US asks private sector to ease bullet shortage

Even in the age of unmanned aerial vehicles, satellite-guided bombs and night-vision goggles, the US army cannot fight a war without its most basic necessity: bullets.


And with more troops in Iraq, more intense combat than expected and the need for almost every soldier from frontline infantryman to rearguard logistician to be prepared for an ambush, the army suddenly finds itself in a bullet crunch.

According to a requisition last week by the Army Field Support Command, the service will need 300m to 500m more bullets a year for at least five years, or more than 1.5m a year for combat and training. And because the single army-owned, small-calibre ammunition factory in Lake City, Missouri, can produce only 1.2m bullets annually, the army is suddenly scrambling to get private defence contractors to help fill the gap.

The bullet problem has its roots in a Pentagon effort to restock its depleted war materiel reserve. But it has been exacerbated by the ongoing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, where rearguard and supply units have been thinly-stretched throughout the countryside, occasionally without active duty combat soldiers to protect them.

The army's formal solicitation acknowledges that its current m anufacturing abilities have been all but exhausted. "Increasing military contingencies have created a situation where the capability to produce small calibre ammunition through conventional methods has been fully exercised," it said


http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1084907850631&p=1012571727085

...why doesn't the Gov't cut down on its bullet usage?

Problem(s) solved.

Shoot fewer people...problem solved.

I'm sure the Iraqis are thrilled to hear that we need a few billion more bullets. I'll bet it makes them so look forward to that free, stable, democratic Iraq Bush* keeps promising. :eyes:

Make every bullet cost $5000. Then people have to be REALLY mad to kill each other!

Shortages like these help!

If we stop shooting people we won't need many.

From the great 2K bug scare....

More bullets.

:eyes:

in one year? let's see... that means we are firing 50,000 bullets per civilian kill. seems like maybe Saddam was right... using gas is much more efficient. somebody should tell bushco. nerve gas has to be cheaper.

by the way, 500,000,000 bullets distributed over 138,000 troops is 3623 bullets per soldier. figuring for holidays, that's about one bullet fired per waking hour for the entire year, per soldier.

n/t

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From TESTIMONY AT THE JUNE 28, 2003, PUBLIC HEARING FOR

THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNAL FOR WAR CRIMES IN AFGHANISTAN

CHIBA, CHIBA PREFECTURE, JAPAN

"Afghanistan is just one of the countries devastated for all future generations by the use of depleted uranium weaponry in U.S. military aggressive actions dictated by U.S. foreign policy.

/snip/

In 1991, in the first Gulf War, the United States broke a 60 year taboo and introduced depleted uranium to the battleground, a radiological weapon which is truly a weapon of indiscriminate killing and mass destruction.

/snip/

It was known at that time that it would contaminate the air, water, food, and the soil. Entry into contaminated environments was impossible without certain exposure both to the enemy and to friendly forces.

U.S. NUCLEAR POLICY AND DEPLETED URANIUM
__________________________________________________________________


The video, Metal of Dishonor: the Pentagon's Secret Weapon, exposes the dangers of the depleted uranium (DU) weapons currently being used by the U.S., most recently in Iraq.

/snip/

By now, half of all the 697,000 US soldiers involved in the 1991 war have reported serious illnesses. According to the American Gulf War Veterans Association, more than thirty percent of these soldiers are chronically ill and are receiving disability benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

/snip/

Between 1991 and 2003, Iraq's National Ministry of Health organized two international conferences to present data on the relationship between the high incidence of cancer and the use of DU weapons. It produced detailed epidemiological reports and statistical studies. These data showed a six-fold increase in breast cancer, a five-fold increase in lung cancer and a 16-fold increase in ovarian cancer. Because of the US-imposed sanctions, Iraqi doctors and scientists were barred from presenting their research papers in most of the world. (13)

US Position: No Cleanup

While the British military has admitted that British Challenger tanks expended some 1.9 tons of DU ammunition during major combat operations in Iraq this year, the Pentagon has refused to disclose specific information about whether and where it used DU during this 2003 campaign. It also is refusing to let a team from the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) study the environmental impact of DU contamination in Iraq.

