Why I Despise the M14...

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] welcome to small arm solutions today is a day that many of you have asked for many of you know that i am not a fan of the m14 by no means and you guys have always wanted me to do a review and say why so uh back by popular demand uh we're finally gonna do that video uh talking about why i despise the m14 as much as i do and these reasons are of several uh one is because of the failure of our ordinance corps to give our troops the proper weapon and proper ammunition and that both of them is is predominant uh for as far as the ammunition is concerned uh going adopting the seven point sixty by fifty one millimeters the nato round the u.s forced down nato's throat and provided them with a heavier cartridge that was really uneven it wasn't even intermediate cartridge it put us well behind what the warsaw pack was doing with their intermediate caliber we would find that very very quickly in the jungles of vietnam when we encountered the ak-47s and our troops had had the m14 which was the nightmare that's why the m16 was rushed into service but if we go into it from the beginning and we look at the nato trials that's really where a lot of this begins it's typical u.s ordinance corps it is where they are so hell-bent on tradition that they will not look at new concepts even if that new concept that they have puts our soldiers in harm's way or puts our soldiers behind the enemy and uh that's exactly what happened with the adoption of the 760 by 51 millimeter it was the same thing with the weapon as well you know you provide our soldiers with an inferior weapon just because you want to keep your arsenals running and you want to keep with your traditional wooden iron m1 garand so i think that's uh that's where we're going to start is talking about the the nato trials in the 1950s for the new nato cartridge starting with with this uh during the 1950s nato was supposed to standardize on not only us one type of ammunition but one type of firearm as well due to the fact that if you looked after world war ii you would see that you know the british with the 303 british the russians 765-54 are the germans with the 792 by 57 and then of course uh throughout throughout europe you would see various 6.5 and you know the us 30 30 caliber they wanted to have something that would be standard standardized for everybody and there's a lot of logical reasons for this uh if we are engaged in uh you know in battles with our you know with enemies and we have our allies there we're able to resupply them with ammunition resupply them with magazines and even firearms if need be so that standardization was very very important but uh let's talk about world war two the germans redefined modern day warfare with blitzkrieg it got rid of the trench war world war one it got rid of the long one mile shots or the thousand yard shots or whatnot it brought combat very very close well with under 300 meters in a lot of cases well under 100 and they were looking at the concept of going with an intermediate caliber cartridge intermediate caliber cartridge means it is in power in between that of a high-powered rifle and that of a pistol and what it would do is it would give the soldier a lot more firepower at re at the normal range since your engagements aren't going to be at a thousand meters why don't we need a cartridge that has that kind of power not only that kind of power to reach out that far but also the power and recoil the germans developed what was referred to as the mp44 or later the mp45 uh stronger bear or storm rifle although this concept was not viewed very highly by adolf hitler in fact he canceled it if i recall twice and it was done in secrecy originally it was called a machine carabiner which was a carbine hitler had only used for machining gevers or machine guns or mps or machine pistols he had no interest in any kind of a new rifle but the germans had saw the benefit of the of the lighter weight rifle selective fire high capacity magazine it would be able to put out a low recoil accurate burst of fire which would really increase the firepower on the individual level you're looking right here we have the standard this is a standard nazi rifle and machine gun cartridge seven point nine two by fifty seven millimeter uh what we had here was a 181 gram bullet going about twenty seven hundred feet a second and this was used in the 98 case it was used in the mg-42s uh mg-43s and uh it was it was standard throughout the war when they came out with the stormgiver as you can see very different here we see the seven point nine two by thirty three curves curves refers to is short and that gives you a velocity of twenty four hundred foot a second this made a major difference uh in the soldier's ability to react in an ambush to provide accurate suppressive fire these guns mostly saw use in the russian front it was unfortunate for the germans anyways it was too late in the war for this to make much of a difference if this cartridge would have been made available to the germans earlier on in the war this could have made a major impact on the outcome of many battles with the with the allies