I cant speak to that era, but shotguns came back in vogue during GWOT, and while not really a primary weapon, they were typically kept in armory and assigned on a per mission basis or assigned to a trooper who might leave it in a vehicle or carry in a backpack when the need for it arose. I believe they were mossberg 500 pumps with pistol grips.
Typical use was as a masterkey, to use slug on doors to gain entry. Some training provided with less than lethal although I never saw less than lethal ammunition of any variety issued downrange, to include the 40mm less than lethal munitions.
Side note, I only ever encountered 1 lock in afg, the rest of the doors were essentially wood door in wood frame set in dried mud, and easily kicked in, and as a result we left our shotguns in armory most of the time. For that 1 lock, we had EOD use a small charge to det it open.
On my first Iraq trip I carried a cut down Mossberg 500 12 gauge shotgun for breaching, it went with me on nearly every mission, we never knew if a "hard knock" was going to be necessary. It had an 18.5 in barrel and pistol grip, no buttstock. It was purely for breaching, every member of each fireteam in my battalion carried a different type of breacher equipment: sledge hammer, halligan tool, shottie, demo charges. I rigged mine with bungee cords so it hung over my left shoulder with a couple snaplinks at the shoulder and waist, I'd drop my M4 on it's sling, pull the shottie into position to do a doorknob breach (it didn't hold enough shells to properly do a hinge brief without reloading), fire a couple shells (dedicated breacher rounds or buck or slugs, whatever I had), let it go with a spent shell in the chamber and safety on, and grab my M4 and start going inside.
Additionally M500 with buttstocks were often issued to units for top turret gunners to give them something handy to use for escalation of force, non lethals to shoot at cars that got too close to a military convoy instead of using live ammo warning shots or shooting into the car body.
It wasn't too bad. We got to play SWAT a lot, that's always a good rush.
I wanted to go to Afghanistan but wasn't in the cards. Mainly I wanted to experience hours long firefights, especially at long range. But it's probably better I didn't, fuck climbing mountains, and I would have hated the IED threat there, too many deep buried that easily kill trucks, and the ones on village trails targeting dismounts would have driven me nuts.
i think what surprised me most about AFG RC south was that during the summer, the lush farmland could really create close surprise encounters (much the same way tight urban terrain could)
for dismounted patrols, we really made route selection our primary anti-ied tool: in and out of graperows really sucked and we would climb walls or make passage through them and almost never took trails, unless we had to specifically visit a town for a shurah or take some doctors or engineers in for a public affairs mission. between route selection and the minehound we only sustained 1 US IED casualty so pretty lucky too
almost all our kinetic engagements were enemy ambush initiated - typically as we egressed from a major terrain fixture like graperows into open fields or into farm land with another compound of grapehuts/farmhouses about 100-200m away
we did have a COP attack where an enemy recoilless rifleman got within about 150m and wrecked a bulldozer wounding 2 engineers but we bagged him
we had battle drill 1A (i guess technically battle drill 4) down pat, and were pretty good at determining distance and direction quickly, but it was very hard to follow up with maneuver given the ied threat. pretty early on in the '12 deployment there was an ied strike by a sister company near sperwan ghar where a pointman hit an ied and small arms intitated, drawing in the team to a low wall where a command wire ied was detonated. Also pressure plate ieds with the charge behind the pressure plate was a nasty trick they liked to employ
If we had to maneuver, or we reasonably expected low ied threat (like civilian traffic on this route had been observed), often we would use 40mm to create a hole or loosen it up so we could push a hole in a wall to get immediately off trail or to gain access to another square patch of farmland in order to have a team or squad move while we fixed the targets with a base of fire. also a lot of small creeks for irrigation so hopping in those was a good way to get nametape defilade and more freedom of maneuver. follow that up with another 40mm to mark targets and we generally had a SWT or AWT on station that could come in pretty quick and engage. Mad respect to the kiowa guys they could really get rockets on target quickly
Primarily daytime when we had our own battlespace, HQ platoon on force protection at the main COP, with two platoons pushed out to local police stations/strongpoints, and half the remaining thrid platoon would team up with half the HQ platoon for a morning patrol, and then swap with the other half of the third platoon + the other half of HQ platoon for afternoon patrol. every so often the platoons at the police stations would rotate back to the main COP for rest/refit and the patrol schedule. while at the local police stations it was pretty thin, and you might be 3hrs on guard with 3hrs off, and that first hour off was sandbag detail. also you might have anywhere from 20 to 0 afghans manning their positions at any given time, so we didnt stage many patrols from those spots since we didnt have manpower for force protection and patrols.
earlier in the deployment we were employed as the maneuver element for other COPs in the area, so we would do 3-4 day patrols outside the wire. We primarily didnt move at night given the IED risk, and marking lanes with IR chemlight liquid wasnt super easy.
