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If talking about NATO battle rifles, could also consider an FN FAL or G3.

Edit:
Considering semi auto is the way to go, is there much benefit to an M14 over an M1 Garand?

Larger mags, less reloading.

 Haighus wrote:
If talking about NATO battle rifles, could also consider an FN FAL or G3.

Edit:
Considering semi auto is the way to go, is there much benefit to an M14 over an M1 Garand?

CETMEs are easy to find and not terribly expensive. Love to have one.

 Bobthehero wrote:
Larger mags, less reloading.

Smaller ammo size, meaning you carry more for the same weight.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:


The whole "only the headshot counts" concept exists because the authors have no practical knowledge of what bullets actually do.

To adds a touch of nuance, it may also be the conceit that is required for zombies to be a threat. The authors may have loads of practical experience with battlefield wounds and their disabling effect on human anatomy, but for the purposes of the story, only headshots do the thing because that is what the story requires.

As I noted earlier, the purpose of zombie stories is not for a detailed assessment of firearm damage to the undead, but rather putting the protagonists in the relevant stressful situation to explore their reactions and interactions.

The real threat in a zombie apocalypse is not the zombies. It's the illness or effect causing it.

Most writers however can't write something decently on the later hence why they need to handwave the formers supposed immunity.

I think ammo availability would depend on how much advance notice we had of the zombie apocalypse. During the mini panic in October a large chunk of the available 5.56mm ammo in the US was gone within 10 days. If zombie videos were coming out of places overseas, you might have a week to stock up, probably less. If the videos were from Chicago or NYC, maybe a couple days before the cupboard is bare, even in the distant stores. Your online orders may well end up sitting in a UPS hub undelivered in a true TEOTWAWKI situation.

On the show, 100lb waifs and pre pubescent boys are able to pierce zombie skulls with a pocket knife, so presumably mall ninja stuff like wrist rockets and blowguns, .22 air rifles, and literally any firearm would do the job. Except maybe the scoped MAC-10 from Escape from NY that Negan was using Still, it doesn't take long before other humans become the biggest threat and you need the best guns you can get against them.

A post apoc M1 Garand is interesting. New ammo is still fairly common and you can still buy surplus ammo packed in clips and on bandoliers. The Hornady reloading bible has separate sections for a few specific guns that can safely accept stronger ammo than other guns but The M1 entry instead specifies weaker than normal loads, and some .30-06 is marketed as being specially formulated for M1 Garands. Yet there are Garands chambered in .458 WM, a *much* more powerful round. It seems like it might be picky with modern ammo but I don't know really.

I suspect that using weaker loads in M1 garands is more about preserving the relic than an actual safety issue. It will definitely last longer if you use weaker loads, but I think this is in terms of heavy usage and thinking about decades or a century in the future.

And most other .30-06 rifles are boltys, and people do love handloading for boltys. A really hot handload for a bolt action probably wouldn't be a good idea in an autoloader.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
The whole "only the headshot counts" concept exists because the authors have no practical knowledge of what bullets actually do.

And because non-gun-people tend to have a wildly optimistic idea of how hard it is to hit a moving target the size of a head at any distance. I remember being amused by World War Z describing a slow, measured, controlled pace of fire as scoring one headshot per second for like an hour straight.

(I remember being less amused and more annoyed by all the handwavium and bs involved in contriving the US Army losing a stand-up fight against the zombie horde, but that's a whole other can of worms)

Slowroll wrote:It seems like it might be picky with modern ammo but I don't know really.

Grey Templar wrote:I suspect that using weaker loads in M1 garands is more about preserving the relic than an actual safety issue.

There's a lot of fuddlore about using modern ammo in Garands, but basically some commercial .30-06 loads are significantly higher pressure than the milspec stuff it was designed for and will beat the gun up. With an adjustable gas plug you can use any commercial .30-06 you want.

This is a pretty common issue with semi-autos chambered in cartridges typically used in manually-operated firearms, it isn't unique to the Garand.

