There is an amazing (and startling) statistic out of Iraq and Afghanistan: the United States has fired an estimated 250,000 for every insurgent killed. The U.S. is going through so much ammo that manufacturers are struggling to keep up. In another milestone, U.S. troops in Afghanistan now surpass the number in Iraq.
The U.S. military are now importing ammo from Israel to keep up the rate of fire.
US forces have fired so many bullets in Iraq and Afghanistan – an estimated 250,000 for every insurgent killed – that American ammunition-makers cannot keep up with demand.
The General Accounting Office (GAO) reports that our forces are now using 1.8 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition a year — a level of use that has more than doubled in five years. The report states:
“The Department of Defense’s increased requirements for small- and medium-calibre ammunitions have largely been driven by increased weapons training requirements, dictated by the army’s transformation to a more self-sustaining and lethal force – which was accelerated after the attacks of 11 September, 2001 – and by the deployment of forces to conduct recent US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Source:Belfast Telegraph and Reddit
Jonathan Turley
we should have nuked them in the beginning, save American lives, Taxpayer dollars and taken care of the drug trade and terrorists with one push of the button….
Nuking some of the poorest people on earth that haven’t done shit to you is the utterance of a hopeless moron brainwashed but the drivel spewed at Faux News whose probably never gotten anything right in his life except the notion that Obamasux, but for all the wrong reasons.
Mouth breathing right wing imbeciles ought to be careful what the wish for as payback is a MoFo, for that’s what 911 was all about, payback for 60 years of a predatory foreign policy in the Middle East.
Res ipsa loquitur
You have a REAL problem Karl – go take an Obama – a laxative, might help!
Personally I put a higher value on American lives – one nuke, it’s over – they attack again – nuke them again, won’t be long and they get the hint.
Sorry if i offended your moral senses – Nah – I take it back…
Live with it – it’s STILL a free country!
250,000 rounds per insurgent killed.
It literally would be more efficient to stack the ammo on top of insurgents and crush ’em to death rather than shooting it at them with a firearm.
Unbelievable.
The really crazy part is that these numbers were first reported back in 2006 or 2007, except back then it was reported as 1.8 billion small caliber rounds used PER YEAR, which added up to a mind-numbing 6,000,000,000 (6 billion) total small calibre rounds at that time. I’m curious what the count is now. There’s no doubt the number is exponentially more ridiculously excessive. And even then, regardless of how incomprehesibly stupidly big the number may be, it excludes any count of medium caliber munitions, “smart bullets”, missiles, grenades, bombs, drones, and experimental weapons. And wait till you hear the punchline… Iraq’s population prior to the war: 27 million.
By insuring healthy spouses and dependents thru individual medical insurance, we have saved our clients as much as 50% over the cost of their group insurance plan. Individual insurance enables the purchaser to choose a plan that more specifically suits their needs and budget.
So how many of these same bullets are being used by the people that we don’t employ and that we don’t indict because they could not be awarded contracts for being where we say that they are not?
This is a merely academic question….any contractor having any resemblance the Blackwater/Xe or Hailiburton is purely incidental or is that consequential……?
I was going to say don’t they teach you guys to shoot.
Maybe I should amend that to don’t they teach you guys to hit the target. 🙂
Lottakatz-
In addition to the massive brass deposits, we have also given the Afghanis lead deposits that can be mined and sold to the Chinese. As we all know, lead is an essential ingredient in all Chinese export goods.
I recently learned the purpose of our long national nightmare in Vietnam. Last week I purchased a package of Fruit of the Loom boxer shorts. There on the label were the revelatory words, “Made in Vietnam”. Eureka! The Vietnam War was all about cheap labor for the Fruit of the Loom Corporation. Some day when we are all shooting up some heroin, we will see the proud label,”Made in Afghanistan”, and know that the War in Afghanistan was worth the sacrifice.
We recently discussed on one of the threads that Afghanistan’s wealth of natural resources including rare metals, may be driving our ambitions in Afghanistan. From this article it seems to me that unless we pick it all up after the shooting stops, brass is going to have to be added to the list.
