7 Mar 02

Should a military rifle merely wound or kill, or both?

Friends on active duty have been having a lively discussion lately about the current variants of the M-16 rifle and the current-issue SS109 ammunition. The Marine Corps may go back to a 308 rifle for individual issue, counter-trendy as that might appear!

Toward the latter half of the last century, military thinkers decided that wounding an enemy soldier in a way which simply takes him out of action for the short term is actually better than inflicting a fatal wound from which he dies in place. The thinking was that wounded soldiers can't fight effectively and, in addition, consume more resources than do dead ones.

It was this philosophical vein that lead to the 223 round suddenly being thought of as adequate for military purposes for the first time. Up until then, it and similar calibers were considered woefully inadequate. We've thus had the 223 round in our system for the past forty years, through a number of major conflicts, including the one ongoing now.

During this period, the role of the infantryman has been degraded from individual fighter and warrior to "locator" and "herdsman." High-tech weapons have caused generals to look at individual soldiers as mere target finders and target designators and little else. That kind of thinking has led to the conclusion that what individual soldiers are armed with is of scant consequence, since they will do precious little actual "fighting" anyway.

In my war, Vietnam, ranges to individual targets were short, seldom extending past one hundred meters. The M-16 rifle actually worked well in that environment. The 55gr hardball round we used didn't penetrate much, but the climate was tropical, and there was usually not much to penetrate. Within 150m, a hit from that round anywhere on the torso customarily brought VC and NVA soldiers down for the count. The bullet is barely stable in air, and, when it strikes anything more dense than air (like human tissue) it instantly tumbles, causing monstrous internal trauma. I saw precious few enemy soldiers continue to be animated in any effective way after being hit. However, most VC and NVA soldiers were relatively small (rarely weighing more than 150lbs) and, as mentioned above, they were lightly dressed and wore no kind of armor.

So, based on our Vietnam experience, we all decided that the 223 round worked pretty well! I believe we were foolishly naive and that our faulty thinking is now coming back to haunt us. I still believe that the 223 round is well suited to domestic law enforcement, personal defense, and other light tasks, but its limitations as an individual, military rifle are becoming too burdensome to ignore.

In an effort to cure some of the problems inherent to the 223 round, the Pentagon has given is the SS109 variant, which features a carbide dart imbedded in the lead bullet. The purpose is to solve the problem of inadequate penetration. As is so often the case, the "cure" has become worse than the disease. The SS109 bullet may penetrate homogeneous barriers in demonstrations, but it consistently fails to penetrate layered barriers in any practical test. It may penetrate a steel helmet at 500m, but it won't penetrate a car door at any range! In addition, it does not destabilize after striking human tissue. Hence, the wounds it causes are far less debilitating than those caused by its predecessor. It appears that we now have the worst of all worlds, a bullet that has limited range, doesn't penetrate, and doesn't reliably produce debilitating, fatal wounds.

What we all need to do is admit that we were wrong and that we are still going in the wrong direction. WE NEED TO KILL PEOPLE, NOT MERELY WOUND THEM. We're discovering, to our consternation, that wounded soldiers DO continue fighting effectively. We need a rifle bullet that will inflict debilitating, lethal wounds at extended ranges, right out to 500m. WE ALSO NEED A RIFLE BULLET THAT SHOOTS THROUGH THINGS, all kinds of barriers, at all ranges, not just in carefully orchestrated demonstrations, but in reality. Soldiers must be able to fight effectively, all by themselves, not just when they're a trivial adjunct to some high-tech machine. Soldiers need powerful, individual rifles (that are not dependent on batteries), so that they, once again, think of themselves as mighty warriors, not just machine tenders.

/John