M1 Garands WORK, and never, almost never, stop working. Becuase they fire a fething big round. The 30-06 is got a hell of a lot more powder behind it than it's modern counterpart, the .308/7.62x51. It's so powerful infact that you can literally burn off and knock out most obstuctions in the working bits on firing. The M14 on the otherhand, can be a right prissybritches when it's not in a perfect setting. Try torture testing the 3,000USD "M1A SOCOM whatever from springfield, and see how long it works after being dropped in the mud and frozen solid. Then do the same with a M1 Garand. There is a reason the Garand worked after Normandy, and Saipan, and Bora Bora, and every damn isle in Japan, not to mention parts of Africa. Because nothing short of being blown up really stopped it. Even saltwater, the bane of most firearms, couldn't stop it.

If you want the best of both worlds, go the extra mile, and get you a upgunned AR platform in 30-06, like the Benelli R1 or the Noreen BN36X3. You get a full AR Package with a 30 round mags into.

Only one problem, 30-06 is basically artillery past 300m. You're lobbing them at that point.
https://images.app.goo.gl/xV2jS9jKAvqKKXqv8

vs the .308 NATO (I would choose 168g BTHP personally)
https://images.app.goo.gl/9WfTKnDJqcbFWiPL9


Also, it's hard as feth to drop a can on a 30-06. You CAN, but they don't make subsonic 30-06. So it's pointless anyway.

 catbarf wrote:

And because non-gun-people tend to have a wildly optimistic idea of how hard it is to hit a moving target the size of a head at any distance. I remember being amused by World War Z describing a slow, measured, controlled pace of fire as scoring one headshot per second for like an hour straight.

There's also the non-trivial problem of them clumping together and taking no cover at all. If you want to go "heavy," and use a full-power cartridge, you could probably kill a bunch in one shot, because they're lined up like pumpkins in the patch.

I recall seeing the beginning of "The Walking Dead" which shows an abandoned tank and thinking "WHY?! There is nothing they can do to that tank crew, and the tank crew knows it. It's actually got an NBC-grade air purifier designed to deal with nerve gas. They are invulnerable." (Former housemate drove tanks for a living for a while. Don't get me started...)

And you are dead-on with the collector community. Holy crap, these people get spun up on ammo. If you want to really stir the pot, go on a gun forum and announce that you've been putting some .308 through your Spanish FR-7 (this is a M1916 pattern Mauser converted to 7.62mm in the 50s) and you will get no end of: "OMG! It's gonna s'plode yer brain!"

Their "proof" is a blown up action on Google that likely got nitro handloads fed into it.

And Spanish rifle fudds got nothing on Garand fudds.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
M1 Garands WORK, and never, almost never, stop working. Becuase they fire a fething big round. The 30-06 is got a hell of a lot more powder behind it than it's modern counterpart, the .308/7.62x51. It's so powerful infact that you can literally burn off and knock out most obstuctions in the working bits on firing.

Milspec 7.62x51 (M80) has 96% the muzzle energy of standard WW2-era M2 .30-06, and identical muzzle velocity at 2,800fps. It's just a 147gr projectile versus 152gr. They're functionally the same round.

The .308 has a smaller case because it was designed to use fifty-years-newer propellant that needs less volume to achieve a given loading. As I mentioned before it's modern commercial ammo that takes advantage of the case volume of .30-06 to cram in more propellant.

The M14 is little more than a M1 adapted to magazine feed and with a better gas system. The idea that the Garand is more reliable than the M14 because it shoots a more powerful round or that this can blow out obstructions is incorrect on both points. If you get mud on the top of either rifle and any particulates get into the chamber face or behind the carrier, you're done- that exposed action is a massive vulnerability, and this was noted in the initial acceptance trial reports conducted at Aberdeen in the late-30s. It was adopted anyways because by the standards of the time, it was still sufficiently reliable for military service, and fared better than any of the other rifles in competition.

