I'm fairly surprised to see the willingness of some to disregard the word of the men who were there, and to attribute the failures of the carbine to poor shooting ability.
The failure of the Carbine, and every other US Military firearm can be for the most part attributed to poor shooting on the part of the American Soldier. I've said that many times and I will continue to preach it.
I don't believe it is the fault of the individual soldier but the fault of the system. The military just does not put inference on marksmanship, it never has and since the Civil War the results have been well documented.
I could flood this site with proof, and attempts by others to correct the problem.
The present wars (Afghan and Iraq) have brought this to light mainly because of the presence of reporters on the battle field.
The Army tried to correct the problem with the Designated Marksman Program in which they train soldiers to shoot, and put them in the rifle squad.
We say the need for the SDM was needed because the M16/M4s just don't have the ability to engage targets at distance.
I call BS on that. To prove my point the M16/M4s are being used as the weapons in the SDM programs as we speak. Yes I said the M4, the short barreled version of the M16. With the military's 77 gr ammo it is capable of engaging targets up to 800 yards. Its being done in the AMY and NGMTU SDM courses as we speak.
Most units qualify twice a year. Normally a one day affair. And that's poor training at that. That's easy to prove. Take a group of soldiers to the range after their twice yearly training, put them on the firing like with shooters who just completed the CMP's Small Arms Firing School (a one day course) and you'll see the difference is Night and Day.
The Army is big on PT, normally several hours a week, often daily. Physical conditioning is extremely important, but so is the ability to shoot. I contend that if the military dedicated 10% of their PT time to marksmanship you would see a vast improvement in both our soldiers and their weapons.
But regardless whether is Korea with the Carbine, Vietnam with the M16A1, Iraq with the M4, soldiers on the whole cant shoot for poop.
There are exceptions of course.
Compare the first Golf war to the 2nd gold war. #1 was shock and all, no real need for the rifleman. There we needed MPs to handle the hundreds of thousands of people who couldn't wait to surrendered after the bombing campaign.
GW #2 was a whole new ball came, you need riflemen to engage enemy hiding among civilians. We had to create a whole new system of snipers and SDM instead of AF Bombing to protect the civilian population.
OK I'm off track, we're talking about the Korean war and the M1 Carbine. Back on topic. This is a quote from post war after action reports:
In peace time training we've gone in for too much damn falderal. We've put too much stress on information and not enough stress on rifle marksmanship..................These kids of mine have all the guts in the world and I can count on them to fight but when they started out they couldn't shoot, they didn't know their weapons..........
It goes on but you get the jest.