/snip/

The Pentagon also has used its weight to control the media's handling of DU. John Hanchette, a professor of journalism at St. Bonaventure University, is a former editor of the Niagara Gazette and was a founding editor of USA Today. Hanchette told DU investigator Leuren Moret that from 1991 to 2001:

as editor of USA TODAY, he published news breaking stories on the effects of depleted uranium on Gulf War Veterans. Each time he was ready to publish a story about devastating illnesses in Gulf War soldiers, he got a phone call from the Pentagon pressuring him not to print the story. He has been replaced as Editor at USA TODAY. (14)


Depleted Uranium - The Pentagon Betrayal Of GIs And Iraqis
_______________________________________________________________

That's the United States plan for genocide - the weapon that keeps on killing long after they are gone.

From other research I've done, the DU bullet to normal bullet is 5 - 1. That's Five DU bullets for every One non-DU bullet. Their 30mm fire up to 4,200 DU rounds per MINUTE, the 40mm bofors around 1800, and the larger"100+"mm cannons at 100 rounds per minute

So every mosque that has been targeted, which thousands of people visit daily, is now radioactive.

The more bullets the troops can fire, the more Iraqis will die, whether they are hit or not.

DU is genocide, and the United State is Guilty, and they know it - I'm sure they are aware of the following:

LEGALITY TEST FOR WEAPONS UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

Weapons must pass four tests in order to determine that they are legal under international law. The tests are:

TEMPORAL TEST ­ Weapons must not continue to act after the battle is over.

ENVIRONMENTAL TEST ­ Weapons must not be unduly harmful to the environment.

TERRITORIAL TEST ­ Weapons must not act off of the battlefield.

HUMANENESS TEST ­ Weapons must not kill or wound inhumanely.

Depleted uranium weaponry fails all four tests. For that reason it is illegal under all treaties, all agreements and all war conventions:
________________________________________________________________________

This is what I have for neighbors? :shrug:

(sigh)

Be interesting to see how many of those 'BULLETS" we give to our "LACKEY IRAQIS" (THOSE IN OUR NEWLY TRAINED MILITIA ARMY)


AND end up in the face and eye of that kid from Iowa who loses his brains as the bullet "EXITS" his SKULL.

The number of rounds per person hit has been going up since the Civil War. From the best of my Recollection these are the approximate numbers:

Civil War 999 Rounds per hit
WWII 17,800 Rounds
Vietnam 55,000

We use a LOT a ammunition in the American way of making war (by the way one of the chief sources of Supply to the Viet Cong was US Army waste Dumps. We threw so much stuff away they had their pick of what to use.)

One more comment, one o the "factoids" that came out of Desert Storm was the fact that a modern US Division uses as much fuel as a WWII Army Corp . Today and in WWII A US Army Division fields about 15,000 men, An Army Corp 100,000 men (Including Three Divisions).

We waste a lot to fight a war.

The average marksmanship is spraying lead with your bullet hose

Lots of Brass on the ground.

> The average marksmanship is spraying lead with your bullet hose

Maybe there's something to be said for *reducing* the fire-rate of
the standard weapons and *increasing* the training of the soldier
(instead of the other way round)?

> Lots of brass on the ground.

Out of interest, what happens to the spent cartridge cases?
Do they just get dropped and trodden into the ground?

They are recycled into trinkets. The Russian-Chinese rounds use washed steel cases--they are useless unless you can get hundreds of pounds of them. They mostly rust into nothing.

Just finishing off a history of the Napoleonic wars - It was expected of the greenjackets (any Sharpe fans out there?) that every round would at least hit the enemy, if not kill: The normal soldiers on both sides had a 3:1 fire:kill ratio.

BTW, does 3-500m rounds/year mean thier planning on killing another 4,500 - 9,000 per year?

Nice.

Whilst acknowledging that the Greenjackets were the experts and so
deserved the 1:1 fire:hit (not necessarily fire:kill), the ordinary
red/yellow/blue jackets had an easier job in that *their* targets
were in nicely packed lines, advancing slowly. That would help even
the squaddie with the hosepipe in today's Iraq get their numbers up.

With regard to the 55000:1 ratio, from memory that is actually worse
than the arrows used:kill ratio back in the days of the longbow!

Strikes me that if you reduce the fire-rate of the weapons and *force*
the soldier to pick their target, not only do you reduce the random
spraying but would also reduce the quantity of non-combatant deaths
(or, at the very least, make it far more accountable to the individual).

