Why does anybody care on the UN treaties allowing only FMJ ammo

P

Para Bellum

New member
I seriously wonder why any strong country obeys the UN treaties which allow only for FMJ bullets:

1. Being a well trained lawyer I truly believe that "international law" only exists on paper. China, the USA, Israel, Russia, France, UK (to name a few) countries frequently violate "international law" and/or UN-Resolutions if it doesn't suit their objectives. And you can't blame them really - nobody would dare to sanction them. They just can do so without having to face consequences.

2. All these countries own, develop and test nuclear weapons. Yet they assert the authority to tell other independent countries that they can't have nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. There is no justification for that. If one may have it, the other one may have it too. So, if having nuclear weapons were that bad or morally impossible, all these countries would have to disarm in a nuclear sense. But of course - they don't. They want to keep their nukes and they want them to stay what they are: A great advantage.

3. So why do the dominant countries obey the treaties that allow only FMJ rounds for military use?

My try for an answer: Because the want them. Because the FMJ is an advantage on the battlefield. The FMJ is the surest penetrator. And penetration is more important than expansion if you have to choose without compromise.

What do you think?
 
Because the same type of treaties tend to curtail even nastier things, like mustard gas.

If the US were to break those treaties, the other side now has an excuse to bring out really nasty weapons without fear of war crimes prosecution after the fighting is over.


If we are going to violate international accords, we might as well be the ones dumping mustard gas than getting into trouble simply using different bullets.
 
I thought "a well trained lawyer" would know that the requirement for non-expanding bullets originated, not with a "UN treaty" but with Declaration III of the Hague Convention of 1899.

FWIW, the ban on soft or expanding bullets could never have been agreed to earlier. It was only because the new high velocity rifles required bullet jackets (lead bullets would "strip" in the rifling and lose accuracy) that requirement for jacketed and non-expanding bullets could be accepted by the signatory nations. In other words, it was just a case of agreeing to do what they had to do and were already doing, and getting propaganda points for being "humane" to boot.

Jim
 
Why the hell would nations converge to create a complicated piece of legislature banning what you call less effective bullets from the battlefield? If you truly believe softpoint rifle bullets are so inferior then they would want the enemy to have them.

I'm not going to argue that FMJs are less effective because thats not the point of this thread, but I highly doubt that you are correct.
 
Not sure we should standby and let countries that want to impose 3rd. century religious rule over the entire world get nukes if we can stop it. Moral equivalency is a mental disease of those that have never had force used against them and live in lala land. :(
 
My try for an answer: Because the want them.
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There are a couple of reasons why the military wants FMJ bullets. The two primary ones are penetration and wounding. The FMJ penetrates barriers and people better than other rounds.

The second is the bullet tends to wound more than kill. It just zips through the body at a high speed with little or no deformation. This is not because or moral reasons. By only wounding enemy soldiers instead of killing them, even more enemy soldiers are now needed to tend to the wounded, getting immediate medical attention, then evacuation to a combat area hospital, then transported to a standard hospital and ultimately back to their home country where they receive more medical care. A single wounded soldier can tie up hundreds of support people and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. A dead guy gets a $20 body bag and two personnel to throw him in the back of a transport aircraft for a ride home.
 
My only problem is this. The treaty says that nukes are OK, but soft points create unnecessary damage.

And wasn't there a prohibition about using hot air baloons to bomb things? What happened to that when planes came out?
 
HK hit it on the head. Wounded soldiers must be dealt with. Either with a $.10 bullet or medical care. Most coutries choose the medical care. Hence, burden to their system. Let us not forget all the money they cost when a soldier returns.

Do you not think the insurgents (enemies) know this?
 
Will people PLEASE quit blathering about bullets wounding people and not killing them. It is pure BS. You want you're opponent DEAD, not being carried off to fight another day, not waiting in the grass for you to walk by and take a shot at you, DEAD. The Brits first used expanding ammo after it was found that the new .303 round would produce fatal wounds in the African Tribesman, but not before they where able to get close enough to kill the British troops. The expanding rounds where much more effective at killing the opponent, It was the media, polititions, and the like who wanted the bullet banned because it was "inhumane". Whatever twisted logic they where using, they managed to ban the use of the "better" ammo. We NEVER signed that treaty, though we have followed it for all these years.
 
Will people PLEASE quit blathering about bullets wounding people and not killing them. It is pure BS.
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Wrong. Time to read Sun Tzu and Clausewitz and a little military history. Even the creators of biological and chemical weapons DO NOT want the weapons to cause instantaneous death but lots of casualties.
 
Wrong. Time to read Sun Tzu and Clausewitz and a little military history. Even the creators of biological and chemical weapons DO NOT want the weapons to cause instantaneous death but lots of casualties.
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Of course, that only works on enemies that care about their wounded soldiers.
 
Of course, that only works on enemies that care about their wounded soldiers.

And the fact that chemical and Bio weapons create the most damage against civilian populations. WMD have no relation to small arms design. You are shooting at an individual because he poses a threat. You must eliminate that threat. Unless you hit them in the leg, most people with a non lethal hit are able to move under their own power until they loose enough blood that they must be carried. So the person you just "wounded" will either keep attacking or remove themselves from the battle to cover/safety. In WWII many troops who had been wounded kept on fighting. There are many cases of this during the D-Day invasion.
 
Obviously ignorance proves to strong for some.

Just watch a little MASH. If there were dead, move and and replace. If they were alive it could take many hours to fix, heal and recover. Now, which one is a greater burden?

Even the scum in Iraq carry off their wounded.
 
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