WAR: British troops were supplied with blank ammunition

I would be totally freaked out if the thing I was shooting at wasn't taking any damage...imagine walking down an Iraq street, seeing a group of insurgents...taking up position and opening up on them, yet none of them take any damage. I would be thinking along the lines of: "Oh boy, that's quite some invisible armor they have there"

I'll be glad to clear up MUCH of the confusion going on here. (Not all of it, but at least the technical aspects of what's going on, and how the military works. I can't answer any "conspiracy" questions anyone may have, being as I wasn't there.)

I'm a solder in the U.S. Army National Guard.

When using blank rounds, you must use a blank adapter. This serves several purposes. It allows others around you to assume with relative ease that you are equipped with blanks. No one in their right mind would be equipped with one if they had live ammunition. Second, because the M-16 assault rifle is gas-operated, without the presence of a bullet in the barrel to increase the gas pressure that is present behind the bullet that causes that action to be charged all the way to rear, ejecting the spent cartridge, and then charging the next round in the clip, there is not enough pressure for this process to take place. The blank adapter allows this pressure to exist in the absence of a round traveling through the barrel. Finally, the blank adapter acts as a protection from the violent gases that are still present when a blank is fired. At the end of the barrel of almost any m-16 is a flash suppressor that causes the gases to escape from all sides of the barrel at the tip, rather than being projected forward behind the bullet. The blank adapter causes any gas to be forced to the sides through the flash suppressor, rather than forward which may cause severe injury to anyone standing within ten to fifteen feet of the firing weapon.

Blanks are VERY OBVIOUS when looking at the rounds themselves regardless of the packaging or not. Its a shell with a crimped tip in the place of a bullet. Because of that, I can GUARANTEE that NO solder went to the field no knowing they were equipped with blanks. I don't know if they were sent to the field with blanks, but I repeat, there's no way it could have happened without the soldier's knowledge.

It sounds to me like this story is an event that has been taken ENTIRELY out of context in order to create a marvelous story of either 1. Military ineptitude, or 2. Conspiracy of some kind to give the reporter or specific news agency something to sensationalize.