Posted on 08/22/2023 2:28:07 PM PDT by Eleutheria5
And you were using it against personnel? I don’t think that would be the norm.
Suppression fire does wonders for crowd dispersal in the 🏜.
But no, you’re right, it isn’t the ‘norm’.
Now that I think about it, when the .50cal is the only mounted weapon in the bird, you use it in whatever way is necessary.
I just watched this today on my YouTube feed. What are the odds of that?
Well, there’s no law against using .50 cal against people but my understanding is it’s not generally done, for two reasons. The first is that it’s seen as inhumane. The other is that it’s considered overkill and a waste of resources that could be put to better use. So it’s not the norm but if push comes to shove it does get used that way.
insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.”
Maybe he was successful. Sorta sounds like the average soldier in the Soviet Army during WWII.
Likewise one could surmise that fearlessness such as from a drug is counterproductive, leading the soldiers to become reckless and getting them killed more easily.
My basement tenant in Far Rockaway, an ex-Marine, told me that he was trained on a .50 caliber side-mounted helicopter gun. It might not be “sporting,” but neither was the Atom Bomb.
Dictators usually have huge blind spots. Hitler believed he was a military genius, so constantly overruled his generals’ plans in Russia, undoing himself. He deprived his army of rollingstock needed to supply his troops, because he gave priority to shipping Jews, Gypsies, etc., to the death camps.
Stalin refused to believe that Hitler meant him any harm until his troops invaded. He also ran gulags for fun and profit, purged his military of officers who knew what they were doing, starved his peasantry to death, and also had this super soldier idea.
Putin invaded one country once too many times, incapable of conceiving that it was evolving socially, politically and militarily in the interim since his last invasion.
China’s now developing their own brand of super soldier that makes Schwarzenegger in his prime look tiny? I think there’s a fundamental flaw in how they did it, or how they’ll utilize this resource. What that flaw is, we’ll discover if and when they invade Taiwan. But I know intuitively that it’s flawed.
Yeah but your post was about the killer instinct directed at enemy troops, that is people — bayonetting them, throwing grenades at them, strafing them from a helicopter. Shooting up equipment with a .50 cal, which is probably what your tenant was trained to do, is a different thing. It’s less visceral, less an expression of the distinctively male killer instinct. Shooting enemy personnel from a helicopter is more in line with the gist of your post, and that would normally be done with a .30 cal, not a .50 cal.
I’ll take your word for it. Whatever your military experience, it has to be more than mine ever was.
Probably a factoid I picked up from the military guys I was around when I did defense related work. Just one of those things that sticks with you for some reason...
You are right about one thing, maybe weapons have moved on, but the M60 was the most underrated weapon of the VietNam War. Versatile and reliable, as many a door gunner from the era will testify.
I saw an article yesterday saying the M60 was the most iconic weapon of the Vietnam war.
Re the .50 cal, it would be interesting to know the current doctrine about its use against personnel. It seems to get a fair amount of debate on the interwebs based on a quick scan of Google search results.
“Take that hill!”
“YOU take that hill!”
“What’s your problem?!?”
“Oh, I think you know what the problem is!”
Why Xena the Warrior Princess would never work.
Well, as a TV show, it worked for a lot of young men who would otherwise not had any kind of social life at all. ;^)
Also gave a lot of impressionable young girls the delusion that they can easily beat men in a fight. Hope they didn’t get hurt, or manage to get ahold of that Frisby with the razor edges.
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