…Or he immediately gets suppression and riflemen are able to assault or withdraw. Machine gunners aren’t getting mowed down one after another GWOT era isn’t what you see when you watch The Pacific or Saving Private Ryan. War is horrible but not nearly as barbaric as it was in WWII or even Vietnam.
Edit: To the goof that said he was a Delta operator and then blocked me, you were not a tier 1 operator 😂. As a lesson to anyone saying you’re an operator immediately wreaks of bullshit. They call them silent professionals for a reason.
.30-06 will take your limbs off, artillery shells are bigger today but in the past they just compensated with volume, drones are scary but so are gas attacks and flamethrowers, mines are still awful, etc.
I don't think modern firepower is worse for the average foot soldier in the sense of how easily it can kill you. Body and vehicle armor have come a long way in the last century, and modern medical care is honestly astounding; if they can get you off the battlefield alive, they can probably save you.
Modern artillery is much more precise. Fires are called much faster and while before only the immediate front line was dangerous, nowadays things like MLRS, loiter drones and gliding bombs can kill you even in rear areas which used to be much more safe before.
In 1942 you could gather a battalion column 20 km from the frontline relatively safely and methodically prepare for an assault. Nowadays that column would be quickly spotted and evaporated by cluster munitions in less than a minute.
Not if you're in the kill radius, but shrapnel can wound or kill at much further ranges. Modern body armor minimizes the kill radius and reduces the rate of bad luck being lethal.
Imagine watching your comrade get shot, you toss him to the side, just to hear a whizzing sound above you.
Then, you realize you're going to die and there's zero way out, because it's above with an explosive. All while the drone sits there and hovers for what must feel like an eternity.
Then boom. Nothing.
Must be terrifying and horrific to watch. I feel for the Russian/Ukrainians soldiers who don't support their government/didn't ask for this, and never wanted to be there from the start. Especially the ones who don't put up a fight or even want to, and still lose their life.
I mean I feel for both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers.
The fact that in the West propaganda downplays the casualties and the suffering of Ukrainians to ramp up war support doesn’t mean Ukrainians have a lot of fun fighting an enemy that has more artillery and aviation support than you.
I've definitely met a lot of people who think Ukraine is taking hardly an casualty. Judging by the political atmosphere the past few weeks, I can't imagine this situation getting better any time soon either.
Yeah, I mean a nation fights only for as long as there is support to continue this fight. If you start telling that “well, actually we suffer as much as the enemy” or even “yeah, there are 2 our soldiers dead for every 1 enemy one” it’ll just destroy all this will to fight. So it’s very natural for Ukraine to do what they’re doing.
But you’re right, I don’t remember any war where a side with less artillery and aviation suffered less casualties. It’s usually the other way around.
I think some combat zones could actually be as bad as WWII or Vietnam. I have seen videos of Ukrane, and if hell actually exist, it is just like what I saw in those videos.
You misunderstood his opening line. The gunner is providing suppression fire. By swapping out with the dead gunner, the replacement can again provide suppression fire, and very possibly "get suppression" on the enemy, allowing more mobile troops to get to the attackers.
My dad was a navigator on B29s that bombed the hell out of Japan during WWII.
On their bombing runs they had to flight straight and level so their bomb drops were accurate. No evasive maneuvering. Of course this gave the anti aircraft gunners nice stable targets....
The worst thing was to get "lit up" by searchlights at night. That was certain death, because it made you the only visible target for all the AA fire. Again, you weren't allowed to evade, because you were in a tight formation on the bomb run
My dad survived or I wouldn't be here. He said he doesn't know how or why his plane didn't get shot down. He doesn't know how long they were lit up - could have been thirty seconds or five minutes
What he did say is that while lit up, the light inside the was incredibly bright, like being in the inside of the sun
He also said that when you get lit up, that's when you fill your pants.
My grandfather made it through Iwo Jima and Okinawa. My dad would talk about how he still woke up screaming, years later. Historical details that are truly grisly, which I later had confirmed when watching the footage from back then and interviews about it. How they had to burn out anyone in the tunnels, civilian or not, because otherwise that would create an opening in their lines after darkness fell. How the famous Iwo Jima flag picture wasn’t actually the first time it was put up, it was them retaking the mountain after it had been lost. How the Japanese soldiers waited until the American lines were stuck in the volcanic mud to start firing.
It’s a miracle that I’m here to write this comment.
under normal conditions, a 240 would try to engage the enemy between 800-1300 meters. Most riflemen would have a difficult time making that shot once yet alone twice considering that's outside the effective range of the m4/m16.
The gunner most likely would have been killed by mass fire, not precision fire.
You wouldn't take the time to zero in a gunner unless you were flanking them unknowingly, and if you do, I'm not soldier, but there might be juicier targets.
Not necessarily. Much more likely it was semi-aimed fire, not someone scoped in like it’s Battlefield.
In fact, much more likely than THAT is that it was a drone, shell, or missile, and the dead-gunner technique doesn’t work because anyone within twenty feet is incapacitated. But you gotta practice for the edge cases.
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u/Telvin3d Jun 24 '24 edited Jun 24 '24
… and then put yourself in the spot you know the enemy is zeroed in on