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“after a while they patched up the reliability problem.”

Sure. After several thousand of us were needlessly killed or maimed and the war was over.

In the early days of WWII, Navy torpedoes were ineffective. It took major bitching to get Washington DC to look into the problem and eventually fix it. The bad torps saved a lot of lives ... mostly Japanese.

The manufacturer specified certain things , like which powder to use lined chambers etc. the defense department has sweetheart contracts with Ammo makers and wanted shortcuts in the building of the M-16. The original AR-10s and AR-15 built by Armalite were very reliable. Politicians screwed up those firearms. Then bandaids were applied to allow the firearms to use the ‘wrong’ Ammo. People lined their pockets.

Talk about crappy ordnance … ever hear of the Mark 14 torpedo used in WW2. It cost many American lives.

. The Mark 14 was central to the torpedo scandal of the U.S. Pacific Fleet Submarine Force during World War II. Inadequate production planning led to severe shortages of the weapon. The frugal, Depression-era, peacetime testing of both the torpedo and its exploder was woefully inadequate and had not uncovered many serious design problems. Torpedoes were so expensive that the Navy was unwilling to perform tests that would destroy a torpedo. Furthermore, the design defects tended to mask each other.[35] Much of the blame commonly attached to the Mark 14 correctly belongs to the Mark 6 exploder. These defects, in the course of fully twenty months of war, were exposed, as torpedo after torpedo either missed by running directly under the target, prematurely exploded, or struck targets with textbook right angle hits (sometimes with an audible clang) and failed to explode.[36] Responsibility lies with the BuOrd, which specified an unrealistically rigid magnetic exploder sensitivity setting and oversaw the feeble testing program. Its pitiful budget did not permit live fire tests against real targets; instead, any torpedo that ran under the target was presumed to be a hit due to the magnetic influence exploder, which was never actually tested.[36] Therefore, additional responsibility must also be assigned to the United States Congress, which cut critical funding to the Navy during the interwar years, and to NTS, which inadequately performed the very few tests made.[37] BuOrd failed to assign a second naval facility for testing, and failed to give Newport adequate direction.