Nihil

At least part of it is psychological. It is easier to get people to shoot at real people (and kill them) if they don't have to take careful aim. Supposedly in the first and second world wars there was quite a problem with soldiers not being willing to fire their weapons, or not fire them at individuals. By increasing the firepower and rate of fire, soldiers have become much more likely to shoot at the enemy. Perhaps this is one reason that PTSD and guilt seems to be greater in more recent conflicts - a greater proportion of soldiers can be reasonably sure that they did kill someone.

Since WWI the doctrine of most of the world has been "Fire and Movement" i.e. you open fire till you get "Fire Superiority" i.e. the other side stops firing do to your excess fire, than you move.

One of the reason for the Trench Warfare of WWI was the Bolt action Rifles of the period could hit area targets up to 3000 meters away (1000 meters for man size targets). Bolt action also could fire 14 rounds per minutes (German Mauser 98s and US M1903 Springfield's and keep this rate up till they ran out of ammunition. British SMLE Rifles had similar range against area targets but shorter range against man size targets but with an action that permitted 20 rounds per minute fire).

Thus since WWI everyone has an ability to kill anyone on the battlefield. The only way to reduce that ability has been to suppress that enemy fire, either through Artillery, Air Attack, Machine Gun Fire, or Rifle fire (Or fire from tanks along with their armor for protection form rifle fire). It is this need for suppressive fire that has lead to the increase in rounds fired since WWI.

As to the English "Green Jackets" of Napoleon they were good shots, but the technology of the time period limited them to no more than 60 rounds at a time (The black powder would jam the mechanism after about 30 rounds). The ignition system (The flintlock) would mis-fire about one out of six times (Causing the rifle to be out of action for 2-5 minutes as the bullet was pulled from the barrel so it could be reloaded). It was this latter problem that caused the Armies of the time period to stay with smooth bore muskets, all you had to do with such muskets in a mis-fire was to pull the bullet out and since the bullet was NOT engaging any rifling, this was a quick operation with the Weapon back shooting within a minute.

Thus rifles had considerable less fire power than muskets prior to the invention of the Percussion cap in the 1820s (The Percussion cap solved the problem of mis-fires, reducing misfires to one is a thousand rounds fired).

Thus prior to 1820 the smooth bore musket produced the maximum fire power possible, by 1900 the bolt action rifle had double the fire power (From 6 rounds per minute to 14 rounds per minute) AND increased range from 100 meters to 3000 meters AND an ability to fire all day.

The later was the result of the Percussion cap. The Cap operated at temperatures over 2000 degrees F (The Flintlock operated at temperature of about 400 F). This increased Temperatures would almost always light black powder AND was needed to light the "smokeless" powder developed after 1880. Smokeless Powder eliminates the soot that was the product of Black Powder (Thus eliminated the jamming caused by the soot) but at the cost that Smokeless powder has to be lite by a Percussion Cap.

The Percussion cap is one of the great inventions of history for like the transistor it was small but changed the whole structure of an existing technology. The cap is the chief reason for the differences between warfare today and Napoleonic warfare. The Cap permitted long range sustain continuous fire, something that did not exist prior to its invention.

Thanks for that post - interesting and well-written!

:thumbsup:

Three inventions that changed society. Ball-bearings were invented during the "Dark Ages" (500-1000 AD). Prior to its inventions Wagons did have wheels but the axles were fixed to the wheels and thus moved with the wheel. Thus when a wagon moved you had to rotate not only the wheel but the axle. On top of this the load of the wagon had to be carried through this rotating axle to the wheels.

The problems inherent with the use non-ball-bearing axles meant you had two types of wagons, a light wagon for one person to ride in (The Chariot or a light wagon) OR a heavy wagon pulled by oxen (At low speeds).

The ball-bearing permitted a fixed axle so the load of the wagon went to the fixed axle and than to the wheel via the Ball-Bearings. This permitted much lighter wagons AND wagons where the only power needed was to rotate the wheels NOT the wheels and the Axle. With the axle you get horse drawn wagons that carry REAL freight.

The ball-bearings was one of the great inventions of the Dark Ages (Along with the Horse collar, horse shoes and Hay) that revolutionized transportation. The greatest land based land base transportation revolution till the invention of the Railroad. It was this revolution in Transport that shows the difference between the Middle ages and Roman Times. You no longer had just an elite moving around but a growing number of working and middle class moving themselves and their services to other areas using horse drawn wagons.

