common caliber

COMMON CALIBER
I love weapons myself. A closet full of food gives you a nice security blanket, and a rifle with sufficient ammunition adds wonderfully to that. It is hard to get too worked up about very many things with those tools providing the basic necessities ( yada, yada, blah, blah, I include water purification or storage in with food, so don't have a kitten on me please ). Yet, I never have too much to say on the subject. You buy your war surplus rifle, its ammo, a couple of bayonets and if you are old and have bad eyes you add a scope. Not too much else to say on the subject. I have a Lee reloader and bullet mold and a butt load of primers. And I don't do gunsmithing. Again, not a lot of subject matter there. I prefer to talk about food. To me it is a much more important topic. Yes, you need weapons to defend your food but you also can't get many calories from an M-16 magazine. However, I am such a friggin nice guy that Baby Jesus himself has dropped a lot of hints my way that I'm his favorite. So I try to give my loyal minions what they want and occasionally yak away about something weapons related. Last week I bought a copy of Backwoods Home Magazine, since the new copy of Backwoodsman hasn't come out yet and I was Jonesing. I much prefer Man to Home but obviously I had $6 burning a hole in my pocket so I bought the damn thing. Their article on the ammo drought inspired this article.
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I've always hated the article of faith amongst survivalist that you simply must have military and common calibers for your arsenal. This should come as no surprise to you since I find almost nothing that is militarily useful carries over to survivalists. I won't rehash those, to your obvious relief. A round simply needs to be effective. Granted, it shouldn't be so obsolete and scarce that you need to spend a lot of money having a specialty shop fabricate the cases, but to parrot what is most popular isn't necessary. I wouldn't carry 9mm. And the only good I see the .223 serving is for a medium distance sniper harassment round. It makes a great assault round, but I don't plan on being that close if I can help it. And if I'm not that close, I don't need semi-automatic. So then I don't need a .308 either. I'm just fine with a .38/.357 in revolver and any thirty caliber for rifle.
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The recent drought in ammunition should underscore the need to be slightly different and not carry what everyone else does. It stands to reason that if every Joe Blow wants to stockpile ammunition in case Uncle Obammy bans all guns or if the economy finally does the final revolution around the toilet bowl before going down the pipe that if everyone is after 308 and 45 than you have a much better chance finding 303 and 38. Duh. But wait, you scream in righteous indignation as you caress your AR-15 against your crotch, if you capture the enemies ammunition you need to use it in your weapon ( or get more ammo for his weapon you took ). That worked great for the freedom fighters in Afghanistan in the 80's as they traded in their much better Lee-Enfields for inferior AK's. Personally I think it was more a status symbol thing for them. Look, Habeeb, I am a mighty superior warrior and I personally killed a Soviet and took his weapon ( he doesn't mention that he peacefully traded the infidel alcohol for the carbine ). I have a hard time believing you would want to trade in a long range rifle you used growing up for an unfamiliar poodle shooter. Surely Pakistan could provide them all the 303 ammo they needed. But, let's just take it at face value and call it enemy supply.
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The problem is that the military is most likely facing a worse resupply problem than the survivalist. Our friendly prepper has oodles and gobs of ammunition plus lots of reloading supplies. The military has a fixed amount on hand and pretty much adheres to the just in time inventory nonsense everyone has bought into. I don't know if anything has changed, but I recall in my tour that every year every unit had to burn off all their ammunition because any left over that carried over into the next fiscal year meant that much was subtracted from the budget. Assuming this is still the case, most units will have very little ammo on hand ( I don't have any idea how much a combat unit has. Our unit was rear area support and I seem to recall very few rounds being allocated to each person at the end of the year-it certainly wasn't enough to stay proficient with and they were trying to fill the need with the M-16 simulator ). As a whole, if combat units are added to the average, I can't imagine every soldier being capable of carrying a rifle having that much ammunition. Even if the amount is thousands rather than hundreds, the spray and pray doctrine will eat through those numbers quickly.
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Another consideration is using the weapon on hand. If you already own a weapon that isn't totally useless like a pot metal pimp pistol like a .25 caliber, you should stick with it regardless of caliber. A less than perfect caliber is compensation for the insane weapons prices currently. You can buy a lot of strange ammo for the price of a gun. So, you don't want to compete for limited ammunition, the military will run out of ammo before you do and can't resupply you, and you might not want to waste the money buying another gun.
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