No, it is not always that bad, but then, does the military need match ammunition for machine guns, or even service rifles?
@Hummer70 wrote this:
http://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?p=5424409
The M14 in issue condition is known as the worst performing rifle we ever fielded. I worked product engineering for the Army Small Cal Lab at Picatinny Arsenal and I had engineering responsibility for the M14 until the Chief transferred me to the Dover Devil MG project. While there my board was adjacent to Julio Savioli who was the draftsman for the M14 rifle and his name is on all the drawings for it. Al Cole was engineer in charge of the M14 and he was also a friend. Savy (as we called him) was a wealth of information on the M14 and had all kinds of stories about it as he not only did the drawings, he was in on the field testing.
First off consider the requirement facts from the engineering files from the government weapons production efforts.
1. acceptance accuracy for 1903 Springfield was 3" at 100 yards.
2. acceptance accuracy for M1 Garand was 5" at 100 yards.
3. acceptance accuracy for M14 was 5.5" at 100 yards and was waivered continually as it could not meet that.
4. acceptance accuracy for M16 series is 4.5" at 100 yards.
From SAAMI we have a recommendation of 3" at 100 yards and it is up to the vendor whether he wants to meet this or not.
H&R also made M14s and M1s and the contracts were shut down due to poor QA.
The M14 if rebuilt correctly and very few can do so is capable of acceptable accuracy. For instance the Army MTU rebuild program with rifle fired from machine rest was 10 shots in 4.5" at 300 yards. Some would go to 3" but rarely. A good bolt gun will shoot in 2" at 300 yards.
The TRW weapons were at one time thought to be good but MTU set up some exotic measurement fixture and figured out the threads in the receiver were not at right angle to the front of the receiver and from then on all their builds were on SA receivers........
I have a booklet, “Rifle U.S. Cal 30, M1, National Match 1957”. I think this was handed out at the National Matches because it was written as an informational brochure on the NM rifles of the year.
Section 5. Accuracy Firing
a. With the rifle supported in a rifle rest three ten shot groups are fired at 100 yards for accuracy using match ammunition. The average extreme spread of these groups cannot exceed 4.2 inches. Any one ten-shot group making this average cannot exceed 5.7 inches extreme spread. If these requirements are not met the rifle is rejected.
b. Figure 24 illustrates the distribution of averages of three ten-shot groups for 655 National Match Rifles targeted in this fashion. It is to be noted that all rifles to the right of the 4.2 inch line were screened out; the average of those accepted was a 3.4 inch average group size and eighty-eight rifles averaged three inches and under for three ten shot groups.
This is a accuracy of NM Garands, with the NM ammunition of the period, and these rifles were hand built at the Arsenal for tightness, function, barrels air gaged (I believe). You can expect the combat guns to shoot a lot worse. And if this is the accuracy of period match rifles, and that rifle was good enough to win WW2, what more rifle and ammunition does the military need?
