Requirements for Replacement of Currently Issued 5.56 M-855 and 7.62 M-80.

[JASmith]

Please cite source(s) to substantiate your claim. To tell others to research it to substantiate it for you is hardly kosher.

Stan's advice is on the mark -- get us a link to the source and, preferably, enough of a description of the comment so we can find it. I once had to deal with verifying claims made by someone who cited references with quote snippets in books that were more than 600 pages long. He had the habit of citing a dozen or more similar-sized references, making an independent check of claims difficult, if not impossible.

Having said that, I've seen the speculation since the Vietnam era. Some of it was attributed to the operations research sponsored by Robert MacNamara. The principle was the notion that a wounded soldier takes 3- or 4- soldiers to get him from the field to proper medical treatment, whereas a dead soldier takes none.

I never saw a source document or authoritative statement to verify, but was told that our design objectives for antipersonal munitions was not to kill but to wound. The argument was based on ethics, not on the operations research.

In any event, the logic was both shallow and flawed in that it trivialized the very complex battle environment.

The criteria used for designing munitions then and, I think, now, is time to inability to perform a specified function. The time and function influenced fragment, bullet size, and numbers choices.

So, Fackler's research might shed light on this long-standing concept.