this particular rifle in this cartridge would have uh outdone anything that the allies had including the m1 garand so now we're going to skip to the post world war ii time period with the soviets the main cartridge that the soviets used in their rifles and machine guns was 7.62 by 54r now this cartridge here is the longest serving military cartridge in history this goes back to the late 1800s and is still in use today uh this cartridge was used back then in world war two in the most in the gods and in all of their belt but machine guns that they had and it would go on to be uh in the 70s in the dragon offs uh in the pkm general purpose machine guns and it would lose a lot of its uh if it's oomp and the small irons because it was now replaced is the standard rifle cartridge by the new 7.62 by 39 and the ak-47 cartridge first it was chambered in the sks in 1945 which was very quickly replaced in 1947 by the ak-47 and we have here's 123 ring bullet 2400 foot a second as you can see the exact same concept between the germans and the russians now we're going to go forward to the 1950s when nato was formed they had their first what they would refer to as nato trials for a new cartridge for use by the new nato allies there was two players in this the united states and british the british used the uh the 303 british cartridge throughout world war ii and in in their machine guns as well as their uh their standard enfield rifles they saw what happened with the germans and with the uh with the soviets they felt going with an intermediate cartridge would also be a positive move which they were right they went with the 280 british the 280 british was a 0.284 diameter and overall length of 2.54 inches it had 139 gram projectile firing about 2545 feet a second this was an excellent uh potential cartridge for nato now comes the united states we have the 30 at 6 or the 30 caliber used in the m1 garand in all u.s uh small arms you had 147 grain bolt 150 grain projectile traveling at 2 800 foot a second and what did the us put in what we have here it was referred to as the t44 cartridge that was the exact same projectile bring it to 273 feet a second so what we did is we went from 7.62 by 63 7.62 by 51 which with binary propellants gave you the exact same cartridge with a very very little difference less than 100 foot a second difference between the two of them so we had a true cartridge that they chambered in their new em-2 em1 rifles which were bullpup rifles lighter recoil easier to control same concept as the as the russians and the germans but the us wouldn't have it due to the fact that the us army was again entrenched in tradition you have to have a full power 30 caliber cartridge with a range of a thousand yards even though that you weren't looking at that kind of a battle any longer that tradition was so hell bent and heavy that studdler and the rest of the u.s origins corps would not have a sub 30 caliber cartridge they'd poke holes in it everywhere that they could and of course the uss you know it's very very influential in fact they're a decision maker when it comes to nato uh what the u.s decides everybody else decides uh they literally forced the 7.62 by 51 millimeter on the british the british in my opinion had a excellent concept they had something that was still a little bit more potent than the uh the you know the previous 792 by 33 and the 7 16 by 39 something it's a little more potent than that but it was still far better crying than the change from the uh you know down to the 7.62 by 51. unfortunately when the dust settled the final decision was a 7.62 by 51 millimeter cartridge now the british did not go quietly into the good night they basically said they knew they had a better concept they knew they had a better idea and they went ahead with production of the 280 british and the em-2 car em-2 rifle for it it was winston churchill himself who basically told the the british military that you are going to stop production and you're going to go into production of the 7.62 by 51 millimeter nail cartridge and you're going to change the m2 over to the fnfal so henceforth we now have the weapons trials part of the concessions the u.s had with nato was that they were to adopt the 7.62 by 51 millimeter cartridge the us would go ahead and adopt the foul rifle the foul rifle went on to be the weapon of the free world was used by virtually all nato countries it was an excellent rifle however the us very very fond of their m1 garan during world war ii uh and general pads saying it was the greatest implement warrior plant ever devised um this was what the us government liked now i do want to talk a little bit about uh some of the problems with the m1 garand at least in my opinion during its development which was again the fault of ordinance corps when the m1 garan was developed uh it was developed for use with the bar magazine a 20 round magazine in oregon's course infinite wisdom they decided they didn't want our soldiers to waste ammunition so they went from a detachable box magazine to an eight-round stripper clip so what they basically did was they decreased the firepower on the individual level that the rifle was designed