The Garand is a fine rifle and is reliable when kept clean, but it's not as impervious as you think or all that different from the M14/M1A. Op rod breakage was a known issue, oil gets washed out of the bolt by rain, and exposure to sand or mud requires immediate remediation. The biggest reasons the M1A is regarded so much more poorly than the Garand are that the M14 was plagued with manufacturing QC problems during Army service, and just that expectations of reliability (and maintenance/upkeep requirements) for semi-automatic rifles have changed considerably in the nearly a century since the Garand was designed.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
I recall seeing the beginning of "The Walking Dead" which shows an abandoned tank and thinking "WHY?! There is nothing they can do to that tank crew, and the tank crew knows it. It's actually got an NBC-grade air purifier designed to deal with nerve gas. They are invulnerable."

Yeah, and a lot of writers seem to have this idea that a tank is a sensitive, delicate machine that will get easily bogged down if forced to deal with unexpected obstacles. I've seen an Abrams with most of a tree tied up in its road wheels; I don't think a horde of squishy things would even slow it down.

Even if we take all of the Walking Dead's Zombie lore as fact, the zombies still take physical damage. So just driving around and crushing them should have been perfectly viable even if you ran out of ammo. Maybe a humvee or lighter vehicle could get overwhelmed, but thats when you as the crew just start tossing frags out the hatch and clear them out. Or make some Moletovs...

 Bobthehero wrote:
Hence why the authors of those settings need to handwave the army away, an enemy that doesn't try to take cover, is slow, has no armor and doesn't fire back would get shredded by IFVs and gunships

I have a few easy explanations for those things: the Army is typically trained to aim center mass, rather than go for the head. Most modern weapons wound, as opposed to kill. And, perhaps most importantly, gunships and IFVs are comparatively rare. Remember, Russia has lost about 7,000 tanks and IFVs in Ukraine, and that has been an absolute slaughter, outpacing a modern industrial societies ability to produce them.

For comparison, the US has 5,500 tanks in it's entire arsenal, and is considerd one of the largest stockpiles of such vehicles on earth. There are only, approximately 700 A-10s *ever* built.

I think that fills in that plot hole.

 BaronIveagh wrote:
I have a few easy explanations for those things: the Army is typically trained to aim center mass, rather than go for the head. Most modern weapons wound, as opposed to kill.

Beehive tank rounds would leave a red stain, nothing more. As for the .50 cal, I don't think you could ever just wound with it.

And yeah, I read the first book, which posited that soldiers were too stoopid to notice head shots were lethal but chest shots weren't.

The amount of body-disappearing firewpower modern armies possess is staggering. Even the much-maligned 5.56mm will - with repeated hits - reduce the target to something less than cohesive. It's also kind of a red herring - modern infantry have support weapons all over the place. M203s would probably make an impression. Concertina wire and some Claymores would also do a number.

I mean, this isn't anything new. The Chinese and Vietnamese both attempted to overrun outposts using overwhelming numbers in close assault. Sometimes it worked.

This an interesting discussion because it brings out so many different myths. Such as: 5.56 is basically non-lethal, only capable of wounding because its so underpowered; the M-14 was wrongly removed from service, and better than the M-16; the legendary reliability and power of the M-1 Garand.

I'd love to get a 7.62mm "battle rifle" at some point. I think the CETME is probably the most cost-effective option, and it dovetails with my Spanish inclinations, which is nice.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Beehive tank rounds would leave a red stain, nothing more.

I don't think that a country has kept a stockpile of those since the Ontos was removed from service. The only thing I can think of off the top of my head that use flechettes like that are certain Russian artillery rounds, and the Hydra 70 rocket for the Apache. I think there's an area defense round for the Carl Gustaf, as well.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

And yeah, I read the first book, which posited that soldiers were too stoopid to notice head shots were lethal but chest shots weren't.

It's not about being stupid, it's about having to fight your own training and muscle memory. Also, the book had their first engagement in urban terrain. Very few people who lived would have gotten close enough to tell the difference.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

The amount of body-disappearing firewpower modern armies possess is staggering. Even the much-maligned 5.56mm will - with repeated hits - reduce the target to something less than cohesive. It's also kind of a red herring - modern infantry have support weapons all over the place. M203s would probably make an impression. Concertina wire and some Claymores would also do a number.

