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From: allen%codon1.Berkeley.EDU@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Edward Allen;345 Mulford;x2-9025)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Explosive Ammo
Message-ID: <7580@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 20 Jun 89 03:45:58 GMT
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From: allen%codon1.Berkeley.EDU@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Edward Allen;345 Mulford;x2-9025)



The person advocating the use of the most effective but illegal by
convention weapons such as explosive bullets forgets a factor when he asks
rhetorically whether small unit commanders would want to have them.  If
the enemy takes the legality issue seriously and captures said officer or
his men, it will go hard on them.  I remember accounts of WWI incidents in
which men armed with saw toothed bayonets, considered to be an unethical
weapon, were stuck with their own bayonets as punishment by the enemy
after capture.  It depends on who you are fighting, but if "honorable
combat" is part of their ethical system, as it has been for western powers
for some time now, its to your advantage to live and fight within the
rules if you want hope of living through capture to reach the prison camp
and eventual repatriation.  If pure combat effectiveness were the only
rule as that previous poster suggested, we'd have seen the use of nukes
since Nagasaki.  There are other considerations, tactical, strategic, and
moral.  As with the debate on fighter armaments and tactics, the
technology must be viewed within the larger framework to see how and why
it's used or not used.

Ed "my, that started to sound like a soapbox speech" Allen
(allen@enzyme.berkeley.edu)