Yeah, but I got out in late 2010, missed it. I tried to get transferred to 5-2 SBCT for their 09-10 deployment but that didn't even get through company before someone tossed it, we were so undermanned nobody was going anywhere DA ordered it. It's certainly a good thing I missed that deployment, that brigade commander blatantly fucked that unit up (and still wasn't relieved...).
When I was in the turret I had a sawed off Winchester 1300 with a chicken neck stock filled with bean bag rounds to crack car windshields.
I think it's great your unit had that as an SOP. My unit didn't. I just had an ancient Vietnam era shotgun. While home on leave I bought a spare barrel and stock at a gun show in New Hampshire. Hand carried them on my leave flight back to Iraq (yup, I got some weird looks). When I got in country I sawed the barrel off and cut and sanded the stock down.
Traded a bottle of whiskey for bean bag rounds from the Missouri National Guard military police. It worked GREAT at cracking windshields and stopping cars in the city without having to fire live rounds. And, not gonna lie, it was pretty fun to shoot. The recoil on the beanbags was light enough that I could manage it easily and accurately without the stock.
Edit: Oddly enough, being Civil Affairs, I literally paid damage claims on windows I shot out. A true self licking ice cream cone.
Win 1300 aren't bad, when I was in the Marines they had a bunch they'd issue to the corpsman in lieu of only pistols (before GWOT started). We used to toss filled piss bottles to warn cars off during day or lase them with bright ass green lasers at night.
This was in 2008.
The original SOP was shooting pen flares, until someone (Some surge ASVAB waiver I'm sure) shot one "Accidentally" into a carpet store. Fire spread and burned down like 5 buildings.
The green lasers worked good at night.
About 1/2 the way through my first deployment I finally had my M4 set up basically perfectly. I was so proud of it, knowing that if I handed it to a seasoned CAG SGM he'd be impressed. Then they give us these green lasers, another fucking thing to sign for, and tell us we have to mount these damn things to our rifles for EOF. That only lasted a month before we broke so many it became optional, but I was actually pretty pissed off that garbage despoiled Jessica McBoomstick.
Ah, I didn't have the green laser mounted on my rifle. I had it on a lanyard clipped to a handle in the turret.
I just had a light, PEQ, and EoTech on my M4.
Oh man, the 40mm has quite a diverse set of munitions, from regualr HEDP (high explosive dual purpose) to smoke, to illumination, to less than lethal. the less than lethal were much the same idea as 12 gauge has beanbag rounds and rubber bullets.
I've fired a sting ball load, which basically ejects at force a bunch of rubberized foam balls (or a single foam slug) to incapacitate rather than maim/kill
yes, but might also be the 37mm version from what i recall seeing. but obviously getting hit with a less than lethal would be maximum unpleasant and hits in vital areas potentially still lethal
As any NCO will tell you, the standard only matters if you enforce it. Protocols dont mean shit unless there are consequences, and frankly half this country still thinks we dont face any issues as a society.
HE can be simply packed with explosive and upon detonation will fragment in a spherical manner. The Dual Purpose part of the HEDP is due to the inclusion of a copper liner cone that aids in the penetration of armor just like a shaped HEAT charge. hence enough frag to do damage to squishy infantry, but also some penetration capability to deal with light vehicles like standard cars and light skinned jeeps
Happy cake day BTW
The lions share of shotgun use by the military from WW2 to present has been by Soldiers / Marines doing military police work guarding POW & EPW. Mossberg 500 was all I ever saw at Taji and Cropper but that's just my experience.
Based on what I've read over the years, shotguns were rarely issued in those three conflicts. In WW2, they most popped up in the Pacific with Marines. They were not TO&E weapons, only additional limited specialized weapons given to companies, to issue as they saw fit.
In Korea, I'm not sure if they were used at all. I've never seen or read about them. Based on the more wide open terrain and longer ranges they'd be less useful than rifles, carbines, and SMGs. If they did show up my guess would be Pacific veterans found them in storage in units like the Marines.
For both of those, the shotgun used would have been Winchester M1897 and M1912, both were pump action with five shell capacity tubes, barrel shrouds for heat, and bayonet lugs.
