So? A lot of changes came with the war, and weapons procurement could have been one too. That it wasn't reflected a failure of policy innovation.
That's not what I mean. I mean that the idea of subsidizing private production by paying them to expand
in advance of the delivery of any firearms is as much an innovation as it would be for someone to develop Cordite (or reliable breechloading artillery, perhaps, though Armstrong and Krupp had both done that), and thus it can't be called a
failure unless you hold them to an unreasonable standard.
Since rifle-training for men with muzzle loading rifles would improve their lethality much more than a switch to breechloaders, and would do so without needing such an innovation (as the British had been doing that kind of rifle training since the mid-1850s) then it seems as though that would be a better thing to criticize first.
The Sharps had been patented thirteen years before the war started. Large scale deployment was largely a matter of scaling production. There was no need to make big changes in the weapon's technical design.
I didn't say the technical design needed development. I said there was technical expertise involved in the
production of modern firearms, and what I mean by that is that the people involved in assembling even the less sophisticated muzzle loading rifles during the Civil War made mistakes- and not small ones. (Take the experience of the Corn Exchange regiment at Shepherdstown...)
Consider what happens with the Spencer. The US government ordered 700 Spencers for the Navy in July 1861 and 10,000 for the Army in December 1861. Spencer misses his deadline of starting deliveries by March 1862, leading the government to reduce the order to 7,500; it takes him until December 1862 to produce 1,200 weapons and June 1863 to fulfil the order of 7,500.
Burnside was due to deliver his first Spencers in November 1864, a deadline which he misses: he makes his first delivery on 15 April 1865.
Or the Henry, which had a production of about ten per day as late as 1864.
This is not evidence of a situation where the skilled manpower is just there to easily expand everything, not when the Henry had a cost per unit of about $40 (thus the firm was making roughly $12,000 per month, or enough to pay the wages of ten times as many men as were actually working on the production line).
The most prolific breechloader factory in the world was the Dreyse factory in Saxony, which produced about 30,000 weapons per year and had been producing weapons continually since the early 1840s for the Prussian and other German governments; the best assessment is that this was a completely mature breechloader factory with twenty years' experience and a seven year backlog of orders, so it's pretty much the upper limit at this time. This would allow the Union to supply the First Bull Run army in about a year, or six months with two of them.
Bringing the