400 rounds?

Many people are poking holes in the account given by the Italian journalist of how she was fired on at a checkpoint in Iraq.

The claim that immediately struck me as fishy was this one:

Sgrena's editor at the daily Il Manifesto, Gabriele Polo, said Italian officials told him 300-400 rounds were fired at the car.

A Browning .50 cal fires 400-600 rounds per minute. An M60 fires 550 rounds per minute. An M4 fires 900 rounds a minute.

I don't think a U.S. gunner would open up for a full minute on a car. Even if the machine gun fire was supplemented with a handful of troops shooting, half a dozen guys would pretty much have to empty their clips while the machine gun continued to fire for 15-30 seconds.

From all the embed accounts I've read, it typically takes just one burst from a .50 cal into the engine block to disable a car. Should the car continue to roll, the driver is then targeted. No one really makes it beyond that point, and that's having fired only probably 1/10 of the bullets the editor claimed were used.

I originally sent the above comment to Robert over at Backroad Blog. Robert knows more about guns than anyone I know. This is his reply:

Keep in mind that rate of fire measures the amount of time for the gun to fire a round and chamber a new round. It does not take into account time to reload the weapon or downtime to either let the barrel cool or swap barrels. For a M249 SAW, the standard belt has 200 rounds. I believe that the .50 M2 is the same, but I'd have to check an ammo box at home to be sure. Firing 500 rounds out of one weapon would require a reload. So, the actual rate of fire is much lower than the cyclic rate of fire.

In addition, machine gunners are trained to fire in bursts. Constant fire at the cyclic rate heats up the barrel fast enough that it would have to be changed out approximately every minute, or 500 to 600 rounds. The sustained rate of fire is something in the vicinity of 1/8th of the cyclic rate. In a stressful situation, most people fall back on training. I would guess that the gunner fired a series of bursts at the car.

With the .50 BMG, one round to the engine block would penetrate. You are right, one burst hitting the engine would disable it. The bullet is typically 700 grains, or 1/10th of a pound. Usual config is four AP (armor-piercing) and one tracer. There is nothing in a car that would stop that. If 500 rounds hit that car, there would likely be no one left alive to tell the story. This is the long way of saying that there is no fucking way one gunner put 500 rounds into the car, and highly unlikely that more than one gunner did either.

I haven't seen the article that made these claims, but I don't know how anyone in the car could estimate the number of rounds coming in. In a stressful situation like that, I am sure it seemed like an eternity in those few seconds, but the pucker factor would likely strip all details away. I'm sure it would seem like the firing never stopped!