What do we (american or not) think of this arising issue in the US of the united states rapidly aging military equipment? My stepfather used to be the quartermaster of an armory when he was still in active service (the marines) and showed me his 1911, which he pieced together with the best salvaged parts he could recover from 1911s that had been in use since WW2. Is a 1911 supposed to rattle like his does? Fuck no but from what he says, when he was servicing the armory, most of the 1911s he had were like that. Worn out WW2 relics that had been kept around because it would have been more costly to replace them. I believe they have replaced them by now, but those replacements are starting to wear out and/or are seriously under powered.
Well, controversial opinion time.
The 1911 as a combat pistol is totally obsolete. As a cartridge, the .45 has like 1 advantage over something like a 9mm - it still works well while subsonic (being designed to run at around 800-900 fps originally). That advantage is completely lost when you consider that you generally only get 7 of them - the stopping power vs. 9mm debate is kind of irrelevant when you consider that just about any modern service pistol will let you shoot a guy at least 10 times more than you can with the 1911. That's also ignoring the fact that 9mm +P+ is totally capable of matching .45 in terms of energy.
Besides that, you're honestly not gaining much over an even older design - a double action revolver, besides a more robust pistol - the whole "revolvers are more reliable" thing is bullshit, since autoloaders don't break when you drop them.
As a gun itself, there's really only one truly impressive thing about the 1911 when compared to some of it's descendants. That is that generally, most of them out there will work, shoot well, and aren't picky with how much you fuck with them. That doesn't sound like much until you consider that the only company that has diagrams for them is Colt, and that literally every single one of the million other clones out there has been reverse engineered from that. Besides, there's a billion aftermarket parts available for them, many of which are drop ins.
Contrast this with say, a Glock. Glocks don't have a reputation as being finicky, unlike the 1911, and are supposed to just work. The thing is that some times they don't. Look at when the gen4 came out - Glock spent literally two years trying to get them to function, and they didn't even change anything super important. In Glock terms, two years means something like 6,000,000,000 pistols of the production line, which is pretty irrelevant in terms of overall production numbers. Anyway, now imagine that everyone from the Chinese to old-school craftsman began churning out Glock clones and parts. I'm betting none of them would work at all.
Besides that, it really doesn't do anything that something more modern won't do better, even in a civilian sense. You don't need a target pistol for service, and you don't need something that will work if you fuck with it, since you're likely never going to fire it in anger and can generally count on being issued something of fairly standard quality.
So, I think you got it right. The Marines didn't keep them because they're amazing. They kept them because the Navy doesn't care about land operations and doesn't give them much funding.
BTW, just about every issue 1911 I've handled, even a mint one, is loose as hell. Helps them work no matter what gets in them.
All that said, your country could benefit from getting out of interventionism for a decade or so, and your defense budget exceeds the GDP of like half the nations in the world. Compared to even other world powers, your army is so far ahead of the rest of us in terms of tech that even "aged, outdated stuff" is laughably far in front of us. You could probably stand to cut down a bit.
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