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On the individual level, there's people who try to avoid killing, but that's more down to morals than strategy, An unwillingness to properly do your job doesn't make for a good soldier. There's a fair amount of logistics that end up getting put into dead bodies anyways. Sure, if things have really gone to poo poo they might just leave the dead where they lie, but there's a time-honored tradition of making sure corpses get sorted out going back to the Iliad, and that means a lot of effort recovering, identifying, and transporting bodies before you even start digging a hole to put them in.
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Apr 13, 2016 17:01
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SlothfulCobra posted:On the individual level, there's people who try to avoid killing, but that's more down to morals than strategy, An unwillingness to properly do your job doesn't make for a good soldier. Going to plug The Dead Are Mine again, if anyone wants to read a WWII novel about graves registration units.
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Apr 13, 2016 17:18
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bewbies posted:People have a bit of a tendency to overlook the whole point of lethality....the point of land warfare is to impose your will on your opponent, and the relative lethality of weapons is only a means to that end. It isn't often that the effects of weapons in and of themselves are all that relevant, rather, what matters is how well they support the goals/objectives of the campaign. This is true in the abstract. Sure if you can non=lethally neutralize the enemy and achieve your objectives that's a win. Narrowly talking about firearms and explosives in the context of wars up to the current era, however, the point is to remove the person being shot or blown up from the fight. Frequently that means killing them, to the point that consciously developing less lethal rifles or grenades is self defeating. Note that this is for combat operations. It's of course a different take if we're talking about riot duty or any of the quasi police activities militaries can get stuck in.
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Apr 13, 2016 17:26
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Cyrano4747 posted:* Not all of them are posthumous either! Check out Roy Benavidez. He jumped out of a motherfucking helicopter with only a loving knife to go save a bunch of dudes who were under heavy fire and got the poo poo shot out of him in the process. He had a total of 37 gun, shrapnel, and bayonet wounds and was declared dead when they got him to a medical facility. He spat in the face of the guy who was zipping him into a body bag to indicate that he was still kicking. Jesus Christ 
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Apr 13, 2016 17:29
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Nebakenezzer posted:Jesus Christ There are some completely insane MOH citations, but Benavidez is up there as one of the wildest.
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Apr 13, 2016 17:47
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Cyrano4747 posted:This is true in the abstract. Sure if you can non=lethally neutralize the enemy and achieve your objectives that's a win. That's partially true, but I'd argue the more important role of small arms and small explosive devices on the modern battlefield is suppression, not so much outright killing or wounding. The effect is the same, but the objective isn't really to remove your target from the fight so much as it is to gain a position of advantage that lets you decide the next course of action. Lethality is important in all of this but I'd argue the real mechanism for influence is the threat of violence (killing, wounding, etc) rather than the actual act itself.
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Apr 13, 2016 18:00
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Fangz posted:The talk about wounding weapons comes out of the observation that in general, as many or more of military casualties are wounded, and not actually killed. Kinda ironic given that hollowpoints are banned by one or another Hague convention. FMJ is more likely to wound, while mushrooming bullets, banned in warfare, are specifically designed for hunters and cops to kill as quickly and humanely as possible. Cyrano4747 posted:An enemy who is just wounded doesn't automatically tap out and go home. Unrelated anecdote: My pa was a Special Forces radioman in Vietnam, one time his team was in a firefight with a vastly superior enemy force and he called for arty. A guy replied with a callsign he didn't recognize, Dad gave the guy his coordinates and the enemy's, &c. Guy said "Confirm danger close." (i.e., "you're a lil' bit in the blast radius, are you sure you want to risk us hitting you?") Dad ofc said "yes" without stopping to think. Once the rounds were in the air, he realized he was well outside danger close for any Army/USMC artillery shell. He gave the order for his guys to become one with the ground, because presumably the guy on the guns knows them better than Dad's lowly infantry rear end.. And then the world exploded. Turns out he hadn't been talking to a USMC firebase with 155mm howitzers. It was USS New Jersey's 16" guns.
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Apr 13, 2016 18:08
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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Nebakenezzer posted:Jesus Christ We remind you that Hispanics and native Americans aren't real Americans, somehow. 