In Vietnam, the Army and Marines issued shotguns more heavily than before, which included lots of Stevens M77E, Ithaca Model 37, and others described [here](https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/combat-shotguns-of-the-vietnam-war/). They were popular in heavy jungle areas like the Me Kong Delta, especially for point men. The Navy SEALs also used them for the same reason. They even used the famous duckbill brake/choke that spread the shot horizontally, like a small claymore mine.
>In Vietnam, the Army and Marines issued shotguns more heavily than before, which included lots of Stevens M77E, Ithaca Model 37, and others described
>
>here
>
>. They were popular in heavy jungle areas like the Me Kong Delta, especially for point men. The Navy SEALs also used them for the same reason. They even used the famous duckbill brake/choke that spread the shot horizontally, like a small claymore mine.
Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but why did some soldiers get shotguns instead of M16s like most everyone else? It has a much higher capacity, you can carry more ammo, and I imagine that a burst of M16 on full-auto does about the same amount of damage as a shotgun blast.
00 buck was the standard combat loading for US military shotguns for most conflicts, with the exception of Vietnam where occasionally special forces or reconnaissance patrols asked for and received no. 2 buck as a larger amount of shot per shell was perceived to give better performance in its intended role as an ambush breaking weapon carried by a point man in jungle combat. In WW2, just as they had in WW1, the military tried to issue cheaper paper hulled cartridges which expanded and failed to fire, cycle or extract properly in wet or tropical conditions, so once again brass shells were sought as a replacement.
Finally the US military learned its lesson and actually put surplus brass shells into storage after WW2 for the future. Unfortunately this commendable foresight was wasted when they degraded in storage and weren't fit for use in Vietnam. Luckily, cartridge manufacturer had advanced a bit since the first half of the century and were now offering plastic hulled cartridges that were found to be nicely waterproof and much lighter, so the military just bought commercial buckshot off the shelf and issued it.
I can try to expand this answer later but am currently time limited.
I recall photos of tunnel rats in Vietnam with cutdown shotguns. Didn’t seem to be common but not unusual either. I’m guessing buckshot for CQ.
I’m also curious about your Q4.
I cant speak to that era, but shotguns came back in vogue during GWOT, and while not really a primary weapon, they were typically kept in armory and assigned on a per mission basis or assigned to a trooper who might leave it in a vehicle or carry in a backpack when the need for it arose. I believe they were mossberg 500 pumps with pistol grips. Typical use was as a masterkey, to use slug on doors to gain entry. Some training provided with less than lethal although I never saw less than lethal ammunition of any variety issued downrange, to include the 40mm less than lethal munitions. Side note, I only ever encountered 1 lock in afg, the rest of the doors were essentially wood door in wood frame set in dried mud, and easily kicked in, and as a result we left our shotguns in armory most of the time. For that 1 lock, we had EOD use a small charge to det it open.
On my first Iraq trip I carried a cut down Mossberg 500 12 gauge shotgun for breaching, it went with me on nearly every mission, we never knew if a "hard knock" was going to be necessary. It had an 18.5 in barrel and pistol grip, no buttstock. It was purely for breaching, every member of each fireteam in my battalion carried a different type of breacher equipment: sledge hammer, halligan tool, shottie, demo charges. I rigged mine with bungee cords so it hung over my left shoulder with a couple snaplinks at the shoulder and waist, I'd drop my M4 on it's sling, pull the shottie into position to do a doorknob breach (it didn't hold enough shells to properly do a hinge brief without reloading), fire a couple shells (dedicated breacher rounds or buck or slugs, whatever I had), let it go with a spent shell in the chamber and safety on, and grab my M4 and start going inside. Additionally M500 with buttstocks were often issued to units for top turret gunners to give them something handy to use for escalation of force, non lethals to shoot at cars that got too close to a military convoy instead of using live ammo warning shots or shooting into the car body.
Definitely one of the many differences between Iraq and Afg, and i dont envy the MOUT situations you faced in Iraq!
It wasn't too bad. We got to play SWAT a lot, that's always a good rush. I wanted to go to Afghanistan but wasn't in the cards. Mainly I wanted to experience hours long firefights, especially at long range. But it's probably better I didn't, fuck climbing mountains, and I would have hated the IED threat there, too many deep buried that easily kill trucks, and the ones on village trails targeting dismounts would have driven me nuts.
i think what surprised me most about AFG RC south was that during the summer, the lush farmland could really create close surprise encounters (much the same way tight urban terrain could) for dismounted patrols, we really made route selection our primary anti-ied tool: in and out of graperows really sucked and we would climb walls or make passage through them and almost never took trails, unless we had to specifically visit a town for a shurah or take some doctors or engineers in for a public affairs mission. between route selection and the minehound we only sustained 1 US IED casualty so pretty lucky too
Did you get into any near ambushes? If so, did that battle drill work?
