SitRep: Pentagon considered hollow-point bullets as the weapon's standard ammunition

As gun makers compete to make the Army's new handgun system, the Pentagon says hollow-point bullets can be considered as the weapon's standard ammunition.


ID=29917583This bit of news was revealed Tuesday, during the service's fourth industry day for its Modular Handgun System.



"There's a myth that [expanding/fragmenting bullets] are prohibited in international armed conflict, but that doesn't make any sense now," Jackson said.

More than 20 manufacturers are vying to make the Army's next handgun, dubbed the XM-17. The solicitation for the contract is to produce more than 280,000 guns for the Army, and is expected to drop later this month, said Lt. Col. Terry Russell, program manager for individual weapons at Program Executive Office Soldier. First deliveries are currently slated for 2018.



Modern complaints against the M9 have included stopping power. The potential shift toward hollow point ammunition could allow manufacturers a tool to change the ballistics equation substantially, without a shift away from the 9 mm round. Advantages of a 9 mm round include theoretically larger magazine capacity (because of a smaller bullet) and adherence to the NATO standard, allowing for interoperability of the allied nations' weapons.



Jackson said a 1907 Hague convention dictated the legal standard by which the Pentagon would hold the new weapon system to. He said it prohibits a weapon from being "calculated to cause superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering." That means probability of enemy incapacitation, the military requirement, has to outweigh any unnecessary damage, he said.

The use of fragmenting ammunition is "widespread" among law enforcement and counter-terrorist forces said, according to an email from Army spokesman William Layer.


In theory, the Pentagon appears to have legally justified broader use that could include rifle rounds, Russell said, though he also called the standard issue 5.56 mm Enhanced Performance Round (M855A1) "a very good performing round."

"I don't know that there would be a necessity to have another round, but I'm not the requirements writer, either," Russell said.

The competition to replace the long-standing Beretta M9 standard had already been opened to weapons of different calibers, opening the door to .40 and .45 caliber handguns. Russell noted the complexity of the different variables that come into play.

For example a larger round means more bullet mass and more gun powder, both of which would give it more power. But that can also damage accuracy, with more recoil forcing a shooter to spend more time reacquiring the target.

"It's about better performance than what we currently have, which includes the shootability," Russell said. "You can't just isolate one variable (as more important than the other)."

"We want them to produce the best system that meets the requirement."

The FBI switched from 9 mm to .40 caliber after a deadly 1986 shootout in Miami in which the shooters managed to keep fighting after being hit. The FBI is in the process of switching back to 9 mm – though the federal law enforcement agency uses hollow point bullets.

The Hague Convention of 1899 included a declaration banning bullets that "expand or flatten easily in the human body." The premise of the conventiondesigned well before World War I was that the bullets caused unnecessary and therefore inhumane injury unrelated to stopping a combatant from continuing to fight. The U.S. did not to sign onto that rule.

The British its most fierce opponent in 1899 because of its use of flattening "dum-dum" bullets, most frequently on the frontier of British India later signed on in the Hague Convention of 1907.