My point is these three inventions (the Ball-Bearings, the Percussion Cap and the Transistors) while small changed how people did things. We are in the middle of the revolution of the Transistor and see ho things have changed since 1947 (The year the transistor was invented). Such small inventions take decades to show the extent of their revolution, but in doing so transform society. Just like today's office is no where like an office in 1947 (do to the Transistor), todays army is not like the army of 1820 (Do to the Percussion cap). The same with transport, the ball-bearing did a similar function to land base transport, a change so fundamental it is hard for us to even image how it was to live before its invention.

The big inventions get the headlines, but it is the small inventions that change society over the long term.

fired at you will hit you? Im willing to wager that the Iraqi's have better aim than that.

If you listen to the News reports, the Iraqi shoot a little bit (maybe 3-4 magazines about 100 rounds) hit 1-2 Americans (or someone allied with the US Forces) than the US Responses with anything from M-16s to Machine Guns shooting 1000-10,000 Rounds per action (whether they hit anything or not).

Remember we used 55,000 rounds per hit in Vietnam, the Viet Cong used much less AND WON.

The reason for this is true 1;1 shot-hit is impossible, you need at least three shots just to zero in your rifle so that you know where the fourth bullet will be going (and this was more so in the days of Napoleon where the speed of the bullets were so low careful calculation as to range was required to hit anything beyond a 100 meters).

Thus the old hunting line: What do you do if you only have three bullets? Use the first two to zero in the Rifle and save the last one for the game.

Now practice is only one of the reason for this being a brag more than a true fact, the other is the concept of "ranging" shots (More common with Arrows when bows were used in combat but still used even today). A "ranging" shots is a shot aimed at a target of unknown range. Where the arrow or bullet hit shows the shooter if he is right on as to the range, short or long. Not as critical today with the relativity flat shooting modern ammunition, but still done in certain limited situation (Mostly Mortars and Artillery).

As to Arrows 55,000 per kill seems high, most archers only carried 60 arrows and fired at a rate of 6 rounds per minute (6 rounds per minute is about as fast as one can load a weapon and fire it, increases over 6 rounds per minutes involve multiple loading of rounds of ammunition into a weapon a opposed to loading one round at a time).

At the above rate of fire most archers would be out of arrows in about 10 minutes (and had to go back to the wagons to load up on new arrows). Fire power could be sustained for hours at a time provided the arrows were being supplied. But even if someone could be kept equipped with the needed arrows the max that could be fired would be no more than 360 arrows in an hour (and most archers after about 10 minutes will drop fire to about 3 arrows per minutes for a "realistic" limit of 200 arrows per hour.

Now in the Middle ages you had stories of 50-60,000 arrows being fired in a battle. 1000 Archers could fire that many arrows in a ten minutes period (6 rounds per minutes, time 1000 archers times 10 minutes equal 60,000 rounds).

The problem with that 60,000 round claim is that it is TOTAL ARROWS being fired and that includes arrows that hit someone. In my 55,000 rounds per hit I mean simply 55,000 rounds were fire and maybe you hit one person, NOT THAT you fired 60,000 rounds into a mass of men)As the English did at Agincourt). While many of those arrows missed, many also hit. It is the shot- hit ratio we are looking at. The 55,000 figure I use is such shot- hit ratio. The 60,000 rounds at Agincourt is a total arrows fired NOT a shot-hit ratio.

When I have read about Shot-Hit ratio on Bows, the numbers claim a number close to a 1:1 ratio. Other have provided other numbers but a 10:1 ratio seems to be the most common (One of the problems with arrows is that they are re-usable even in combat. In Agincourt the English Archers after each retreat of the French horse went among the dead and wounded French and retrieved arrows to use again. Thus you may even have a 1:2 arrow to hit ratio (With one arrow being used twice).

My point here is the number I given (For example 999 per hit for the Civil War) are shot per hit ratio NOT rounds fired at any one time. Archers rarely were so far way from their targets that such high missed shots happened. Hard numbers are hard to find but I lean to 20-1 ratio which is still much better than the numbers I site above.

Ok, boys and girls. The fight’s over. Let's go back in for our afternoon math session. Today, we will learn how to use “50,000 bullets to kill person”.

we'll stop killing each other.

gas, bombs, hunger.

n/t

like in "The Last Samurai". Wars might end a lot faster if the soldiers had to run out and hack at each other on the battlefield.

if cheney would stop going to the secret service firing range to play

soldier, there'd be plenty of ammo left. sorry i don't have the DU

link to that story.