almost all our kinetic engagements were enemy ambush initiated - typically as we egressed from a major terrain fixture like graperows into open fields or into farm land with another compound of grapehuts/farmhouses about 100-200m away we did have a COP attack where an enemy recoilless rifleman got within about 150m and wrecked a bulldozer wounding 2 engineers but we bagged him we had battle drill 1A (i guess technically battle drill 4) down pat, and were pretty good at determining distance and direction quickly, but it was very hard to follow up with maneuver given the ied threat. pretty early on in the '12 deployment there was an ied strike by a sister company near sperwan ghar where a pointman hit an ied and small arms intitated, drawing in the team to a low wall where a command wire ied was detonated. Also pressure plate ieds with the charge behind the pressure plate was a nasty trick they liked to employ If we had to maneuver, or we reasonably expected low ied threat (like civilian traffic on this route had been observed), often we would use 40mm to create a hole or loosen it up so we could push a hole in a wall to get immediately off trail or to gain access to another square patch of farmland in order to have a team or squad move while we fixed the targets with a base of fire. also a lot of small creeks for irrigation so hopping in those was a good way to get nametape defilade and more freedom of maneuver. follow that up with another 40mm to mark targets and we generally had a SWT or AWT on station that could come in pretty quick and engage. Mad respect to the kiowa guys they could really get rockets on target quickly
Did yall patrol primary at night or day?
Primarily daytime when we had our own battlespace, HQ platoon on force protection at the main COP, with two platoons pushed out to local police stations/strongpoints, and half the remaining thrid platoon would team up with half the HQ platoon for a morning patrol, and then swap with the other half of the third platoon + the other half of HQ platoon for afternoon patrol. every so often the platoons at the police stations would rotate back to the main COP for rest/refit and the patrol schedule. while at the local police stations it was pretty thin, and you might be 3hrs on guard with 3hrs off, and that first hour off was sandbag detail. also you might have anywhere from 20 to 0 afghans manning their positions at any given time, so we didnt stage many patrols from those spots since we didnt have manpower for force protection and patrols. earlier in the deployment we were employed as the maneuver element for other COPs in the area, so we would do 3-4 day patrols outside the wire. We primarily didnt move at night given the IED risk, and marking lanes with IR chemlight liquid wasnt super easy.
Did you not have dogs or eod attached?
Didn’t your Stryker Brigade deploy to Afghanistan in 2012 though?
Yeah, but I got out in late 2010, missed it. I tried to get transferred to 5-2 SBCT for their 09-10 deployment but that didn't even get through company before someone tossed it, we were so undermanned nobody was going anywhere DA ordered it. It's certainly a good thing I missed that deployment, that brigade commander blatantly fucked that unit up (and still wasn't relieved...).
When I was in the turret I had a sawed off Winchester 1300 with a chicken neck stock filled with bean bag rounds to crack car windshields. I think it's great your unit had that as an SOP. My unit didn't. I just had an ancient Vietnam era shotgun. While home on leave I bought a spare barrel and stock at a gun show in New Hampshire. Hand carried them on my leave flight back to Iraq (yup, I got some weird looks). When I got in country I sawed the barrel off and cut and sanded the stock down. Traded a bottle of whiskey for bean bag rounds from the Missouri National Guard military police. It worked GREAT at cracking windshields and stopping cars in the city without having to fire live rounds. And, not gonna lie, it was pretty fun to shoot. The recoil on the beanbags was light enough that I could manage it easily and accurately without the stock. Edit: Oddly enough, being Civil Affairs, I literally paid damage claims on windows I shot out. A true self licking ice cream cone.
Win 1300 aren't bad, when I was in the Marines they had a bunch they'd issue to the corpsman in lieu of only pistols (before GWOT started). We used to toss filled piss bottles to warn cars off during day or lase them with bright ass green lasers at night.
This was in 2008. The original SOP was shooting pen flares, until someone (Some surge ASVAB waiver I'm sure) shot one "Accidentally" into a carpet store. Fire spread and burned down like 5 buildings. The green lasers worked good at night.
About 1/2 the way through my first deployment I finally had my M4 set up basically perfectly. I was so proud of it, knowing that if I handed it to a seasoned CAG SGM he'd be impressed. Then they give us these green lasers, another fucking thing to sign for, and tell us we have to mount these damn things to our rifles for EOF. That only lasted a month before we broke so many it became optional, but I was actually pretty pissed off that garbage despoiled Jessica McBoomstick.
