Quote Originally Posted by Vojnik View Post
So what's the best tactical situation to use precision, automatic fires at the 400-500m range?

I feel like we're talking in circles.

"What does the Automatic Rifleman do?"

"Oh, he's the guy who fires his rifle automatically."

"Why does he do that?"

"Because he's the Automatic Rifleman."

Of course, this is the military so that makes perfect sense...
I think you may be getting wrapped around the term 'automatic rifleman'. He isn't the just guy who fires his rifle automatically. The M27 is distinct from the Browning Automatic Rifle in that the standard response in the offense is not to respond to a target by flipping the safety to automatic and dispatching the enemy as quickly as possible with multiple bursts. Good BAR gunners could squeeze off very short bursts or single shots when the slow rate of fire was selected, but it was still an automatic weapon.

What the Marine Gunners and infantry guys have essentially concluded is that the IAR gunner should move as a rifleman would. He doesn't need the rest of the team or portion of the squad to seize his next firing position for him, as he struggles to relocate to this new firing point. The rest of the team need not fight to protect him as a primary task, and he is not expected to be that "suppressive firepower" fight-stopper that I think too many folk envisioned the SAW gunner was supposed to be.

The standard response for the IAR gunner is accurate, semi-automatic fire delivered against a point target(s), and he ratchets up to bursts of fully-automatic fire against massed targets, or perhaps enfilade targets, and definitely against area targets. Even in a counter-ambush scenario, the answer is not to spray-and-pray wildly, but you have 28-30 rounds to put out there quickly...if you're not already dead at the initiation. For targets at the 400-500m range, if I need to use automatic fires due to the nature of the target, I'm going to be using a machine gun first if I have one.

We had a maintenance problem, and a training problem, and a mobility problem, with the employment of the SAW within the team and squad. Time will tell if the IAR is the answer, and if we are looking for a panacea at the end of a length of extruded metal, pins, welds, and polymer, we are already behind the power curve. It has been tested, evaluated, and weighed against the SAW in terms of hits-per-tgt and rounds expended per hit, and it won, but still needs to be looked at as a system.

Effective suppression is hits on target, and giving dirt naps to the knuckleheads who need them.

BREAK--

Fuchs, everything you stated above is really stating the obvious, it seems, for great war settings.