The Real Reason the M14 Was Pulled From Vietnam After Just Five Years.

On May 1st, 1957, the United States Army adopted a new rifle. They called it the M14. On paper, it was everything the Army had wanted since the last shot of the Second World War. One rifle to replace four weapons. It would retire the M1 Garand, the M1 Carbine, the M3 Grease gun, and the M1918 Browning automatic rifle all at once.

one weapon in every soldier’s hands, one cartridge in every pouch. It was chambered in a big full power 30 caliber round. And it was designed the way America had always designed its rifles in-house at a government arsenal by men who had built the Garand that won a world war. And barely 5 years after American troops carried it into Vietnam, it was being pulled off the front lines and handed to the enemy of every tradition that made it. You have probably heard why.

It was too long, too heavy, uncontrollable in the jungle. All of that is true and all of that is beside the point. Those were the symptoms. They were not the disease. The real reason the M14 died so fast is not that it failed in Southeast Asia. It is that it was already obsolete on the day it was adopted and the men who adopted it had been handed the proof [music] years earlier and thrown it away.

Here is the detail to hold on to because everything turns on it. The M14 was sold as barely a new rifle at all. It was pitched as an improved garand so close to the old weapon, the argument went, that it could be built on the very same machines. That single promise won at the contract. That same promise helped destroy it.

Before we go further, if you want the real reason, not the textbook one, [music] subscribe and stay with me, because the fight that doomed the M14 was won and then thrown away years before a single one of them reached Vietnam. To understand how the army talked itself into this rifle, you have to understand where it was made.

Not in a garage, not in a startup. at Springfield Armory in Massachusetts, a federal arsenal that had been designing American service rifles since the age of musketss. This was the establishment. Weapons development here happened inhouse under government supervision by government engineers. It was the opposite of an outsers’s operation.

[music] It was the institution itself. The men doing the work were career arsenal designers. Earl Harvey and Lloyd Corbett had spent years developing rifles around a new cartridge, the 30 caliber light rifle known in the files as the T65. The idea behind that round was clever. Take the old 306 that had served since 1906. Shorten the case, then using modern propellants, deliver almost the same power from the smaller package.

The T65 [music] would eventually be adopted as the 7.62x 51 mm NATO. Shorter than its grandfather, nearly as powerful, full power in every sense that mattered on a battlefield. Corbett’s rifle design was deliberately conservative. His T44 was not a clean sheet. It was built from a T20 receiver, which was itself a modified Garand rebarreled for the new round with a shorter gas system borrowed from an earlier prototype, replacing the Garand’s long operating rod.

This was not reinvention. This was evolution. And that was the entire selling point. But [music] there was a bigger fight happening around this rifle. And it decided everything. [music] It was a fight over the cartridge itself. The British had a different idea. After the war, they developed an intermediate round, the 280 British, and a radical little rifle to fire it, the EM2.

[music] A compact bullpup that was years ahead of its time. [music] The intermediate cartridge was the future, and the British could see it. Less recoil, more rounds carried, [music] controllable automatic fire. The Belgian firm Fabri National designed its new rifle, the FAL, to fire that same 280 round.

Between the EM2 and the FAL, the free world had a genuine chance to standardize on an intermediate cartridge in the early 1950s, a full decade before anyone said the words assault rifle in an American procurement meeting. The United States said no. American ordinance would not accept a foreign cartridge. It would not accept an intermediate one. Full power or nothing.

The pressure was enormous and the allies buckled. Britain had actually adopted the EM2 in 1951 as the rifle number nine. Then Churchill’s incoming government reversed the decision for the sake of NATO unity to keep the alliance from splitting over ammunition. In December 1953, NATO bowed to Washington and adopted the American T65 as the 7.62 62 mm NATO round.

The full power cartridge won. The intermediate idea was buried. Now only the rifle remained to be chosen and the contest came down to two. Springfield’s homegrown T44 and the T48, a licensed copy of the Belgian FAL, built on American soil by Harrington and Richardson and by the high standard company. Roughly 3,200 T48s were made for the trials which ran from 1953 through 1956.

Here is what matters about that contest. The FAL was winning the world. Canada adopted it. Britain adopted it. Allies across NATO were lining up behind the Belgian rifle. and many of them expected after swallowing the American cartridge that the United States would return the favor and adopt the common NATO weapon.

The final decision between those two rifles is where the real story begins because the army did not pick the rifle most of its allies had already chosen. It picked its own. And the reasons it gave are the reasons the whole thing came apart. So why did the T44 win? Start with the rifle itself because on its own terms it was a serious weapon.

The M14 was gas operated with a rotating bolt feeding from a 20 round detachable magazine. It fired the full power 7.62 mm NATO round. It weighed around 9 lb empty. It ran about 44 in long. It was capable of select fire and its cyclic rate ran near 750 rounds per minute. [music] In the hands of a trained rifleman, firing one shot at a time, it was accurate, powerful, and hit hard at long range. The 7.

62 round punched through cover and reached out across open ground in a way nothing lighter could match. But the decision to adopt it did not rest on ballistics. It rested on that promise. The T44 was chosen over the FAL in large part because it was familiar. It was American. It was, the argument ran, just an improved garand.

