we never signed the Hague Convention about “dumdum” bullets, and the Geneva protocols don’t mention any such things. Neither one of those treaties applies to non-declared wars, nor to nations that are not signatories to those treaties. The 223, especially with the short barreled M4, lacks reliable stopping power with non-expanding full-metal Jacket" FMJ “ball” ammo, and the hollowpoint bullets significantly add to that power/effect. We dont give a damn about “excessive” wounding, or we would not use mines, grenades, etc. So that is NOT a 'reason".
The bottlenecked shape of the 223 rd means that the guns and magazines will feed the holowpoint ammo just fine. The HP ammo will pierce soft body armor and our enemies are not armored in the first place. The HP ammo will pierce vehicles, walls, treeds, etc, almost as “well” as 223 ball ammo (ie, not very well) and the troops could either mix every other rd in the mag as hp with ball, or carry the ammo, each in its own mag, for use where appropriate. So there’s no reason there, either.
The troops MISS with thousands of rds for each hit that they get (with their rifles) and 90+% of all hitting is done at ranges under 100 meters. There’s only about 1" difference in POI, point of impact between 62 gr HP ammo and the 62 gr “ball”, non-expanding ammo. So any differences between the 2 types of ammo don’t matter, as to accuracy. So, that’s not a reason, either.
The mushrooming (in the man) hp ammo is far more likely to stop an enemy, and to give him a humane death. We INSIST upon the latter for hunting animals, but not for men! That’s ridiculous. So why are they not using hollowpoint 223 ammo, hmm? does the (very tiny) increase in cost of such bullets mean more than the US lives that are lost because of the 223 ball rd’s failure to stop guys (with good chest hits)?
Countries sometimes choose to voluntarily comply with a treaty limitation even if they haven’t signed the treaty. This encourages other countries to also follow the limitations if they’re fighting against them. But it leaves open the legal option of disregarding the limitation if it appears useful to do so.
Probably most important of all, especially to the guys pulling the triggers, FMJ is the most reliably feeding ammunition type out there.
Beyond that, the 5.56 and 5.45 bullets currently in use have a tendency to yaw and tumble earlier than the heavier 7.62 bullets that preceded them, due to the colossal difference in momentum (7.62= 10g bullet @ 833 m/s = 8.330 kg m/s, versus 5.56= 4 g bullet @ 940 m/s = 3.76 kg m/s), and in general, tend to do as much or more damage.
Of course, this is all dependent on the muzzle velocity and weight of the bullet- below a certain velocity, they don’t yaw at all.
All the above in addition to the need for maximum penetration. Militaries aren’t looking for a clean quick kill like a deer hunter who possibly will lose a quarry that was punctured but ran away. Military personnel need the ability to poke holes through humans that might be sitting in a vehicle, or standing on the other side of a wooden door. Your enemy might be wearing a backpack full of gear. Green tip will go right through the backpack to puncture the soft bits inside the ribcage.
If you follow developments in military small arms ammunition you will see most research focusing on improving penetration. See the M855A1 lead free ammunition as an example.
maybe SOME of the hps (designed for match shooting) don’t expand, but Sierra’s GameKing design certainly does. The effects are VERY demonstrable, with coyotes and feral dogs, not small stuff like prairie dogs. SOME of the hp’s, in fact, expand so violently that they dont penetrate well (on purpose). They actuall DO vaporize most of a crow.
now, what are your “several reason” not to use a HP, hmm? Bet you don’t post any.
223 aint much on penetration anyway. Even with the steel capped ball ammo, it doesn’t reliably shoot thru both sides of a car, even at 90 degree impact angles, with enough power remaining to do much to an enemy. I favor the 223 highly, especially with an M4 and sound suppressor, but it’s no penetrator. Shooting at what you can’t SEE (ie, enemies using cover) is a really STUPID tactic for civilans. Unlike soldiiers, you don’t get help into and out of the combat zone. You wont get ammo replaced, nor is anyone coming to your aid when shtf. You’ll not have a safe base to flee back to, either. I favor the deep penetrating, but animal-proven 60 gr Nosler Partition sp’s, but they’re quite expensive and if you shoot the things much, little frags of lead build up. I dont carry a lot of ammo and I DO have a cleaning kit in my BOB, bugout bag. I don’t favor full auto and my suppressor helps me be far more effective, while firing far fewer rds. I want the hits that I DO get to be maximally effective.
The “yawing” and “fragmenting’ bullet thing doesn’t work with 62 gr ball and short barrels. They found that out in Somalia. it DOES work fairly well, to 100m of range, with a 20” barrel and the older 55 gr ball ammo (as was used in Nam).
ragheads and rice farmers aint GOT backpacks, so how would they be wearing any, hmm? Attackers tend to be shot from the front, too.
The United States has always had good relations with Crowtopia and it’s unlikely we’ll ever fight a war with them.
Seriously, hunting animals and fighting a war are two different things. For military purposes, you’re better off not using bullets that give “a humane death”. It’s generally felt that wounding people is preferable to killing people from a moral viewpoint. And from a strategic viewpoint - a wounded opponent uses up more enemy resources than a dead opponent does.