around it was designed to run a 20 round magazine but again we had tradition you know we want our one shot one kill we don't want them to waste ammunition so they had to carry around these disposable clips and insert them into the into the rifle so the m1 grains were also manufactured in us government arsenal's rock island arsenal frankfurt arsenal and so forth and that was the only time in american history well last time in american history that was ever to happen and we're sort of going to get into a little bit of that a little bit of course when lieutenant colonel renee stoodler decided on the rifle he had no intention of ever going with the fnfal he wanted not only an american-made design but he wanted it to come out of us government arsenals not caring that the u.s soldier would have been far better off with the foul that nato was going with it was a more accurate rifle it was more durable it was a 20 round magazine it was selective fire and it was controllable on fully automatic it could be used in all those different conditions they decided they were going to upgrade to their wonderful m1 garand into what we see here and this was referred to as t44 rifle now the rifle that i have access here today is the m21 version i did not have access to the standard infantry version but this will do good for me to describe basically what we had here so what do we have the difference between the m1 garand and this basically it's the exact same rifle what they did was they changed the gas system they brought the gas system down closer the reason why the gas system was as such on the m1 garand during the development uh mr grant wanted to make sure that the gas system did not affect accuracy so he figured having the gas system as close to the muzzle as possible would not have any adverse effects on accuracy well testing after after world war ii for the new program they moved the gas system back finding out that didn't make much of a difference whatsoever so we have the gas system moved back we have the addition of a flash suppressor we went back to a bar style magazine now chambered in 7.62 by 51. the action everything identical to the m1 grand the stock was basically the same and they added a selector lever to make it fully automatic and in reality it was a joke now the whole concept around the uh m14 rifle program was the m14 or the rifle that was chosen to be the m14 was supposed to replace an entire family of weapons it was supposed to have the firepower of the bar it's supposed to have the lightweight of the carbine it was supposed to have the controllability of the submachine gun and it was supposed to have the accuracy of the m1 so it was to replace all those firearms in the us inventory in the end what did they get they got a gun that wasn't even as good as the m1 garand the reliability and one that didn't replace any of the other ones because it was extremely heavy it was difficult if not impossible to control for your average soldier on fully automatic it did not replace any of those firearms it was basically the exact same thing that they had that was a problem it was they were not they were putting the soldier the american soldier behind all of our all of our allies and at the same time this this program was going on there was another rifle that came out right towards the end the armalite ar-10 what we have here is an example of the new brownells retro version of the rifle but this is an excellent iteration of what that rifle actually was this is the rifle that should have been the m14 however just like we stated earlier this was not designed by the army it wouldn't be manufactured by the army and it wasn't within tradition it utilized aluminum it utilizes uh synthetics and it was totally unlike anything the army had ever seen now when you are so entrenched in tradition what that does it makes you impervious and blind to new technology even when it's when it's in front of you you're seeing in the case of the ar-10 they did everything that they could to sabotage it the introduction of the new uh era in aircraft with the uses of aluminum and alloy the aluminum alloys dissipated heat better and they are more corrosion resistant than the steel was the synthetics were uh much stronger than the woodward they didn't swell when they got humid or when they got when i got rain and with the new concept of inline construction it gave you us the same kind of a rifle that was far more controllable on fully automatic than the current m14 in fact the m14 as it was issued because nobody could control it majority of those rifles were issued without the selectors in place which that totally defeats the purpose of it the soldiers are having a fully automatic weapon now we're also this is before the vietnam era that would come into more of a crisis later on the army was forced to take a look at the ar-10 and the testing that the army put the ar-10 through was not even what their m their t-44 went through the animation that was used in this rifle was a 762 nato ammunition armor piercing animation that was rejected because it was too high pressure so they used ammunition that wasn't even uh within spec uh to test it the initial ar10 that they