🚀 go-pugleaf

"Andrew Chaplin" <ab.chaplin@yourfinger.rogers.com> wrote in message 
news:0o2dnWlvj7klsDTZnZ2dnUVZ_oSdnZ2d@giganews.com...
> [City and provincial groups trimmed.]
>
> "Carter" <per.ardua@adastra> wrote in message
> news:e09qg.5623$pu3.127099@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca...
>> Mountain Goat wrote:
>> > On Mon, 03 Jul 2006 00:45:22 GMT, John Fleming <nospam@sprynet.com>
>> > wrote:
>>
>> >> As will blowing up bridges, bombing airfields and mining harbours.
>> >> Anything to disrupt the supply chain and limit the enemy's 
>> >> effectiveness
>> >> in the theatre of operations.
>> >
>> > But not something that affects a grunt one on one with an enemy, the
>> > only outcome you want is him dead and you not. This is all automatic
>> > reaction if your training is good. Stopping to think gets you dead.
>>
>> That might have been true in the days of Attila the Hun.  Today
>> it comes under the heading of urban legend.  In modern warfare
>> not thinking is what gets you dead.
>
> Or, to be more precise, not having though things through beforehand.

I wasn't following the thread precisely, and some key posts appear to show 
up only quoted in others, but I gather at some point an observation was made 
about wounding versus killing, on the battlefield.

I had a (friendly) argument with a buddy about this - he was absolutely 
convinced that weapons systems that have a high rate of wounding were/are 
purpose-built to be that way. My position is that this is almost never the 
case, not in the sense he meant.

On the face of it, one can indeed argue that many weapons systems are 
designed to wound rather than kill, or at least have mostly wounded as a 
percentage of casualties. But this argument invokes a rather common logical 
fallacy, that if X happens, then it must have been intended to happen.

Looking at it from another perspective, you'd not normally want to design a 
weapon merely to wound. This even includes weapons that by their very nature 
could almost never kill (and I'll mention a few in a bit). The reason being, 
if you are already ratcheting down the lethality of your system so that the 
upper tail of the effects curve (dead people) shrinks, you're moving the 
entire curve so that the other tail - not wounded or lightly wounded - 
grows. Wounded people - unless they are utterly incapacitated - are capable 
of continuing to fight, to some degree, for some undetermined period of 
time. In a tactical timeframe, that's generally unacceptable.

So when a weapon is employed against N troops, and a single use in a certain 
situation is assumed to result in N1 deaths, N2 severely wounded, N3 lightly 
wounded, and N4 unwounded, N = N1 + N2 + N3 + N4, it's obviously better to 
have people in categories N2 and N3 at the expense of N4, but *not* at the 
expense of N1.

As an example, do you shoot to wound or to kill? Well, if you're an idiot 
you may shoot to wound, and possibly even succeed. In which case the wounded 
man may shoot you, and he most likely will not be returning the favour.

As another example - artillery airbursts. By their very nature, you have to 
expect lots of wounded along with the killed outright. But the existence of 
the wounded does not mean that the intent of the designers of the munition 
was to create lots of wounded *rather* than lots of dead. Because lots of 
those guys will be the prototypical machine gunner who took some shrapnel 
and will bleed out in 30 minutes, but for at least the next quarter hour 
he's pretty pissed and can still shoot his MG.

This observation was also made about ERWs - neutron bombs and shells. With 
the likelihood that, outside a small radius where every tank crewman dies 
immediately or rapidly, there would be quite a large area affected where 
tank and APC occupants would die over hours or days, some geniuses decided 
that this must have been an intended effect of such weapons. Wrong. Because 
that Soviet tanker who is puking up every hour and will die in 3 or 4 days 
has not lost the short-term ability to drive the tank, turn the turret, and 
press buttons. Plus, he's awfully ticked off.

Now, as to weapons that realistically can't kill or rarely will. AP mines 
with very small charges, for example, that might blow off a foot at best (my 
buddy mentioned these). Or rifle rounds used as AP devices, or punji stakes. 
Or bioweapons that sicken but rarely kill, or chemical weapons that 
incapacitate. Or AT mines or IEDs that won't crew kill a tank, but will 
mobility kill it.

The key point here is that wounded (my categories N2 and N3) is still better 
than unwounded (N4). You'd prefer N4, but you've accepted that with your 
resources, and in order to accomplish your mission, not everything you use 
will guarantee kills. But is your purpose to wound *rather* than kill? No it 
is not. Because everyone of the systems that I mentioned in the last 
paragraph is less desirable than a system that kills, precisely because a 
lot of the victims aren't dead. The weapons may still be very effective (a 
good AP minefield that mostly blows off feet can be very effective), but if 
they killed better they'd be more effective yet.

I've heard the argument many times that a weapon that wounds is better, 
because it takes guys to carry the casualty back, extract him, treat him 
etc. That's precisely bullshit. In the heat of a firefight, dead and 
severely wounded guys will get treated roughly the same, and lightly wounded 
will continue to fight. Mission accomplishment will come first, and you 
won't have people dropping out of a fight to carry back severely wounded at 
the expense of failing in the mission.

AHS