Why do they use FMJ ? So the bullet can continue on after it goes through something else, like glass, perspex, door,wall, tree, another person…
FMJ also reduces fragmentation and therefore hitting the wrong target, and ricochets…
Its fairly easy to reduce the chance of ricochets in a forest,
but what if its a built up area ? Well if the fragmenting bullet takes a new path, the fragment can then ricochet off a hard surface and come back toward oneself or friends…
The less fragments the better, the bullet that does not fragment keeps going relatively straight, fragments go off at greater angles…
They do use hollowpoint ammunition, sometimes. Look at the specs for Mk 262. Or Mk 318. Or XM118 if we want to go back in the day. And though the Sierra 77 grain MatchKing used in Mk 262 isn’t officially an expanding bullet, and the ‘hollow point’ is really just a tiny hollow tip, and an artifact of the jacket swaging process, it has reputedly tremendous terminal effects on people, close range or not.
I have not shot it, at people or anything else, so I don’t know how that Sierra MatchKing holds up on flesh. I have shot other MatchKings on deer, and they blow up like a grenade within Coastal Blacktail deer. Usually after going nearly all the way through the animal, but still. Not sure how barrier-blind the bullet is, as my deer weren’t hiding behind logs, and barrier-blindness / ability to defeat body armor is an important characteristic for military small arms ammunition.
I have wondered why something like the Nosler Partition design hasn’t been used. Or something similar within a FMJ architecture, where you can have violent (unintended, of course) initial expansion along with a hardened penetrator to defeat armor.
As others have said, warfighting is different from varmint hunting (and Og keep me from thinking of taking out another fighter before he does it to me as varmint hunting). For all their customary public-servant/government-contractor foibles, I’ll let the guys actually having to equip an army evaluate the OP’s position on what ammo to make standard issue. For all we know the next gen ammo will be something else altogether (though we’ve been using Ball FMJ for over a century now).
But as to the reasons the military sticks to FMJ Ball for the general mass issue, among other reasons, as mentioned, the military tends to place firing reliability above wound mechanics – a majority of soldiers do NOT train for one-shot-one-kill anyway and many combat situations don’t give you the chance to even try; many of our Allies DO observe legal/treaty restrictions on ammunition and at least within NATO you want a good deal of standardized commonality (and sales opportunities) with them; plus we want ammunition that we can use against the broadest possible range of potential adversaries.
Racially offensive terms like raghead are not permitted here, and while “rice farmer” could just be a profession, using it as a slur as you have done here is also not permitted. Since you are new and don’t have a feel yet for what is or is not acceptable, I am going to make this a mod note instead of a warning. But do not do this again.
As my grandfather once explained to me, when you kill an enemy soldier then you have one less person shooting at you. When you wound him, you eliminate three (the one you hit, plus two more to carry him to safety). There is no analogous scenario for hunting.
However, that rule of thumb may not work so well in urban, close range combat situations.
You are going in the wrong direction for your solution to the problem. The problem, as you sort of pointed out, is that the M855 had less than superior performance penetrating vehicles and glass. The solution is not to go ahead and accept it and start using a round that has even less ability at punching through windshields and hard targets. The solution is to improve the round so that it can punch through car doors and windows and still produce ideal effects in soft targets and body tissue. That was the whole purpose behind the development of the M855A1, which is currently in use. Your gripe is about half a decade too late.
As you also sort of pointed out, we could probably use hollow point 5.56 if we wanted to. The fact that we don’t use it should be an indicator that we don’t want to! We want something that is going to punch through hard objects on the way to the target and then still have enough energy left over to kill the target. “Knock-down power” is useless against the side of a truck or a windshield.
No it’s not. Animals deserve a humane death. My enemies do not.
The increase in cost of bullets? You do realize that the military spent almost $40 MILLION just to design the M855A1 EPR. That doesn’t even factor in the cost of purchasing the rounds, just developing them. This is not about cost-cutting and penny pinching. This is about getting the best round for the job, which obviously is not what you think it is.
I’ll have to disagree with the point that you make about fmj being used to prevent richochets. If anything fmj increases the chance of just that. For those of us that carry concealed you will generally find that most of us carry hollow point ammunition. We do this for two specific reasons. The first being that the hollow point round offers a huge advantage in stopping power. The second is to prevent the chances of a richocet or over penatration. When a hollow point hits a hard target the most likely reaction is that it will shatter apart and not ricochet. When a hollow point hits a soft target like flesh it will expand, using most of its energy inside the target lessening the chance of penetrating through and endangering anything behind.
Remember, the saying is every fired bullet has a lawyer attached to it. We want to make sure the ammo we use is a “safe” as we can possibly get.
I’ll just go on and point out that there’s a huge velocity difference (as much as 3x-4x) between rifle and pistol rounds, and that hollowpoints are more or less required to get consistent stopping power out of handguns, while due to the higher rifle bullet velocities, they tend to have greater stopping power even with FMJ.
I also suspect, but have no citations, that 5.56 HP might not penetrate deep enough to be as consistently effective as FMJ would be. With pistol rounds, something like 16-18" of penetration into gelatin is required to show that the round has enough oomph to go through clothes and enough body at funny angles to ensure a stop. I sort of doubt that a 5.56 FMJ is going to penetrate that deep- they’re typically varmint loads meant to expand fast and completely.
Soft points… maybe, but hollowpoints? Unlikely to be useful.