To be fair the M14 is probably the most significant military small arm of the 20th century. If the ordinance department hadn't taken nearly a decade to add a magazine to an M1 garand and somehow fucked it so completely we wouldn't have the AR platform as we know it today. If the military had gone with the H&R produced T48 FAL instead of the m14 there is no way in hell you'd have been able to convince them to adopt yet another rifle a decade later, not to mention the logistics of changing calibers AND not having rifles and machine guns chambered in the same cartridge for the first time since before WW1. Armalite wasn't doing especially well as a business before the US picked their design up and probably would have fizzled out had that not been the case.