What type of guns do the armed forces use to practice?
 

I've been watching alot of military shows and it looks like they're using airsoft guns, but when they shoot it gives off a crack of light. Is this due to the attatchment on the end of the gun? Is it not an airsoft gun? Could they be just firing blanks? Any help would be appreciated.

Really!?...you think the military would use airsoft guns...even for training? There real guns.

Yeah, actually some are using Airsoft to train. I was reading an article on it in Guns and Ammo

Maybe ROTC

Just read the article and some do use them...but the guns the guy was talking about is the real guns they train with that make the end of the gun look like a rpg...the airsoft part will soon be a thing of the past once they perfect and get a budget for the ammo that shot a paint burst

Well sonny back when I was in the U.S. Army we used M.I.L.E.S. (Laser Tag equipment), real weapons with blanks and blank adapters, smoke grenades and flash-bangs.

P.S. Did I mention that was when men were men and women were still women. ;)

my local police use smith and wesson autos (think 59s) converted to reliably shoot lower powered simunitions, but the service weapon is a usp45:confused:

how do you use laser tag systems?

Those were the days. :D

In my ragtag nasty guard unit we seldom use simunition rounds and I don't care about it really, because sim rounds are really unimpressive if you are doing anything other than CQB. During bootcamp the opfor "ambushed" us during FTX and they fired at us with sim rounds from their M4s, it was pathetic -they had to angle their M4s up like Mortars and the sim rounds still fell short of us and they couldn't have been more than 100-150 meters away.
Most of the time though we just put blank fire adapters on our M4s when we are practicing battle drills. We don't bother about "who hits who" because it isn't a game. We just run through the procedures.

I've always wanted to do MILES but everyone I've talked to only has bad things to say about it.

+1

I've used MILES, I wasn't all that impressed. Simunition, as AdAstra said, REALLY sucks at anything approaching range. HURTS up close though. Mostly we just use blanks, like he said it's more about the drills then who gets who.

From 93-96 I was with the 1/4 Inf Battalion at the Combat Manuver Training Center in Bavaria, Germany. We were next door to a small village called Hohenfels.

The 1/4 Inf was an Opfor unit. Sometimes called Opposing Force. We "fought" not only American units, but Spanish, French, Dutch, German and Italian. We had MILES equipment not only for individual soldiers, but vehicles to include helicopters.

As an individual soldier I had a harness that I wore in place of the LBE harness. It had sensors on it. I also had a laser emmiter that would fire a laser whenever I fired a blank round.The emmitor clipped onto the top of my M16 barrel. If I was hit by a laser beam my sensor harness would emit a high pierced squeal. In order to turn it off I had to remove the key from my laser emiter and use it to turn off the squeal box. Once I did that I could no longer fire my weapon so I was out of play.

We also had laser emmiters for our machine guns.

The Observer controlers had what we called a God Gun. So if an artillery barrage, air strike or what not was called in they could do an area kill with their god gun and take out multiple soldiers, vehicles ect with that god gun. The could also bring back dead soldiers.

There was more to it of course, but that gives you an idea of what was involved. The MILES beams could be defeated by heavy moisture in the air like rain/snow and they could be blocked by things like tree leaves. But at the time it was the best we had to simulate real combat without using real ammo.

For those who care the 1/4 Inf Bn has it's own website as does the CMTC at Hohenfels.

Ugh, don't say CMTC, it provokes bad memories. I've spent WAY too much of my life at the one in Wainwright.

LOL. I still get that same reaction from vets who trained at CMTC-Hohenfels when I tell them I was stationed there. I just tell them that if they think the few months they spent there during their overseas tour was rough they should have tried living there for three years! :D