nice shooting with the G19 btw. I guess I gave you a pretty good compliment.

in my office. It had great sound and a spinning barrel, whole thing. Some days I used it to end discussions, others I just started up the flying pig that hung over my conference table.

‘Course, you don’t want to think about how many truckloads of ammo that little “firefight” would have taken. I’ve seen videos of some of my kid’s unit’s firefights in Afghanistan, and they’re almost that profligate with ammo. When they were fired on, they just started hosing. They might have been more disciplined when they were out in the field and away from their fire base, but during attacks on the fire base, they just filled the air with lead.

People who don’t know any better are very critical of Civil War and later quartermasters and armorers for their reticence and slowness in adopting repeating rifles. The limitation was horsepower; it took all the transport the armies could muster to provide the necessary ammunition for single shot muskets and the logistics trains just simply couldn’t get more ammunition to the troops. One of the reasons Meade was so slow in pursueing Lee after Gettysburg is that his men were hungry, poorly shod, and lacking all sorts of other supplies because they had used all their transport to get ammunition from the railhead to the battle field. The literally had set up a nose to tail line of mules and horses with wooden ammo cases slung over their backs from the railhead to the battlefield to keep the men firing. Lee’s train was almost eighty miles long, but one of the reasons he broke off the engagement after the 3rd Day was he wasn’t comfortable that he had enough artillery ammunition left to respond to the expected Yankee attack.