US Army begins shipping M855A1 ammo

Doc M said:
Well, the Marines settled on the more violently-upsetting Mk318 Mod 0:

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I guess we'll see who starts reporting better field performance...

-M
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http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2010/02/marine_SOST_ammo_021510w/

Pretty crafty how the Americans got these legally allowed to see combat.:rolleyes:

http://accurateshooter.wordpress.com/category/bullets-brass-ammo/

Scrolldown the page to read about how these perform like Bearclaws etc. Yup the USA first got the Sierra Matchking HPBT cleared as a military sniper bullet and now essentially a hunting type expanding bullet. No matter how they dress it up its a tiny little TBBC. The spirit of Hague peace conventions held in the Netherlands in 1899 and 1907 are officially dead. Our soldiers can now expect someday to come under fire with hunting ammunition designed to produce the horid wounds the Hague Convention tried to stop.

I'm all for killing insurgents with one shot but this wasn't the right or legal way to do it. God bless the USA and their own interpretations of “unnecessary suffering” and “superfluous injury”. This is an excerpt from the first link about the US Marines getting this new TBBC with a cooler name:

In a 3,000-word memorandum to Army Special Operations Command, Parks said “unnecessary suffering” and “superfluous injury” have not been formally defined, leaving the U.S. with a “balancing test” it must conduct to assess whether the usage of each kind of rifle round is justified.

Very slick.
 
The hauge convention is garbage anyways. You wouldn't use FMJ bullets on deer would you? It'd be unethical, but for some reason its prefered for you on people? What? A hunting style round isn't designed to produce unneeded suffering, its designed to kill the target as efficiently as possible, its perfect for use on unarmoured combatants.
 
The Hague Convention prohibition against expanding bullets does seem rather silly, given all the horrific ways of dying on the battlefield besides small arms fire. Besides that, expanding bullets from modern high velocity rifles often produce wounds of similar severity to large bore black powder rifles firing plain lead bullets, such as .45-70, .577-.450, and the like.

The lead-free bullet is absurd, too. Metallic lead in the ground is not a pollutant- that's where it came from in the first place! If they really wanted to cut down on lead pollution, they would be better off developing lead-free primers and a regular bullet that has the jacket enclosing the base (like the SOST bullet).
 
This round has gone from being called M855A1 Lead Free Slug, to M855A1 Enhanced Performance Round. The SOST family (Mk318, 316 and 319) was announced from the start as being barrier-blind and yaw-independant, while the M855A1 was announced from the start as being "green". It is only recently that the Us Army has been refering to it as an "enhanced round". Perhaps they changed their tune because of the bad rap they were taking over the orientation of the program. Perhaps it really has an enhanced performance. This is a case where perception in 9/10th of the truth and i would bet that most soldiers already have their mind made up.
 
I'm down with killing insurgent with a blowtorch and chainsaw.

Frankly they put zero respect into the Hague Convensions, and which don't legally apply to insurgents in Iraq or Afghan anyway, so why should we.

The original 77gr TOTM Bonded round from the USMC Barrier Blind RFI is a better round than the current SOST, but the 62gr works with the ACOG's etc calibrated to the M855.

Canada and the UK should pull their head out of their ass and adopt SOST as well.
 
I'm all for killing insurgents with one shot but this wasn't the right or legal way to do it. God bless the USA and their own interpretations of “unnecessary suffering” and “superfluous injury”.
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Y e a h ...... cause all the other stuff on the modern battle field like landmines and grenades and rockets and bombs and artillery and depleted uranium bullets etc etc etc don't cause "unnecessary suffering"?

That entire notion is ridiculous on top of the fact that the little ####ers we are fighting today have never and would never sign the Hague accord. So screw them. Whatever turns those twisted scum into a bloody smear in the dirt is fine with me.
 
KevinB said:
I'm down with killing insurgent with a blowtorch and chainsaw.

Frankly they put zero respect into the Hague Convensions, and which don't legally apply to insurgents in Iraq or Afghan anyway, so why should we.

The original 77gr TOTM Bonded round from the USMC Barrier Blind RFI is a better round than the current SOST, but the 62gr works with the ACOG's etc calibrated to the M855.

Canada and the UK should pull their head out of their ass and adopt SOST as well.
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Canada? Pull it's head out of it's ass? Have you seen the 'caliber' of most people and politicians nowadays? ;)
 
Suputin said:
Y e a h ...... cause all the other stuff on the modern battle field like landmines and grenades and rockets and bombs and artillery and depleted uranium bullets etc etc etc don't cause "unnecessary suffering"?

That entire notion is ridiculous on top of the fact that the little f**kers we are fighting today have never and would never sign the Hague accord. So screw them. Whatever turns those twisted scum into a bloody smear in the dirt is fine with me.
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+1
couldn't have wrote it better myself!
 
