Army Awards SIG NGSW Contract

[Double Naught Spy]

Not an expert in Army doctrine, but it seems to me that if one wants to count how many "rounds per kill", then only rounds directed to that purpose should be counted. What I mean is, if the purpose of fire, such as suppressive fire, is to allow maneuver, or rescue of a fallen solider, etc, then those rounds should not be counted as part of "rounds per kill". The other problem you have when trying to state "rounds per kill", is whether you have an accurate body count to start with, and only "count" those bodies that were done by the small arms fire - exclude CAS, artillery, etc casualties. Not sure how it's possible to get accurate counts on these then. "Rounds per kill" sounds more like some sort of pop-analytical term, unless you're talking about sniper fire, where rounds per kill could be fairly accurately counted.

Yes and no. From a stats perspective, absolutely it would be great to be able to actually determine the efficiency of individual soldiers, squads, etc. in terms of actual numbers of rounds fired in attempting to kill the enemy. By the same token, you could not count any enemy killed as a result of cover fire, right? There is no way to have that information, however. At best, the only data they have are body counts and ammo expended. That is as fine of resolution as you are going to get.

Bean counter terminology? Sure, but bean counter terminology used since at least WWII, but really coming into vogue with Vietnam and still being used today.

With that said, suppressive or covering fire (what you mentioned) is a fire superiority tactic to gain control of part of the current day battlefield, even if just for a short period of time. It burns of lots of ammo. Sometimes fortuitously, some of the enemy are killed by it. Having whiz-bang sights isn't going to reduce the amount rounds expended in gaining fire superiority in battle if you can't actually see your enemy. There is a lot of area target shooting that goes on instead of point target shooting. And so with this new 6.8 caliber that is capable of penetrating armor at much greater distances, a HUGE amount of those are going fired in the exact same manner as the current rounds are being used.