had had a barrel that was uh it was a steel main barrel wrapped in aluminum to give it more of the light weight you're looking at a weight on the ar10 at 6.85 pounds compared to the 8.45 pounds of the t-44 rifle significantly lighter so that barrel was part of keeping that that weight down a little bit well gene stoner was adamantly against having that variable use he wanted to use a standard steel barrel but the uh you know the management and armalite insisted and gene stoner's fierce games came came true when the the barrel actually blew on the left side making it making an 8 gap and of course that told the army that oh this is this is a piece of garbage just getting five years of development well after that the barrel rupture jean stoner went back over the weekend and he built uh three fluted standard steel barrels put them on there to complete the testing but at the time studdler again there was no way anything was gonna happen other than his t-44 he didn't care this was a better rifle he didn't care that the foul was a better rifle he was not concerned with the with the u.s soldier having a better rifle he was concerned with keeping his people in business keeping people's uh ranks of higher ranks in in their jobs keeping guns pumping out of the us the us arsenals even though they were inferior so the ar-10 was was tossed to the scrap peep of history so now we have a 20-round capacity m1 garand and it's uncontrollable and fully automatic it's extremely heavy it's not designed for close quarter combat it uses a cartridge that's is much more powerful making it less controllable even on semi-automatic for the most part when you would fire a shot you have to re get your sight picture every time because of the recoil the foul rifle before would have been also an ideal rifle for the us military it worked out very well for all the nato allies this is not an exact rendition of what what the rifle that was trying the t-48 this is just another version of it is you know it's very very similar there's some differences in the stocks materials and various things but this was the basic rifle but this was again controllable it had adjustable gas system it was you know it was it was the right arm in the free world as the british call it so now we're going to move forward from the 50s to 1965. the first us combat troops arrived in vietnam in 1965 equipped with the m14 rifle they had no idea what they were going to be encountering in those jungles with the enemy equipped with the ak-47 a true uh assault rifle and when you are in the jungle environment when you your your enemy is within 20 feet from you if even uh even that your all your shots are gonna be well under 100 yards and a majority of all of your battles are going to be meeting engagements or ambushes whether you're ambushing them or they're ambushing you the only way to get out of an ambush is provide a heavier volume of fire on the enemy and they had found when they come under fire from troops with the ak-47s that most of the guys who are carrying our beloved m14 they just hit the dust uh when they when they heard that fully automatic fire and it was spraying the area and keeping their heads down they're not gonna have the opportunity for their legendary one-shot kill because they're not gonna be able to see where that enemy is so they basically viewed their fire as being uh ineffective and most of this a lot of the troops did not even engage uh during an ambush which was a major major problem at that time there was another rifle the ar-15 rifle now this was another rifle that the government was forced to look at by the air force's request and they wanted a ultra-modern rifle that would be ideal for the air force for replacing the m1 carbines that they are mostly using more effective rifle this one here is a scaled down version of the ar-10 after the us government basically nixed the ar-10 there was no way he was going to happen with it the air force approached gene stoner and said would you like to get it on a weapons program for us we're looking for the intermediate caliber cartridge and gene stoner said yes he knew that his direct gas and fishman system or his internal piston was ideal for that so him along with mr sullivan some other guys that armalite scaled it down to this now again this had the same issues that the mar-10 did back uh during the nato trials it was not made by the army it was a 5.56 millimeter which you know if they were going to go for the two do a british there was no way in hell they were to go down to a 22 caliber cartridge it was utilizing synthetics it was utilizing aluminum and they just they just weren't going to have it lieutenant colonel stoodler said once again he goes the army has no use for such a weapon our m14 is what it needs to be well because of the way the army handled the m16 program the rifle got its attention to the us military outside normal procurement channels uh once the troops were in vietnam a lot of our uh our south vietnamese allies they were given world war ii era weapons uh to fight the vietcong and the nva however uh their small stature made carrying these heavy m1 garands and and so forth almost impossible you're looking