I think you're failing to understand the scale of the issue. Let's use the US military, and three cities in close proximity to each other as our Outbreak. Assuming that the initial government response is a quarantine and lockdown of the area, which gives the disease time to infect... 60% of the population. In the case of New York and it's surrounds, that's 9 million Zed, or twice the *entire* US military, reserves, National Guard, and everything. M203s would be like throwing pebbles into a pond.

The last time I'm aware of that the Pentagon actually drew up a plan for fighting an *entire* American city, it consisted of a Nuclear Weapon. Mind you, this was the Nixon administration, but there you have it.

The abandoned tank in the Walking Dead could simply have been out of fuel. Supply lines can and do get busted up, and an tanks in general are fuel hogs.

I'm also wondering what the "sweet spot" is for zombie-biting. In 28 Days Later and World-War-Z being infected happens in literal seconds. In other films it can take literal days, if not weeks, to fully turn a person. Someone that turns instantly does make an instant horde. On the other hand, people are stupid, and if someone gets bitten they might not tell you about it.

A single slow-turn person can get into your bunker/safe zone and cause more damage than 1000 infected outside. Both are bad, but what would the "worst case" time for turning be? If they turn instantly there is no need to try to identify infected. Too slow and they can't build their numbers up fast enough, and you can contain them. I'm thinking that somewhere in the 8-16 hour range (bite to turning) would be the worst case scenario. They still turn a lot of people in a short time, but it gives panicking people that have been bitten plenty of time to jump in cars and drive for hours, spreading infection far and wide.

In the WWZ book it was a much slower burn. The only times it was shown as rapid was organ transplants and after nerve gas attack just turned a mob of civilians off, letting gthe disease take over instantly.

As another example the WWZ book has an outbreak start in a South African informal settlement. Cramped humanity, no real organised defence force, hundreds of thousands of victims, at night, confused.

Add that to general social inequality and the powers that be not really caring what happens to slum dwellers and you can get a ,ajor escalation pretty quick.

WWZ also pointed put that canister shells kn tanks were awonderful, but each tank only had 3, and the .ogistics trai. Was set up all wrong.

It's not a perfect book, and zombies definitely have poor descriptions and suchlike, but that book real,y got over an amazing set of short stories set at different points in a major g,oval outbreak. I rea,ly love it, and am quite grumpy at the utterly beige film that resulted.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, people aren't stupid. They are scared and alone and they don't want to die, and it's not going to happen to me is it? It was just a scratch, and it can't happen to me, because who would look after the kids if Im infected, no it'll be fine. Just need to ride it out, it's probably just a cold. And oh god I'm so scared!

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:


I'd love to get a 7.62mm "battle rifle" at some point. I think the CETME is probably the most cost-effective option, and it dovetails with my Spanish inclinations, which is nice.

I have a pre-ban HK-91 and a M1A SOCOM model. Love them both.

 BaronIveagh wrote:
It's not about being stupid, it's about having to fight your own training and muscle memory. Also, the book had their first engagement in urban terrain. Very few people who lived would have gotten close enough to tell the difference.

The central conceit of zombie movies is that no one in them has ever heard of zombie movies. That's why they don't work.

Kind of like vampire movies, etc. "What is this strange, new inexplicable thing that has an entire genre of entertainment built around it? How do we respond to it without betraying obvious and easily exploited conventions?"

Post-pandemic, bio-agents are going to be a concern, the military has long-standing decontamination processes (mostly for ATSO or whatever they're calling it now), but in any event, the instant people are shambling around, someone will blurt out "could they be zombies?" and there would probably be a discussion of head shots vs body shots. Oh, and "muscle memory" says nothing about your aim point. You have to be able to adjust that at will. If a guy's in a trench or behind a wall, you don't mindlessly shoot where his torso would be.

Indeed, the closer targets are mostly head, because that would be what is visible.

Anyhow, while writing The Imperial Rebellion, I wrote myself into a blind alley. After agonizing about it, I had to delete about 1/3 of what I had written to that point and take a different fork in the road.

