Weapons and Their Costs

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by fredtheobviouspseudonym

The .50 kept on in production after WW II. Costs went up as skilled machinists became relatively scarce. For reasons I can't quite figure out the US and other armed forces were willing to pay premium prices for Ma Deuce.

The reasons aren't really that hard to understand, and there are several I can think of off the top of my head. First, you have to consider retraining costs, not just for the weapon usage but also for the armours who maintain and repair the weapons. New guns mean new training. Second is the logistics cost; you either have to maintain double supply lines of parts (and possibly ammo) while you phase the old weapon and bring in the new or you have to pay a premium to do a complete replacement of all the current weapons in a short amount of time. The third reason is good old fashioned conservatism; the military, for obvious reasons, is extremely conservative when it comes to equipment and training. They don't make changes if they don't have to, and when they have something that's tried and true they need a very compelling reason to replace it.