Technology

For the longest time, at least fifty years, military forces in the West – and especially in the United States – have held fast to the dream of “clean” warfare, where civilian casualties are greatly minimized, if not eliminated. This dream grew out of the nightmare of World War 2’s “Strategic Bombing” campaigns, which were not simply failures, overall, but verge into war crimes territory, if one looks too closely.

While technically requiring fewer weapons dropped, as “smart bombs” are certainly more accurate, the dream of airpower alone ending wars is still a phantasm of science fiction – for all the damage precision munitions can inflict, airpower alone stopped neither Saddam Hussein, nor the Taliban, nor the “Islamic State”. Those forces were definitely damaged by technology, but that damage did not stop those forces on their own, by any stretch of the imagination, or suspension of disbelief.

Modern militaries have spent decades cultivating an image of warfare transformed by technology — conflicts resolved through clean, precise strikes that eliminate threats while sparing innocent lives. Defense contractors promote weapons that promise “one target, one bomb” accuracy. Military briefings showcase grainy video footage of munitions threading through windows and down ventilation shafts. Politicians assure anxious publics that twenty-first century warfare has evolved beyond the brutal arithmetic of earlier conflicts.

The reality on the ground tells a different story.

The Promise of Precision

The evolution of precision-guided munitions represents genuine technological achievement. During the 1991 Gulf War, only 9% of munitions were guided, yet they accounted for 75% of successful hits, proving 35 times more effective per weapon than unguided ordnance. Modern systems like the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) can achieve circular error probabilities of approximately 20 feet, transforming standard “dumb bombs” into satellite-guided weapons for roughly $20,000 per kit.

These capabilities have fundamentally changed how militaries plan operations. Where previous generations of commanders compensated for inaccuracy through overwhelming volume — dozens, if not hundreds, of aircraft dropping hundreds or thousands of bombs to ensure target destruction — contemporary planners can theoretically strike with surgical economy. The technology exists, and in controlled conditions, it performs as advertised.

But technology is only one variable in an equation that includes intelligence, decision-making, environmental conditions, and the fog of war. These factors, environmental and otherwise, have not changed for millennia, and are unlikely to change anytime soon.

“Accuracy” Is Not “Effectiveness”

The critical distinction between “accuracy” and “effectiveness” undermines much of precision warfare theory. A weapon might strike precisely where it was aimed while failing utterly to achieve its intended effect, a phenomenon researchers call the “Precision Paradox“.

Consider the 2003 strike against “Chemical Ali” — Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam Hussein’s cousin and a high-value target. Two JDAM satellite-guided bombs hit his residence exactly as planned. The strike was accurate. It was also completely ineffective — Chemical Ali survived and remained active for months. When targets are hardened, mobile, or simply more resilient than anticipated, accurate strikes create a destructive feedback loop: the initial precise attack fails, requiring follow-up strikes, then more strikes, with each iteration expanding the circle of destruction and increasing civilian casualties.

This pattern repeated throughout recent conflicts. In battles like the siege of Mosul, accurate but ineffective strikes accumulated, generating precisely the widespread destruction and civilian harm that precision warfare was supposed to prevent.

The Intelligence Problem

Even perfect weapons cannot compensate for imperfect information. Precision-guided munitions hit their designated coordinates with remarkable consistency — but those coordinates are only as good as the intelligence providing them. One USAF officer notes that “the term ‘precision’ does not imply, as one might assume, accuracy. Instead, the word precision exclusively pertains to a discriminate targeting process.”

This distinction matters profoundly. Military spokespeople describe “precision strikes” knowing that civilian audiences will interpret this as “accurate strikes” — a deliberate misunderstanding military force have little incentive to correct. Yet targeting failures remain common: the 2015 Kunduz hospital strike that killed 42 people, the 1999 Chinese embassy bombing in Belgrade, repeated incidents of strikes on Afghan weddings and Iraqi civilian gatherings.

The Hidden Costs

The gap between precision warfare rhetoric and empirical evidence manifests in sobering statistics. Between 2002 and 2020, U.S. strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen killed between 10,000 and 17,000 people — with 800 to 1,750 confirmed civilians among the dead. More recently, drone strikes across six African countries killed over 943 civilians in just three years — casualties that governments either disputed or attributed to “terrorists.”

