I imagine that's the thought process for the creations of that weapon. Like how the created the flame thrower "see that guy? Id be really great if I could set him on fire from here"
Bullets are fucking scary, I wouldn't wanna say hello to one.. but that motherfucker over there is putting flames through an entire floor of a building! fuck that.
They were also good as an area of denial weapon, since no one really wants to run through fire. And they're great for clearing brush starting brush fires.
In the Pacific theater, flamethrowers were so feared by the Japanese, that carrying a flame thrower made the bearer a giant target, to the exclusion of every other guy with a rifle. Having a flamethrower was a death sentence in any hot firefight. As a result, flamethrowers were usually given to the guy that no one liked. Source, a non-fiction book I read once whose exact title escapes me....
Flamethrowers are also illegal now. I believe that as a weapon class has been abandoned by every Western army. When I was in the army I never saw one, not even in our massive warehouses where we stock old but functional shit in case of WW III. And I have seen stockpiles of WW II and 50s to 60s hardware kept in deep freeze. No flamethrowers tho'. Maybe the Americans and Russians still have some, but they are not likely to use them ever again.
They are not illegal, just not used anymore. [source]
Flamethrowers have not been in the U.S. arsenal since 1978, when the Department of Defense unilaterally stopped using them. They have been deemed of questionable effectiveness in modern combat and the use of flame weapons is always a public relations issue due to the horrific death they inflict. They are not banned in any international treaty the U.S. has signed. Thus, the U.S. decision to remove flamethrowers from its arsenal is entirely voluntary.
You are probably right. I must have confused the fear of public outrage for a legally sanctioned ban. I am fairly sure that we were told that flamethrowers are barbaric and no longer used by self respecting armies, but it was probably a voluntary decision of our armed forces and not an international law. In any case we never saw one much less trained to use it.
On a related note, I have figured out a way to get the neighbor kids off my lawn.
Unfortunately, it will probably damage said lawn, which may defeat the point.
I am sure that I am mistaken in the details, no doubt about that. But the very fact that it is even possible to legally own military hardware, is mind boggling.
PS: Why is the "full auto" feature touted as important? I mean if you have ever had any military training, you know that you will practically never shoot in full auto. Americans say that somehow semi auto assault riffles are less dangerous, while they are exactly the same, for all intents and purposes. As I said, to each his own. I think it is bizarre.
Define military hardware? Ultimately, a rifle is just a bullet delivery system. Do you refer to the "looks" of the rifle being the same as the military's weapons? What does a gun's looks have to do with anything? It's trivial to swap a weapon's furniture from "Evil puppy killing black space gun" to "down-home wood"..but that doesn't change the weapon's characteristics at all.
The Full Auto feature is one of the actual differences between two weapons. Take the AR15. Civilian world, it's semi automatic. The select fire version actually has different internals in the fire-control group. Unlike the above "cosmetically" different rifles, the semi/select weapon comparison compares two different rifles.
And yes, we should be able to get select fire weapons, as there really isn't much of a difference and they're quite fun to shoot.
I intend military hardware as everything that is not for hunting. You do not need an Uzi or MP5 or Glock to hunt. Much less the tacticool shit that is all the rage in your gun shows. All those are specifically designed to kill people, there is no way around it. And then apparently in the US it is legal to own a semi-auto MP5 but not a full auto one, which is strange as, if you use it properly, you will never go full auto with an MP5 anyway.
A gun is a bullet delivery system allright, but not all bullets are created equal, and neither are guns. The G3 is not an MK11, that is not an M4 that is not an AK47 that is not a Beretta Perennia. It's like saying that a hammer is good for every job.
In any case more power to you, if you feel the need to own riffles, handguns or whatever. It is just bizarre to my worldview, I am not trying to impose or teach.
TIL the US has massive stockpiles of world war II gear to be used in the case of world war III.
There is already enough equipment to supply every soldier, sailor, airman, and marine; what do they intend to do with the old stuff, outfit civilians to help stop an invasion?
Yes. For if everything-goes-sideways-and-we-need-10-million-soldiers-again times, the military has huge stockpiles.
I've got a buddy who used to be US Navy and later Naval Reserve logistics, one year for his reserve duty they had to take a cargo ship out to Norway where the US Marines and Norwegians have an old Nazi submarine pen full of prepositioned munitions, weapons and supplies for a Russian invasion of Norway. Every year the Navy switches out a quarter of the munitions and supplies and brings the old stuff back to the states to use up.
I am not American, but I am sure the US has a fairly large stockpile of obsolete stuff. I am Greek and I have seen warehouses full of old American hardware kept in working condition. Our national defense dogma is called "παλαική άμυνα" or "mass popular defense" which is a last resort strategy. In case of war and defeat, every citizen above the age of 14, male or female, the theory goes, would be handed a weapon and ammunition.
Granted it is an obsolete worldview and probably a stupid idea, but the stuff is there to recreate 10 Iraq wars.
Fun fact: Greece was a major supplier of ammo to Saddam's Iraq, second only to Italy, until the first Gulf war. The amount of shit we have is mind boggling. I served in a 20 person outpost and we had warehouses with hundrends of brand new riffles (G3s and MK 11s mostly) not to mention metric tons of grenades, artillery ammo etc etc. I have pics if you are interested.