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Apr 13, 2016 18:13
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bewbies posted:That's partially true, but I'd argue the more important role of small arms and small explosive devices on the modern battlefield is suppression, not so much outright killing or wounding. The effect is the same, but the objective isn't really to remove your target from the fight so much as it is to gain a position of advantage that lets you decide the next course of action. Suppression is a key component of basic infantry tactics and has been for a long time, but I think it's taking things a bit far to argue that the goal is a performance of violence that cedes the initiative to you and, eventually, forces them from the field. If that were the case small arms development probably would have gone even further down the path of tiny rounds that can be packed in the thousands by the individual infantryman, or multi-projectile weapons. That's not to say that kind of thinking hasn't worked its way into militaries here and there. A lot of that was part of the basis for Project SALVO. That said, those were all developmental dead ends and they ended up sticking with the rifle or intermediate rifle caliber automatic weapons.
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Apr 13, 2016 18:28
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A more lethal round is also more likely to disable or otherwise impact the fighting capability of your opposition. Intermediate caliber rounds give up a little lethality (in theory) in exchange for more overall shots. In abstract terms a 10% reduction in lethality per shot but 60% (or more) shots is a net gain. If the smaller rounds are more controllable and thus more accurate you might even get more hits and get an even better return.
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Apr 13, 2016 18:40
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Nebakenezzer posted:Jesus Christ And that was after he retaught himself to walk. There isn't a  in the world big enough.Delivery McGee posted:Turns out he hadn't been talking to a USMC firebase with 155mm howitzers. It was USS New Jersey's 16" guns. This is also pretty
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Apr 13, 2016 18:43
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Taerkar posted:A more lethal round is also more likely to disable or otherwise impact the fighting capability of your opposition. Yeah, it's noteworthy that the final conclusion of the SALVO clusterfuck was to recommend the adaptation of what became the M-16.
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Apr 13, 2016 18:47
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Cyrano4747 posted:Suppression is a key component of basic infantry tactics and has been for a long time, but I think it's taking things a bit far to argue that the goal is a performance of violence that cedes the initiative to you and, eventually, forces them from the field. If that were the case small arms development probably would have gone even further down the path of tiny rounds that can be packed in the thousands by the individual infantryman, or multi-projectile weapons. For suppression to suppress, don't the weapons have to be actually capable of doing lethal damage? Suppression isn't based on it being noisy and scary if you do something the enemy wants to stop you from doing, it's based on it being lethal. The enemy doesn't have to get into a position for the rifle to be lethal for its lethality to matter, much as armor doesn't have to block an attack for it to matter, because by its existence it's changed the enemy's actions.
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Apr 13, 2016 19:03
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Well... Let me get a whole bunch of kids with baseballs and see how much you want to step out into the open. 
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Apr 13, 2016 19:13
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xthetenth posted:For suppression to suppress, don't the weapons have to be actually capable of doing lethal damage? Suppression isn't based on it being noisy and scary if you do something the enemy wants to stop you from doing, it's based on it being lethal. It's based on it *hurting*. If it were a microwave weapon that incapacitates people with pain but doesn't actually do any damage, people still aren't going to want to run out in front of it.
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Apr 13, 2016 19:28
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Those guys in SOG during Vietnam got into some crazy situations. Benavidez MOH incident is the wildest one probably but there are many, many more. Check out the book SOG: Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam by John Plaster if you can. Basically they would go from launch points just inside the RVN border, over into Laos and Cambodia, on the Ho Chi Minh trail. Typically teams of two Americans plus 5-8 Vietnamese or Montagnards although some teams were bigger. Once on the Trail they would take notes on NVA troop/truck movement down the trail, sometimes plant a wiretap, occasionally grab a prisoner and try to make it out of there with him. Small teams of 6-8 dudes creeping around hundreds of NVA. No possible fire support from artillery or naval gunfire. They could call in helicopter and fixed-wing support but it took time to get there. If discovered, they would enter into running gunfights with the NVA while trying to move to a possible extraction point, which it would take helos at least twenty or thirty minutes, sometimes more, to reach from their launch sites in Vietnam. About every fifteen minutes after discovery resulted in another NVA company trucking into the area, until it could wind up the 6-8 man SOG team vs hundreds of NVA, who sometimes used dogs to track. Plaster's book contains dozens such stories, and is structured in linear fashion from the very first recon teams to go in, up through the end. Often times a team would make a scheduled radio contact and then just never be heard from again, clearly having been contacted with the resulting fight so quick and vicious they didn't even have time to get a radio message off. It was insane, casualties through parts of 1967 and 68 ran to 80% and reached 100% at some points. The NVA, being no dummies, figured out what SF was doing and how they operated and in '67 if I recall they decommissioned a paratroop unit and using those people stood up counter-recon teams whose whole purpose was to hang out at different spots on the Trail and hunt the SOG people down. Gives me the willies just thinking about it. Here's the book: http://www.amazon.com/Sog-Secret-Americas-Commandos-Vietnam/dp/0451195086 I give my personal guarantee that no one interested in such stuff will ever regret spending the time to read it. It's that good.
