Special Tactics: Small Unit Machine Gun Employment

The machine gun is in many ways the backbone and most decisive weapon system in modern infantry units. Effective machine gun employment has made the difference between victory and defeat in countless modern combat engagements from the First World War to the War on Terror. However, despite how important machine guns are on the modern battlefield, there are remarkably few books and references that focus specifically on how machine guns work and how to use them on the battlefield. This book aims to provide machine gunners with a short, simple but comprehensive reference that is easy to understand and apply to real-world mission requirements.

The book covers basic principles in detail and should be accessible and easy to understand even for those with little to no prior experience with machine guns. However, because the book focuses on topics not often covered in existing manuals, we expect that even the most experienced machine gunners will find useful information in the following pages. One of the main focuses of this book is how information is presented visually to the reader. Machine gun employment is a physical skill that takes place on a three-dimensional battlefield. Some of the topics in this book are covered in other machine gun manuals but they are presented using only a few, small, black-and-white illustrations, making it difficult to visualize concepts and how they apply to real-world battle. This book takes the opposite approach and takes maximum advantage of large, color pictures and diagrams.

This book covers a wide variety of topics, tactics, techniques and procedures for machine gun employment in a rural environment. Topics include:

• Machine gun squad and platoon task organization
• Machine gun theory, ballistics and rate of fire considerations
• Types of fire including grazing, plunging, enfilade, defilade and indirect
• Fire control and direct fire control measures
• Fire commands, range cards, surface danger zones and T&E mechanism
• Final protective line and predetermined fire applications
• Crew drills and offensive/assault employment
• Machine gun battlecraft, tactics, fire and maneuver
• Training techniques for machine gun teams