at you know 90 pound you know soldier so they started introducing the ar-15 you know your armor light did and colts to that and the army special forces the green berets who were over there they were getting the ar-15s as well to do some testing on them and they absolutely loved them they found that this weapon was ideal for jungle warfare it was light it was controllable and fully automatic this matched the ak's firepower but it made it even better because they were able to be much more accurate than the ak-47 was uh being it was the 5.56 millimeter animation they were able to carry you know down there three times the amount of ammunition they did with the m14 and again controllable fully automatic flight automatic was necessary because of the ambushes this weapon along with the m60s enabled them to a lot of times overpower the nba and vietcong which suppressed more accurate fire so what did the army do it was the same thing it was with m14 the ordnance corps plagued the rifle with with issues they uh they sabotaged it as best as they could they tried to make it fail there was a one-time buy of over a hundred thousand rifles that was uh against oregon's course wishes and orders square was ordered by the secretary of defense to get this rifle ready for the troops because general westmoreland after he saw the you know what the ar-15 was he requested for every maneuver element in entire southeast asia all of our troops he requested to have the new ar-15 rifle the army figured that well they knew it was going to fail so what we're going to do is we're not going to issue cleaning kits we're not going to put it through a development process we're going to throw it right into combat which you never do you never do any kind of development in combat it's done before that and sure enough the rifle did fail uh they they screwed up the ammunition they knew about it uh ahead of time they felt that n would justify the means even though rifles would malfunction and our troops would be killed because of malfunctioning rifles they felt the animal justified the means the army would settle back on their m14 and it would be done even though that it was the wrong weapon for that kind of a conflict well 1968 came letters came into congressmen stating that the rifles were failing on soldiers and they were forced to look into it they formed a subcommittee uh headed by a representative a republican i believe it was the name of richard eichord and mr icord uh set up a whole committee to investigate the m16 and everything around it everything from procurement to the reliability durability problems to uh foreign sales towards everything this committee actually went to vietnam and saw what was going on with the rifles he saw no cleaning kits he saw that the rifle didn't have a chromeborn chamber and it was causing a lot of the major failures he saw the the pitted chambers he also found out that the army was aware of all this stuff long before he had found out that the army sabotaged the rifle for as far as filling cyclic rate tests uh when the rifles were being manufactured at colt there was a great limit which was 750 rounds a minute uh for high for fully automatic they could not meet that with a new ball ammunition that they used it was exceeding a thousand rounds a minute so colt couldn't pass their rifles so if the army did was they sent them the imr propellant and so they saw the rifles would pass the testing so they could be shipped to vietnam then once the soldiers got to vietnam they gave them the ball ammunition which was the problematic ammunition so this was all done deliberately again to make the m16 look bad so they would go back to their homegrown m14 well the the findings from this uh for this congressional hearing came down to the army being called criminally negligent in their handling of the program and once that happened the army was forced to fix the rifle and that was the final nail in the coffin of ordnance corps the ordinance corps has failed the u.s soldier throughout our history we've had advanced weapons available to us some of the most advanced weapons in the world did the army because of their own traditions uh and their own concept of what they thought war was that we don't need that the thompson submachine gun was a very good example of that during world war one it was designed as a trench broom before trench warfare now they didn't want that uh the uh the maxim machine gun several machine guns that were developed here in the united states by browning oh we don't need that so our enemies ended up using those before before we did you know it was a constant failure of them it was always about uh you know their their tradition them keeping their arsenals open and in reality is most a lot of innovations did not come out of the army anyways it came out of private firms with the adoption of the m16 uh the procurement of m14 stopped the m14 had a very short six year service life it was probably the least of any us military small room in our history the u.s ordinance uh plants factories were shut down and from that point forward you would never see a u.s manufactured or a u.s military manufactured weapon system everything has