US forces have fired so many bullets in Iraq and Afghanistan - an estimated 250,000 for every insurgent killed - that American ammunition-makers cannot keep up with demand. As a result the US is having to import supplies from Israel... A government report says that US forces are now using 1.8 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition a year...There is additional information at the Belfast Telegraph article, where a commenter raises a valid counterargument that the bullet count may be for the entire armed forces, while the body count is only for Iraq/Afghanistan. Still, it's a lot of bullets.
John Pike, director of the Washington military research group GlobalSecurity.org, said that, based on the GAO's figures, US forces had expended around six billion bullets between 2002 and 2005. "How many evil-doers have we sent to their maker using bullets rather than bombs? I don't know," he said.
"If they don't do body counts, how can I? But using these figures it works out at around 300,000 bullets per insurgent. Let's round that down to 250,000 so that we are underestimating."
Pointing out that officials say many of these bullets have been used for training purposes, he said: "What are you training for? To kill insurgents."
11 January 2011
250,000 bullets per kill
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I, uh, guess that makes Sarah a pretty good shot (at least with strangely, non moving targets).
ReplyDeleteSounds about right. There are about 50,000 troops remaining in Iraq and about 95,000 in Afghanistan. Call it 140,000 total.
ReplyDelete1,800,000,000 rounds per year / 140,000 soldiers = 12,857 rounds per soldier per year.
Considering that the M16 fires somewhere between 12 and 60 rounds/min that would be enough for each soldier to practice between 216 and 1083 mins (3.6 to 18 hours) per year. Oh, yeah. They also shoot at the enemy sometimes too, but that usage is negligible for the purposes of our calculations.
How else are they going to get rid of all that depleted uranium? More than 600,000 lbs according to the monitor!
ReplyDeleteI think dumping all that radiation is a war crime. Deplorable.
Sounds like we need to revisit that target practice training.
ReplyDeleteWatch the documentary 'Restrepo' (which is excellent, by the way). It's a video account of some soldier's tour in a particularly dangerous part of Afghanistan in 2007. It'll make you wonder why the bullet count isn't HIGHER.
ReplyDeleteDepleted Uranium is not used in standard small arms. Lead and copper are the standard materials, with a tiny percentage of lead-free compounds. Some specialized .50BMG rounds use DU, but the overall numbers are insanely low, especially when stacked next to 1.8B.
ReplyDeleteAs to the number of rounds fired in training, it varies widely from MOS to MOS. Infantry and special forces fire more than support personnel.
From anecdotal evidence, as well as multiple decades of change in thought at the Pentagon, I'd say that it's true that US forces are less marksmen today than in the past, mostly by design. The Marine Corps stands out as a bastion of marksmanship, but even there it seems that the standards have been lowered over the years.