Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins
I'll start right off with a disclaimer: I have never been in a fire fight.
That said, WTF?? 12 magazines - 360 rounds fired in half an hour from the M4? Plus 600 more from the M-249? This is just one of each weapon. Can we assume the other soldiers were firing their weapons at approximately the same rate? That puts thousands of rounds downrange in half an hour, against what - 200 some insurgents? How many of them did they actually hit? Sounds like it should have been every damn one of them, several times over. Yet is also sounds like that was not the case. Is this sort of panicked, ineffectual "spray and pray" how they are trained to fight? Or does training go right out the window when it really hits the fan? I don't want to second guess these guys, as I will never "walk a mile in their shoes (or boots...), but this sounds like more of a training/discipline breakdown than a weapons breakdown. I'm not sure any rifle would hold up to that rate of sustained fire.
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Jeff modern US military thought dictates that you want to outweigh your enemies
volume of fire to sieze the initiative and pin them in place while you manuever(or call in support assets/fires).
IOW, all that ammo that was fired was
suppressive fire, not
precision fire. Most of the MG firing was almost certainly
grazing fire.
Volume of fire:
http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA167920
Precision fire:
http://www.answers.com/topic/precision-fire
Suppressive fire:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressive_fire
Grazing fire:
http://usmilitary.about.com/od/glossarytermsg/g/g2700.htm
Very, very, very little of actual infantry firing is directed at specific targets. In vietnam it was something like 300,000rds of small arms ammo fired for every inflicted casualty. Some 85% of all casualties in war are caused by fragments (from mortar/arty/air strikes and grenades).