it’s stated that the US uses 250 000 bullets for every enemy killed. This figure seems to divide the number of rounds used in the year by the number of enemies killed that year.
If so, it may be fine as one component of the cost of killing enemies but it doesn’t give us an accurate idea of the accuracy of the shots fired by US forces. This, because it includes all the rounds fired during training which have about a 0% chance of hitting an enemy.
So, do we have approximate data that tells us how many small arms rounds are fired in actual engagements for every enemy incapacitated? Do we have similar data per small arm category or for other weapon platforms?
I’ll be very interested to see whatever numbers come up, but I would start by looking at the fact that not every shot fired is intended to kill a specific target. Warning shots as one example. Or covering fire, designed to keep the target pinned down while the rest of your forces maneuver. Bullets may be fired at a building, with the hopes that a round penetrates walls and hits a target you can’t see.
So it would certainly be a mistake to take kills/rounds - even limited to rounds fired in live engagements - and use that to estimate the accuracy of a shooter.
I did think of that but figured it wouldn’t be possible to distinguish rounds according to intent when fired. If someone can provide data that distinguishes according to intent, I would be quite glad to see that too.
Let’s keep the politicized pot shots out of GQ, please. Also note that in GQ, we ask that you not give non-factual responses until the question has been addressed factually.
From the General Questions Rules & FAQs sticky at the top of the forum:
It strikes me as a rather meaningless statistic, deserving of a “so what?”. As to rounds per kill in combat, let me know when you have an accurate count of either rounds fired or enemies killed.
If the point is that there’s a more efficient way to achieve the goals that are reached by shooting at/killing enemy personnel, then by all means let us hear about it. Otherwise, “information” like this is just a vehicle for arguments and pompous pontification.
Even if it were possible, the result would still be meaningless if you’re trying to get an idea of accuracy. Not every weapon is a one-shot-one-kill system. Maybe the gunner intended to kill someone, pulled the trigger only one time, and successfully killed the enemy. Would you say that he was accurate? Does the fact that his weapon system is designed to be used in 7-9 round bursts change your perception of his accuracy? If he had perfect accuracy, that would still be 100 rounds fired for only 10 bad guys killed. And what if three of those people were in fact hit, but they didn’t die, or maybe they were wearing armor and weren’t even wounded. So now it’s only 7 KIA for 100 rounds fired, and this is a PERFECT score.
There is absolutely no way to gain useful statistics by calculating rounds fired vs KIA or WIA.
Even if you knew the number, this would be a meaningless statistic.
It’s like counting how many kits of combat rations were eaten while killing X number of enemy.
Or how many gallons of aviation fuel were used.
Extreme hypothetical: “We burned 250,000 rounds this year. We killed one enemy combatant this year. We fired 249,999 rounds in marksmanship training and weapons practice, which is why it required exactly one perfectly-placed headshot to kill that one combatant.”
And even with all the already mentioned caveats, it’s not a meaningful gauge of combat efficiency: if you don’t kill anybody, but get the enemy to surrender, that’d be 250,000 rounds well spent, it seems to me. The use of ammunition in combat simply isn’t geared towards maximizing kills per bullet, since it’s not necessarily the object of combat to kill as many enemies as possible.
Lets take the claim at face value. One interpretation is that man we sure waste a lot of bullets to kill people.
Another interpretation is that we do a buttload of practicing and testing so that when we go into the field we know what we are doing and aren’t winging it like Bruce Willis in Die Hard.
Something to definitely keep in mind. I took a class in high school from an eccentric guy who designed a class about methods and psychology of warfare. One theme was that it was generally seen as preferable to either wound and disable, not kill, so that you’d be forcing the enemy to use more resources on keeping the wounded person alive but out of the fight, or even better, just have them run away or surrender. Shows of force are not made in general expecting that they will need to be used; they are more to intimidate the other side into backing down.
I’ve seen the same question reworded to, “we drop xxxxx tons of bombs to kill one enemy soldier”.
We (I’m US Army retired civilian in ammo field) have made strides in this area. Sometimes it’s still effective to drop a few sticks of dumb bombs from B-52s in an area attack. Or we can have the same B-52 or other platform launch or drop precision guided munitions. We have missiles with various warhead weights and types of munitions. The idea is to tailor the effect to the target and minimize collateral damage. Things like response time, target hardness, asset availability, etc… also come into play (despite snark, tailoring is actually the goal - bad press is counter productive). Cost almost never comes into play.
Just want to emphasize this one. From what I’ve heard, suppressing fire is such a commonly-used tactic that maybe some tacticians might raise an eyebrow that we’re only using 250k bullets per kill (if they were inclined to try to connect two statistics that have so many confounding factors in-between them).
But it’s also funny to take the stat at face value and imagine US soldiers as essentially stormtroopers. Facing away from the gun with their eyes closed because they’re afraid of the loud bang.
It has been steadily climbing number, pretty much since firearms came onto the scene, and I suppose at some point there were quartermasters grousing over how many bolts these new fangled cross bows were wasting. Some Military bolt action rifles ('03 Sringfield for sure, and I think the Lee Enfield, and maybe some Mausers) had a magazine cutoff position on the bolt stop, because TPTB felt that magazine feeding wasted too much ammo, and wanted the troops to hand-insert each round by default.
As for the “so what” the soldiers end up carrying a lot of extra ammo around, and it isn’t light. This drove the change toward lower-powerd “assault rifles” a few years back, but making the ammo lighter has also coincided with an increase in “wasted” shots, so the soldiers aren’t a lot less likely to run short on ammo. And all the money spent on ammo isn’t being spent on body armor, or drones, or whatever helps keep the soldiers alive besides cover fire.
To me it sounds like an absurdly excessive number, given how many engagements are actually small unit, often SOF people involved. Even US infantry units have pretty good fire discipline given the constraining ROE’s they have to operate under.
Yeah, but have you fired a machine gun? They’re not the kind of thing that you aim precisely and pop a bad guy at 800 yards with. They’re more the sort of thing that you aim as precisely as you can, squeeze the trigger, and fire off a burst of 5-10 rounds in the general direction of the target, more like a long-ranged shotgun than anything else.
Note that it says “rounds”, not “rounds fired from M4 carbines” (or insert your rifle/carbine of choice). That means that every burst of machine gun fire for suppression, every burst of 30mm cannon fire from a helicopter toward suspected enemy positions, every mortar round, every howitzer round, is counted toward that total.
Look at it this way- let’s say your squad comes into contact with 5 bad guys. Your machine gunner will likely start firing at them in hopes of making them put their heads down and take cover, while your colleagues maneuver to eliminate them. You’re going to use a LOT more than 5 rounds doing that- the MG suppressive fire alone is probably in the dozens, if not hundreds of rounds, plus whatever the other guys are putting downrange.
To me the number sounds very low when you stop to think that all soldiers are trained to shoot but only a fraction actually engage in active warfare. 1,000,000 to one would sound more reasonable if it included training bullets.