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Assault rifles are selective fire intermediate-power rifles.
Note: this term should not be confused with the loosely-defined term assault weapon, which refers to any number of classes of pistols, rifles, and shotguns.
The typical mission of an assault rifle is to provide fire support at ranges up to 200 meters by ordinary troops. It is designed for massed anti-personnel fire at short ranges with simple maintenance.
Doctrines about the desirability of this rifle vary. Studies by the U.S. Army indicate that most conflicts between soldiers occur at ranges of 100 meters or less. Russian doctrine asserts that the typical soldier is unable to aim beyond 400 meters, and therefore 400 m should be the ultimate aimed range of a rifle for massed fire.
As a massed military weapon, assault rifles share common features: light weight, hand grips positioned for good instinctive pointing (for unaimed "intuitive" fire), bayonet lugs (to provide lethality without ammunition), selectable fire rates, high reliability, large magazines, and simplified operation. Many lightweight semiautomatic civilian rifles, meant only for personal defence use, provide similar features but omit selective-fire and bayonet lugs.
Assault rifles cause injuries more often than death. Doctrines vary concerning this effect. The U.S. military states that this is an intentional goal. Enemy logistics are overloaded with wounded, and the lack of deaths is seen by the enemy and those pulling the trigger as more merciful, enabling average troops to pull the trigger with less guilt. Some Russian accounts state that the lower lethality is an accidental side-effect of the cartridge's smaller powder charge, which they tried to overcome by making the bullet more lethal at lower energies. (See AK-47 for details).
The fastest select-fire setting of the U.S. M16A2 rifle engages a three-part automatic sear that fires "optimal" three-round bursts for each pull of the trigger. The U.S. Army uses this feature to enhance the reliability of a shot under combat conditions. The U.S. still does not issue fully automatic weapons to ordinary riflemen in order to reduce the amount (and thus the weight) of ammunition carried by soldiers and support vehicles. In the 1990s, however, the new fully automatic M4A1 carbine was issued in large quantities to radio operators, officers, and troops other than front line riflemen.
Most assault rifles are capable of fully automatic fire, many do not include finite bursts, like the M16A2. The idea is that a trained soldier can effectively use aimed automatic bursts without fear of spray and pray. The low training time for US soldiers is often blamed on the known inability of the soldiers to control their fire, (the US regular force basic training is 8 weeks, the Canadian reserve force basic training is 12 weeks.) Also the US focuses mainly on physical soldiering skills, whereas most other modern nations focus more on mental soldier skills, ('boot camp' is typically used to describe military basic training, whereas calling the basic training of most other nations 'boot camp' is considered a grave insult.)
Some later models of the Russian Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles can reduce the rate of fire below five rounds per second. Although this may aid logistics, lowered logistic loads is said to be a doctrine of secondary importance. The lower rate of fire is to help moderately skilled shooters, while it is said to limit better shooters. Many Russian troops apparently dislike this accessory, because it reduces the rate of fire during the assault, and is less reliable than a simple automatic sear.
To reduce logistic problems, and still provide high rates of fire, some current military doctrines employ a squad automatic weapon used by one or a few specially-trained soldiers in a squad. The term squad is largely a US term, where the equivalent to a squad automatic weapon is a part of most normal military training. Fully automatic assault rifles can, at a pinch, replace a light machine gun. Another very common method is to have one of the riflemen (the nearest and typically a fireteam partner), pick up the gun of a fallen machinegunner and thence, until proper unit reorg, become a machine gunner himself. Some weapons such as the AK-47, although classified as assault rifles, were designed as light infantry automatic weapons with single-shot capability, rather than rifles with the option of full -automatic fire, such as the M16A1. Therefore, the doctrines associated are often weapon dependent.
When assault rifles were adopted, ordinary troops became less able to perform sniping. Russian and Russian-derived doctrines retain squad-level snipers, while the U.S. and its derived doctrines maintain a sniper team at battalionIn military terminology, a battalion consists of two to six companies typically commanded by a lieutenant colonel. The nomenclature varies by nationality and by branch of arms, e. some armies organize their infantry into battalions, but call battalion-siz level.
In the late 1970sMillennia: 1st millennium 2nd millennium 3rd millennium Centuries: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s Years: 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 Events and trends, after experience in VietnamThe Vietnam War was a war fought between 1957 and 1975 on the ground in South Vietnam and bordering areas of Cambodia and Laos See Secret War) and in bombing runs ( Rolling Thunder) over North Vietnam. See also the timeline of the Vietnam War. Fighting on, the Russians adopted lighter weight weapons. The helicopterA helicopter is an aircraft which is lifted and propelled by one or more large horizontal rotors ( propellers). Helicopters are classified as rotary-wing aircraft to distinguish them from conventional fixed-wing aircraft. The word helicopter is derived fr had become an important, perhaps the primary, means of resupplying embattled troops. At this point, the USSRThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR ( Russian: ; tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (SSSR) also called the Soviet Union ( ; tr. Sovetsky Soyuz , was a state in much of the northern region of Eurasia that existed from 1922 until 1 adopted an even lower-weight cartridge (5.45mm) and rifle, the AK 74.
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