So, a generation of soldiers already knew how to use it, so armorers already knew how to fix it. And so, crucially, it could be manufactured on the tooling already in place for the M1. Why retool the country for a Belgian design when you could bolt the new rifle onto machines you already owned? That was the case.

Same family, same tools, lower [music] cost. It was persuasive precisely because it sounded like common sense. There was just one problem. The rifle could not actually do the job it had been designed for. The M14 was meant to be everything. Rifle and automatic weapon in one. But put a full power 7.62 millimeter cartridge in a 9-lb rifle firing at 750 rounds a minute and physics takes [music] over.

On full automatic, the M14 was close to uncontrollable. The muzzle climbed. The shots walked off the target and into the sky. A man could hold the trigger down and empty a magazine. And after the first round or two, he was no longer aiming at anything. It could not replace the Browning automatic rifle. It was too light to serve as a base of fire, and its 20 round magazine ran dry too fast to matter.

The army knew, and the army tried to fix it again and again. There was a heavy barrel version, the M15, meant to fill the automatic rifle role. It was cancelled before it went anywhere. Then came the M14E2, later standardized as the M14A1. A pistol grip stock, a folding foregrip, a muzzle compensator, a bipod, everything engineers could think of to tame the recoil. It helped.

It was not enough. The rifle still climbed, still overheated, still ran dry. The problem was not the accessories. The problem was the concept. So the army gave up on the feature that was supposed to justify the whole rifle. Across much of the force, the M14 was issued as a semi-automatic only.

Some units had the select fire parts removed entirely. On the M14M variant, the automatic mechanism was literally welded shut. A rifle built to do the work of four weapons ended up doing the work of one. the Garand it was descended from a heavy accurate full power semi-automatic rifle [music] which is exactly what the M1 had already been.

Now [music] honesty demands a caveat because the legend has grown taller than the record. In skilled hands with [music] the compensator and the inline stock of the E2, the M14 is more manageable on automatic than [music] the totally uncontrollable story suggests. Every full power rifle [music] climbs. That was never really the point.

The point is that as a general issue weapon put in the hands of an ordinary conscript and expected to [music] replace a squad automatic, it failed at the mission the army bought it to perform. None of that stopped the adoption. The M14 became the standard [music] rifle of the United States. And now it had to be built not by one arsenal, but by four factories racing to make good on that promise about the tooling.

What happened when they tried is where the story turns from disappointing to disastrous. Production began in 1959. It ran until 1964. In those years, four manufacturers built 1,376,031 [music] man 14 rifles. Springfield Armory led. Winchester built roughly 356,000. Harrington and Richardson built [music] the most of the commercial makers around 537,000 and a firm called Thompson Ramo Waldridge TRW [music] built roughly 319,000.

Remember the promise, the rifle that could be built on the Garand’s own machines. It was a lie. Not a deliberate [music] one maybe, but a lie all the same. Springfield discovered that the M14 could not simply be run off existing grand tooling. The similarities that had won the contract turned out to be surface deep.

And the moment the work moved to the commercial contractors, the wheels came off. The quality failures were not minor. Rifles came out with heat treatment defects. Bolt lugs sheared. Receivers cracked. Some receivers burst apart during firing tests. In late 1960, there [music] were bolt failures serious enough to trigger a full army investigation.

At Harrington and Richardson, lowgrade steel found its way into an unknown number of receivers before anyone caught it. When inspectors pulled sample [music] rifles from the lines and sent them to Aberdine to find out why the M14 could not meet its own accuracy specification, they found rifles with excessive head space, loose handguards, oversized bores, misassembled parts.

As of August 1961, the failure rate across Springfield, Winchester, and Harrington, and Richardson ran somewhere between 5 and 12% from all causes. And the money followed the failures. The contractors had bid low to win. The first commercial contracts were priced near $68.75 per rifle. By 1960, the average price the army was actually paying had climbed to $150.75.

In 1961, it was $13061. The bargain rifle, the one that was supposed to be cheap because it reused the old tools, was costing roughly double what the country had been sold. Now, the irony inside the irony. One contractor got it right. TRW. [music] And TRW was not a gun company. It was an aerospace and electronics firm.

It had no heritage in small arms, no old grand tooling to lean on, no institutional habits to protect. So it did the one thing the winning argument had said was unnecessary. It invested in brand new machinery built for this rifle, [music] and it produced the cleanest, most trouble-free M14 rifles of the entire program. The outsider, who ignored the promise about the old tools, made the best rifles.

The insiders who believed it made the worst. Then the rifle reached the war it was named for, and the field added insults the factory had not managed. The M14’s stock was wood cut from the same tradition as the Gans. In the wet heat of Vietnam, that wood swelled. As it swelled, it pressed against the barrel and pulled the rifle’s accuracy apart.

Fiberglass stocks were developed to fix it, but only small numbers reached the field starting around 1964. And in the [music] dense brush, the long, heavy rifle was simply hard to move with. The virtues of the full power battle rifle, [music] reach, power, penetration meant less in close jungle than its length and weight cost.

