Suppressive Fire

(I received the following question via email. While I'm pretty sure I've mentioned the answer in passing several times herein, I figured it can never hurt to pound the answers in a little better.....--J.M.)

From a reader:

"And now my question, which you may wish to elaborate on in your blog: What is a good rate of fire for suppressive fire? Is there a rule of thumb for determining rate of fire for the area being suppressed and the number of friendly troops available?"
My response, in its entirety:


I generally try to teach two standard answers, modified by METT-TC (obviously).

The first magazine spent during an engagement, whether a react-to-contact, or react-to-ambush, gets put downrange as fast as you can humanly put it downrange, with any degree of accuracy. Rounds are put into every known, suspected, or likely position of enemy concealment or cover. I tell guys to try and achieve 4-5 rounds per second, as long as they're getting two or three rounds into every hidey-hole. The whole purpose is to keep the enemy's head down while the maneuver element begins to bound around, and to keep the enemy from having any opportunity to accurately respond to your fire. It's all about fire superiority at that point. Obviously, if you're discussing a far ambush situation, at 300+ meters, that's going to be slowed way the fuck down, but as I've been trying to get across, the G has a need to get inside and fight at eye-gouging distance if he wants to win without losing the fight to supporting fires, so it's a relevant and realistic target to aim for.

After the first mag is dumped, the shooter(s) should perform a speed reload (again, to maintain continuity of fires, since everyone is going to be running out at the same general time), and re-engage, slowing his rate of fire to one round or so every two seconds. Here, the idea is still to target known, suspected, or likely enemy positions, but you HAVE to slow it down to conserve ammunition. As the base-of-fire element is providing suppressive fire, if one man runs dry, he needs to COMMUNICATE with his buddies to let them know he's changing magazines.

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