These figures understate the full toll. Collateral damage — the antiseptic military euphemism for dead civilians and destroyed homes — extends beyond immediate blast effects. Infrastructure destruction cascades into humanitarian crises: a “precision strike” on a power station is “surgical” in execution but indiscriminate in consequence when hospitals lose electricity, water treatment fails, and disease epidemics follow.

Environmental and Technical Realities

The technology itself faces inherent limitations that military public relations rarely acknowledge. GPS-guided munitions are vulnerable to electronic warfare—jamming and spoofing that can render satellite guidance useless. Laser-guided weapons struggle in adverse weather, smoke, and dust—precisely the conditions created by ongoing combat operations. An Australian military study found that 45.5% of laser-guided weapons used in early Desert Storm operations missed their targets due to weather, technical malfunction, or pilot error — hardly the “near-unerring accuracy” promised by manufacturers.

Moving targets compound these challenges exponentially. While military marketing showcases successful strikes against vehicles, such footage represents carefully selected successes, not typical outcomes. The failure rate for strikes against mobile targets remains classified, a telling omission.

The Attrition Reality

Perhaps most damning for precision warfare theory: history provides no clear example of precision strikes hastening wars to swift conclusion. Instead, conflicts like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine demonstrate that precision-capable forces still find themselves mired in grinding wars of attrition. When strikes prove accurate but ineffective, belligerents escalate to saturation bombardment — the very approach precision warfare was meant to supersede.

The U.S. military now formally institutionalizes procedures for civilian harm mitigation, acknowledging what operational reality has long demonstrated: even with advanced technology and genuine efforts to minimize casualties, modern warfare remains fundamentally destructive. Recent policy shifts — including the 2025 dismantling of offices dedicated to addressing civilian harm — suggest this institutional knowledge remains fragile and subject to always shifting political winds.

Beyond the Mythology

None of this argues that precision-guided munitions offer no improvement over unguided ordnance. They do, significantly. The problem lies not with the technology but with the mythology surrounding it — the dangerous fiction that modern militaries can wage “antiseptic” wars where force is applied with surgical precision at minimal cost.

This mythology serves multiple audiences. It reassures domestic populations that their military operates with restraint and discrimination. It provides political cover for interventions that might otherwise face stronger opposition. It allows defense planners to minimize discussions of civilian casualties by framing them as aberrations rather than inevitable consequences.

But for those living beneath the drones and missiles, the distinction between precise and imprecise warfare often proves academic. The “smart bomb” that destroys a wedding party because faulty intelligence identified it as a terrorist gathering is no less devastating than a “dumb bomb” that misses its military target. The family killed when an accurate strike proves ineffective and requires three follow-up missions experiences no comfort from knowing that each bomb hit exactly where planners intended.

The path forward requires abandoning comfortable fictions in favor of uncomfortable truths. Precision-guided munitions are powerful tools, but they remain tools of war — and war remains, as it has always been, inherently destructive and unpredictable. Acknowledging this reality doesn’t diminish efforts to minimize harm; it makes those efforts more credible and more effective by grounding them in operational truth rather than technological fantasy.

Until military and political leaders stop marketing “surgical strikes” and start acknowledging the messy, costly reality of modern warfare, the gap between precision rhetoric and bloody fact will continue to undermine both strategic effectiveness and moral credibility.

To restate what should be the obvious, war is inherently destructive; it always has been, and always will be. Sometimes, war is a necessary evil…

…Because sometimes, “peace” is merely another word for “surrender”.

This is not the typical article that I write, here. In an odd way, this is unusually personal…and I have no real idea why.

What started as a curious observation, eventually became something of an obsession. I knew that something was wrong about my observation, but I couldn’t put my finger on why it was wrong. Many might see this as an odd — possibly disturbing — example of OCD, but as you will see, while it is certainly “odd”, it is not irrational…Not least, because it is properly placed between two earlier articles here. It is connected to the two, but because it was so odd, it appears here as the third installment, instead of its proper place as the second article in the series.

It took that long for me to parse out what had happened. As to why it happened…well, we’ll get to that point.

Firearms are curious things, when it comes to weapons. If you look back through all verifiable human history, there are no mentions of “firearms”, as we understand the term — going back as far as c.50,000 years ago, to the oldest cave paintings and petroglyphs — before about the 8th Century AD (c.900 AD). Every other weapon that appears is a club, a spear, a bow and arrow, a sling, and the occasional jawbone of an ass. But, once gunpowder was invented, and someone realized that it was useful as a weapon in more than rockets, development began in earnest.

