plawolf
Lieutenant General
One of the issues NATO ground forces encountered with their recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was one of poor stopping power/over penetration of the standard NATO 5.56mm round against unarmored insurgents.
There have been persistent reports of hits that should have been kill shots failing to bring down the target as the round passes right through the person before doing critical damage.
The US seem so concerned that they are seriously thinking about choosing a new cal. for their future weapons, and in the meantime, they are getting around this problem somewhat but issuing better optics to all their combat troops.
These experiences seem to shared by the Russians when using their new small cal. rounds in chechneya. Although it might be interesting to find out how their rounds performed in the Georgian campaign against armored infantry.
China's new standard 5.6mm seems to have better penetrating capability then both the Russian and NATO rounds. Better against armored targets, but the problems of poor stopping power/over penetration experienced by the other two rounds is almost certain to also experienced by the Chinese 5.6mm round if it is ever used in anger.
So, this would seem to be an issue that concerns pretty much all of the world's major military powers, which makes it all the more puzzling why no-one seemed to have come up with a suitable solution short of proposing moving to 7mm.
Surely it cannot be at all hard to design small cal. hollowpoint equivalent rounds and issuing them to troops fighting insurgents?
Sure, hollowpoints may suffer a reduction in range, but considering a lot of the fighting against insurgents tend to be urban or close quarters combat (like in a village or some ruined compound), 400m+ range does not seem to be an absolute necessity, and the practice of most militaries to have M14/Dragov etc equipped SDM in infantry squads would more then make up for the shortfall. And since its just ammo, there's nothing stopping the troops from carrying two kinds of rounds and swopping when appropriate.
If it is still considered too much of a trade off, its still a pretty simple and cheap process to design slightly more sophisticated round designed to flatten/tumble/fragment/whatever after entering an unarmored body to vastly increase the killing power of existing small cal. weapons.
What am I missing here? Why has no army commissioned such rounds for their troops?
There have been persistent reports of hits that should have been kill shots failing to bring down the target as the round passes right through the person before doing critical damage.
The US seem so concerned that they are seriously thinking about choosing a new cal. for their future weapons, and in the meantime, they are getting around this problem somewhat but issuing better optics to all their combat troops.
These experiences seem to shared by the Russians when using their new small cal. rounds in chechneya. Although it might be interesting to find out how their rounds performed in the Georgian campaign against armored infantry.
China's new standard 5.6mm seems to have better penetrating capability then both the Russian and NATO rounds. Better against armored targets, but the problems of poor stopping power/over penetration experienced by the other two rounds is almost certain to also experienced by the Chinese 5.6mm round if it is ever used in anger.
So, this would seem to be an issue that concerns pretty much all of the world's major military powers, which makes it all the more puzzling why no-one seemed to have come up with a suitable solution short of proposing moving to 7mm.
Surely it cannot be at all hard to design small cal. hollowpoint equivalent rounds and issuing them to troops fighting insurgents?
Sure, hollowpoints may suffer a reduction in range, but considering a lot of the fighting against insurgents tend to be urban or close quarters combat (like in a village or some ruined compound), 400m+ range does not seem to be an absolute necessity, and the practice of most militaries to have M14/Dragov etc equipped SDM in infantry squads would more then make up for the shortfall. And since its just ammo, there's nothing stopping the troops from carrying two kinds of rounds and swopping when appropriate.
If it is still considered too much of a trade off, its still a pretty simple and cheap process to design slightly more sophisticated round designed to flatten/tumble/fragment/whatever after entering an unarmored body to vastly increase the killing power of existing small cal. weapons.
What am I missing here? Why has no army commissioned such rounds for their troops?