Re: Does the US military use metric ???

Posted by MarkB on April 30, 2002 at 14:35:53 from (198.208.223.35):

In Reply to: Does the US military use metric ??? posted by Alberta Mike on April 30, 2002 at 06:32:17:

The answer is that the military uses a multitude of systems, including metric and English.

Many of the NATO common systems are at least partially metric. For example, all NATO ammunition is in millimeter calibers, even though the weapons that fire the round have all English dimensions. All of the weapon systems that I've dealt with had English fasteners. I think that one reason for this is that virtually all of the US mil-spec and aerospace-spec fasteners are English. It's really kind of amazing that almost all of the countries that buy US military systems are 100 percent metric, but they are perfectly happy to buy guns, planes, tanks, etc that use English dimensioned parts.

One of the more bizarre units used by the military is the "milliradian", which is the ordnanceman's unit of angle. A true milliradian would be a metric unit, and there should be 3141 milliradians in a circle, EXCEPT that the Army decided that 3141 was too awkward, so they decided that there are actually 3200 milliradians in a circle. Kind of like redefining the value of pi.

Of course you'll find many other examples of mixed metric and English units. Military maps are all metric, which makes sense, so that we can operate along with our Allies. On the other, I'm pretty sure that naval navigation is still done using nautical miles.

Follow Ups:

• Re: Re: Does the US military use metric ??? John Ne. 16:24:27 04/30/02 (0)

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