US Army Considers Adopting an Interim Battle Rifle in 7.62NATO: eventually adopt 6.5

[n9nwo]

I am not one who shares the view that it was a "bad" decision, because the .276 Garand offered only marginal improvement in weight and ammo capacity compared to the .30 M1 rifle.
IMO, the bad decision was to develop a clip-fed, semi-auto battle rifle to replace a clip-fed, bolt-action battle rifle, instead of creating a mag-fed assault rifle and intermediate cartridge.

The Garand rifle -- in either caliber -- was truly a classic example of "designing for the last war," instead of the war that was to come; preparing for trench warfare, instead of blitzkrieg.
With just a little bit of vision, the US Army could have opted for a two-caliber system, keeping .30-06 for machine guns, and developing a cartridge similar to 7.62x39 for assault rifles.



If designed for such a cartridge, the resulting Garand assault rifle could've been at least 8 inches shorter and 2 pounds lighter than the M1 rifle, with almost 4 times the ammo capacity.

My thoughts were that had the M1 Garand been designed more like the M14 with less wood and a box magazine (used the BAR mag) it would have been the right rifle for WW2. The Assault rifle that the Germans designed came very late in the war. Just about everyone was using weapons and ammo from WW1.