@jmm99: He meant hit probability, not dispersion.
As always: It depends.Get some fire down!’ is the wrong approach.
‘Suppress the enemy!’ is a better approach.
‘Suppress the enemy, to enable the platoon to attack him
from his rear’ is a better approach still.
He's right when destructive indirect fires are difficult, but he's wrong if shortages prevail in regard to
- ammunition for suppressive fires
- cover & concealment for maneuver
I always miss the element of artificial concealment (smoke) in discussions about suppression.
You often don't need to suppress if you can conceal.
Another caveat is about the maneuver (old school flanking) thing; it becomes predictable.
It's sometimes better to make them move (smoke on their position if they're on a delay mission, for example) so they expose themselves instead of exposing yourself.
Besides; suppression isn't really important for ambushers, and ambushes should be top priority because they're extremely unfair.
We're extremely short of infantry for major warfare - so we need to keep casualties and exhaustion down or else we would have 3rd grade infantry (cooks, engineers*, clerks, mechanics) real quick.
I have a strong preference for a huge emphasis on fieldcraft (for stealth), ambushes, sneaking up, movement in heavy APCs, movement with cover by smoke, long-range combat (400+ m) reserved to mortars and snipers and rather rarely raids with surprise as precondition.
The whole 'machine guns suppress, infantry moves' thing falls apart once you fail to ID a relevant hostile position (or simply face too many hostile positions). It worked satisfactorily in WW2 when a stray soldier had only a repeating rifle, not an automatic magazine-fed weapon. the other reason for the success in earlier times was the acceptable margin of failure; armies had more infantrymen than our armies have soldiers overall.
*: Not applicable to Germany, as Germans traditionally consider all engineers as (kind of) combat troops.
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