Quote Originally Posted by Pete View Post
...after the initial burst of suppressive fire one needs to orient onself as to what is going on and assert some sort of fire control. If the world were a perfect place the officers would be the ones doing that, but probably in all the noise and confusion it is the NCOs or even privates are the ones who catch on before they do. In spite of school solutions and doctrine the reality is probably pretty messy.
First, not an Officer's job -- they're supposed to be doing more important things like figuring out what to do next. Plus there are not enough of them around to provide 'instructions' to the Troops who should be too dispersed for even their Squad Leaders to really control their fire. Officers who try to interject themselves into the brouhaha often do as much harm as good and are not doing what they get paid for. So do some poorly trained NCOS do a bit of damage in that effort...

METT-TC of course applies.

The theory is -- and the doctrine says -- that the NCOs will control the fire. That is sometimes possible and it even happens occasionally. More often, there is an initial free for all and Joe has to KNOW what to do and nobody controls anything very well. The flaw is that only after he gets to a decent unit will someone possibly teach him what to do. Or he can partake of two or three firefights and figure out most of it. If he goes to a poor unit, no one will teach him and as the institution did not do it, he'll have a rough couple of fights initially. My estimate is that about half or more of the Troops did not really know how to react until they'd been in fights. Used to be that most didn't understand all they know about what they were doing. May be better now but I wouldn't bet on it...

Good units train on it and work at it and get a good system of individual fire discipline and control operating; the poor ones never do. There are a lot of poor units out there, thus the reputation of the US Army and Marines for being trigger happy. I enjoyed watching units from both organizations fire at each other a lot of places in the world. Fortunately, the fire was usually so poorly aimed that only rarely did anyone get hurt...

We simply do not train as well as we should. Our training and much of our doctrine is residual from WW I with a WW II overlay. The lessons of Korea and Viet Nam -- and Afghanistan and Iraq thus far -- are not allowed to move the Ark of the Covenant that is "mobilization of a big Army oriented training." Even though we don't have that large an Army...