Make it too small, combined with that the grunts found out that you could program the rounds to explode inside people, and it's an exploding bullet, which is illegal for anti-infantry use. Edit: though it is legal to use against vehicles and other materiel
Because most “war crimes” are unironically just arbitrary rules made up to make us feel better about conducting war. Hollow points are illegal for the military but fine for police - and if you win the war you’re not gonna be tried for war crimes anyways. Somehow killing someone with a 20mm explosive is less moral than a 40mm, it’s silly.
I understand that it is something so efficient at killing humans that all countries agree that it is stupid to use something like that in battle. This specific weapon destroys the body of the soldier hit by the missile, so it does not give an ounce of honor to the combatant, not even in his death.
There is actually a variant of the Hydra launcher that fires rockets that split into seeking smaller cluster missiles actually and this could be recreated easily nowadays compared to even just 15 years ago
The xm25 was not a war crime because it was classified as an auto cannon. Auto cannons aren’t regulated under the Saint Petersburg declaration of 1868 only small arms under 14.5mm are regulated. The reason it was abandoned was a mix of cost of munition manufacturing and the 40mm grenade launcher did the job better even without air burst rounds.
If you're saying those retrofitted rockets aka pikes can be loaded in the 40mm platform, then the US military does have the Milkor revolving grenade launcher, if that's true, this technically could already be done very effectively
How would that factor in backblast though? 😮 The only thing that comes to mind is naval missiles but the entire deck by the missile when it''s launched is cleared completely, so it's a non issue
It's one of those stupid legalese clauses they put in as lip service. Like a .50 cal MG is technically supposed to be anti materiel, therefore shooting a person is a war crime... but you can shoot at their gear because that is material... stupidest crap made by a bunch of beureaucrats that dont have a fking clue
Nope they realized it was a war crime then after the fact dug up every bad review or issue of it and paraded them around. Its less painful for the brass to go "oh it failed" then "oh we made a war crime launcher". The Fat Electrician mentions it in one of his videos. It was getting rave reviews from troops and was functioning perfectly then one day the switch flipped.
