I read an article the other day that talk about the fact that the US military has used over 1.8 billion rounds of small caliber ammunition in Iraq. It seems that domestic industry can’t keep up with demand and the US is turning to overseas suppliers. The article talked about the hollowing out of American industry and its threat to national security. OK, but one thing really jumped out at me.

1.8 billion freaking rounds!

Let’s look at this number a minute. US Army spokesmen estimate that there are 20,000 insurgents in Iraq. It’s harder to say how many insurgents have been killed. All sides play with these numbers far too much. So let’s say that 5,000 actual insurgents have been killed by the US military. How many of those were killed with small arms rather than bombs, artillery or missiles? I have no idea, so lets split the difference and say half or 2,500. This means it takes 720,000 rounds of ammunition to kill a single insurgent.

Looked at another way, since the standard 5.56 NATO round weighs 15.12 grams US forces have fired off more than 30,000 tons of small arms ammo, and it takes more than 12 tons of ammunition to bring down an insurgent. When we look at just the projectile weight — the part of the round that actually flys (presumably) in the direction of the target — it takes about three tons of flying metal to send an insurgent to meet his maker.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 22nd, 2005 at 10:49 am and is filed under America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.