American Rifle - Alexander Rose [216]
The AK-47 gets grisly PR about having killed more people than any other gun—mostly a result of its widespread use by psychopathic regimes. But interestingly, in terms of deadliness the AK-47 suffers by way of comparison with the M4. Testing and unfortunate experience show that the AK’s bullet, after entering human tissue, tends to take a straight path. It pushes in headfirst to a depth as great as ten inches, and for that reason many pass through the body in one piece, leaving behind less severe wounds. When hitting, say, the abdomen, an AK-47 projectile will cause the same “minimal” degree of disruption as a handgun bullet.
By way of contrast, an M4/M16 bullet, shot into the abdomen at less than two hundred yards, will penetrate headfirst for about 4.7 inches, then yaw to 90 degrees before breaking in half. The pointed half remains in one piece, but the base is torn into shards that perforate tissue in many places. This fragmentation and the yawing enhance lethality by creating more traumatic internal wounding.40
Bullet fragmentation combined with marksmanship produces a far more favorable kill ratio than the “spray-and-pray” tactics employed by untrained, undisciplined insurgents, who eventually realized in Iraq that directly confronting U.S. troops amounted to an involuntary suicide mission. Hence the shift toward Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) to inflict American casualties instead of risking close-quarters combat using their AKs.
Between September 2003 and October 2004, attacks on U.S. forces were roughly balanced between IEDs, direct fire, and indirect fire (mortars, generally). By 2005 insurgents were employing more IEDs. During that year, out of 674 combat deaths, 415 were caused by IEDs, or 61.6 percent. IEDs also inflicted 4,256 of the 5,941 wounded, or 71.6 percent.41
Killing and crippling were more certain with these terror bombs than with an AK-47. Since then the overall IED casualty rate has declined—as of April 2008, 1,682 U.S. soldiers have been killed by IEDs out of a total of 4,052 fatalities—to 41.5 percent (though there are monthly spikes), mostly as a result of increasingly effective suppression of enemy activity, improved IED detection, and the greater role played by Iraqi military and police forces.42
As American soldiers have come to realize in the centuries since the War of Independence, a successful army relies on warriors who are able to individually control their shooting while themselves serving in a disciplined unit observing the laws of war. The myriad attempts to forge specifically American soldiers en masse into either musket-wielding automatons or independently minded riflemen have all failed. Today, as a result, U.S. combat troops are the distant heirs of George Washington’s beloved Virginia Regiment, which benefited as a fighting force from its colonel’s dual emphasis on riflemen’s skill and musketmen’s drill. As the 2003 weapons report made clear, the M4 derives its lethality from the ability of its wielders to place controlled shots into the enemy’s vital regions. Though there are times when maximum, unaimed suppressive fire using machine guns and artillery is warranted or necessary, the key to American success remains, as ever, a cadre of well-trained, self-motivated riflemen who keep their heads while their foes lose theirs amid the thousands of rounds wastefully shot into the air, brick, and dirt.
It could therefore be counted as an encouraging sign when, in February 2007, Brigadier General Terry Wolff, commander of the Military Assistance Training Team in Baghdad, announced that the United States would be issuing M16s and M4s to Iraqi army units to replace their AK-47s and would take them through a marksmanship course.43
They needed it. The Iraqi army suffered (and except among elite units, continues to suffer to an extent) from poor morale and discipline problems, mostly the by-product of decades of dreadful conscript