Thanks. I could be wrong as well, but I don’t think the Mini 14 chambers the same round as the M14. I admit...it’s late and I’m probably confused. Anybody who can set me straight?
“I’m could be wrong but I believe it’s called the Ruger Mini 14. The Air Force Sea/Sar teams use it as well and because of poor stopping power of the 9mm pistol certain branches of the military are allowing the use of the .45 pistol ...”
No US DoD organization has used Ruger’s Mini-14 in anything but experimental/developmental quantities. It is more lightly constructed than the M-16, more difficult to manufacture, less durable, and less accurate.
To reiterate, “stopping power” cannot be found in any US DoD glossary of terms, is nowhere formally defined, and has yet to be quantified.
Forum members post as if none have heard about the JSSAP organization that conducted the M1911A1 pistol replacement demonstrations and OT&E - the group that recommended the adoption of the Beretta 92 variant now known as US Pistol, M9.
The whole effort was deliberately placed under a USAF organization at Eglin AFB on Florida’s Panhandle - a bureaucratic move that had no precedent, as the US Army had by that point owned all prior responsibility for small arms development and selection, dating back some three generations.
Via the best-conceived, most carefully planned, most rigorous, best-documented operational testing up to that date, JSSAP concluded that the 9x19 pistol round (which out-powers the 45 ACP cartridge in some loadings) led the pack in several key performance attributes, the chief of which were kinetic energy transfer to target, body armor penetration, and effective range. Added benefits: much greater number of ready rounds in the magazine, and the higher round count for any given weight load.
It was conceded that NATO’s adoption of 9x19 as the standard handgun cartridge was inescapable politically. The US was then (circa 1980) still in quite bad odor among NATO members, for forcing the issue in the 1950s on rifle/machine gun cartridge selection.
“... intell units ... conducted some extensive examination of the regular Iraqi Army and Republican Guards as well as the irregular forces ... the performance of the irregular forces that intrigued the intell guys ... discovered though in autopsies on the jihadis is that they were pumped up full of amphetamines, pain killers tranquilizers ...”
Fanatics pumped up on drugs and jazzed up by propagandizers have been a longtime concern of US forces. See reports on the Philippine Insurrection, the US Army’s ugly experience of the early 20th century, the one that brought the juramentados of the southern islands up against Army regulars. The pop history / gun culture aficionadoes recall it as the conflict that enshrined the 45 cal as *the* pistol bore diameter of choice, but any beyond the shallowest study immediately reveals that no issue arms of the day could guarantee results against what are now judged to have been drug-crazed fanatics. Even the 30-40 Krag comes off as inadequate, despite close-range performance equal or superior to 7.62 NATO. The best-rated “man-stopper” - necessarily at close range - was the shotgun.