I was asked to tell how the American soldiers dropped their rifles. Please.
On July 4, 2008, an American helicopter shot 17 residents from a village in the Afghan province of Vanat. Several doctors and nurses at the local clinic were killed. In response, on Black Sunday, July 13, 2008, an anti-Taliban coalition checkpoint consisting of 49 American paratroopers and 24 Afghan soldiers legally armed with regular NATO weapons was attacked by the forces of one or two hundred Taliban fighters, illegally armed with machine guns and machine guns of the Soviet system.
The result of the battle for the losses of the coalition - 9 killed and 31 wounded, for the losses of the rebels - two corpses were found, in connection with which their total losses were declared at fifty people. The clash became the subject of close study by military specialists. In the process of polling the participants, a picture emerged that is directly related to our question.
It turned out that in a serious mess at the distance of throwing a hand grenade, the weapon does not work at all as it should. Here are the facts recorded in the survey of participants in the events:
According to Chris McCaig, he shot 12 magazines in half an hour of the battle. “I couldn't reload my weapon as the rifle was hot, so I got angry and threw her to the ground."
The American "all-out" at once spread the rumor that in this battle the killed soldiers were lying with jammed or disassembled M4s. American patriots have documented this denial. And only Russian analysts noted that if someone had not thrown his rifle, his neighbor would have survived, without being hit by the bullets of the Taliban who could have been hit by the one who had thrown the rifle.
On the network you can find videos on which dozens of stores are shot, demonstrating the reliability or survivability of the weapon. I can offer these comrades a game of American roulette. After five or six magazines, shoot the seventh not to the end, look into the barrel and count to ten. If the experimenter remains alive, the old truth that fools are always lucky will be confirmed once again.
In 1990, the army conducted tests for resistance to prolonged automatic fire, and in 2001 the US Special Operations Command documented the problem of weapon failure during prolonged firing. In addition to the usual failures associated with contamination and thermal expansion of parts, another factor was tested. This is self-ignition of a cartridge in the chamber - "cook-off". The ignition temperature of gunpowder is about 200 degrees. After the ceasefire, the cartridge, falling into the hot chamber, can fire on its own within a few seconds. It was found that for a rate of fire of 15 rounds per minute after 170 rounds, the cartridge heats up very quickly to the ignition temperature. So McCaig was lucky: with a rate of fire of 12 rounds per minute, he could no longer hold a weapon in his hands. Again, the lack of a design for exhausting gases into the cavity of the bolt carrier, which, with intense firing, quickly warms up the receiver, has affected. Gunpowder can ignite in the cartridge of a Soviet machine gun, but its steel sleeve is more than two times worse than American brass in terms of thermal conductivity.
The problems in the clash in the Vanat province were attributed, as always, to unclean weapons, lubrication of the wrong system and non-observance of instructions for its operation in conditions of intensive firing, which were developed based on the results of tests in 1990.
The development of these instructions strangely coincided with the emergence of a panacea for increasing the effectiveness of single-fire firing. Everything was done very competently. On the one hand, instructions are designed to train fighters with normal technical perception, understanding the essence of the processes, with normal cause-and-effect logic. Their weapons are always cleaned and oiled. On the other hand, lawyers and botanists. If they are told that their compatriot has proved that single fire is always more effective than bursting, and even a Nobel Prize for this, then they will indeed shoot single. The barrels will not overheat, cartridges are saved, and the overall statistics on failures will decrease due to the smaller number of shots. But botanists don't like to clean their weapons. Or they forget.
In fact, firing single, except for saving cartridges, does not make any sense. With equal aiming time, a double or triple shot is always more effective than a single shot. This simple, obvious mathematical truth was deduced empirically on the fields of real battles and has always been perceived by us as "a hundred grams before dinner improves appetite." After all, the work of a fighter is as creative as that of a designer or artist. Although work on the verge of physical and moral forces does not allow controlling the train of thought when choosing one solution or another, the musician also cannot realize what kind of algebra deduces the harmony of his improvisation. Playing on notes is boring, a war over textbooks and instructions leads to defeat as soon as the enemy begins to use the "strategy of indirect actions" - Liddell Garth, with all my skepticism towards this author. A fighter should be free from cliches and dogmas in choosing his actions, and only he has the right to decide how to shoot in a given situation, unless it is a direct order from the commander.
Analysis of the use of small arms in Afghanistan has revealed another problem. It turned out that the bullet of the M855 cartridge, when fired from an M4 with a shortened rifling pitch, and intended to penetrate hard Russian body armor, loses its magical ability to somersault, falling into the soft body of an adversary, pierces him through and through. For a reliable defeat, it turned out to be necessary to hit the target two or three times, and preferably on vital organs, which is better done in an automatic mode than in a single mode. In general, not diarrhea, so scrofula (people).
When I was studying the materials on Vanat, I came across an interesting fact - in Iraq, the Americans did not disdain Soviet weapons with folding butts.
It turned out that when conducting a database in buildings and at short distances, being in the position of the shooting technique "Pointed quick fire", it is more convenient to work with the Soviet AKMS, pouring the target from the belly and not saving ammunition.
than to conduct aimed fire from the position of the "Aimed quick fire" technique.
