mr.fred wrote:Section firepower is an interesting topic, to which we should ask: what is firepower?
It it the effect you have on the enemy or the amount of ammunition you can convert into noise?
A good point, as we are now in April of 2019, the below attempted to give an answer:
"Reports that the British Army was firmly considering moving away from suppression in favour of precision in infantry fire-fights surfaced at a specialist Soldier Technology conference in London in early 2016 and at a Future Soldier Technology conference this spring more detail surfaced. One of the current underlying British Army’s mantras is ‘Fight Light’ and in this context casting some weapons types might make sense.
Both the 5.56mm L86A2, generally known as the Light Support Weapon, and the 5.56mm L110A3 Light Machine Gun, the FN Minimi, will be withdrawn from service at the end of the current fiscal year (i.e. by April 2019), along with the M6C-640 60mm mortar. It has been stated that
to partially compensate for this reduction in firepower of the infantry section the number of 7.62mm L129A1 Sharpshooter rifles could be increased, but to date there is no sign of an order being placed for more of these, and it has also been hinted that the hand-held mortar will be replaced by another system currently under
evaluation." from 12 Aug 2018
UK News, joint-forces.com
As we have over 3000 of those rifles, assuming 1 per section would cover 21.000 front line infantry
- scale that with the A-stan numbers, of the total deployed (at peak) 3000 were frontline infantry. For the sniper's number two, for A-stan needs the MoD purchased 580 PLRF 15C’ Pocket laser Rangefinders from the Swiss company Vectronix in 2008.
- I presume that at normal section level there is no number two, but all optics used are attached to the weapon? Take the specialists away, and you can still kit out 2000 sections and have a good number in armouries. As the trained infantry numbers hover around 25k (add 10% on top, from Gurkhas in infantry roles... and not forgetting the RM) how many sections does that make?