Over the centuries, lessons were learned, and weapons, projectiles and propellants were improved, sometimes slowly, sometimes at breakneck speeds…Until 1945.

In the aftermath of World War 2, there were something like thirteen “calibers” of military small arms in general use in the world. As the Cold War began to dawn, the Soviet Union — in the form of Russia — established a regimen of standardization in small arms ammunition, beginning with the 7.62x54mmR caliber for rifles and machine guns, and the 7.62x25mm “Tokarev” for handguns and submachine guns. This was not unusual — the 7.62mm as a basic bore diameter had been settled on by the Soviet’s predecessor, the Imperial Russia of the Romanov Dynasty.

(Note: When reading a weapon’s caliber in millimeters, the numbers at the beginning are the bullet’s diameter in millimeters; the number following the ‘x’ is the overall length of the cartridge, again in millimeters.)

But, before the Warsaw Pact was formally organized, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in 1949. As a purely and openly military alliance, the NATO member states quickly decided that the alliance’s national militaries needed to standardize on a common caliber, even if they did not adopt the same small arms.

To describe caliber in brief, caliber is determined by the diameter of the barrel, but is also determined by the chamber — which holds the cartridge case — and the spiral grooves (“rifling“) that stabilizes the projectile as it moves down the barrel. It is this combination of features that determine the caliber of a firearm, and is the reason why you cannot “trade” ammunition between different weapons, without a great deal of serious machinist work.

But…The first, and most critical step in making a barrel is to punch a bore down the length of the “barrel blank” (the steel bar stock you are cutting the barrel from) at the precise diameter, because as the old rubric goes, you can take material away, but you cannot add it back. With this established, you can move on to rifling the bore, and reaming our the chamber for the (usually) brass cartridge case, forming the overall “cartridge“.

This is not an academic exercise, because in the world of military procurement, few decisions are made without extensive documentation, cost-benefit analysis, and strategic rationale, because the cartridge — the bullet, propellant and case — represents a colossal expenditure of money and infrastructure. For NATO, a standard cartridge for rifles and machine guns made perfect sense, both in a manufacturing sense, but also in the tactical and strategic senses: being able to share ammunition would cure one of the chief problems the Allies had during World War 2.

So…What’s the problem? The problem is what the NATO nations standardized on…and no one knows why. One of the most significant standardization decisions of the 20th century — the global convergence on 7.62mm-diameter ammunition — remains curiously undocumented and logically inexplicable.

Consider the scope of this convergence: the Soviet 7.62×25mm Tokarev pistol cartridge for handguns and submachine guns; the 7.62×39mm “intermediate” rifle round for the AK-47/AKM; the 7.62×51mm NATO standard for the M14, FN FAL and H&K G3, as well as in the M-60 and MAG-58/M240 General Purpose Machine Guns (GPMG’s); and the 7.62×54mmR Russian full-power cartridge in the ‘Dragunov’ SVD “Designated Marksman’s Rifle” (DMR) and the PK-series GPMG. Four distinct ammunition types, serving five completely different tactical roles — pistol, submachine gun, assault rifle, battle rifle, and machine gun — yet all sharing the same precise bore diameter to within hundredths of a millimeter.

From a manufacturing perspective, this represents extraordinary efficiency. The same rifling buttons, bore drilling equipment, and quality control gauges can produce barrels for weapons ranging from sidearms to tripod-mounted machine guns. But this efficiency only matters if you’re planning coordinated, large-scale production across multiple weapon systems — exactly what you’d need for rapid global mobilization. More importantly, uniformity is a real concern, because of how “good enough” barrels can be made in very basic workshops.

The timeline of adoption makes conventional military explanations even more problematic. When NATO standardized on 7.62×51mm in the 1950s, superior alternatives were readily available. The .30-06 Springfield had proven performance and massive existing production infrastructure. The 8mm Mauser was the world’s most widely distributed rifle cartridge. The .303 British had decades of successful Commonwealth service.

Instead, NATO chose to develop an entirely new cartridge that required complete retooling of production lines and weapons systems. This makes sense tactically, strategically, politically and diplomatically. No doubt. You take the logistical and manufacturing infrastructure hits, but it makes everyone in the alliance feel like they’re not the only ones making sacrifices. The official justifications — improved efficiency and reduced weight — however, would apply equally to other available diameters.