Zombie fiction just sort of handwaves that stuff, because it's hard and the authors tend not to know much about the nuts and bolts of military units (like the fact that all US infantry is mounted in vehicles that could sweep a street packed with zombie by themselves).

By way of contrast, in Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, no attempt was made to contain the spread of the plague within London, but instead patrols were set up ringing the city, firing at escapees on sight. That would be what you would do. The troops would surround it, run wire, mines, lay guns and just wait. That could be quite a good premise for an adventure movie - an all-volunteer detachment offers to go and try to extract an enclave and bring it to a quarantine camp.

 CptJake wrote:
I have a pre-ban HK-91 and a M1A SOCOM model. Love them both.

Oooh, very cool!

The reason we don't have Beehive rounds anymore is simple. Shot guns and mass-dispersion rounds like that are illegal by the GC. It's only by sheer technicallity that we're still able to use the Claymore, and that's because it's not classified as a mine, but a "Directed Area denial weapon", which is silly.

Shotguns remain in US military inventory today (see: Remington M870 MCS, Mossberg 590), the Beehive Program flechettes were used in Vietnam, projects SALVO and SPIW researched a variety of multi-projectile rifles from the 50s through the 80s, and the Abrams deployed to Iraq in 2003 with the M1028 canister round.

There is no legal prohibition on weapons that employ multiple projectiles, sounds like more fuddlore. Next you're going to tell us using the .50BMG against personnel is a war crime but using it on materiel is legal so they just aim for the belt buckle.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
This an interesting discussion because it brings out so many different myths. Such as: 5.56 is basically non-lethal, only capable of wounding because its so underpowered; the M-14 was wrongly removed from service, and better than the M-16; the legendary reliability and power of the M-1 Garand.

And speaking of fuddlore, 'modern rifles are designed to wound' is one of those chestnuts of wisdom that seemingly everybody knows- except the ordnance board at APG. Suffice to say that the institution that rejected the .276 Pedersen, .280 British, and 9x19 on grounds of insufficient lethality did not do a sudden and temporary 180 on their stance during the 1960s. Methinks they were swayed more by the fact that when a barely-stabilized M193 hits flesh at 3000fps, it blows apart in a way that FMJ .308 doesn't and produces comparable terminal effect.

Reminds me of Korean War vets swearing that .30 Carbine was so weak that it bounced off the winter coats of their Chinese adversaries. Turns out that being in a life-or-death situation has a tendency to skew one's memory and turn mundane near-misses into something out of a Terminator film. Something to keep in mind when you read about malnourished VC surviving ineffective hits from that poodle-shooter M16.

I think that the truth is that 5.56 is "lethal enough", so there hasn't been a ton of push to get something more until recently. And there is a school of thought that its better to wound enemies than kill them so they become a burden on the enemy logistics. My personal problem with this is that, at least from the US perspective, our enemies don't seem to care too much about their wounded. Not much in the way of logistics for the average injured terrorist to be a burden on, and the Russians definitely are happy to let their wounded rot in the trenches.

And while I don't care about "rules of war" or anything I think someone having the idea to shoot to wound would definitely qualify as icky for those who care about such things. If anything, the rules of war should require more lethality not less. If the goal is to make war more civilized, we should be all about that explosive ammo, hollowpoints, etc... End the suffering sooner

Poking neat holes in people is just mean.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
The reason we don't have Beehive rounds anymore is simple. Shot guns and mass-dispersion rounds like that are illegal by the GC. It's only by sheer technicallity that we're still able to use the Claymore, and that's because it's not classified as a mine, but a "Directed Area denial weapon", which is silly.

The reason claymores don't violate international agreements is that they require an operator to make a conscious decision to fire the thing, rather than indiscriminate triggering by people walking past. There's no reason they couldn't be non-directional, and explode 360, except that it makes it harder to have your operator survive. They're very distinct from mines.

Seems amazing we developed the M1028 canister round for the Abrams if they are 'illegal'. More amazing we used them.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also amazing I had my guys shotgun qualified when we got stuck on an airfield security detail. Waiting for the Geneva Police to kick in my door and arrest me.