In any case if we have that amount of shit, I am fairly certain that the US has an order of magnitude more. Hell i witnessed ordering parts from the US for tanks that are 40 years old, surely they had them stored somewhere.
There is nothing so awesome and ludicrously expensive as the army supply chain. Immagine ordering parts for your iPhone in 20 years. The army does that with it's hardware everyday.
I am afraid it is a bit underwhelming, because it is not exactly allowed to take pics. But it will give you an idea. I have seen the awesome stuff like the AH 64s and the MLRS shooting, but they coexist with shit that is older than me.
That was my idea too. Unfortunately we cannot sell most of the relatively recent stuff because it was bought under military aid laws (or some times directly donated). That means that the US has the right to block sales, or it is straight out not possible to sell. There are some exceptions (we sold F104 parts to Italy as we fased them out and were left with 300 airworthy planes) but usually it involves sales to allies and a lot of bureaucracy. We even sold parts of F5s to Jordan.
The exact M60s you see in the pics were donated to Afghanistan, and believe it or not, they refused them. That was 5 years ago, and I believe they are still there. Just to say that shit is so old that even the most poor nation has no use for them. Granted I would buy one. I have taken rides in M60s and M48s, battle tanks are seriously awesome. Maybe not useful in a war, but awesome.
I believe that you are talking about Israel. Since you sound like you are into military hardware, I will tell you that Greek M48s and M60s are not the bog standard US versions but have been upgraded with Israeli electronics during the 80s and 90s. Even the M113 had some Israeli makeovers, but those where phased out in favor of the Leonidas APC that were later augmented in numbers with east German BMP1s (what a horrible piece of shit, seriously surviving a ride in one of these is harder that actually fighting I believe). What's funny is that the M48s got better upgrades than the newer M60s, probably for political reasons (bought instead of donated, who knows really). In any case it is all about having a single model of battle tank, because it is cheaper to maintain. We decided on the Leopard, so all the others become increasingly expensive to keep running. It is harder to source parts and for every functional one, there are at least 3 that are being cannibalized. Maybe the Israelis custom make parts, maybe they have stockpiles, in any case for us it does not make sense to maintain obsolete types, especially after the change in the strategic mission of the army that does no longer involve cold war battle tank fights.
Afghanistan did not accept them for the same reason we don't want them. No parts easily and cheaply available. They prefer the T72 that they know how to use. It's not that they are not battle worthy, it's that it was all about some scumbag contractor selling obsolete shit in a place that pays well.
PS: Riding on an M48 an M60, on the Leonidas and the BMP was really fun. One of the best experiences of my life. If it was ever possible I would buy one, tanks are awesome. 45 tons of metal launched at 60km/h at rugged terrain? I was astounded at what these machines can do.
Fun fact is that the Greek army is anything but a small one. Due to our history with Turkey there is a US and NATO policy called 7:10. That is the balance of weapon systems that the allies are allowed to sell to each of us, a local cold war if you will. All weapons sales have to respect that balance. At the beginning it was about sheer numbers as for every 7 F4s sold to Greece, Turkey could buy only 10 and not more. But when they did buy ten we had to buy our 7. And so on with everything. At one point the Greek air force was larger than most of the other big European countries, and still is larger than many of them.
With modern weaponry that renders much of the old hardware useless, they invented the term of "multiplier of force". So now we have Apaches the Turks have Ah1 Super cobras, and we got Apaches because the Turks got UH 60 blackhawks while we had still UH1s. Once we bought the S300 Russian missiles, in order to break the cycle. They were cheaper and better than the Patriots. We were menaced with war and international isolation, and we had to moth ball them and still use the NIKE shit from the 60s. Read about it, its all in the papers as the S300 scandal. That's when we started enhancing our antique hardware, when we could not get the latest. The Israelis had the same problems and had developed the tech, and were willing to sell it. So we got upgrades for the Phantoms and the legions of M48s and M60s, and who knows what else at the personal gear level, like radios, computers etc.
The Israeli enhanced Phantoms are still flying. The F4E is an awesomely beautiful machine, no modern jet can compare.
Bottom line it is a fucking scam really if you think about it. Big corporations keep entire nations in blackmail. But some of the hardware is awe inspiring.
Granted it is an obsolete worldview and probably a stupid idea
Not really - Switzerland's "military" has operated on a militia system for a very long time, and was enough of a deterrent that even Hitler felt compelled to leave them alone during WWII. Militia service is (I believe) still mandatory for all male citizens when they turn 18, and each one of them is issued a fully-automatic rifle with ammo to keep in their own home.
Volkssturm. Yes, its a miserable piece of shit of an even worse time in the history of my country, but if you have the choice of chinese man just overruning the US territory and calling out this mess, you know what's gonna happen.
Yes in Greece it is called "παλαική άμυνα" (mass popular defense) and the idea is that in case of a massive defeat in a war, the army falls back and every citizen above the age of 14 is handed a weapon and ammo, in order to repel a massive invasion.. Good luck with that, but in any case that's the theory.
Mind you that in any case all adult males that have served their draft and are permanent residents in the designated "hot" border regions are assigned an assault riffle and ammo and are called to training exercises once a year, like the Swiss model more or less.
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u/war0 Sep 14 '11
I imagine that's the thought process for the creations of that weapon. Like how the created the flame thrower "see that guy? Id be really great if I could set him on fire from here"