re: #77 William Lewis

The biggest lie in the whole mess was Springfield promising they could use most of the M1 tooling to produce the M14 so it could be built at significant savings (this is outlined in General Hatcher’s book “Hatcher’s Notebook”. He loved the M1 & there is insane levels of pro-M14 propaganda & anti FAL, AK, STG, & M-16 in his writings.) that of course was false & known by Springfield to be false. The costs of this was one of the biggest single causes of the closure of the armory.

If you can find a copy, I recommend the book that was recommended to me on the subject: “Misfire: The History of How America’s Small Arms Have Failed Our Military.” Long and short of it, the US Army came into being in the post-Revolution landscape of limited resources and war-time stories about men with Kentucky/Pennsylvania Rifles changing the tide of war with single shots and adopted the mindset that an army built around slow, accurate long-range fire was the ideal.