There's a heap of "The Geneva Conventions say it's illegal" stuff floating round every western military it seems, because we got much the same spiel. The Red Cross publishes a summary of the GC, and it's less than 20 pages long. Most of it deals with the treatment of PoW, and occupied territories. This is all the GC really says about weapons:

"Conduct of combatants
The Protocol lays down the rules governing the conduct of com- batants during hostilities. The basic principle underlying these rules is that the right of the warring parties to choose methods and means of warfare is not unlimited. It follows that it is prohib- ited to use arms, projectiles and materials and methods of warfare that cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering (P.I, 35).
It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resorting to perfidy (P.I, 37). The recognized emblems (red cross, red crescent and red crystal emblem, white flag, protective emblem of cultural property, etc.) must not be misused (P.I, 38 / P.III, 1, 2). The use of nationality emblems of adverse parties or other States not party to the conflict is prohibited (P.I, 39). The Protocol thus affirms that the law of armed conflict requires a degree of fairness on the part of the combatants.
It is prohibited to refuse quarter (P.I, 40). An adversary who is not or no longer able to take part in hostilities, who has surrendered or who clearly expresses the intention of surrendering, must not be made the object of attack (P.I, 41, 42). A captor who lacks the means to evacuate his prisoners must release them (P.I, 41)."

The Geneva Conventions aren't the be-all-end-all of warcrimes, though. Mines, for instance, are covered by the Ottawa Treaty, and there are a few more treaties covering other things.

I think the real reason we don't see combat shotguns is they're limited in usefulness beyond things like breaching doors (I assume your adgies use them for alternative ammo, CptJake?) more then anything legal. And beehive rounds probably went away for similar reasons. Do you waste precious space carrying a hyper specialised, incredibly short ranged round (you don't want enemies that close), or instead take HE which is probably going to do 80%+ of the same job while being useful outside that hyper specialised role?

Grey Templar wrote:And there is a school of thought that its better to wound enemies than kill them so they become a burden on the enemy logistics.

Right, and you often see that used to explain why weapons are 'designed to wound'- the idea that one dead combatant is one man down, but one wounded combatant takes out the man and a couple of stretcher bearers.

The thing is, nobody involved in procurement or evaluation actually buys that. Reliably incapacitating the enemy (within the constraints of the rules of war) is overwhelmingly preferable to just hurting him and giving him the opportunity to return fire, especially if you have him backed into a corner and he will keep fighting rather than be medevaced. Plus if you're looking at the long game, a wounded combatant may contribute to his polity's economy, provide intelligence, serve in a secondary role, or return to fight another day. A dead one will not.

Plus if you explicitly design a weapon to maim rather than kill, you are committing a war crime, and the US takes those prohibitions very seriously. Even as a fed I was prohibited from carrying hollowpoint ammunition on-base because if it were construed to have been used by military personnel, it would constitute a war crime.

Farseer Anath'lan wrote:The Geneva Conventions aren't the be-all-end-all of warcrimes, though.

Correct. The Geneva Conventions primarily address treatment of non-combatants, POWs, and surrender. It was the prior Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 that form the basis of most rules of war as concerning hostile combatants and allowable weapons. Ammunition designed to cause undue suffering is prohibited, and that includes expanding ammunition which has been understood to include things like hollowpoints. It also prohibits explosive bullets, formally enshrining a prohibition previously established by the Declaration of St Petersburg in 1868. But there is no prohibition on flechettes, shot, duplex rounds, or other mechanisms of firing more than one bullet at a time.

Farseer Anath'lan wrote:I think the real reason we don't see combat shotguns is they're limited in usefulness beyond things like breaching doors (I assume your adgies use them for alternative ammo, CptJake?) more then anything legal. And beehive rounds probably went away for similar reasons. Do you waste precious space carrying a hyper specialised, incredibly short ranged round (you don't want enemies that close), or instead take HE which is probably going to do 80%+ of the same job while being useful outside that hyper specialised role?

