page_title: Suppressive fire
section_title: Direct fire weapons
hierarchical_section_title: Suppressive fire / Weapons used / Direct fire weapons
caption_attribution_description: English: EX-U.S. Navy special warfare combatant-craft crewmen (SWCC) from Special Boat Team 22 drive a special operations craft-riverine at the John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi Aug. 16, 2009, for a scene in an upcoming Bandito Brothers production (Act of Valor). SWCC are U.S. Special Operations Command maritime mobility experts.
context_page_description: In military science, suppressive fire is "fire that degrades the performance of an enemy force below the level needed to fulfill its mission". When used to protect friendly troops advancing on the battlefield, it is commonly called covering fire. Suppression is usually only effective for the duration of the fire. It is one of three types of fire support, which is defined by NATO as "the application of fire, coordinated with the maneuver of forces, to destroy, neutralize or suppress the enemy".
  Before NATO defined the term, the British and Commonwealth armies generally used "neutralization" with the same definition as suppression. NATO now defines neutralization as "fire delivered to render a target temporarily ineffective or unusable."
context_section_description: A rifle or machine gun bullet only has a suppressive effect within about one metre of its trajectory.  However, both can be used to suppress an enemy within a small area, often called "winning the fire fight".
  Machine gun fire is also available from armoured fighting vehicles and aircraft, notably helicopters and perhaps fixed wing aircraft such as AC-130. Automatic cannon (20–40 mm) or grenade fire may also be available and fire from larger direct fire systems such as tanks. However, limited ammunition loads mean that such systems are better suited to destructive fire against precisely identified targets unless the required suppression time period is short.
  In Afghanistan, the Mujahideen often modified RPG-7 rocket launchers for use against Russian helicopters by adding a curved pipe to the end of the blast tube, which diverted the backblast, allowing the RPG to be fired upward at aircraft from a prone position. At the time, Soviet helicopters countered the threat from RPGs at landing zones by first clearing them with saturation anti-personnel suppression fire from machine guns.
  The Russians used the Dragunov sniper rifle at the platoon level for providing special long-distance disrupting and suppressive fire on the battlefield, even with sudden close encounters with enemy troops in mind.
caption: U.S. Navy special warfare combatant-craft crewman (SWCC) of Special Boat Team 22 conducts training.
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