Reply #16: This is a problem endemic to military ordnance boards

[Euromutt]

History is replete with armies that resisted weapons with a higher rate of fire because some moron was afraid the infantry would use up its ammunition "too quickly." The British have actually been much worse about this than the Americans, grudgingly accepting the breech-loading Martini-Henry but limiting the amount of ammunition the individual soldier could be issued (which is what lost them the Battle of Isandlwhana in 1879; the quartermasters refused to issue more ammunition until the riflemen began to run low, by which time resupply couldn't keep up with demand, and the British force was overrun by the Zulus because the riflemen ran out); they resisted accepting sub-machine guns (deriding them as "gangster's weapons") until in the winter of 1939-1940, during the "Phony War," British patrols on the Franco-German border found themselves getting mauled in nighttime meeting engagements with German patrols, who usually had a couple of MP28s or MP38s; and even after WWII, the British wouldn't adopt the Belgian FAL without disabling the automatic setting. But I'm sure there was at least one asshole on the U.S. Army Ordnance Board who thought the M1 Garand was a bad idea because a semi-auto rifle would encourage troops to use too much ammo.

I say "asshole" because invariably the bean-counters who make these decisions aren't the ones who have to do the actual fighting. To paraphrase a line of Clint Smith's that someone quoted in the thread on .380 ACP, "nobody who's been in a firefight ever wished he had less firepower." History is also replete with military units that performed better once they acquired more firepower. During the American Civil War, "Mosby's Raiders" (more formally, the 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry, Partisan Rangers) greatly improved their effectiveness by ditching their standard-issue cavalry sabers and instead carrying an extra revolver. In WWII, the Soviets equipped entire regiments with PPSh-41 "burp guns" (cyclic RoF 900 rpm) which could overwhelm German positions with a hail of fire, and note that this was when the Sovs were already scraping the bottom of their manpower barrel (yes, contrary to widespread belief, the Sovs did not have a bottomless reserve of soldiers; by late 1943, almost everyone who could be drafted had been, and the Sovs increasingly relied on heavier firepower to compensate for their inability to replace losses). Both the Warsaw Pact and NATO (the latter with considerably more foot-dragging) glommed onto the German concepts of the air-cooled general-purpose machine gun (à la the MG34 and MG42) and Sturmgewehr because they worked. That is, these weapons made the rifle squad more effective by giving them more firepower.

It's not a coincidence that Custer lost at Little Big Horn, given that all the Winchesters on the field were in the hands of the Sioux.