Re: 1970 lake city match ammo
Y'all need to consult those back issues of The American Rifleman.
Here's the history:
XM118 was developed starting something like 1957 or 58, but IIRC quantities and development didn't really get big until about 1962. Lake City and Frankfort Arsenal both made it. All M118 variants though the end of production sometime like 1988 or so was with a 173-grain, sometimes 174-grain FMJBT bullet which traces its origins to the original M1 Ball round in .30-06.
The FMJBT bullet was pretty much developed to the end of its capabilities by Lake City by the mid-1960s. Large-sample groups fired from the machine rest recoil on rails test barrels at 600 yards delivered increasingly small mean radius dispersions from the group center then, always beating the companion lots of M72 Match ammo in .30-06. Think the short fat powder column experiences of the PPC cartridges starting in, what? the mid-1970s or so?
Mean radius is generally about one-third of the extreme spread, but is a better measure of total accuracy because EVERY shot is measured, not just the two most extreme ones. Think whether you'd rather have a load that shoots .75 MOA "donuts" around your aimpoint, compared to another load which truly randomly spreads the shots all over the .75 MOA circle. M118 regularly scored MR in the 2.0 inch range, statistically significantly better than the .30-06 stuff. I personally don't believe the M118 going 100 fps slower than the M72 had anything to do with it.
One of the black marks of the Reagan era was de-funding some less popular military spending items like MATCH AMMO. The rise of the M16 didn't help, either. Congressional budget priorities tended to trim the military more than Reagan was proposing anyway, so M118 Match in the white box with red printing was replaced by the infamous "brown box" M118 "Special Ball" which was NOT that special. Some boxes (I have 1 or 2 with fired cases) were even white boxes with brown labels pasted over. Special Ball used regular crimped primer pocket cases which typically was headstamped L C __ __ with the blanks being the last two digits of the year. The characters were evenly spaced 90 degrees apart.
Note I am NOT describing any NATO quartered circle mark. M118 Special Ball was never NATO standard. Neither is current production M193 stuff rolling off of the lines these days, but those are just surplussed NATO cases being used to load commercial ammo after the military runs are done. Thus the last couple of boxes of Federal 55-grain stuff I bought had NATO-marked headstamps.
M118 was always headstamped with the LC or FA, the year of production (for the case at least), and MATCH opposite those other two marks which appeared on the "top" of the rotation. Some small lots were occasionally made with NM on the casehead, as production for the National Matches at Camp Perry.
Before M118 went out of production, the military teams took advantage of one wise budget-cutting device, something about off the shelf products, to get M852 Match ammo produced using the 168 SMK. Called M852 Match, it was originally thought to be illegal for combat use per the [insert pejorative insult to intelligence here] Hague Conventions prohibiting bullets *designed* to cause "superfluous" injury and some such other 1890s inflammatory terms.
M852 was always, to my knowledge, put up in cases with the same "MATCH" markings, but with an annular ring of shallow knurling about a half-inch up from the casehead. Reputed (long before Errornet rumors ever existed) to lead to shorter case life by allegedly weakening the case there, such is just not true in my experience. My over-resized and shot in a long chamber M852 cases failed starting on the 3rd reload with very, very safe 168 SMK charges, sometimes just ahead of the knurling, or usually just behind the knurling, but NEVER AT the knurling.
The boxes for M852 ammo had a blue-type "Not for Combat Use" warning on one side, and otherwise had a slightly updated look compared to the 1960s and 1970s M118 boxes.
Someone from my generation then came along, went to law school, joined the JAG Corps and finally generated a legal opinion that M852's open-tip match bullets were NOT equal to expanding hollow-point hunting bullets, and were therefore legal for combat use. If that was during the Clinton years, cheers for him. Almost every one of his successes came from co-opting conservative ideals and going along with...okay, politics over, but it IS gun-related.
M118LR then came along, using the 175-gr SMK. The rest is what most of us here are familiar with.
One thing that really chaps me about M118LR are the legends without any citation to military publication or reports that the first loads using more RL-15 than is "officially" recommended now was too high pressure in the heat of Iraq/Afghanistan and was bending op rods in M14 systems. Every time I run QuickLOAD, the port pressures predicted at 110F are still well below the 14,500 maximum (nominal the system is designed for is 12,500, and that's CUP) at 14.1 inches down the barrel. Might have run it to 120F and they were still predicted to be okay.
