[wjmao88]

This is more of a risk-reward trade off that comes with anything that is more performant but more sophisticated. The same can be said about guns, but obviously the reward of having a gun is vastly greater than the risk of it malfunctioning.

[craftinator]

But on this same point, the military favors very simple firearms for good reason: they don't malfunction nearly as often, and are robust enough to survive very harsh conditions without much change in firing characteristics. A good analogy is to website availability: if you run a personal blog, it doesn't matter if your uptime is ~100% or 80%. If you run a remote monitoring site for a power grid however... You don't gain anything if you lose reliability. See the F-35 JST for a good case in point.

[rjr8r83ueue]

What makes you think the military favors simple firearms? American forces use small arms that require a fairly high degree of service compared to alternatives like the ak-47/akm variants. It's not a problem because the maintenance requirements can be adequately accomplished by a single disciplined soldier and the performance gains over simpler alternatives are substantial.

[craftinator]

Because I've used them. The most complicated firearm the average grunt will use is an M249, which has fewer moving parts than many handguns. Production inertia and poor accuracy keep the AK series out of the US armed forces, along with a preference to 5.56 over 7.62. Basic maintenance for an M16 is nearly identical for an AK-47, the M16 is lighter and has smaller/lighter ammunition, and has better mid-range and long-range accuracy. So let's say that there is a very slow curve to complexity vs convenience up to a certain point. But we have been using the M16 since the 60's; plenty of newer, more complex rifles have come out in that time, many with better range, accuracy, stopping power, cyclic rate, etc... But we haven't moved away from a simple, fairly reliable rifle.