A sound suppressor on your fighting rifle cuts down on hearling-loss, on "callling’ to more enemies, it helps you not flinch/miss, it eliminates flash at night Your muzzleflash helps the enemy hit you with their rifles, so why have any, hmm?
For the survivalist, a suppressor means that your shots don’t scare off game, and don’t call in every enemy within a mile radius of your position. A 223 suppessor renders full power 223 ammo every BIT as "tame’ to use as normal .22lr ammo is thru the Ciener .22lr conversion unit, when it’s installed in the AR15. Lots of youtube videos about this. Also about match shooting with the 223 to 800 and even 1000 yds. crazy, but feasible.
The .22 unit costs $200, with a 30 rd box mag. It weighs 3/4 lb, so you can always have it with you and the caliber swap takes less than 20 seconds. I’m managed it in 10 seconds, on occasion. The savings is 30c per shot, 22lr vs 223, so being able to do most of your snapshooting practice with the .22 unit is a huge deal.
With 60 gr subsonic Aquila .22 ammo, the 223 silencer and the .22 unit make the .22 sound like a BB gun. With such a gun, getting 5-6 hits per second, “getting caught with just the .22 unit” is not the same thing as being unarmed. Not by a long shot.
Anyhow, soldiers are foolish to go into combat without proper gear. They insisted that they be issued rifle-rated body armor, and they GOT that armor. If they KNEW enough to insist upon having silencers, they’d get those, too.
Assuming a proper installation—i.e., the can is concentric, made for that caliber, and fitted to the firearm—they improve accuracy if anything. See, e.g., this article in Accurate Shooter. My guess is that they make the gas flow over the muzzle crown region, much more consistent, and if you make things more consistent in shooting, you’re generally rewarded with more precision. I don’t know how they’d affect the vibrational nodes of the barrel, but I think that would be taken care of during the process of fitting the can to the rifle.
I don’t know if a rifle with a suppressor requires more in the way of preventive maintenance or care over that of a rifle without a suppressor. Usually, I’ve heard of high speed/low drag guys using them, like SEALs, other JSOF types: guys who you think would take better care of their weapons than an ordinary Joe would. If they don’t, I don’t see why the Army doesn’t use them on all of their weapons. Would suppressors cut down on hearing damage, or is the earpro they use good enough that it isn’t a problem?
The ones the US Army likes are a bit pricey. Then again, isn’t everything that Knights Armament makes in that category?
How effective is silencing the M249 SAW? Anyway to silence hand grenades or the 40mm grenade from the M203/M320? Those are fire team level weapons. You don’t need to go much higher to involve the superb noisemaker called the M240B. In a fight with more than one target, you’re looking at them making noise with their non-suppressed weapons pretty soon after things kick off. I suspect you are over-estimating the benefit side of the comparison and not really getting a sense of the 9 digit price tag to field them universally.
Sure but it would be less effective at the two prime uses of the bayonet - opening MREs and looking cool at ceremonies.
Are you talking about special forces or all our troops? If the former, I was under the impression that they do have them (if the mission calls for them). If the latter, then I’d say it’s because of cost (not just of the things themselves but of putting the entire system into use from logistics to training to maintenance) as well as adding more weight and complexity for the troops (I don’t know about modern suppressors, but the ones I’ve seen do wear out and get dirty/filled with copper and residue). My WAG is that the cost to benefit simply isn’t there (a quick Google search seems to indicate you are talking about $500-1000 for a military grade suppressor for a modern battle rifle…I don’t know exactly how many are issued to US troops but it’s in the millions, so adding suppressors is going to be in the billions or 10’s of billions of dollars extra, especially after you consider all of the other stuff you have to pay for besides just the suppressor).
ETA: Or, you know, what Whack-a-Mole and Gray Ghost said.
You might as well ask why don’t the troops have a weapon at least as reliable as the AK-47. This is an age old argument, but it’s not an unreasonable engineering goal to design an assault rifle, one that passes many levels of testing, to be at least as mechanically reliable as the AK but with better accuracy and smaller intermediate caliber so that more bullets can be carried in the same weight.
Somehow, in 45 years since it was apparent that the AK-47 was a more reliable weapon, this basic deficit has not been fixed. People are probably going to jump on me with the retorts of either :
Cleaning the weapon daily makes it “just as reliable” (not true) or
“My M-16/M4 never failed on me” (personal anecdotes have no statistical meaning)
A sound suppressor won’t do much to silence any supersonic bullet
A bullet is supersonic if it has a velocity above 1225 feet per second (at ground level). I don’t think that the military has used anything this slow since the black powder 45-70. Since most of the report is from the sonic boom, a suppressor won’t do anything for that.
I’m an owner and user of suppressors on both 22 rimfire and AR15s. 22 rimfire suppressors get filthy very fast and need cleaning on a regular basis. Center fire units used with jacketed projectiles stay pretty clean. My center fire suppressor runs about $1000 including the transfer tax, but of course the military doesn’t pay the tax. In my experience accuracy in the AR15 is not greatly affected by the suppressor.
The 22lr conversion units for the AR15 are not very accurate in the barrels used for the .223 cartridge because the twist is wrong. The most common twist for 22 rimfire is 1 in 16 while .223/5.56 twists are in the 1 in 7 to 1 in 9 range. And the chamber better be clean before you try and install your conversion unit. I know because I have 3 of them. Fun for plinking though.
Plus suppressors wear out fairly quickly. The wipes and filing material wouldn’t last long in an automatic weapon. Plus, I can see a sniper benefiting from the use of a suppressor, but troops in close combat not so much. Nose can be an asset at times, scaring or making nervous the enemy. I remember reading that our troops in Europe were terrified by the sound of the mg42. So much so the Army made a training film trying to convince new troops that the mg42’s bark was worse than its bite. The video is available on YouTube.
Also you have to think of reliability. The more complex you make a weapon the more chance of problems. And as others have said, you’re not going to silence the sonic boom of a high powered round.
As much night fighting by troops w/o night vision consists of “shoot at the flashes”, cutting down the flash should cut down on the number of people trying to shoot the suppressed rifleman.
There are vids of people with suppressed M249s, M60s, etc… and there are several reasons why the idea remains the province of one-offs. Heat management, metal fatigue/the suppressor catching on fire, difficulty with making the gun cycle, and so on. So far, it sounds like that currently outweighs the benefits of lowered sound and light signature, recoil reduction, and possibly greater accuracy. Then again, mounting an optic to a MG seemed silly too back in the day, and now I’ve read people stating that if you had to choose, you’d rather have the optic on the MG instead of the riflemen’s weapons.
Don’t suppressors also save your hearing? If you’re on foot, raiding houses in a city in Iraq at night (a common operation), you don’t want to have earplugs in. You want all your gear to be taped down, and to move as quietly as possible (one reason you get out of the vehicles and proceed on foot the last click or 2). You want to be able to hear the slightest creak that might mean there is someone moving around getting into position to shoot you.
Anyways, if you’re forced to fire, you don’t have time to put in earplugs. And, after you fire, not only do you not want to have permanent hearing damage if possible, but you want your ears functioning again so you hear the next bad guy sneaking up.
I thought this was actually why special forces use suppressors. They do use supersonic ammo, so the suppressors don’t remotely make the weapons silent, but they do reduce the amount of hearing damage and ringing.
Not by a long shot.