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If you get shot in the torso with a 5.56, and you don't go into surgery, you're going to die. On soft tissue, which is %99 percent water, the 5.56, and others rounds like it, produces two distinct holes or tracts. The first is the rip of the path of the bullet. You can carefully follow this with a soft wire probe. In one end, out the other. But what does you in is the speed of the round through the fluid of the flesh leaving a about a 1 and a half diameter tube, that follows the bullet path. All that flesh has the texture of strawberry jam. Muscle, organs, blood vessels are goop, trash, debris and on their way to cell death. They can not be saved. This tissue is mechanically removed, gooped, spooned, scraped, cut out.

In a phrase, it isn't the bullet, it's the speed that gets you.

As far as stopping, only a shot to the upper spine or brain pan is certain. Maybe a shot to the hart, or carotid artery, producing violet blood pressure spike and drop such that the brain feels as if it was hit by a baseball bat. Maybe. A lot of what is thought as knock down is due to the bullet shock wave passing or distroying a major nerve, and/or that nerve sending a major jolt to the brain causing the body to spass often on the run. Hence a tumble fall. Hunters know this from deer dropping and recovering and getting up again. The actual physics energy/force imparted by a bullet into the mass of a 150lb person is minimal. There are no/none/zero 'knock downs' by bullets a la bowling ball to bowling pins.

Sniper biographies are full of reports of clear shots to the upper body with 7.72 type rounds and the subject continuing along, seemingly untouched. Vietnam biographies are full of guys fighting for their lives and once they make it into a helicopter, they found they've been shot by SKS/AK rounds five or more times and thought they got hit once.

Other than the .50, I don't know of a rifle round in common military use that will "knock down" consistently a young male on adrenaline.

The military can get a new round, but the reports will continue coming in. I'd rather see the money spent on each soldier/marine shooting thousands of rounds on moving targets on realistic ranges with their full kit, hot, sweating, tired, pulse rate up, after they have been up for a day or so.

The military can get a new round, but the reports will continue coming in. I'd rather see the money spent on each soldier/marine shooting thousands of rounds on moving targets on realistic ranges with their full kit, hot, sweating, tired, pulse rate up, after they have been up for a day or so.

What you said. At the end of the day, it comes down to who can put the most rounds on target the fastest. Nothing else matters.