So — why 7.62mm diameter, specifically? Why precisely the same diameter as the bullets used by the Soviet Union…not the cartridges, not the bullets themselves, but the bullet diameter?

The mystery deepens when examining the ballistic evidence. The abandoned cartridges — .303 British, 8mm Mauser, and .30-06 — all delivered essentially identical performance, despite bore diameters ranging from 7.57mm to 7.92mm. The differences are all within normal manufacturing tolerances and offer no meaningful ballistic advantages.

From a purely ballistics and physics perspective, these major “battle rifle” cartridges deliver functionally identical terminal performance despite NATO’s insistence on 7.62x51mm standardization. Cross-sectional analysis reveals the marginal differences:

• The .30-06 Springfield (150gr @ 2910 fps) delivers 2,820 ft-lbs of energy
• The 8mm Mauser (198gr @ 2600 fps) produces 2,800 ft-lbs
• The .303 British (174gr @ 2440 fps) generates 2,300 ft-lbs
• The 7.62x51mm NATO (147gr @ 2750 fps) yields 2,470 ft-lbs

These performance variations fall within normal manufacturing tolerances and environmental factors. At combat ranges under 400 meters (which is the normal range for most infantry engagements), the sectional density, penetration, and lethality differences in these cartridges are statistically insignificant. Wind drift, drop, and terminal ballistics vary by mere percentages.

The engineering reality is that any of these cartridges would have served NATO’s stated requirements equally well, as the FN-49 rifle would demonstrate, being made in multiple cartridges, depending on what the customer wanted. The choice of 7.62mm over existing alternatives cannot be justified by ballistic superiority – suggesting the true rationale lay elsewhere entirely.

The technical evidence is clear: NATO’s choice of 7.62mm as a bullet diameter cannot be explained by ballistic superiority or manufacturing convenience alone. When military organizations abandon proven systems and invest billions in retooling for marginally different alternatives, there are usually compelling strategic reasons documented in procurement records. But those records, if they exist, remain conspicuously absent from public view. What we’re left with is a pattern that suggests coordination on a scale that transcends normal military alliance cooperation—and raises uncomfortable questions about what scenarios would justify such systematic preparation.

Manufacturing compatibility, not ballistic performance, appears to have been designed for rapid, large-scale interoperability — but between whom, and for what purpose?

Yet somehow, across different continents, political systems, and industrial bases, everyone converged on 7.62mm as a bullet diameter. The Soviets, developing their own weapons independently, chose the 7.62mm bore diameter for their entire small arms family, because they had been using it for so long, and wanted to make only the most minimal changes, as their industrial base struggled to recover from the devastation of World War 2.

But then, we have the example of NATO, deciding to completely retool their arms infrastructure to make a completely new round…whose diameter was precisely the same as that of their supposed enemies on the opposite side of the Fulda Gap…not the same cartridges, but the same bullet diameters — the most important part of a modern firearm. To put the proverbial ‘last nail’ on the problem, the only 7.62mm diameter weapon in wide use by NATO members at the organization’s formation in 1949 was the US .30 Carbine round, which is 7.62x33mm.

The only logical possibility is clear: This wasn’t market pressure or alliance requirements — this was systematic coordination at a level that transcends normal military procurement.

The implications become more unsettling when considering modern developments. Recent U.S. military procurement of obsolete M60 GPMG’s, massive ammunition purchases by US domestic agencies, and the recent emergence of “plug-and-fight” deployment systems all suggest preparation for scenarios requiring rapid mass armament using standardized systems.

The 7.62mm convergence may represent the most successful case of industrial coordination in military history — a decades-long effort to ensure global manufacturing compatibility for weapons systems across supposedly competing nations. Whether driven by legitimate defense planning or more extraordinary circumstances, the technical evidence suggests coordination at levels most people would find difficult to accept.

The question isn’t whether this coordination exists — the manufacturing evidence is too consistent to ignore. The question is, what scenarios would justify such systematic preparation, and why has the public never been informed of the reasoning behind these decisions?

As we pointed out in the “Hamlet” article above, none of the possible reasons for this subtle standardization are good…But there is one last wrinkle, that I cannot shake from my mind…

All of this happened very quickly…..after 1947.

Additional Resources:

– NATO Standardization Agreements (STANAGs)
– Congressional Defense Primer: Conventional Ammunition Production Industrial Base
– International Ammunition Technical Guidelines