Comment by meheleventyone
5 years ago
Isn't it a long standing thing that the US Military use of force rules in warzones are generally more restrictive than the policies for use on their fellow citizens by police back home?
5 years ago
Isn't it a long standing thing that the US Military use of force rules in warzones are generally more restrictive than the policies for use on their fellow citizens by police back home?
Yes
One obvious example of this is simply ammo. Military bullets don't expand as much as bullets available to cops or civilians. A military bullet is explicitly not allowed to be an expanding hollow point which really messes you up.
There are all sorts of international agreements on not using certain types of things in war - types of bullets are no exception.
This comment is all sorts of wrong.
Military "bullets" (they're called rounds, actually) are designed to be optimized for performance in a warfare environment. That means accuracy, and range. A hollow point round is design to expand and be a stopping shot - with one round - and not continue to travel large distances, which puts other people at risk. Cops can carry those because if they're in a crowded environment firing a hollow point round at a threat means less risk to anyone else who isn't a threat.
>There are all sorts of international agreements on not using certain types of things in war - types of bullets are no exception.
Yeah no one will care about this once an actual near-peer war kicks off.
A bullet is a bullet, a round refers to the whole package - bullet, powder, case, etc. I'm referring to just the bullet part.
You're probably right on overpenetration though.
> accuracy
For accuracy up to a few hundred rounds you likely want boat tail hollow point, not a steel penetrator. Just look at the loads for prs, cmp, etc. Military bullets are not made to be the most accurate.
> Yeah no one will care about this once an actual near-peer war kicks off.
Probably right, though restrictions on bullet types have been around for like over a hundred years, and most modern US bullets adhere to the spirit of that.
It's also worth pointing out that there are a whole bunch of those international agreements that the US hasn't signed. Cluster bombs, for example.
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There's an argument for using hollow point bullets on sidearms in civilian environments. There's a lower probability of "over penetration". For a high power rifle in a military environment, such a thing is less of a concern.
But for the sorts of conflicts the US is involved in they are often working in situations with a lot of civilians present. There are also frangible rounds other than those also more destructive to humans. And above all the best way not to accidentally shoot civilians isn’t to have ammunition that makes it less likely to penetrate something else if you miss (this is after all a failure of training) but sane rules of engagement about when you can shoot.
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Correct, hollow-point ammunition is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. This has always baffled me since large caliber and high explosive munitions (120mm HEAT rounds from an Abrams) are regularly used against soft targets in combat, not to mention things like hellfire missles or JDAMs. That's the rules of war for you.
It's mostly because this isn't true, though lots of people love to wax on about what they think is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. I've heard all kinds of stuff like this over the years, such as "you can't fire a 50 cal at a human" etc.
The Geneva Convention says nothing in particular about hollowpoints, so the verbiage has an "interpretation" by DoD about the Rules of Land Warfare that skirts around the issue . See https://www.justsecurity.org/25200/dod-law-war-manual-return...
I know this because I carried hollowpoints while deployed in an anti-terrorism capacity.
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Hollowpoints are banned under Geneva because the injuries they inflict are less treatable by medics. Same reason buckshot and such is restricted.
In a civilian environment, the hollowpoints don't penetrate through walls and bodies as easily, meaning less risk of bystanders being harmed - and the local hospital has a lot more kit than your field medic.
My understanding was that hollow point bullets allow the shooter to hurt someone without risking the lives of the people behind them. Not hurting “people just behind [your enemy]” is presumably less a concern in a war zone (than in a civilian setting) because they are presumed brothers in arms.
Did I understand that right?
This is a very confusing post if you have followed American wars over the last 50 years.
Do you have any idea of the level of misery inflected abroad? How can that even be compared?
Doesn't that mostly have to do with the amount of training, responsibility, leadership etc. that comes with military hierarchy? It can still get pretty bad (coverup and/or violence wise), but it seems that at least they have some sense of the relationship between violent actions and their consequences.
>sense of the relationship between violent actions and their consequences
exactly. Whatever you use in warzone you're risking that the same can be used against you, thus all the conventions on warzone weapons usage and prisoner treatment. Thus all the training, so that your soldiers wouldn't cross [too frequently] the redline to trigger the response.
I remember reading for example that in WWI new young soldiers, i think in Russia, were sometimes issued old style non-flat 3-edged rifle attached combat knives. Whether the knife is flat or 3-edged wouldn't make any difference during the actual stabbing and the immediate time after that. Where it makes all the difference is outside of the immediate combat situation - those non-flat knives would make for unnecessary horrible very hard to heal wounds, and thus if you were found with such a knife on a battlefield you'd be killed right there instead of taken POW. So the older soldiers would make sure that the newbies would promptly lose the knives.
The situation is similar to hollow-point bullets - they create those horrible wounds without any tactical benefit on actual battlefield.
I'm struggling to picture what a "non-flat 3-edged" knife (bayonet?) looks like. Do you have a link to a picture?
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So the police should be able to inflict horrible wounds without tactical benefit?
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Not really. See FM-3-19.15, "Civil Disturbance Operations"[1]
[1] https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-19-15.pdf
This isn’t very helpful which part would you like me to look at and how does that compare to actual rules of engagement in modern conflicts versus those used by the police?