Oh, this one is hard to beat. The Breda 30 has got to be one of the top three most God-awful firearm designs to be developed by professionals and fielded by a serious army.
Meh. It's not as bad as it sounds. The AA sights were meant to be used by whole platoons at a time, with one officer shouting speed and range corrections. The platoon would fire in a volley. The intended target was the slow biplane scouts and bombers used by the Chinese, to whom volley after volley of 6.5mm Arisaka was a legitimate threat.
Oh, this one is hard to beat. The Breda 30 has got to be one of the top three most God-awful firearm designs to be developed by professionals and fielded by a serious army.
Meh. It's not as bad as it sounds. The AA sights were meant to be used by whole platoons at a time, with one officer shouting speed and range corrections. The platoon would fire in a volley. The intended target was the slow biplane scouts and bombers used by the Chinese, to whom volley after volley of 6.5mm Arisaka was a legitimate threat.
While there have been some good suggestions in this thread, I’m going to go with the unorthodox choice and say that one of the worst military rifles was… the M-14.
Yes. The M-14. The finest rifle of WWII, except it was developed and fielded in the Atomic Age when everyone else had learned the lessons of that war and moved on to better weapons like the G3 or the FN FAL.
But to understand just how bad the M-14 is, we need to look back to the genesis of the rifle. That would be the US Army’s Lightweight Rifle Program, an effort to find a successor to the M1 Garand. This successor would be a select-fire rifle weighing less than seven pounds and chambered in a cartridge not one bit less powerful than the .30-06. It was to replace not just the M1 Garand, but the 1918 BAR, the M1 Carbine, and the M3 submachine gun.
Yes. The Ordnance Department was serious. They wanted a do-it-all rifle that could be issued to everybody, and that rifle was going to be a magazine-fed select-fire M1 Garand. That was seriously in the program requirements. At one time, they required that the new rifle share 75% parts commonality with the existing Garand rifle.
To illustrate just how futile this idea was, let’s look at one of the prototypes that went into the Lightweight Rifle Program, entered by Winchester. Under the direction of CEO Edwin Pugsley (Yes,
that Pugsley), senior Winchester engineers modified the M1 Garand with a selector switch and the ability to accept modified Browning Automatic Rifle magazines. One of those engineers had this to say about the project later:
The Garand was designed from the ground up to be semi-automatic, so it had an incredibly high cyclic rate. The recoil impulse was so harsh that .30-06 ball ammunition would destroy the BAR magazine, and Winchester engineers suggested treating the magazines as disposable. M2 AP ammunition would dent the front plate so heavily that it would prevent the cartridge stack from rising after a few shots.
Parallel programs ran by Remington and Springfield Armory ran into the same problems, and it would take another twelve years of slow, iterative development to deliver the M-14. By that time, almost none of the program requirements survived. The M-14 had zero parts commonality with the M1 Garand, its select-fire capability and integral bipod were abandoned, and it was still a shitty option compared to the FN FAL and the G3.
So why did the Ordnance Department insist on developing the Garand into a select-fire rifle, when anyone who fired the damn thing could tell you it was an exercise in futility? Well, the answer has two parts.
The first part of the answer is logistical commonality. In both WWI and the interwar period, the US Army rifleman squad had one M1918 BAR and a bunch of bolt-action Springfields, and the Ordnance Department dreamed of the day when all soldiers in the rifleman squad could be issued the same weapon. It was thought that a general-issue selfloading rifle could replace both the Springfield and the BAR, but this didn’t work out. Squads still carried the BAR, sometimes two BARs, in both WWII and Korea.
But the Ordnance Department had hope. Maybe by making incremental improvements to the M1 Garand, maybe by giving it full-auto capability and a detachable magazine, America could have a weapon that could do it all, and the Rifleman squad could achieve logistical unity.
The other half of the blame falls on the broad Teutonic shoulders of those fucking Krauts who invented the FG-42. The
Fallshirmjägergewehr had its shortcomings, but it was a viable automatic rifle that was controllable when fired from the shoulder. It made the Ordnance Department’s fever dream look like a tangible possibility. There is a reason why the Lightweight Rifle Program was originally a requirement for a paratrooper rifle.
Of course, the Ordnance Department and the boys at Springfield Armory could have looked at the FG-42 and realized all the compromises needed to make the damn thing work in the first place. To make automatic fire controllable in such a light rifle, you need an inline stock, plenty of room for the bolt carrier to reciprocate, and one hell of a muzzle brake on the far end. To make the rifle lightweight and handy, you need an almost hollow receiver and a short overall length.
But the bureaucrats kept demanding something conventional and inexpensive, not realizing that Garand’s magnum opus into an automatic rifle was as doomed to fail as their earlier requirement that the selfloading rifle be built from the 1903 Springfield. And that’s why we entered Vietnam with such a shitty rifle that couldn't hold zero.
