Small Arms Accuracy in Combat Situations

[Balrog]

It's something that comes up often not only in scifi debates, but other discussions as well - supposedly trained warriors in fiction having a damn hard time hitting the broad side of a barn, or so it goes.

But alas my search-fu has failed me, and so I come here to ask, have there ever been any studies done about the accuracy of real life soldiers during combat? Does it vary by type of training, equipment, situation, et cetera?

[Sea Skimmer]

It varies by how much the enemy shoots back, more then anything else. The best trained man on earth with the best weapon on earth isn’t going to hit much when he can only pop over the lip of his trench for a half second and squeeze off a few shots at a tree line 300 yards away before ducking back down. Most gunfire in combat is only aimed in the general ‘towards the enemy’ sense in the first place and intended as suppressive fire.

Meanwhile if you are a sniper on a rooftop in Iraq with the streets around you filled with M1 tanks, and dozens of Marines around you, all looking at a building 50 yards away which has a single insurgent hiding in it and just waiting for him to show himselve, accuracy is obviously going to be better.

In the end in large scale conventional combat individual weapons are really just a way to defend tanks and artillery observers while they do the real killing.

[Raj Ahten]

I suggest checking out the FBI's Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted report, which is available online at FBI.gov. It has detailed descriptions of every incident in which a US law enforcement officer was killed in the line of duty each year including number of shots fired by both sides, whether anyone was wearing body armor, etc. In a lot of cases multiple rounds are fired with few hits, in fact I'd say that is the norm for most shootouts. Be warned though; it can be pretty chilling reading at times.

[Pablo Sanchez]

In the end in large scale conventional combat individual weapons are really just a way to defend tanks and artillery observers while they do the real killing.

For a specific figure the number of small-arms rounds expended per enemy killed in Vietnam is usually given at 50,000. The vast majority of these were fired to suppress the enemy. Even in a small-unit infantry action that doesn't involve vehicles or heavy crew-served weapons a lot of rounds will be fired without specific intent to kill an enemy. What actually happens is, IIRC, called "fire and movement." One part of the infantry unit will fire in the direction of the enemy to suppress them to the point that they are unable to maneuver or effectively return fire. Once the enemy is suppressed the other element of the unit is able to maneuver without being killed and moves to a position from which they can kill the enemy with rifle fire, grenades, bayonets, etc. The fact that its necessary to shower the landscape in hundreds and thousands of bullets just to move around indicates that combat is actually extremely lethal; soldiers attempting to maneuver without having heavily suppressed their enemy would almost certainly be killed. The apparent inaccuracy of small arms fire is thus ironically a function of how dangerous it actually is.

[weemadando]

One statistic that I've read was that for the War on Terror was it was something like 10,000 rounds per "kill".

That isn't exactly a true figure for infantry engagements alone (as it was based off figures for total ammunition expenditure in the field), but it gives you an idea.

[Spoonist]

It's something that comes up often not only in scifi debates, but other discussions as well - supposedly trained warriors in fiction having a damn hard time hitting the broad side of a barn, or so it goes.

But alas my search-fu has failed me, and so I come here to ask, have there ever been any studies done about the accuracy of real life soldiers during combat? Does it vary by type of training, equipment, situation, et cetera?

As others have adressed it varies a lot by the situation. However if you are looking at the situations where this comes up, ie movies, then you will notice that a lot of the irritation and flames comes from how the director shows the scene and how the actors act. If the scene is a long corridor with the protagonists firing at each other while standing/walking towards each other then its simply not OK that they consistently miss each other. So even if you in real life war have to fire thousands of rounds for each kill, that does not address the matter of SW/ST/SG etc where they indeed prove that most of them cannot even hit the barn from the inside. Instead if addressing the issue one should look at similar situations and compare them.

[Nathaniel]

One statistic that I've read was that for the War on Terror was it was something like 10,000 rounds per "kill".

That isn't exactly a true figure for infantry engagements alone (as it was based off figures for total ammunition expenditure in the field), but it gives you an idea.

250,000 apparently

[Dark Flame]

There's another factor that I've read a little bit about, but I don't know how to account for it. Anyways, how many soldiers, cops, whoever, actually aim with intent to kill when they have the ability? I understand that suppressive fire is the vast majority of what's going on, but when a SWAT team busts through the door or the soldier sees a bad guy pop his head up and not move, how many of them intend to miss and how does this affect those statistics?

I'm specifically thinking of the book On Killing, here. Human nature and the natural mental resistance to killing fellow humans is a factor, but I don't know if it's large enough to be noticed or even if we can ever know what sort of effect this is.

I really hope this makes sense...

[weemadando]

One statistic that I've read was that for the War on Terror was it was something like 10,000 rounds per "kill".

That isn't exactly a true figure for infantry engagements alone (as it was based off figures for total ammunition expenditure in the field), but it gives you an idea.

250,000 apparently

That's right - it was 10,000 in WW2 and 250.000 now.

[Spoonist]

There's another factor that I've read a little bit about, but I don't know how to account for it. Anyways, how many soldiers, cops, whoever, actually aim with intent to kill when they have the ability? I understand that suppressive fire is the vast majority of what's going on, but when a SWAT team busts through the door or the soldier sees a bad guy pop his head up and not move, how many of them intend to miss and how does this affect those statistics?

I'm specifically thinking of the book On Killing, here. Human nature and the natural mental resistance to killing fellow humans is a factor, but I don't know if it's large enough to be noticed or even if we can ever know what sort of effect this is.

I really hope this makes sense...

This is an old fact and myth. It is a fact that in World War I there are plenty of anecdotes about soldiers unwilling to fire directly upon the enemy with the intent to kill. It is also fact that several incidents of soldiers refusing to kill exposed enemies occured. However the extrapolation of this to WWII and other wars is usually based on the book Men against fire which turned out to be myth...
What S.L.A Marshall and his supporters where doing where taking things out of its context. In WWI there was a great upheaval in all of europe and some of the soldiers where forced recruits. So what you had was that the troops of almost all the major sides felt more with the soldiers in the other trench than they did with their commanders and politicians. Especially so after the first two years when the horrendeus losses where obvious to all soldiers while being censored at home to the civilian population. Also most officers was living in luxury while the men in many cases was starving. Etc.
For good and bad, in the era of WWII propaganda made the soldiers more committed and the objectives more clear. Also the fronts where moving which did not give the static feeling of futility. So what had been something "known" in WWI, was not backed up with evidence in WWII.

So even if it is true that there are some who are relucant to fire directly and killing people, this is not a factor which is as big as the myth describes it to be.

[Sea Skimmer]

One statistic that I've read was that for the War on Terror was it was something like 10,000 rounds per "kill".

That isn't exactly a true figure for infantry engagements alone (as it was based off figures for total ammunition expenditure in the field), but it gives you an idea.

250,000 apparently

That's right - it was 10,000 in WW2 and 250.000 now.

Except since no one actually has accurate records of expenditure that figure is almost certainly based on ammunition shipped to the theater. That would mean all the ammo the US stockpiled as a contingency against Iran invading or mass uprisings in all Iraqi cities simultaneously would be counted in the figure. Lucky Saddam, having had his own absurd ammunition pile left us plenty of bunkers in remote areas of desert to store it all in.

[Coyote]

Bear in mind that a LOT of shooting now is also being done from the backs of moving vehicles. That won't help.