90,000 rounds at each insurgent???

This came from an editorial by Paul Craig Roberts:

According to the Sept. 1 Manufacturing & Technology News, the Government Accounting Office has reported that over the course of the cakewalk war, the U.S. military's use of small caliber ammunition has risen to 1.8 billion rounds. Think about that number. If there are 20,000 insurgents, it means U.S. troops have fired 90,000 rounds at each insurgent.

Very few have been hit. We don't know how many. To avoid the analogy with Vietnam, until last week the U.S. military studiously avoided body counts. If 2,000 insurgents have been killed, each death required 900,000 rounds of ammunition.


Roberts piece: http://antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=7330

Manufacturing & Technology News piece: http://www.manufacturingnews.com/


90,000 rounds at each insurgent and we're "winning" :rolleyes:

apparently.

ka-ching.

N/t

in WWII it took 200,000 rounds of ammunition for every enemy casualty we inflicted. That number doubled in Vietnam.

I read a book several years ago called, I believe, "On Killing". It was written by a Colonel who taught at the Army War College and at West Point. The point of the book was that humans, for the most part, have a very ingrained aversion to killing, even in war time.

He spoke of experiments they had done in historical settings regarding how lethal different types of arms were. For example, they calculated what the effective killing rate should have been for they types of arms used during the Napoleonic Wars given their battle strategies. For instance, they lined up 20 abreast, didn't fire until they were 300 feet apart and used "X" type of weapon. They wanted to know how many people should have been killed or severely wounded vs. how many actually were. They always found that the kill rate was much lower than they expected to find. He also mentioned contemporary reports from Gettysburg on how many dead soldiers were found who had never fired their gun. Who in fact, had loaded their gun several times just to give the appearance of having fired.

Sorry, slightly off topic but tangentially related to the original post.

I think this is why the standard is now to just open fire and spray the area with as much lead as possible.

Cuts down on each individual's personal connection to killings, makes the contractors shit loads of money (remember the stories about the US running out of ammo production capacity?), hopefully intimidates the enemy, and they don't give a shit about collateral damage anyway.