This is just a topic in admiration of the standard of US Army training. I just saw a program on TV about a training facility in the US that cost a poxy $7m, but basically, its an artificially constructed non populated town area for combat simulation training.

Soldiers are handed real weapons with respective calibre (M4A1 5.56, M60 7.62) and live ammo, but instead of giving them real bullets they basically give them paintball rounds. One difference, THEY HURT!

The idea is to takle the mental and physical barrier between training and real combat. Quite frankly, it seemed very effective mainly because soldiers got trained on the fear of being shot. And it being such a god damn simple and cheap training system, i think there should be one in the UK aswell.

paintball bullets do hurt. But only for about 0.5 seconds, after that your fine but i daresay there might be something like that over here in the UK.

There is a training village built in Groningen, the Netherlands, but I don't know what the soldiers there shoot with.

Yes well it depends on the pressure the paintbullet is pressed out of the barrel and the shape of the paintbullet, if they got some nifty shit over there it might hurt like hell

I would think that if you would want stuff to hurt as hell you'd use rubber bullets, but wtf do i know. It would seem very hard to "recreate" a combat situation like that, to me. The difference in "real" combat i think is the ability to cope with stress and fear, not pure skill. And with paintgun bullets or whatnot you still don't have to fear for your life or summit.

okay, maybe i didnt say it clearly but they use REAL CALIBRE!

e.g. They are given a standard issue assault rifle with a paintpellet 5.56mm wide but propelled by the same amount of gunpowder in the real round case.

maybe Sat or 11b will explain.

lol, that'd be welcome, i don't know crap about all this anyhoo. In some countries it isn't mandatory to know basic gun training to get tru the day.

I dont think one can use gunpowder with paintballs, it would cause it to explode inside the barrel. Especially with the same amount used in live ammo. Its a tremendous power we are speaking of. Theoretically it could be done but i doubt they use such a thing.

No need to theoreticise, its been done!

Ill do you a pic but the basics is that its made of plastic, not a rubber ball.

Lol i wouldnt volunteer to test that, if the plastic is strong enough to withstand the xplosive power that propells it then it should be strong enough to pierce flesh

its a good thing they wear full kevlar uniform

Never heard of this, but I wasn't infantry. When we played wargames, we used blanks. The only thing that was painful was the tear gas.

This is new, Satis is right. We used "MILES" gear which was basicly laser tag and a POS. When I got out of the Army they where testing the paintball idea out. I would have prefered training with paintballs that laser tag.

Yes its pretty recent, it was to mentally prepare troops for Iraq and give them an understanding of urban combat.

just on the topic of rubber bullets. You seen jackass the movie? lol, they fire a little bean bag thing and J Knoxville. Thats some bruise.