Cheney's collection, our sources say, is in the hundreds of guns, including pistols, shotguns and machine guns -- from antique Thompsons to the most modern European automatic machine guns.

To let off some steam (God knows he has some to let off these days), the Vice President has been known to go out to the federal training center in Maryland where the Secret Service does its own gun practice.

A typical Cheney visit, told to us by a person who attended one, included the Vice President bringing some 30 guns from his own collection.

On the range, Cheney would blow away his targets -- with Thompson machine guns, the latest German and Austrian machine guns, Lugars, MP5s, shot guns, you name it.

One after another an aide would hand the Vice President his latest armament, and Cheney would fire away, no doubt imagining al-Qaeda terrorists in his gun sights.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/5/3/125421.shtml

"Cheney's collection, our sources say, is in the hundreds of guns, including pistols, shotguns and machine guns -- from antique Thompsons to the most modern European automatic machine guns."

If that is true, then Cheney has committed a crime. It is illegal to import/or make/or sell any new automatic firearms (for civilian consumption). The only automatic weapons that are legal to possess are existing, used, pre-1984 (I think that is the right year).
It is also illegal to import (for civilian consumption) military style semi-automatic rifles, if those rifles are not disassembled and reworked with a correct number of USA manufactured parts.

Jeremy

was May 19th, 1986. Government agencies are exempt from the manufacturing ban, of course. Even assuming Cheney owns a post-'86 machine gun he could probably make an argument in court that he's a government employee or something. Besides, who is going to arrest him?

Well, I was close.

The LEO/Government exemption doesn't cover personal ownership, even if he could claim to be a government employee.

Jeremy

even assuming the guns aren't legal.

was recently struck down by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on ICC grounds in U.S. v. Stewart.

Here's a link:

http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:2kvbUmJl-1gJ:www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/90B5FFB18A092A6F88256DDD000000FE/%24file/0210318.pdf%3Fopenelement+u.s.+v.+stewart&hl=en

we could buy a few bullets. What a SICK SICK joke on the American people.

we could always count on fine contractors.

Fighting in Iraq, training in U.S. keep manufacturers humming

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5068407/

The first thing our teacher taught us in Economic class. $1 dollar invested into the Military Industrial Complex is equal to investing $3 to $2 in the private sector. I've NEVER seen a Media Whore state that fact on TV, radio, internet or newspaper.

The US military and civilian leadership knew on the evening of sept 11=, 2001 that useage of military stores and equipment would dramaticaly increase and no one thought of increasing production? BushCo forgot to think before acting (as usual).

As I understand it everything from small arms amunition to replacement bradley treads is in short supply both from increaed training and Iraq. Bush has utterly squandered the peace dividend of the post-cold war era.

Working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, producing 300 loaded rounds an hour, a single person with a manual progressive loading press like the Dillon 550B (which costs under $400 and is NOT a technological state of the art thing) can make 600,000 rounds of ammo in a 50 week year. (2400 rounds per day times 250 days).

There's something hinky about the math on this...unless, of course, the Lake City plant is just two guys with manually driven progressive presses...

produces 4 million rounds of .223 A DAY, not 1.2 million rounds a year.

I reload my own .45ACP and can probably donate a few dozen rounds. Of course, they're jacketed semi-wadcutters and so only really suitable for killing targets, but hey ... I want to do my bit for the war effort.

Anyone know where I can send some?

</sarcasm>

won't jam either.

Send some to Charleton Heston so he has something to use on himself when he is drooling in his oatmeal and wearing his Depends. Oh, and you can send some to Crawford, too.

the toilet and they don't have enough bullets. Where the fuck does that money go and will anyone in Washington have the guts to ask?

1 - cut down on ammo use dramatically, soldiers will have to learn how to aim though.
2 - they wont jam (unlike an m16 in a desert sandstorm, which can jam like clockwork)
3 - longer range

Out of curiosity, does anyone have a ballpark figure for the approximate average cost of one round? I do realize that the Armed Forces deals with many different types of rounds to slaughter Iraqi children with, but I'm trying to find an approximate cost per average bullet.

Thanks :)

I would have *never* dreamt of this, and I prided myself on an above average imagination.

Well that does it, can't compete with god. When you piss him off (as Bushco seem to have) he can write a satirical script so well that he can pull off even the most absurd string of coincidences.

ammo, oil and prisons.