KevinB said:
I'm down with killing insurgent with a blowtorch and chainsaw.

Frankly they put zero respect into the Hague Convensions, and which don't legally apply to insurgents in Iraq or Afghan anyway, so why should we.

The original 77gr TOTM Bonded round from the USMC Barrier Blind RFI is a better round than the current SOST, but the 62gr works with the ACOG's etc calibrated to the M855.

Canada and the UK should pull their head out of their ass and adopt SOST as well.
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I couldn't agree more.

Anyone else who doesn't see this should go stand over there with the idiots on the receiving end of these things.

Open your eyes and stop making our troops fight a war with one hand tied around their balls.

-M
 
Suputin said:
Y e a h ...... cause all the other stuff on the modern battle field like landmines and grenades and rockets and bombs and artillery and depleted uranium bullets etc etc etc don't cause "unnecessary suffering"?

That entire notion is ridiculous on top of the fact that the little f**kers we are fighting today have never and would never sign the Hague accord. So screw them. Whatever turns those twisted scum into a bloody smear in the dirt is fine with me.
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This gets a +2 from me too.

-M
 
I've never really understood the whole 'humane killing' thing myself, there's not a lot that's humane about killing with your hands, or with a bayonet or with explosives but it seems everyone gets concerned about humane rifle bullets, what a load of cr*p.
 
They should field the best damned bullet they can find. If that means re-calibrating ballistic drops on optics so be it. I would imagine a fair amount of that 30 million could have gone a long way in sorting that out...
 
Well,

If we ever get a chance at buying these new rounds at surplus, no problems using them coyote hunting, or even on deer, caribou and seals in jurisdictions that permit centerfire .22 on big game!

I can see the consternation across the ranks of Canada's game wardens now... "Yes warden, I'm using "service ammo" for hunting purposes. What do you mean I can't? Check 'em out, you're looking at a .22 cal Trophy Bonded Bear Claw...FMJ's are so Cold War! ":)
 
Wow! Was the actual idea of the Hauge ever missed here. I've read extensively on it and these new bullets that have a TIP that expands like a hunting bullet flies in the face of it. The original idea was that a man (no "persons" in combat back then) that does his duty and get's wounded in the process deserves to be taken from the battlefield and go home. It was written when bullets were larger bore and heavy making them less prone to tumble. So if the nose didn't expand there was a slight chance it may pass through without doing so much damage that a lad might survive to be sent home but enough damage to take him out of the fight. Notice I'm using words like "slight" and "might". Everyone already knows the story of the bullets from the Dum Dum arsenal. That was the convention on bullets in a nutshell.

Then the USA adopted an itty bitty caliber. The bullets sucked because they weren't designed to be arse heavy enough to initiate the tumble that lets the expose rear of the jacket act like a large hollow point once inside flesh. Along came some engineers that reshaped bullets to do exactly that. All was good!

I love the fact that the new bullets are being issued because I have a dislike for these desert rats that never fight face to face. But now the Americans haved opened Pandora's Box. And all sides will employ the same "not clearly defined" loop hole to shoot anything they want. And all that means is our boys will receive wounds like in the American Civil War. No leg wounds anymore, just amputations. Same goes for arms etc.

Stay safe over there men. And those here please don't flame me on this topic. I just never thought I'd ever see a bullet used by infantry that expanded tip first in my lifetime. I've killed a lot of game with 165 gr TBBC bullets at 2600 mv. The entry wound is always 3x the size of the exit. Bonded bullets expand fast because of the heat process to fuse the lead to the jacket. Then stay together nicely. It will be the same on Haji's I imagine.
 
The Taliban is using IEDs because they lack JDAMs. People need to maintain a little respect for the enemy as they are keeping the fight going while working with s**t. Don't like them, just respect that they are not as low on the firepower food chain as we would like.

As for the Hague Convention I am still trying to get my head around how I can set the enemy on fire but can't use a bullet that expands.
 
Suputin said:
Y e a h ...... cause all the other stuff on the modern battle field like landmines and grenades and rockets and bombs and artillery and depleted uranium bullets etc etc etc don't cause "unnecessary suffering"?

That entire notion is ridiculous on top of the fact that the little f**kers we are fighting today have never and would never sign the Hague accord. So screw them. Whatever turns those twisted scum into a bloody smear in the dirt is fine with me.
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Question. Are you a hermit that lives in the woods on a diet of CNN and cynicism?
 
The only Environmentally Friendly thing I want on the battlefield is more enemy corpses fertilizing the Pomegranate plantations. Does it make meaty things drop easier? That's all the technical info I need.
 
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