$25 bullets and $25000 rifles are insanely expensive. And I don't see how better rifles will bring an advantage - most coalition casualties are from mortar fire and improvised explosive traps - rebels have already lost preference for gun standoffs. But I'm sure H&K and Alliant will love to sell lots of these to whatever army is corrupt enough to buy them.
Also... aren't exploding bullets illegal under the Hague convention?
The Hague forbids bullets that expand on penetration, on the basis that it creates larger and more traumatic wounds. This round acts more like a grenade. It explodes (and wounds/kill by shrapnel) near the target. It shouldn't actually hit the person. Completely different class of weapon. It's more accurate to call this a grenade launcher than a rifle.
It always seems so absurd to me that there are rules around wartime killing. Once you acknowledge that it is acceptable to take another person's life for profit you really have little credibility for laying out rules of fairness.
Well, most of the rules aren't about killing per se, but rather wounding. And most of the rules are in place so that the stakes of fighting never gets high enough that we would all have to stop fighting. For example, the Geneva Protocol that bans chemical and biological weapons pretty much because aside from killing, those who were wounded were an enormous burden, and terrible for morale (aside from any ethical reasons).
In that case, losing the ability to use those weapons was deemed to be outweighed by the consequences of having to deal with them being used on you. Also, since they could be potentially huge and unpredictable force multipliers, it made war all the more predictable, which is good from their perspective.
Long story short, nearly all rules of war exist because they are beneficial to abilities of the parties to conduct war. The rules do no exist to make killing fair. They exist so that parties may conduct war in a way they agree with.
"Long story short, nearly all rules of war exist because they are beneficial to abilities of the parties to conduct war. The rules do no exist to make killing fair."
That actually makes perfect sense. Although I find it rather disturbing.
War without rules would be a greater horror. Even the ancients had them (Julius Caesar himself was charged with war crimes). How could closure and peace be negotiated, for example, without protection for emissaries.
You were on your way to an interesting point until you made the implicit claim that war is always about profit. For pretty much every war, that isn't true for at least one side, and often for both.
Obviously one side isn't necessarily in it for profit, they could simply be defending the other side's actions. But the instigator is usually in it for profit.
IANAL but that has some problems. First of all the convention mandates 'declaration of war' in a sense that you have to tell someone you're attacking. If it was skipped then it was against the part of the convention mandating such notification.
Secondly the other parts of the convention do not talk about war as a set of specific circumstances (e.g requiring declaration of war) but just hostilities regardless on how they originated.
So by skipping the declaration of war one simply breaks one additional part of the convention, the one mandating the declaration.
It's a 25mm explosive round, not a rifle round, so $25 isn't out of the question. I don't know how much an M203 grenade costs in bulk, but that would be a suitable comparison.
It's really a misnomer to call this thing a rifle. Yes, it has a rifled barrel. But it's a grenade launcher, not a rifle in common parlance. It replaces the 40mm grenade launcher in use.
Also... aren't exploding bullets illegal under the Hague convention?