been done outside if you look at today we have colt m16 we have manufacturing it we have the fn 248 249 we have the beretta m9 and now the sig m17 they're all manufactured by outside contractors private companies so the us military can no longer caused the same damage that they did to our soldiers they had for all those years during the previous wars so we're gonna talk a little bit more about the m14 the gun why i didn't particularly care for it again we have a lot of very heavy recoil we have a very heavy magazine compared to what the ar10 had this was a steel magazine there's two different concepts the concept of this magazine was steels to be used over and over again where the ar-10 it was designed to uh have a disposable magazine is carried pre-loaded then it's gotten rid of very heavy heavy systems you have a lot of moving parts you have a rifle that's prone not to like to work in the winter time in the cold because you have so many parts especially considering you know the ar-10 only had a gas tube this was more prone to malfunction in the wintertime because of the gun being frozen actually being frozen than the air 10 was as i previously stated this was supposed to have the firepower of the bar well once you took away the select lever now we have a regular old m1 garand uh this summer back with a 20-shot magazine entire concept of uh being able to have a that kind of firepower was gone nobody could control it you would take an extremely highly trained person to be able to control this thing um if you look at the vietnam war for instance i had the opportunity to interview general moore uh for a paper i did for picatinny arsenal and it was about his uh his involvement with the rifle the battle of badrang valley was the first battle where the m16 was used and it was up close and personal it was it was you're crossing bayonets it was uh it was close i asked him if he felt that the m16 had anything to do with the outcome of that battle he said absolutely he said the kind of uh the kind of hand-in-hand combat and the close range that we had if we had the m14 first of all would have been too long to whip around like we needed to do it would have been much recoil to be able to engage the multiple targets as quickly as they were coming at us and when we had to use fully automatic fire because we couldn't see the the targets the m16 made all the difference in the world the army if they would have had the ar-10 at that time uh i don't i don't think that their ar-15 probably would have come into play i think they would have you know refined the ar-10 over the years to make it even even better they may be even stuck with a 7.62 caliber however the the 5.56 truly was truly was better in my opinion uh for for human target versus the 762. um ballistically uh and the you know considering the trauma that the 5.56 creates it was a better decision but the ar-10 still would have provided them with controllable fully automatic fire long-range accuracy and light weight there you really have it my my despise because comes from the fact that this this weapon didn't none of what it was supposed to do it didn't give you the firepower of the the bar it didn't give you the lightweight of the carbine it didn't give you the controllability of the submachine gun it didn't do any of that in fact it was less accurate than the current than the m1 garand was what the army came out with was the same thing they already had with a couple minor changes and uh they were looked uh much better weapon systems so they put our soldiers at a disadvantage right from the get-go they forced seven six two down donato's throat when they uh there was a better cartridge that was out there tradition can really be a bad thing it really can when tradition clouds your judgment weapons have gone through a lot of changes over the years they thought they've gotten better and if you are so caught in the way things always work done that you are not capable of seeing that there's better equipment out there and your soldiers they deserve the finest equipment in the world and you fail to give it to them and not to mention when you make decisions that cause people to die because you feel your n would justify the means so there you have it uh why i despise this rifle so much i don't believe it ever should have existed we had two rifles that were superior to it that were available to us at the time that were ignored the fell in the ar-10 the cartridge which had never been thrown down nato's uh nato's throat they should have been with the 280 british because it was putting us behind where our enemies were where our warsaw pac countries were and it was giving them a firepower superiority on individual level well over we had i hope you guys did enjoy this video i know it's a little bit long we try to cover a lot of ground there's a lot more we could have talked about but i think you want to be here for two hours so again i hope you enjoyed this video if you did please click like please subscribe and even better share and joining

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Id: mby4hOq-DpI

Length: 30min 31sec (1831 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 21 2018