Nope. They use their own rifles and don’t share ammunition with other foreign nations. As a matter of fact, I believe no nation does.
PLA Small arms
- Thread starter Vanguard1688
- Start date
Trust me. If I found the related photo I will show it there.
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
NATO uses common logistics and ammo stores. The UN is entirely voluntarily and doesn’t. This has been one of the complaints about it. Blue Helmets are basically scarecrows.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Some good points already raised, in addition, visible and IR lasers are typical co-aligned, meaning if you zero one, the other is zero’d as well. As such, you can use the visible laser to zero both, which is much easier and more accurate than trying to zero an IR laser in the dark with NODs.
Maybe it’s not standard practical, and it’s admittedly a very niche application, but I also find a visible laser to be very useful when zeroing my back-up red dot, as I had to do recently after upgrading the offset mount. Theoretically, you should also be able to do the same if you want to change your primary optic. Just leave the zero’d laser on, and zero your new optic to the laser and you should be hitting the bullseye with your first shot.
Another useful military application is covered in this video on the benefits of using visible lasers to warn off civilians during night raids.
Be warned as there is a fair bit of casual descriptions of war crimes, and it goes without saying that I am not condoning or supporting the actions of the tuber or the troops he was operating with.
Oh yeah. I was referring to the UN peacekeepers. They are volunteer units under one command, but with separate logistical chains.
as other members have mentioned, having a group of nations that share common ammunition like NATO does simplify logistics when it comes to the point where this act is necessary, otherwise individual nations within NATO would still operate their own logistics.
In the context of PLA UN deployments, where there is little commonality between countries' logistics, but in fact using 5.56 or 5.45 would likely become the bottleneck within PLA logistics operations to whichever UN mission they find themselves in.
Yes, in the unlikely scenario where various countries' contributions need to share ammunition, using a common round would have its benefits (but if you need to share, you have other, much bigger problems to worry about, e.g. 'the rebels have somehow gained air superiority and we cannot fly in supplies.'). But when you consider that the PLA has only small quantities of 5.56mm available, compared to the likely tens of billions of rounds of 5.8mm already embedded into their existing logistical systems, other than in extreme scenarios where ammunition NEEDS to be shared between nations, using 5.56 or another common round would actually be the thing that causes bottlenecks and issues within the PLA supply chain.
This is one of those situations where, in very niche, specific circumstances, there could be some benefits to be had. But the road to those set of circumstances is so unlikely and raises so many other issues that it is not something worth even dealing with.
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TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
That is the EXTREME case but you don’t need the extreme to see the advantage. I mean consider if you went to every military on the planet and raided their armories generally you would find the vast majority of pistols and SMG in 9x19mm Parabelum.
Rifles in Eastern Europe and Asia are going to be primarily 7.62x39mm followed by 5.56x45mm with rare cases of 5.45x39mm with Africa being a mix of 7.62x39 and 7.62x51mm. America north, central and south, Western Europe Japan, ROK Australia will be primarily 5.56x45 and 7.62x51mm.
With China being unique to 5.8x42mm and the Middle East being a bit of everything. Now what does that have to do with anything? Only a handful of of those states were Warsaw Pact or NATO yet they all buy their standards. Why is that? Because it’s first cheap. Second because in a shooting war your stocks of bullets will burn through fast. Often far faster than expected.
Now most nations don’t have a large arms industry. So using common cartridges allows you to restock ammunition stores very fast. Even states that do have large arms capacity often avoid trying to go there own paths. This differs from the pre WW2 when though some did it was fairly common for nations to buy the same rifles but modified to shoot the locally chosen round.
Small Quantities? Perhaps for their use but not capacity. China Is one of the worlds top arms exporters they sell ammo in both NATO and older Soviet types. The stocks of both those ammo types though are primarily targeted for export.
MwRYum
Major
You should know China also manufacture almost the full range of M16/AR15 series for export, plus 5.56mm ammunition? They'd not need to waste resources as such, but simply to maintain a small cache of M4/M4A1 manufactured by NORINCO / POLY, along with 5.56mm ammo. Of course, that typically reserve for familiarity training prior to overseas competitions.