Karl,
After a particuarly strenuous debate with an opposer my old mentor once asked me rhetorically “you know how you know you won? They start calling you names.” Wear it with pride, brother.
|
|
|
“Tootie
1, January 10, 2011 at 2:14 pm
Karl Marx Friedrich,”
Tootie. You’re the one whose nuts. If you’d have actually read Marx instead of regurgitating the right wing propaganda about him maybe you wouldn’t sound like such a deluded fool. Here’s a stubborn fact. Concentrating wealth into fewer and fewer bourgeois hands, as Obama has done in continuation of Bush’s policies, has absolutely nothing in common with the philosophy of Karl Marx who was for proletarian revolution and the elimination of social classes. Only a complete ignoramus would claim otherwise.
so much for fire discipline. It’s one thing to fire M16 .223 cal with no kick. If the military had to use a M1 30-06 or M14 7.62mm both rounds with a sufficent kick, the ammo splurge would perhaps stop. In WWII it was estimated that it took 10,000 rounds per death. so it goes
Tootie: I hope you’re being sarcastic. Bill Gates has given over $24,000,000,000 to charity and counting. On a side note, Barack Obama is more conservative on taxes than Dwight D. Eisenhower (91% top tax rate), Richard Nixon (70%), and Gerald Ford (70%). He’s not a socialist, or communist, or liberal, he’s basically your average pro-business centrist Democratic president.
Karl
MarxFriedrich,You blithering so and so.
What do you think Obamcare will do? Leave insurance companies healthy, strong, and free from government control? Leave doctors free to run their practices as they choose? Leave Americans free to choose their doctors without government interference? He has all but nationalized them in name.
What has the government done with banking? With education? With American homes? They own most the mortgages, do the not? So much for no nationalization.
Food is next. Then the shortages and government created famines. The Marxists HAVE to have famine to control the people.
We don’t even have an industrial economy anymore. There are no factories to speak of that can be nationalized. Did you think Marxism would go away because factories would?
No, Marxism is alive and well. The left likes to play dumb with me pretending that since we don’t really have factories, Marxism cannot exist.
But it exists through government TAXATION. That is how the Marxist achieve edistribution (Obama’s goal).
Hayek wrote, in the 1976 preface of his Road To Serfdom which he wrote in 1944:
“At the time I wrote, socialism meant unambiguously the nationalization of the means of production and the central economic planning which this made possible and necessary. In this sense Sweden, for instance, is today very much less socialistically organized than Great Britain or Austria, though Sweden is commonly regarded as much more socialistic. THIS IS DUE TO THE FACT THAT SOCIALISM HAS COME TO MEAN CHIEFLY THE EXTENSIVE REDISTRIBUTION OF INCOMES THROUGH TAXATION AND THE INSTITUTIONS OF THE WELFARE STATE.” (my emphasis)
Now the government can declare you insane if they wish and be in charge of asylum. And they can decide who lives and dies a lot more neatly than those messy camps and gulags. This is rank Marxist despotism.
If Obama and Democrats cared about the poor (and they most certainly do not) they would immediatly stop immigration (which lowers wages), they would eliminate Obamacare, and they would pull out of the Middle East immediately. This would help slow down the growth of the deficit. The deficit devalues our money and makes everything more expensive. This hurts the poor and you can best be sure Obama wants it that way or he would stop what he is doing.
If Democrats cared about the poor they would eliminate the Labor Department (unconstitutional), they would eliminate Housing and Urban Development (unconstitutional), Health and Human Services (unconstitutional), Energy (unconstitutional), Commerce (unconstitutional), the Education Department (unconstitutional), and a whole plethera of departments. These all cost the government too much and they bloat the budget which increases the deficit.
The DHS is a virtual standing army. It is the proto-gestapo. It is growing by leaps and bounds. In otherwords, it is a jobs program for the federal government which is dependent on importing terrorists in order to justify its existence.
If the Marxists (Democrats/Obama, etc.) cared about the poor they would slash all non-discretionary spending by 10 percent, eliminate Medicaid, and a thousand other unconstitutional and expensive programs in order to slow the deficit growth.
But they refuse.
If leftists cared about the poor (and they do not) George Soros, Peter Lewis, Bill Gates, Warren Buffest, Oprah Winfrey, Barbara Striesand, Michael Moore, John Kerry, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Obama and loads of other rich leftists would give their money away to help them.
BUT THEY REFUSE! All are still incredibly wealthy.
They are not fools. They want to be rich themselves. They love money. They just want it all for themselves. Only a Marxist is permitted to love money.
Obama and the Democrats will not do any of the above. This is because they despise the poor who they step on and back stab to achieve absolute power and destroy the Constitution.
Metro:
He’s a Marxist. He is out to “fundamentally transform” America. To do that legally he would have to change the Constitution. Instead, he is usurping it. He is nuts.
Wake Up.
I’ll send tickets.
That is the most misleading title of topic. Couldn’t they just split the reasons for using ammo in their findings? Target practice, maintenance testing, and actual battle shots.
