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“...Soldiers on the front lines said “When I shoot them with this, they drop. When I shoot them with that, they don’t.”
Not good enough for you? Don’t care. Get into combat and check it for yourself.” [dsc, post 67]

My apologies: didn’t mean to lead you so far outside your area of expertise, not intentionally.

I assumed you were more familiar with War Dept organization, and armaments development history. Assumptions are risky.

By the 1890s, US Army Ordnance was well into a period when it ignored inputs from units in the field. It did so deliberately: early in his tenure as Chief of Ordnance (1874-1891), Stephen Vincent Benet stated for the record that Ordnance would no longer accept inputs from field units on arms development - weapons had become too complex technically for officers leading outfits there to understand.

Doesn’t matter what you or I think about the advisability of such an idea. It’s what they did.

It led to a long stretch of time during which the United States lagged other nations in weapons development & fielding, at a time when the state of the art was advancing more rapidly than at any previous time since gunpowder came into use in Euro nations.

It’s long been an article of dogma among civilian gun fanciers that the US military is backward-looking when it comes to adopting newer technology. Just why it all happened isn’t as clear as most of us believe, but politics, tradition-worship, and a bevy of other factors played roles.

I’ll toss in another causative factor - the general attitude of the American public, where citizens have long been uniquely un-militaristic despite our many accomplishments. I’ve watched stuff happen for over half a century, and haven’t come up with a better explanation.

“shoot them with this, they drop...shoot them with that, they don’t” sounds great, but doesn’t work in the real world.

First, as targets, human beings vary too much. Size, fitness level, excitation, range, weather conditions, etc etc etc. What stops one assailant may not do the job on the next.

Second, in action, almost no one doing the shooting can manage the levels of accuracy nor precision to assure a hit in the “right spot,” even if that spot could be determined before the fact.

Third, the data to determine just what happened cannot be collected. Wars are singularly bad places to collect what is needed.

Fourth, even if it were possible to negate all the prior constraints, we would still be unable to equip every soldier with a weapon effective enough to sure-kill the adversary each and every time. We cannot give each troop an atomic hand grenade, nor a 30mm GAU-8 aircraft gun. Such armaments would be too heavy or too violent anyway, for individual use.

There are always constraints: size, weight, cost, materials, etc etc etc. There are many more on the list. What’s more, the full list has yet to be compiled.

Just a few observations, from the 24-plus years I spent on active duty. 13 of them were spent in operational testing and studies & analysis.