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.
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.
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|5 years ago
rjr8r83ueue|5 years ago