4 ms·
$25 bullets and $25000 rifles are insanely expensive. And I don't see how better rifles will bring an advantage - most coalition casualties are from mortar fire
by dimitar 15y ago
$25 bullets and $25000 rifles are insanely expensive. And I don't see how better rifles will bring an advantage - most coalition casualties are from mortar fire and improvised explosive traps - rebels have already lost preference for gun standoffs. But I'm sure H&K and Alliant will love to sell lots of these to whatever army is corrupt enough to buy them.
Also... aren't exploding bullets illegal under the Hague convention?
- ck2 15y agoThere are lots of "end-runs" around the Hague http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanding_bullet#Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanding_bullet#Law and note that domestically governments do not have to obey even the most basic "rules of war" when they set police against their own people
- __alexs 15y agoDoes Afghanistan even get covered by that stuff since no formal declaration of war has been made according to Hague Convention III?
- sharpneli 15y agoIANAL but that has some problems. First of all the convention mandates 'declaration of war' in a sense that you have to tell someone you're attacking. If it was skipped then it was against the part of the convention mandating such notification. Secondly the other parts of the convention do not talk about war as a set of specific circumstances (e.g requiring declaration of war) but just hostilities regardless on how they originated. So by skipping the declaration of war one simply breaks one additional part of the convention, the one mandating the declaration.
- thisrod 15y agoI understand that changed when the UN was formed. Its member states aren't permitted to start wars, period.
- anamax 15y agoDoes it matter whether both parties are signatories?
- JamisonM 15y agoNo
- jcurbo 15y agoThe US follows the Hague Convention and other 'rules of war' regardless of if the other side does or not.
- bootload 15y ago"... $25 bullets and $25000 rifles are insanely expensive. And I don't see how better rifles will bring an advantage ..." Snipers are force multipliers ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication
- mjwalshe 15y agoWell a "better" rifle allows you to engage at longer range Fireteams tend to have designated marksmen with Battle Rifles these days. Also a better rifel is less prone to jamming (this is why SF's prefer the piston version of the M4)
- reitzensteinm 15y agoIt's a 25mm explosive round, not a rifle round, so $25 isn't out of the question. I don't know how much an M203 grenade costs in bulk, but that would be a suitable comparison.
- icegreentea 15y agoThe Hague forbids bullets that expand on penetration, on the basis that it creates larger and more traumatic wounds. This round acts more like a grenade. It explodes (and wounds/kill by shrapnel) near the target. It shouldn't actually hit the person. Completely different class of weapon. It's more accurate to call this a grenade launcher than a rifle.
- grannyg00se 15y agoIt always seems so absurd to me that there are rules around wartime killing. Once you acknowledge that it is acceptable to take another person's life for profit you really have little credibility for laying out rules of fairness.
- almutasim 15y agoWar without rules would be a greater horror. Even the ancients had them (Julius Caesar himself was charged with war crimes). How could closure and peace be negotiated, for example, without protection for emissaries.
- felipemnoa 15y agoAccording to history rules only matter if you loose.
- icegreentea 15y agoWell, most of the rules aren't about killing per se, but rather wounding. And most of the rules are in place so that the stakes of fighting never gets high enough that we would all have to stop fighting. For example, the Geneva Protocol that bans chemical and biological weapons pretty much because aside from killing, those who were wounded were an enormous burden, and terrible for morale (aside from any ethical reasons). In that case, losing the ability to use those weapons was deemed to be outweighed by the consequences of having to deal with them being used on you. Also, since they could be potentially huge and unpredictable force multipliers, it made war all the more predictable, which is good from their perspective. Long story short, nearly all rules of war exist because they are beneficial to abilities of the parties to conduct war. The rules do no exist to make killing fair. They exist so that parties may conduct war in a way they agree with.
- Detrus 15y agoIt's very affordable when you compare it to air strikes and artillery bases.
- tsotha 15y agoIt's really a misnomer to call this thing a rifle. Yes, it has a rifled barrel. But it's a grenade launcher, not a rifle in common parlance. It replaces the 40mm grenade launcher in use.
- tlb 15y agoIt costs about $1M / yr to maintain a US soldier overseas, so those costs aren't a huge deal.