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Apr 13, 2016 19:51
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Rick Rescorla is kind of favorite of mine. especially how he was all WHERE THE WAR AT when young
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Apr 13, 2016 20:06
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Cyrano4747 posted:Yeah, it's noteworthy that the final conclusion of the SALVO clusterfuck was to recommend the adaptation of what became the M-16.
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Apr 13, 2016 20:32
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Cyrano4747 posted:This needs to be emphasized. People don't just drop when they're hit a few times. Page through Medal of Honor citations and you will find all sorts of crazy examples of people taking dozens of rifle-caliber wounds and staying in the fight.* An enemy who is just wounded doesn't automatically tap out and go home. More anecdotally there was a guy in TFR a while back who was friends (or something? I remember reading the attached news article) with a guy who took a dozen .40 caliber pistol rounds during a domestic dispute he tried to intervene in and still had his poo poo together enough to carry out a toddler to the cops waiting outside. It's not that uncommon for people to take mortal wounds and keep fighting until they expire. I've taken a lot of interest in researching real world stories of gunshot wounds and their effects, and you tend to see totally opposite behavior from bullets over and over again to the point where you may as well rely on blind luck for anything smaller than .50 BMG. I'm trying to find the account by the victim detailed in this article, as it goes into much more detail. Basically, this nutcase attacked him at his pawn shop with a sword and he ended up flying past all of his guns stashed around the counter (or they were disassembled for maintenance) so he had nothing but a .25 Saturday Night Special left. He took some serious wounds before finally magdumping into the guy's face at point blank range. It dropped him, but he still ended up "surviving" on life support until the plug was pulled. The same link I got that account from had a somewhat similar story about an elderly woman who was the victim of a burglary, and managed to get free from her bindings enough to grab her .25 and fire at the burglar as he was rifling through her stuff. He actually almost beat her to death and it took the whole magazine of 6 rounds to fell him during his attack. Later examination of his body revealed that the victim's first shot actually went through his mouth and out the back of his head, and he didn't do anything except get mad.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:05
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bewbies posted:People have a bit of a tendency to overlook the whole point of lethality....the point of land warfare is to impose your will on your opponent, and the relative lethality of weapons is only a means to that end. It isn't often that the effects of weapons in and of themselves are all that relevant, rather, what matters is how well they support the goals/objectives of the campaign.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:10
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T___A posted:No it wasn't, it's final conclusion was to adopt a flechette firing weapon in the form of the SPIW. The M-16 only became a thing when McNamara heard we were running out of M-14s to use in Vietnam and the only alternative we had was the good old M1 Garand. That had nothing to do with Vietnam (well, at least from a standard issue sort of thing). LeMay was an Armalite booster as early as 1961 and the McNamera order came down in 1963. The only connection to Vietnam was that we sent over a thousand AR-15s in 61-62 for testing under ARPA. I'm still curious as to whether the perceived lack of production capacity for M14s was a real thing or if it was an end-run around the Army's preference for that rifle over the AR. The inter-service politics were loving nutso.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:17
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Adrenaline, the will to live and entering a state of shock can make you do abnormal things like surviving multiple gunshot wounds. Drugs too.xthetenth posted:For suppression to suppress, don't the weapons have to be actually capable of doing lethal damage? Suppression isn't based on it being noisy and scary if you do something the enemy wants to stop you from doing, it's based on it being lethal. The enemy doesn't have to get into a position for the rifle to be lethal for its lethality to matter, much as armor doesn't have to block an attack for it to matter, because by its existence it's changed the enemy's actions. All firearms are capable of being lethal, this is a serious lesson drilled into people acquiring a firearms license in Canada. Also, suppression can totally be based on something being scary or noisy. Why do you think military training videos from WW2 showcase German automatic weapons? Alternatively, tanks vs infantry is pretty scary if you can't quite fight back. Sure, it may have a cannon but even coaxial machine guns aren't something you'd want to mess with. Hell, even planes can suppress infantry under the right circumstances. Deadlier is better, but noisy/scary can also suppress/break troops.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:21
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Cyrano4747 posted:the goal is a performance of violence that cedes the initiative to you and, eventually, forces them from the field. I mean, it is though....the basic idea in practically every land campaign is to force your opponent into the dilemma of surrender, retreat, or die, and lethal direct fire solutions only enable one of those choices directly. Even in a COIN environment, doing a cordon and search or something, my immediate objective is to control the terrain necessary to do the search; any enemy casualties I cause in pursuing that objective are kind of incidental. There are obvious exceptions of course, like if your mission is to just straight-up kill someone (ie, OBL). To be clear I'm not advocating that the US army march off to war with big smiles and nerf pistols, just that the metal-on-meat effectiveness of individual weapons is a relatively low priority in the various spheres of capability for a modern army.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:22
