It boggles the mind to think we made SO MANY small arms for WW2 the leftovers could be shipped halfway around the world to fight another war.
Edit: Also military logistics are not following the same pressures for upheaval and progress as civilian organizations. During my compulsory military service I remember getting handed a bedsheet with the year 1933 embroidered on it. Looked liked it had never been used. We were also trained in usage of out-phased rifles on top of our normal weapon training. Somewhere they had a huge pile of old weapons, should they ever be needed. It would not sunrise me if they still have the Garands on store.
https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/whats-inside-a-ta...
We got some of those Garands to rebuild our military after ww2.
Small arms are pretty durable. There's a thriving black market shipping them from war to war; the same guns can be involved in kicking off many different civil wars across the globe. Every now and again some country destroys a few thousand knockoff AK-47s in an attempt to keep this down.
Some friends when I was in high school were buying surplus M1 Garands in new condition, packed in grease from the factory in the early 1990s.