Comments by "Jim Taylor" (@jimtaylor294) on "The Worst AK I have Ever Seen" video.
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^ Disagree entirely, because you're blaming the wrong people.
Enfield were tasked by the government to make the L85A1, but given no money to retool the factory. As such they had no choice but to manufacture a brand new weapon with worn out tooling, making the end result inevitable.
Instead of realizing their mistake and getting the plant overhauled, the government lumped Enfield with the blame, and tried to cheapskate their way out.
This has been a theme of defence pocurement, since the postwar era.
(of government taking the easiest and cheapest route, even if it meant putting underdeveloped kit into service, or wasting the full potential of an existing bit of hardware)
As for design faults; most of those can be attributed to not being allowed time to properly test anything, another age old trend of defence pocurement.
Having actually used and done mantainance on an L85A2, I would say that the L85A1's underlying design was always good, but should have been afforded the same level of prudence the politicians did afford Challenger II when she was being developed. To this day the latter is still the most rigourously tested bit of kit [prior to service entry] in British Army history, though Vickers were later cheated out of the full order of 600 units the government had placed, so still not a happy ending for the manufacturer, despite having put so much into the project.
(though Vickers had at that point spent most of the postwar era being screwed over by the government)
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