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Cyrano4747 posted:That had nothing to do with Vietnam (well, at least from a standard issue sort of thing). LeMay was an Armalite booster as early as 1961 and the McNamera order came down in 1963. The only connection to Vietnam was that we sent over a thousand AR-15s in 61-62 for testing under ARPA. I'm still curious as to whether the perceived lack of production capacity for M14s was a real thing or if it was an end-run around the Army's preference for that rifle over the AR. The inter-service politics were loving nutso. The M14 was such a stupid obsolete piece of garbage.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:23
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Cyrano4747 posted:That had nothing to do with Vietnam (well, at least from a standard issue sort of thing). LeMay was an Armalite booster as early as 1961 and the McNamera order came down in 1963. The only connection to Vietnam was that we sent over a thousand AR-15s in 61-62 for testing under ARPA. I'm still curious as to whether the perceived lack of production capacity for M14s was a real thing or if it was an end-run around the Army's preference for that rifle over the AR. The inter-service politics were loving nutso. Considering all the other bullshit that the M16 struggled with that often looks like outright sabotage (like using dirtier powder, issuing the rifle with no cleaning kit or instructions, ignoring the chrome lining from the design, and the suggestions of obvious bias during the tests), I'm willing to blame malice in this case.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:24
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bewbies posted:I mean, it is though....the basic idea in practically every land campaign is to force your opponent into the dilemma of surrender, retreat, or die
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Apr 13, 2016 21:26
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David Simon's Homicide has a good chapter about the effects of getting shot that echoes a lot of what you're saying, with illustrated examples of people who got shot and because they were either high, or on adrenaline, or just plain didn't notice, kept moving like usual because they didn't realize they were supposed to fall down like on television. It's basically ruined TV for me because now every time I see someone blown off their feet by a gun I have to quiet down a little autistic part of my brain that wants to shout "that's not how it works!" I think he explained it by saying something like "a shot strong enough to blow someone away would also knock the shooter off their feet" and I'm not good enough at physics to work out the math on that but it's still something i can't not think about now
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Apr 13, 2016 21:35
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Ainsley McTree posted:I think he explained it by saying something like "a shot strong enough to blow someone away would also knock the shooter off their feet" and I'm not good enough at physics to work out the math on that but it's still something i can't not think about now Newton's 3rd law
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Apr 13, 2016 21:40
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Ainsley McTree posted:David Simon's Homicide has a good chapter about the effects of getting shot that echoes a lot of what you're saying, with illustrated examples of people who got shot and because they were either high, or on adrenaline, or just plain didn't notice, kept moving like usual because they didn't realize they were supposed to fall down like on television. Equal and opposite reactions man, same reason its hard to push your friends around in a pool when you were a kid. You see the same thing with swords. There are tons of accounts of dudes who got stabbed or slashed but still mortally wounded or killed the other guy before they themselves died, or one of them survived. A big part of learning how to actually fight with swords was learning to hit the guy without getting hit yourself since just stabbing the guy does not mean you won.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:43
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Equal and opposite reactions man, same reason its hard to push your friends around in a pool when you were a kid. also i read an account of a fight from my own research where a guy looked down on the ground, at his own blood, and only collapsed after that
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Apr 13, 2016 21:50
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Newton's 3rd law Yep. If the bullet's big enough to send them flying, it'll recoil enough to send you flying as well.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:54
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Guys go down hard when they take rifle rounds in SAPI plates, I'm unsure how the physics works there though.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:58
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darthbob88 posted:Yep. If the bullet's big enough to send them flying, it'll recoil enough to send you flying as well. it would also likely just go right through them, so it would have to be like a shotgun shell that had 2000 pellets in it or something bewbies posted:Guys go down hard when they take rifle rounds in SAPI plates, I'm unsure how the physics works there though. plate absorbing the impact and spreading it out across the body of the person, makes it more like a shove then a bullet entering the body and dissipating force as it travels through them
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Apr 13, 2016 21:58
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That's only if both shooter and shot are both braced equally though, it's a lot easier to knock a running target literally off their feet and totally arrest their movement while you stay stock still. Hell, you can do it with your fist.