I bet if they only focused on ammo fired while in battle, the rounds used will go down drastically.
Happiness is a warm gun that makes for a trigger happy warm and fuzzy daze.
http://powertoxins.blogspot.com/2009/11/greatest-source-of-power-toxins.html
Tootie: You teabaggers might sound more credible if you actually understood what’s going on. Marxists states to not cozy up to big business. They Nationalize them. Here’s what’s really going on, and it has nothing to do with Marxism, as Obama doesn’t have a Marxist bone in his body:
Op-Ed Columnist
Misery With Plenty of Company By BOB HERBERT
Published: January 7, 2011
Consider the extremes. President Obama is redesigning his administration to make it even friendlier toward big business and the megabanks, which is to say the rich, who flourish no matter what is going on with the economy in this country. (They flourish even when they’re hard at work destroying the economy.) Meanwhile, we hear not a word — not so much as a peep — about the poor, whose ranks are spreading like a wildfire in a drought.
The politicians and the media behave as if the poor don’t exist. But with jobs still absurdly scarce and the bottom falling out of the middle class, the poor are becoming an ever more significant and increasingly desperate segment of the population.
How do you imagine a family of four would live if its annual income was $11,000 or less?
During a conversation I had this week with Peter Edelman, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a longtime expert on issues related to poverty, he pointed out that the number of people in that tragically dismal category has grown to more than 17 million. These are the folks trying to make it on incomes below half of the official poverty line, which is $22,000 annually for a family of four.
No one talks about these families and individuals living in extreme poverty. Certainly not the Republicans who were having a dandy time this week deliberately misreading the Constitution and promising budget cuts and other initiatives that will hurt the poor even more.
If you’re still having trouble deciding whose side the Republicans are on, just keep in mind that the House G.O.P. bigwig Darrell Issa sent a letter to 150 businesses, trade groups and think tanks asking them to spell out which federal regulations they dislike the most. These are lifeguards on the side of the sharks.
Scared to death of being outdone, President Obama and his sidekicks climbed into their spiffy new G.O.P. costumes and promised in humiliatingly abject tones to shower the business world with whatever government largess they could lay their hands on. The first order of business (pun intended) was the announcement that William Daley, the Chicago wheeler-dealer and former Clinton administration official who landed a fat gig at JPMorgan Chase, would become the president’s chief of staff. Mr. Daley was a loud critic of recent financial regulatory reforms and has been obsessed with getting Democrats to be more subservient to business.
The poor, who have been hurt more than anyone else in this recession, don’t stand a heartbeat’s chance in this political environment. The movers and shakers in government don’t even give a thought to being on the side of the angels anymore — they’re on the side of the millionaires and billionaires.
Nearly 44 million people were living in poverty in 2009, which was more than 14 percent of the American population and a jump of four million from the previous year. Anyone who thinks things are much better now is delirious. More than 15 million children are poor — one of every five kids in the United States. More than a quarter of all blacks and a similar percentage of Hispanics are poor.
Are we doing anything about this? No. Our government officials, from the president on down, are too busy kissing the bejeweled fingers of the megarich.
Professor Edelman broke the poor into two categories: the new poor, who have lost jobs and homes and otherwise been clobbered by the recession; and the old poor, who in many cases had previously been working, sometimes sporadically or part time, at jobs that didn’t pay much. Many of those low-paying jobs have since vanished and the old poor have just been crushed.
“There is this astonishing number of people all the way down there at the bottom that we just don’t talk about,” Mr. Edelman said, “and they’re in very big trouble.”
Welfare, even for the poorest of the poor, is not much help. More than 17 million people may be living in extreme poverty, but welfare, for most of the people who need it, was “reformed” right out of existence. TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), which is what welfare is called now, helps far fewer people than welfare used to, even though the poor have been laid low by the worst economy since the Depression.
Hardly anyone cares. Hardly anyone even notices.
With the tax cuts for the rich saved and William Daley coming on board, the atmosphere is being readied for Obama & Co. to tap the fat cats for the zillions necessary for next year’s re-election run. And that, of course, is the only thing that really matters.
Tootie, your a pip….would love tickets to your comedy club routine sometime….
Ah. A defanged military stranded and cornered in the most dangerous part of the world having problems arming itself.
Perfect. An ideal situation when you are planning a Marxist totalitarian police-state revolution and you don’t want the military that doesn’t like you hanging around or stopping you.
At least they can’t sell to our enemies if they can’t keep up with our supplies. Or maybe they can’t keep up with our supplies because they’re selling to our enemies. Certainly they’ve gone to the right place to find more – Israel.