From an article headed BAE wins £3bn ammunition contract:
Colonel David Collins paid tribute to staff at the three plants for the way they had responded to the increased level of operations and training. He said the factory in Crewe last year produced up to a million rifle and machine gun rounds a day, which was "quite a significant achievement".
Hmm.
There are 8,000 UK troops in Afgh, and 4,000 in Iraq.
Are they all firing 80 rounds a day? How many 'insurgents' are they shooting every day? Somewhat shy of a million, I'd guess.
Thursday, 21 August 2008
Fun with numbers (5)
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3 comments:
if you are wondering whether this is just a contract to keep factories in NuLab constituencies busy, Mark,
- infantry support weapons will fire off 80 rounds in just a couple of minutes in an engagement
- armed helos etc will expend a great deal more
- any soldier (not just one stationed in theatre) will fire off a couple of hundred rounds in a day at the ranges
We are without doubt in US-style casualty-minimisation mode (I am not criticising) and one consequence of this is profligate expenditure of ammo - watch any of the YouTube or LiveLeak clips
Fair comment, but that's just one factory producing 1m rounds a day, the article doesn't say what the total output is.
I'll be looking it up later, but I seems to remember that during the high intensity ops in Basra and Al Amarah back in 2004, the PoWRR were blatting off seriously high numbers of rounds at times.
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