How come military non magnification sights are used if the whole point of iron sights is that you get two points of reference?
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Because those sight are called reflector sight and work on an optical principle. Basically they don’t need 2 points of reference to work, because of the lens. Once you align it with your gun, no matter the angle at which you look through the sight it will be on target and you don’t need to align 2 points of reference like with an iron sight.
The advantage is that you have a clear field of view and not those big iron sight that might hide some of the target and you can use it more quickly without having to align the 2 points of reference. They are also more visible in the dark and are easier to use with a night vision device, compared to iron sight.
Irons require the shooter to carefully line up two sights, and often have a tradeoff between visibility and precision. The more you can see, the more difficult it is to aim with them, and vice versa. Non-magnification sights get around this problem by using different optical tricks to make it seem like the ‘target’ dot is actually miles away when it is generated by a laser or LED right inside of the optic. The two main examples that come to mind are reflex and holographic sights. Holographic sights use a hologram of a dot or crosshair that is a mile away in order to show you where the gun is pointed. Reflexes use a curved piece of glass to reflect a tiny bit of light back to the observer in such a way that the reflection appears to be miles away and directly in front of the barrel. It is very clever, actually.
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