Bullshit.
So when you buy the bullets you have to designate what gun they'll be fired from? Obviously they can't be easily reprogrammed, or else the criminals could do it, too. And oh, what a market for password-free ammo.
Hooray, it's another way to make life more difficult for law-abiding people and stimulate the growth of the black market.

Also would give reloaders a shit fit if the supplies to reload were taken off the market.

Personally, if those bullets became the norm, then reloading would be all the rage. Especially among non-law-abiding citizens.

No, I'm willing to bet there's a number of people who'd dig this. The crowd that likes trigger locks, the crowd with kids but no gun safe, the crowd that wants Smart Guns, the crowd that thinks guns are fine for sport but that defensive use is unnecessary.

Do *I* want it? Do *you* want it? No. But there's a decent chunk of gunowners who would at least be interested in it. Personally, I think Smart Guns would be a better way to appeal to them... you aren't spending that extra money every time you pull the trigger. And it sounds like, unless they're totally deviating from modern case design, you could probably pop out the radio-fired primer and replace it with a standard one.

Me? I'll stick with a high-retention holster and a safe at home. Lot less stuff that can go wrong.

Only if the solid state switch is flipped.

Which is also a bad idea. It means that either you enter the password when you first holster it, and be subject to such a problem as the radio frequency, or you hope that you have time to enter in a code between the time when you see a need for the gun, and actually have to use it.

Also, a password could be provided by Biometric readers, but that also proves difficult. For instance, a bring scanner on the barrel. Touch your finger to it. What if it has dirt on it and won't read, or if it fails.

Not to mention, if a keypad is placed on the gun, it would need to be electronic as well. Need for more batteries. A mechanical activator would not work in such a case.

Using a public key system could make it so that all members of a unit (company/platoon/regiment/whatever) could use any other member's ammunition using their own password.

If you can do it right, it makes a lot of sense: It can prevent the enemy from using captured equipment. That's an awesome capability to have.

Or at least right away. With time it should be possible for the enemy to rework the ammo.
"So let me get this straight. They are taking our unfired ammo, adding a second casing around it and firing it off that way? How many soldiers have live rounds in them?"
Or if nothing else they could use it as shrapnel in a booby trap.

The vietnamese made very good use of our "unusable Junk" we left in the field.

My problem is more

"If the enemy are close enough to steal your weapons you've kind of lost anyway"

I can see this things application of bulk transport of ammunition. Stopping people being able to pinch your stock of ammo may actually work.

Once it gets to the individual's level, anybody who lets bullets currently in their weapon end up in somebody else's weapon, something has already gone wrong somwhere, anyway. (Remember this was being introduced to add security to guns that were already biometric.

To clarify, Joe burglar has broken into your house, taken your weapon/bullets, realised the gun didn't work, so they unloaded the gun, and put the bullets for it into their own mag that they brought with them, after checking that they matched caliber. They then loaded and cocked before pointing it at you and pullign the trigger. Lucky you thought ahead that far, that'll show them.

What exaclty the blue flaming drek were you doing during all this, and what are you going to do to defend youself condidering the buglar appears to have hold of your ammunition?

Unless the unit is Army/MC/AF/Navy, etc., or else something like Iraq Occupational Force, this would wreak havoc on logistics.

Spoofing it on the fly is the issue... most Smart Gun concepts are ideas like making it so that the officer who just had his gun taken away from him can't be shot by it (since he's not holding it).

Sure, you can hack the RFID and get around the Smart Gun circuit if you've gotten a little time poking at it or you've been scanning the cop ahead of time, but the first assumes the gun has been stolen, and the second assumes you attacked a cop with the intention of taking his gun and shooting him with it, not a very frequent occurrence.

Even if you spoof the RFID, the one on the cop's hand is still going to work (and so his gun will still fire).

Maybe. I expect it would be a bit of a pain in the ass. OTOH, it would probably be less of a pain in the ass than getting shot with your own munitions.

I'm sure it could be worked around, if they wanted to badly enough. Whether or not the payback would be worth the effort.... I don't know.

That doesn't seem like a real issue anywhere. In nearly all armed conflicts, especially those where at least one side is technologically quite advanced and has a functioning logistical system, not to mention when equipment standards are compeltely different (e.g. NATO vs. former WP-based) captured enemy equipment makes up for a tiny part of the firepower of any particular unit. Or, as the case is in Israel/Palestinian territories and Russia/Soviet Union/Afghanistan/Chechnya, if one side has a significant amount of equipment originally belonging to the other, said equipment was most likely sold by the previous owner/keeper.

In long, large scale warfare where systematic use of captured enemy hardware might be a bigger problem logistics becomes and even more important issue. I cannot imagine anyone being able to wage war in a way that would allow them to decide even at the division level which battalion, let alone company or platoon, is going to be firing which batch of ammo.

Well, you don't necessarily have to decide at manufacture time which battalion/etc can use the ammo. You can theoretically use a key signing chain; you use a master key on all ammo you make.

This key is kept very secret and would change only infrequently. You use this key to sign the next lower level of organization's key, which would be kept slightly less secret and would change more frequently.

You repeat this process until you get to the, say, company level, where the signed key is rotated very frequently, which is used to issue "mission" keys which are rotated very very frequently.

As long as you can present a complete chain of certificates from the original key to the mission key, the bullet will fire. If the enemy can compromise any level of certificate, then they could use the captured ammunition until such a time as the planned expiry of the compromised key.

PITA, but it might be worth it.

Somehow I instead see it as actually being a great opportunity....for the enemy to disrupt effectiveness by doing a little Spec Ops wetwork.

But then I'm not military, so I'm a person of small brain on the subject.

I'm not sure I see how any kind of wetwork would disrupt such effectiveness. (as opposed to a system without the certificate chain)

Command structure in DC? A few dozen bunker-busters...

Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe.

You could have several valid root keys in several valid locations, with revocation certificates, etc, etc, etc.

There are plenty of ways to build in redundancy at the top layers, and it's plenty decentralized at the lower levels due to the certificate signing.

The main issue to me is not securing the higher levels, as it's pretty easy to get around their being compromised or destroyed, but making sure that everyone has valid and updated keys at the lower levels where the key rotation is "fast."