Quote Originally Posted by wm View Post
I once was at Fort Sill attending a firepower demonstration. It was quite a while ago--we still had towed 8" in the inventory. The demo was an 8" battalion time on target on a tree line. After the firing finished, the announcer said, "No living thing could have survived that attack." And then, a family of 3 deer came walking out of the trees.
Things changed a lot since fragmentation pattern design begun. Blast and non-prefragmented cases are surprisingly erratic in their lethality (especially if impacting at near-horizontal angles), a mortar bomb with a pre-defined fragmentation pattern, proximity fuze and near-vertical descent isn't.
That's one of those techological advances that de-value old experiences.