You've probably seen the news about the ammunition shortage in the U.S. Seems our local police forces can't train up with live ammo rounds which, while it isn't causing me to lose sleep, is getting play in the nation's local press. Of course this information has been around for a few years, but for whatever reason, sick of Vick diaries, this news caught my attention again today.
The reason for the shortage is the One billion bullets used every year in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
I'm math challenged and it's hard to wrap my mind around a figure like one billion, so I took the easy way out. To be as conservative as possible, though you should feel free to correct me, I alloted 99% of those one billion bullets to live fire exercises, ETC.
But that left 10 million bullets.
While I know that in May 2003 General Tommy Franks told us "We don't do body counts.", and that GWB dimissed the 2006 Lancet Report of 650,000 Iraqis killed post-invasion by bombs, bullets and disease as methodologically flawed, I've also kept abreast of the ongoing reporting of U.S. soldiers shooting at Iraq checkpoints by McClatchy, who tell us that the military reports only 429 deaths at checkpoints in 2007. Hey. I thought we 'don't do body counts.'
Still, at this rate, we've still got millions of bullets left.
About a year ago an article in the UK Independent estimated that soliders are firing 250,000 bullets for each terrorist killed. But, these guesses are based on U.S. military estimates of terrorist deaths, which of course doesn't really do body counts.
Behind the bullet shortage came the news that the U.S. must purchase ammo from Israeli Military Industries LTD. Behind that news, in 2003, Arab News, along with many freepers, reported that Congress determined that Israeli bullets shouldn't be used to kill Arabs.
"There’s a sensitivity that I think all of us recognize," Weldon told the Army witnesses, including Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, who led the US Third Infantry Division that captured Baghdad in April 2003.
O.K., not that we have the "sensitivity issue" out of the way, how much does a (U.S. made) bullet cost? You might be surprised to learn that the Army now considers the waste hazard clean up costs of the proverbial lead bullet and, despite the fact that intial costs aren't much lower, has invested in a Green Bullet. Does the job just as well, but it's made of a mixture of tungsten and tin.
Leaving aside the remains of toxic DU bullets in Iraq, that's happy news for the Iraqi landscape, wouldn't you say? After all, we recycle our tin cans here in the U.S. Tungsten?
But even with only 5 million "Green Bullets" fired at 'terrorists' every year in Iraq and Afghanistan, (you know, because we're sensitive to using Israeli bullets on Arabs), who the hell are they hitting? Iraq Body Count has a max of 77,121 civilians today.
Why does it feel like asking "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" when I ask myself how many Iraqis and Afghanis are getting shot (each month) by the U.S. military?