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Apr 13, 2016 22:00
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HEY GAL posted:time to once again mention that 16th century autopsy where a guy chased another dude in a flat out run for quite a while before falling over and when they opened him up he had been skewered right through the heart Taking a look at this, there's apparently a nearly 1/3 chance of surviving a stab wound in the heart. Gunshots are way more deadly, with only a 9.7% chance of surviving (although like hell you'd see that happen in a movie other than maybe Crank 3).
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Apr 13, 2016 22:05
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lenoon posted:That's only if both shooter and shot are both braced equally though, it's a lot easier to knock a running target literally off their feet and totally arrest their movement while you stay stock still. Hell, you can do it with your fist. That's what I mean, yeah. Newtons laws are basically the one thing I do know about physics, it's when you get into gun mechanisms and the effects of the stance of the shooter versus the victim that I'm not sure whether just "equal and opposite reaction" is on its own fully accurate (I got a D in high school physics and stopped learning new things after that) But the point stands generally, that it would have to be a heck of a bullet to work the way it does in movies.
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Apr 13, 2016 22:05
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wdarkk posted:Taking a look at this, there's apparently a nearly 1/3 chance of surviving a stab wound in the heart.
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Apr 13, 2016 22:06
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lenoon posted:That's only if both shooter and shot are both braced equally though, it's a lot easier to knock a running target literally off their feet and totally arrest their movement while you stay stock still. Hell, you can do it with your fist. Also depends on A) where the hit is and B) reaction of the person getting shot. Reflexes aren't universal after all.
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Apr 13, 2016 22:12
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Exhibit A: Shooting a Garand from a standing position That's shooting some core-lokt ammo at 2,913 ft·lbf (3,949 J) of energy. It's like a stiff punch in the shoulder with every shot. Interestingly, I found this article: http://www.connectsavannah.com/savannah/the-true-force-of-a-boxers-punch/Content?oid=2133328 With some nice quotes like quote:-- An oft-cited 1985 study of Frank Bruno, who'd go on to be WBC heavyweight champ, showed he could punch with a force of 920 pounds in the lab. Researchers extrapolated that to a real-life blow of 1,420 pounds, enough to accelerate his opponent's head at a rate of 53 g -- that is, 53 times the force of gravity. Edit: I used the energy of punches because its more relatable. Jobbo_Fett fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Apr 13, 2016 |
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Apr 13, 2016 22:15
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Ainsley McTree posted:I think he explained it by saying something like "a shot strong enough to blow someone away would also knock the shooter off their feet" and I'm not good enough at physics to work out the math on that but it's still something i can't not think about now A big part of the problem is that a punch and a bullet are very different types of collisions. A punch can easily cause more than 200 foot-pounds of force, greater energy than the .32 ACP round fired by James Bond's Walther PPK. But you don't see any punches like that knocking heads off or going through a guy's torso. The reason is that punches (especially ones made with boxing gloves on) have a very large surface area compared to a bullet. A bullet with less raw kinetic energy than a punch concentrates all of that energy into a very small point, which is sufficient to tear a hole through the body. This is also why needles go through skin so easily with the lightest push. What this means is that a bullet can't knock someone off their feet, or even impart any really noticeable pushback to the person hit by it. Being pushed back by an impact requires the body to resist the impact sufficiently to avoid what an engineer would likely call a "catastrophic structural failure". Even a direct hit from a tank shell wouldn't cause pushback, as the shell would more likely just rip apart whatever it hits and leave limbs and bits of meat scattered on the grass. A bullet that knocks someone off their feet would do more than just knock the shooter off their feet; it would also be acting in an incredibly strange way in terms of physics. You do hear stories of people being "knocked over" by bullet impacts, but this has nothing to do with the kinetic energy. The shock and pain of the impact causes the person to fall over, sometimes with their limbs flying out as they topple over backwards. I even read a story about a guy being shot point blank at an upward angle with a .44 Magnum being "lifted off his feet", but that can be attributed to embellishment, poor vision at night, incorrect memory, etc. bewbies posted:Guys go down hard when they take rifle rounds in SAPI plates, I'm unsure how the physics works there though. This is the exact same thing. The bullet fails to penetrate, so the kinetic energy is spread across the surface area of the plate. The plate pushes back on the soldier's torso.
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Apr 13, 2016 22:20
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