4 ms·

>Caveat: if you don't luck out with a CNS hit or convincing the target he doesn't want to get shot again, there's a rather thin line between causing him to lose

>Caveat: if you don't luck out with a CNS hit or convincing the target he doesn't want to get shot again, there's a rather thin line between causing him to lose enough blood to stop fighting, and losing enough to die. But he still has a better chance to survive the former, and you and the other good guys have a better chance of surviving because you took him out of the fight faster. To add to that, I've often heard that one of the reasons the M16 (AR15) uses 5.56mm as opposed to a larger round size is to encourage incapacitating/wounding shots as opposed to kill shots. The idea being that a wounded soldier is both out of combat and utilizes additional enemy resources for care vs. a KIA soldier who is simply out of combat.

hga 12y ago
It's not clear what all the motivations were in adopting 5.56 mm and the AR-15/M16, besides their being totally political. The unit of the Army responsible for this, which had done a good job up through WWII, was utterly corrupt by the '50s and sabotaged the copies of other designs, allowing the M14 to win, which was an inferior battle rifle, but not all that bad. (Hmmm, and if they did the M60 GPMG, they managed to field the absolutely worse modern GPMG in history; of course, by then we'd long sacrificed our normal means of developing machine guns on the altar of gun control.) But it was rather heavy for Vietnam, and assault rifles were of course getting a lot of attention after the Nazis invented them and the USSR adopted one, which was also more reliable (the M1 and M14 designs leave way too much of the action out in the open). And the "space age" AR-10/AR-15 got a lot attention (the Armalight subsidiary of Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation was set up explicitly to use aircraft type materials in weapons, e.g. aluminum and plastic, which are just fine if done right, which was the case with these two guns). The Air Force bought a bunch to defend their planes (rather lighter duty than infantry in the jungle), and McNamara, justifiably in terms of the Army's corruption, but displaying his usual total stupidity, e.g. in actually testing the weapon and cartridge, forced it on the Army. Getting back to your point, as best I know, it was not thought the AR-15/M16 was bad at killing, in fact, one early very informal field trial ascribed miraculous wounding power to it. Which didn't turn out to be the case, but this was most certainly a minor consideration in its adoption, somewhere down there with it being reliable. If you're familiar with McNamara's other decisions when he was the Secretary of the DoD, well, you can imagine he and his wizz kids might have thought such a thing, but their thoughts would likely be completely independent of any check on their reality. Heck, it wasn't until the 1980s that Martin Fackler figured out how 5.56 mm rounds actually behave, not that the Army gives a damn about that (the Marines are not surprisingly another story).

hga 12y ago

It's not clear what all the motivations were in adopting 5.56 mm and the AR-15/M16, besides their being totally political. The unit of the Army responsible for this, which had done a good job up through WWII, was utterly corrupt by the '50s and sabotaged the copies of other designs, allowing the M14 to win, which was an inferior battle rifle, but not all that bad. (Hmmm, and if they did the M60 GPMG, they managed to field the absolutely worse modern GPMG in history; of course, by then we'd long sacrificed our normal means of developing machine guns on the altar of gun control.) But it was rather heavy for Vietnam, and assault rifles were of course getting a lot of attention after the Nazis invented them and the USSR adopted one, which was also more reliable (the M1 and M14 designs leave way too much of the action out in the open). And the "space age" AR-10/AR-15 got a lot attention (the Armalight subsidiary of Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation was set up explicitly to use aircraft type materials in weapons, e.g. aluminum and plastic, which are just fine if done right, which was the case with these two guns). The Air Force bought a bunch to defend their planes (rather lighter duty than infantry in the jungle), and McNamara, justifiably in terms of the Army's corruption, but displaying his usual total stupidity, e.g. in actually testing the weapon and cartridge, forced it on the Army. Getting back to your point, as best I know, it was not thought the AR-15/M16 was bad at killing, in fact, one early very informal field trial ascribed miraculous wounding power to it. Which didn't turn out to be the case, but this was most certainly a minor consideration in its adoption, somewhere down there with it being reliable. If you're familiar with McNamara's other decisions when he was the Secretary of the DoD, well, you can imagine he and his wizz kids might have thought such a thing, but their thoughts would likely be completely independent of any check on their reality. Heck, it wasn't until the 1980s that Martin Fackler figured out how 5.56 mm rounds actually behave, not that the Army gives a damn about that (the Marines are not surprisingly another story).