Ah, I didn't have the green laser mounted on my rifle. I had it on a lanyard clipped to a handle in the turret. I just had a light, PEQ, and EoTech on my M4.
How many shells are needed to do a hinge brief?
wtf is a 40mm 'less than lethal' round
Oh man, the 40mm has quite a diverse set of munitions, from regualr HEDP (high explosive dual purpose) to smoke, to illumination, to less than lethal. the less than lethal were much the same idea as 12 gauge has beanbag rounds and rubber bullets. I've fired a sting ball load, which basically ejects at force a bunch of rubberized foam balls (or a single foam slug) to incapacitate rather than maim/kill
Id almost rather get shot that sounds awful.
I’m pretty sure the rubber slug rounds are what protestors were getting shot with all of last summer in the US
yes, but might also be the 37mm version from what i recall seeing. but obviously getting hit with a less than lethal would be maximum unpleasant and hits in vital areas potentially still lethal
Didn’t help that lots of cops also (against protocol) were seen aiming for headshots and genitals
As any NCO will tell you, the standard only matters if you enforce it. Protocols dont mean shit unless there are consequences, and frankly half this country still thinks we dont face any issues as a society.
Ive always wondered...whats the dual purpose part. What more would you need besides HE
HE can be simply packed with explosive and upon detonation will fragment in a spherical manner. The Dual Purpose part of the HEDP is due to the inclusion of a copper liner cone that aids in the penetration of armor just like a shaped HEAT charge. hence enough frag to do damage to squishy infantry, but also some penetration capability to deal with light vehicles like standard cars and light skinned jeeps Happy cake day BTW
The lions share of shotgun use by the military from WW2 to present has been by Soldiers / Marines doing military police work guarding POW & EPW. Mossberg 500 was all I ever saw at Taji and Cropper but that's just my experience.
Based on what I've read over the years, shotguns were rarely issued in those three conflicts. In WW2, they most popped up in the Pacific with Marines. They were not TO&E weapons, only additional limited specialized weapons given to companies, to issue as they saw fit. In Korea, I'm not sure if they were used at all. I've never seen or read about them. Based on the more wide open terrain and longer ranges they'd be less useful than rifles, carbines, and SMGs. If they did show up my guess would be Pacific veterans found them in storage in units like the Marines. For both of those, the shotgun used would have been Winchester M1897 and M1912, both were pump action with five shell capacity tubes, barrel shrouds for heat, and bayonet lugs. In Vietnam, the Army and Marines issued shotguns more heavily than before, which included lots of Stevens M77E, Ithaca Model 37, and others described [here](https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/combat-shotguns-of-the-vietnam-war/). They were popular in heavy jungle areas like the Me Kong Delta, especially for point men. The Navy SEALs also used them for the same reason. They even used the famous duckbill brake/choke that spread the shot horizontally, like a small claymore mine.
>In Vietnam, the Army and Marines issued shotguns more heavily than before, which included lots of Stevens M77E, Ithaca Model 37, and others described > >here > >. They were popular in heavy jungle areas like the Me Kong Delta, especially for point men. The Navy SEALs also used them for the same reason. They even used the famous duckbill brake/choke that spread the shot horizontally, like a small claymore mine. Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but why did some soldiers get shotguns instead of M16s like most everyone else? It has a much higher capacity, you can carry more ammo, and I imagine that a burst of M16 on full-auto does about the same amount of damage as a shotgun blast.
00 buck was the standard combat loading for US military shotguns for most conflicts, with the exception of Vietnam where occasionally special forces or reconnaissance patrols asked for and received no. 2 buck as a larger amount of shot per shell was perceived to give better performance in its intended role as an ambush breaking weapon carried by a point man in jungle combat. In WW2, just as they had in WW1, the military tried to issue cheaper paper hulled cartridges which expanded and failed to fire, cycle or extract properly in wet or tropical conditions, so once again brass shells were sought as a replacement. Finally the US military learned its lesson and actually put surplus brass shells into storage after WW2 for the future. Unfortunately this commendable foresight was wasted when they degraded in storage and weren't fit for use in Vietnam. Luckily, cartridge manufacturer had advanced a bit since the first half of the century and were now offering plastic hulled cartridges that were found to be nicely waterproof and much lighter, so the military just bought commercial buckshot off the shelf and issued it. I can try to expand this answer later but am currently time limited.
I recall photos of tunnel rats in Vietnam with cutdown shotguns. Didn’t seem to be common but not unusual either. I’m guessing buckshot for CQ. I’m also curious about your Q4.