TTAG: A Look At The Springfield M1A

From "Springfield Armory’s M1A: The M14 Reborn (Almost…)" by Mike Hardesty, a look at the history of the M14, the differences and features of the M1A versus the M14, photographs of the author's M1A, and some of his thoughts. As most of you probably already know, the M14 wound up competing against the FAL and AR10 in U.S. weapon trials (although the results were pretty much a foregone conclusion). Hardesty mentions some reasons that the M14 was selected over the FAL:

 The reasons that the M14 was adopted include: 

• Its design incorporated fewer parts 
• It was lighter 
• It had a self-compensating gas system
• Supposedly, it could be manufactured on the same machinery in place that had made the M1 Garand. They later found out that this was not the case, but they went ahead with the M14, anyway. 

It is, nevertheless, telling that the FAL was widely adopted among our allies and a number of third world countries in South America and Africa earning the nickname the "right arm of the free world", while the M14 only saw adoption in Taiwan after we sold all of our tooling to them and was, itself, quickly replace in the U.S. arsenal by the AR10's little brother, the M-16. It didn't help that the weapon was plagued by production issues early on after it adoption, as Forgotten Weapons notes:

Production of the M14 was plagued by problems, largely due to quality control lapses. Early in production there were heat treatment problems that led to sheared looking [sic] lugs and broken receivers. Once those were addressed, the main problem because one of accuracy, with a shocking number of M14s failing to meet the 5.6 MOA minimum accuracy standard. Ultimately production ended in 1963 with 1.38 million M14s produced, and the M16 took over as the new American service rifle.

 And that is an understatement as "The M14, Not Much For Fighting (A Case Against The M14 Legend)" at Loose Rounds describes. For instance, a study of the rifle (the Hitch Report) noted that it was inferior to even its predecessor, the M1 Garand. There were numerous manufacturing problems that contributed to the poor accuracy of the weapon. "An M14 Rifle Cost Analysis report that gave rounds used and overhaul schedules from rounds fired states M14 annual usage is 3,500 rounds to overhaul and 599rds MRTF." It proved just as problematic as a sniper or DMR rifle, as the article details. The Loose Rounds article concludes:

The M14/M1A will be around for as long as people will continue to buy them. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with owning them liking them and using them. By no means is it useless or ineffective. But its legendary reputation is something that needs to be taken with a grain of salt and careful study of the system if you intend to have one for a use your like [sic: life] may depend on. 

And the foregoing article does not even discuss the problems with an open receiver design when exposed to mud and blowing sand.