Talk about crappy ordnance … ever hear of the Mark 14 torpedo used in WW2. It cost many American lives.
. The Mark 14 was central to the torpedo scandal of the U.S. Pacific Fleet Submarine Force during World War II. Inadequate production planning led to severe shortages of the weapon. The frugal, Depression-era, peacetime testing of both the torpedo and its exploder was woefully inadequate and had not uncovered many serious design problems. Torpedoes were so expensive that the Navy was unwilling to perform tests that would destroy a torpedo. Furthermore, the design defects tended to mask each other.[35] Much of the blame commonly attached to the Mark 14 correctly belongs to the Mark 6 exploder. These defects, in the course of fully twenty months of war, were exposed, as torpedo after torpedo either missed by running directly under the target, prematurely exploded, or struck targets with textbook right angle hits (sometimes with an audible clang) and failed to explode.[36] Responsibility lies with the BuOrd, which specified an unrealistically rigid magnetic exploder sensitivity setting and oversaw the feeble testing program. Its pitiful budget did not permit live fire tests against real targets; instead, any torpedo that ran under the target was presumed to be a hit due to the magnetic influence exploder, which was never actually tested.[36] Therefore, additional responsibility must also be assigned to the United States Congress, which cut critical funding to the Navy during the interwar years, and to NTS, which inadequately performed the very few tests made.[37] BuOrd failed to assign a second naval facility for testing, and failed to give Newport adequate direction.
As with BuOrd, the M16 was raced through the Operational Testing phase and sent in huge numbers and they still had significant flaws. I suspect that a bunch of people's pockets were lined in the process.
I was in the "beaten zone" when they fielded those things and besides the catastrophic double-feeding and jamming the chamber - caused by the wrong powder - we had safeties jamming on "Safe" (bad detents), ridiculous sights, fragile stocks and the wrong lubricants.
The M16's basic design is lousy because the chamber is inaccessible from the outside and it is a crazy routine to strip one down, clear the jam, then reassemble it and resume fighting. We had to carry assembled cleaning rods and drilled a hole in the handguard to carry it, to try reduce the deadly time when you had to clear it. I saw many, many dead Marines with their broken down rifles by them.
The people who rushed the field the M16 have blood on their hands - they did more for the enemy than even Jane Fonda.