What happened to US Optics? When i bought my ST10, USO was touted as top notch, go to war type optics. These days, they are rarely talked about and it seems as though their quality has slipped greatly (judging by reading reviews online.)
IMHO, the ST10 was the only thing they were putting out back in the day that was competitive.
20 years ago, the number of mfgs that were able to offer the feature set in "tactical" magnified optics many enjoy today was Schmidt & Bender, Premier, USO....and wayyyyy on down the line from them were Leupold Mk4. The cool thing about USO was that you got to pick a lot of your features, reticles in a made-to-order style build. They really weren't all that cutting-edge then. They stagnated, and the market caught up in a hurry (as it tends to do with technical products such as optics). With more options on the market, more enlightened and savvy consumers with the rise of PRS and longe-range shooting boom, they simply could not compete with their stagnant line and could only rest on previous reputation for so long (a rep largely from a lack of options). They really started running out of steam about 15 years ago. They also had their Unertl 10x clone for those into that kind of thing.
Tangent Theta has taken Premier's corner and their IP. S&B is still around. ZCO entered the game. Nightforce, Kahles, Leupold, and Vortex as well taking up marketshare of the USO had with better optics.
Obviously USO is still around, and have a few of their legacy scopes. Their modern "TS" series are OEM'd "overseas" (which is almost always Japan, China or Philippines)...and pricepoint ususally tells the tale of origin.
In short, capitalism at work...