The end came from the top, and it came [music] fast. On January 23rd, 1963, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamera [music] ordered a halt to M14 production. The rifle was still the standard weapon for Army and Marine units deploying to Vietnam as late as 1965, but by 1966 and 1967, [music] it was already being replaced in country by a lighter weapon in a smaller caliber.

By 1970, only a handful of M14 rifles remained on the front lines of the war it had been built to fight. That replacement was the M16. And here is the consequence that reframes everything. When the United States pulled the M14, it did not just swap one rifle for another. It reversed the entire idea the rifle stood for.

[music] It abandoned the full power cartridge it had forced on the whole world. To understand how bitter that reversal is, you have to go back not to Vietnam, but to a decision made a decade earlier in a fight America won. Go back to that cartridge fight. The one the United States won. Washington had told its allies there was one right answer, and the answer was full power.

It pressured Britain into abandoning the 280 [music] British. It helped kill the EM2. It steered the whole of NATO onto the 7.62 mm round over the objections of allies who thought the intermediate cartridge was the smarter path. And it did all of this on an understanding widely held across the alliance that if everyone accepted the American cartridge, the United States would accept the common NATO rifle in return, the FAL.

The United States took the cartridge concession. Then it kept its own rifle anyway. It adopted the T44 over the T48 and left its allies holding a bargain that only ran one [music] direction. To this day, the decision is called biased. And there are specific allegations behind that word, including that the cold weather portion of the trials was skewed [music] to favor the American rifle.

The FAL went on to arm dozens of nations and earned the nickname the right arm of the free world. The rifle America chose instead lasted as the standard weapon of its own army about 5 years. And now the twist that makes the whole thing almost unbearable. Within those same few years, the [music] United States did not just drop the M14. It dropped the full power concept entirely.

The M16 fired the 5.56 mm, a light smallcaliber high velocity round, an intermediate cartridge. The exact category of ammunition the [music] British 280 had pointed toward the exact idea America had strongarmed the Alliance into [music] rejecting. It gets worse because the data had been sitting there the entire time.

The Army’s own research had been saying [music] it for years. Project Salvo, which ran from 1952 to [music] 1962, and the hit probability studies before it, kept reaching the same conclusion. A soldier does better with a lighter controllable weapon and more ammunition than with a heavy rifle firing a full power round he can barely manage on automatic.

volume of controllable fire beats a handful of powerful aimed shots. The case against the battle rifle was [music] not discovered in the jungle. It was written down in American reports before the M14 was ever adopted. So follow the full circle. America forced its allies onto a cartridge it would abandon over a rifle it would keep for five years to reject an idea it would adopt anyway.

And to close the loop, the 5.56 mm would go on to replace the 7.62 [music] mm as NATO’s standard rifle cartridge by 1980. the intermediate round winning the argument in the end a quarter century late after all the coercion and all the cost. Now circle back to where we started to the question on the screen. The real reason the M14 was pulled from Vietnam after just 5 years.

It was never really the heat. It was never really the swelling stocks or the length in the brush. Those things hurried it along. But the rifle was obsolete in concept the day it was adopted, and the men who adopted it had already been told so by their own researchers and their own allies. The M14 did not lose to the M16 in Vietnam.

It lost years earlier to an argument its own [music] creators had already had and already lost. return one last time to the beginning to the American way of building a rifle in-house at the old arsenal out of the Garan’s own lineage in a big and powerful round. The M14 was the last of that line.

The last full power battle rifle [music] the United States ever issued in quantity to its soldiers. After it, the tradition ended. The next rifle [music] was black and light and made of aluminum and plastic, and it fired a [music] cartridge the old Arsenal men would have called a varmint round.

The lineage that ran from the trapoor Springfield through the Garand stopped with the M14. It was the end of an era, and it [music] did not get to be the end on its own terms. And here is the last turn of the knife, the one hidden in that founding promise. The thing that was supposed to be the rifle’s great strength, that it was descended from the garand, familiar, safe, buildable on the old machines.

That was the trap. The lineage did not make it cheap. It made it a fiasco. [music] The familiarity did not make it the perfect allpurpose weapon. It made it a garand with a bigger magazine, [music] pretending to be four guns at once. But the M14 did not vanish. It found a strange and quiet second life.

And that second life completes the story. The very [music] traits that made it a poor assault rifle, the weight, the long reach, the heavy accurate full power round, turned out to be exactly what a marksman wants. The rifle that could not be everything became very good at one thing. It lived on as the M21 and the M25 sniper systems.

It came back decades later as the Mark1 14. Its civilian [music] form, the M1A, is still built and still prized. The weapon survived by becoming the specialist [music] it was accidentally good at instead of the universal soldier it was forced to be. Picture the rifle as it actually stood in Vietnam, though. Not on a range in peace time, not in a collector’s rack, in a soldier’s hands, in the wet green. in 1966.

Look closely at the selector switch. On so many of them, it isn’t a switch anymore. It’s a weld, a little bead of metal where the automatic setting used to be. A rifle built to do four jobs, issued to do one. Its single clever feature spot welded out of existence [music] by the same army that had promised the world it could do everything. That is the M14.

A broken promise made permanent one weld at a time.