, .30-30 WIN, or 7.92 Mauser.
Those are already yesterday’s rounds.
The newer M855A1 Enhanced Performance Round has basically replaced them in recent US military use. Terminal performance against soft targets like flesh is less yaw dependent than in the older rounds so there is less difference round to round. Along they way they also increased accuracy, improved hard target penetration and reduced environmental impact (more of an issue for use on training ranges where throwing lots of lead day after day into the same ground creates heavy metal hazards.) In fact the new round grew out of a program just to create a round for training to reduce that environmental impact. They just managed to use the program to make a better performing round along the way.
Like any change in rifles and ammunition there’s cries of chaos, mayhem, and government claims about performance being wrong. It most certainly is the standard operational use round for US conventional forces now.
The ironic thing is that yhe only place one is likely to see this round is in combat. Haven’t seen the round used once since leaving Afghanistan 6 years ago!
The distance between the end of World War I (for the US) and the beginning of World War II was a mere 23 years.
The turret explosion aboard the U.S.S. Iowa in 1989 was (partially caused) by old unstable propellant from 1944-1945… a time distance of 45 years. Obviously, the U.S.S. Iowa itself was also about that old.
The U.S. Air Force is currently flying main-line combat aircraft that are over 60 years old.
The US military is full of old old shit. Kept because it still works, or someone mistakenly thinks it does.
It’s true in many cases older weapons work well enough, and in other cases the military seeks economy in keeping older stuff but it doesn’t really save money in the end. Anyway the number of years doesn’t mean much taken in isolation. I wouldn’t count 60+ year old KC-135’s as actual combat a/c, but there are ~55 yr old USAF combat a/c, the B-52H’s. Whereas it was obviously impossible to have 55 yr old combat airplanes ca. 1941, and even 10 yr old ones at that time were obsolete. Now 10 yrs old is still a new plane: the pace of development has slowed greatly in military a/c.
Anyway the decision not to adopt .276 as the new US Army caliber was made (by Douglas MacArthur, then Army COS) in 1932, well before WWII. And while the stock of .30-06 ammunition is sometimes given as ‘the’ reason for that, it wasn’t the only reason. At that time, obviously, the entire huge stock of rifles (not counting obsolete Krag’s etc which still existed in armories) was .30, plus automatic rifles (M1918, the BAR) and machine guns (M1917 water cooled Brownings). And it was the Depression in terms of funding. Plus MacArthur claimed to be not satisfied .276 was a superior rifle caliber anyway.
There were around 2 billion rounds of .30-06 in inventory then, but it was largely gone by WWII, where the great bulk of ammo produced and used was M2 .30 cal which people loosely now also call ‘.30-06’. In between there was M1 .30cal (ammo, not the M1 rifle) adopted in the 1920’s which had a heavier bullet, actual M1906 .30 cal and M2 were more similar but not identical. But again, there was a whole ‘ecosystem’ of .30 caliber, not just a question of ammo in store.
And in hindsight the post WWII quick adoption of 7.62mm NATO then the McNamara era quick decision to undermine it only 5 yrs after the first 7.62 rifle was adopted by starting to buy the ‘not invented here’ AR-15, was arguably the aberration*. The Army has been much more reluctant over a long period since then to throw out the M16 family or 5.56mm, though it’s done lots of iterations of trials and development suggesting it do one or both those things.
*calibers changed more often in the few decades prior to the M1906 .30 cal, but again development was moving faster. The arguments over 7.62, 5.56, or 7mm (.276) or whatever over the last almost 90 years have occurred in a relatively static technological era in guns compared to say how the M1842 musket compared to the Pedersen and Garand developed in the 1920’s.
A Korean War veteran I knew carried the radio, and hence a .30 carbine.
They were charged by South Koreans wearing feather stuffed jackets. He hit one twice and saw feathers fly. The guy kept coming. An American with a Garand hit the guy once, and he was knocked over backwards. My acquaintance tossed the carbine and picked up a Garand from a casualty.
Why did the South Koreans charge them?
Hollywood physics in real life!
Good point, he was probably exaggerating, but the carbine pissed him off by ruining his coat, and the Garand killed him.
No one ever claimed the Army made sense all the time.
I actually has a “that’s new” at a range my troops were running in CONUS. It was a mobilization station so maybe that had something to do with why. It wasn’t directly related to meetings, Powerpoint slides, CRM matrices, or email management so I didn’t have enough exposure to reality to know if it was common for us or not.
Agreed. Ref also **Corry El **just above.
Another factor is that consumables are different from capital stock.
A heck of a lot of consumables are stockpiled ahead of need for a war. Which then get used slowly in peacetime. The right way to use consumables is in FIFO order. So you’re always using the oldest possible stuff. With some caveats for them putting the newer stuff in the crisis hotspots and the older stuff in the backwaters and stateside training facilities. Just in case. So one person’s experience will vary from another’s depending on where they served.
The kinds of changes which trigger a need for new capital (i.e. buying new rifles) are doubly-selected against when they also necessitate obsoleting existing consumables and re-stocking that too (i.e. new rifle in different caliber drives need for different caliber ammo). Which had something to do with the .276 transition that never happened as discussed above.
Examples:
I was in the service throughout the 80s. We ate C-rats in the field that were Viet Nam-era. Despite the fact MREs had been current issue for almost a decade at that time.
I also flew piston powered aircraft then. We were burning Viet Nam-era avgas that was at least 15 years old and maybe was 20. It’d have taken the few remaining piston aircraft in the USAF the rest of eternity to use up all the avgas DoD still owned after the unplanned rapid drawdown post-Viet Nam and the scrapping of 99% of USAF/USA/USN’s already shrinking fleet of piston aircraft.
The stuff smelled like paint thinner and they had to test it chemically every month to ensure it still met specs. On the other hand, our fuel budget was effectively zero so we could & did fly the pants off the aircraft. Which were likewise fully depreciated and run out.
The eldest part of the tail of the curve is pretty creaky. Which, to DoD’s credit, amounts to wringing every last drop of utility out of the gear the taxpayers spent so much money to buy.
Belated thank you, as usual you go above and beyond.
Yeah, DS, knowledgeable, and articulate, but I tell you what most impresses me at this moment: You wrote and posted an enormous post on a phone (in the desert) without a single typo, with no re-post with edit. Jeez Louise.
Another caveat, left unsaid perhaps because economic utility is always a structural component of these decisions, is the international defense market.
Our cast offs are golden to many, and if the circumstances align that stock can be sold, supply backlogs obviously diminish.
I worked closely with various Latin American air forces during the early 80s. They all operated a mishmash of US, Soviet, and European cast-offs. Some from WII, others from the 50s. P-51s, F-86s, MiG-15s, Dassault Mysteres, Hawker Hunters, etc.
I recently read an in-depth article (lost the cite) about the last air combat with piston fighters. F4U Corsairs vs. P-51 Mustangs. In 1969. The F-14 & F-15 first flew only a couple years later.
Cast-offs indeed.