Weapons Man points to a “ruined” video demonstrating just how quiet a suppressed .22 can be to suggest that most armies will be using suppressors in combat in the near future:
It is an extreme advantage for a small element to have suppressors, when the enemy does not. In combat, the distinct sound and light signatures of friendly and enemy weapons are very important for both sides to assess the action and identify key opposing weapons.
If you’re suppressed and he’s not, he’s got a whole lot of kaBANG going off close to his ears, and he is going to have a hard time detecting, let alone locating, the toonks your suppressed weapons are making.
Since suppressors are cheap — they’re only $50 to $100 worth of machine time and material, in series production, or only $1000 to $2000 after the overhead of the Defense Acquisitions Process is larded on to them, which is still cheap as DOd buys go — the time will come when everybody has them. That time will come very quickly to all the world’s armies as they start to see the results of firefights with asymmetrical use of suppression.
The counterpoint is that doinkers lose.
Suppressors are used by snipers and other long range shooters. They make a big difference escaping detection, and preventing evasion.
They make no sense for most soldiers who are looking for the shortest, handiest weapon to handle ranges under 200 yards.
Suppressed .22 LR weapons will not make it the battlefield. Underpowered. As are most all subsonic rounds.
I’ve shot a lot of suppressed weapons. They have their pluses and minuses.
Suppressed .22 LR rifles have already been used successfully in war — and civil unrest. That said, I don’t think the proposal is to switch over to tiny, unreliable rounds, but rather to switch to something like .300 Blackout, which won’t be silenced by a suppressor, but which will be quieted down — and flash-suppressed — enough to leave any enemy guessing exactly where fire’s coming from.
Suppressed rifles were used in the Viet Nam conflict with remarkable success and I am not writing just about sub-sonic rounds but full power ones. The supressor dropped the sound down enough that the actual firing could not be heard much more than about 30 meters away and definitely by 50 to 100 meters. The sonic boom or crack moved perpendicular to the bullet track so a round seemed to be coming 90° from its actual direction. ( Note: enemy troops behind the shooter would not be fooled. )
Read about this in: The Long-Range War: Sniping in Viet Nam, Peter R. Senich, Paladin Press,1994, Chapter 4 (The Suppressor and Sniper Rifle), Chapter 8 (Noise Suppression: The Silent War), and Chapter 10 (Silencers and Suppressors: The Sionics Legacy).
My personal suspicion is that substantial (though not particularly extreme) regulation of suppressors in the civilian market has severely retarded their development. A lot of stuff that was only in widespread use by hobbyists — or even mall ninja bullshit — when I started paying attention to this stuff — like PMAGs and reflex sights — has led to real, if incremental, improvements.
Infantrymen will never carry subsonic rounds — they just don’t go far enough — but a six-inch suppressor on the end of an M4 would still be shorter overall than the M16s used for decades, and it would be easily removable if needed.