Also 100% correct. Shotguns are carried as breaching tools and by MPs but they haven't been optimal CQB weapons since WW2, and M1028 is still in inventory but usually not worth the rack space.

Same deal with flamethrowers, land mines, and poison gas- it's not a matter of war crimes, they're not used because they're not optimally mission effective. You can give a guy a disposable rocket launcher that will chuck a thermobaric ten times farther than a flamethrower can reach while still letting him carry a rifle, you can defend an area with command-activated munitions and pre-registered artillery without the legwork and liability of producing an active minefield, and conventional explosives aren't neutered by anyone with even third-world CBRN capability. There's no moral progression, just more efficient and flexible means of killing.

This is not a nice business. It is what it is.

 catbarf wrote:

Same deal with flamethrowers, land mines, and poison gas

I believe poison and chemical weapons ARE now prohibited, although they weren't under the initial conventions (which are subject to revision). This has evolved from no prohibition, to prohibited unless the opposing side uses them first, and I believe they're now blanket prohibited. And incendiary weapons are prohibited if there is another weapon that would work in their place (in addition to the practical reasons like range, weight, specialty, etc).

All these conventions make distinction between international, and non-international (civil) conflicts, and some things that are permitted in one are not prohibited in the other, in addition to making distinction between civilians and military (some things are permitted against military targets that may not be used on civilians - in addition to the normal "don't attack civilians").

I do feel like we're maybe derailing the thread, though 😅

I thought there were also treaties about landmines, but with not great signature coverage so plenty of nations still use them.

I'm not convinced landmines are obsolete in modern warfare. They are cheap and therefore can achieve massive coverage, as seen in Ukraine. Breaching defended minefields is very challenging.

Yeah, the Geneva Protocol forbade the offensive use of chemical weapons (but not their development, or use in retaliation, or use in civil conflicts) in 1925, and the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997 enforces stricter restrictions and established a dismantling program that makes for a handy bargaining chip when dealing with third-world regimes.

But despite some of the signatories developing sophisticated chemical weapons programs and then violating jus in bello in other ways, there's been little use of chemical weapons between developed powers since WW1. It's counterproductive to modern maneuver warfare and ineffective against a prepared military force; you mostly see it used between developing nations or by governments against their own civilians.

(To be clear: flamethrowers remain legal, as are land mines despite pressure to accede to the Ottawa Treaty like you noted)

The point just being that if a weapon of war is banned or retired for seemingly moral reasons, dollars to donuts it was already on the way out among the signatories for more pragmatic reasons. Once you've gotten rid of weaponry that doesn't fit your doctrine, then you can leverage moral outrage to your advantage against parties that haven't done so.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
I'd love to get a 7.62mm "battle rifle" at some point. I think the CETME is probably the most cost-effective option, and it dovetails with my Spanish inclinations, which is nice.

Forgot to reply to this earlier- yeah, the CETME is the most cost-effective battle rifle nowadays, but I don't think it's the best example among the big four (G3, FAL, AR-10, M14). The roller-delay is great for a subgun but pretty violent for a rifle caliber, and it mangles brass if reloading is a concern.

I'm pretty partial to the FAL. Most aren't any better than 3 MOA and using steel-case ammo can be risky, but the adjustable gas system makes them exceptionally soft shooters, and the controls and layout feel surprisingly modern considering its age. DSA makes decent new ones, or builds on old Imbel receivers can still be found for $1-1.5K.

 Haighus wrote:
I thought there were also treaties about landmines, but with not great signature coverage so plenty of nations still use them.

I'm not convinced landmines are obsolete in modern warfare. They are cheap and therefore can achieve massive coverage, as seen in Ukraine. Breaching defended minefields is very challenging.

the US has not signed the Minefield treaty since it was first created. Because we refuse to be held accountable for our mistakes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty#:~:text=Major%20powers%2C%20which%20are%20also,signatories%20include%20India%20and%20Pakistan.

And Yes, the Claymore mine can absolutely be set to trip mode. It's not just a clacker mode.

And also take a grain of salt with an Airforce MP telling me how their Shotgun training qualifies them as an expert of laws of war.