11-16-2011, 03:44 AM
In response to the Afghan combat footage:
That is basic react-to-contact...which is more psychological than meant to connect, especially if you look at the nearby mountains he's firing at. The idea behind it is to convince the enemy that they just put their hand in a hornet's nest, rather than an easy target. The more bullets whizzing by their heads, the more likely they are to run away and live to fight another day. Since the Pashtun people have less fear of death than the average human being, I'm not sure how effective our react-to-contact drills really are, and CAS usually deals with these threats.
They know the effective ranges of our shoulder-fired weapons, so far ambushes like this with well emplaced PKM's, mortars, & Dshka's pin the dismounts down. If you have indirect assets on-hand, they can deal with these types of ambushes fairly quickly, but the goal of insurgents or guerrillas is often to get you to overreact, as they collapse into the mud villages, in hopes that you bomb some civilians for the information war campaign.
Since those mountains from which one of the elements engaged from are at least 800m-1.2km away, an M4 in any caliber offers very little. The use of the ACOG to spot and direct mortars was his best bet, but I'll bet the FO was already on it.
That is basic react-to-contact...which is more psychological than meant to connect, especially if you look at the nearby mountains he's firing at. The idea behind it is to convince the enemy that they just put their hand in a hornet's nest, rather than an easy target. The more bullets whizzing by their heads, the more likely they are to run away and live to fight another day. Since the Pashtun people have less fear of death than the average human being, I'm not sure how effective our react-to-contact drills really are, and CAS usually deals with these threats.
They know the effective ranges of our shoulder-fired weapons, so far ambushes like this with well emplaced PKM's, mortars, & Dshka's pin the dismounts down. If you have indirect assets on-hand, they can deal with these types of ambushes fairly quickly, but the goal of insurgents or guerrillas is often to get you to overreact, as they collapse into the mud villages, in hopes that you bomb some civilians for the information war campaign.
Since those mountains from which one of the elements engaged from are at least 800m-1.2km away, an M4 in any caliber offers very little. The use of the ACOG to spot and direct mortars was his best bet, but I'll bet the FO was already on it.