"Police officers responded to a domestic dispute, accompanied by marines. They had just gone up to the door when two shotgun birdshot rounds were fired through the door, hitting the officers. One yelled `cover me!' to the marines, who then laid down a heavy base of fire. . . . The police officer had not meant `shoot' when he yelled `cover me' to the marines. [He] meant . . . point your weapons and be prepared to respond if necessary. However, the marines responded instantly in the precise way they had been trained, where `cover me' means provide me with cover using firepower. . . . over two hundred bullets [were] fired into that house."
First of all, let me say this isn't light reading. Unless you're interested in military doctrine and such you'll find this to be quite heavy reading.
However it's fascinating to note the timeline of the riots and the response by the California National Guard, and what they were up against, and how the LAPD probably abused and misused them being there, as well as understandably not ever relly being sure what the troops could and could not do.
First of all, I'm not entirely sure I'd grasped the scope of the riots. The paper refers to the area as roughly a hundred square miles. That may or may not be accurate. At any rate, upon further review it probably *was* a much larger area than I ever realized at the time.
Secondly, if you're to believe the facts in this report the CA National Guard (CANG) botched their deployment. They didn't get ammo out to troops in a timely fashion, nor did they give strict enough deployment orders to the various units as to what they should and shouldn't do. The result was that CANG officers often wandered around to various police units and stations trying to find something for their guys to do. Naturally this was well-intended (they're there, they might as well jump right in and it is admittedly best to not leave them idle). However as the quote leading off this post shows, there were differences in doctrine that nobody had accounted for.
One of the other issues at hand apparently revolved around a difference in how the LAPD felt it was also CANG's duty to help maintain "Law & Order", and the CANG themselves felt they were only limited to restoring "Law & Order" according to the original Executive Order.
"It [JTF-LA] required each request for assistance to be subjected to a nebulous test to determine whether the requested assignment constituted a law enforcement or a military function. As a result, after the federalization on May 1 . . . not only were the federal troops rendered largely unavailable for most assignments requested by the LAPD, but the National Guard, under federal command, was made subject to the same restrictions, and therefore had to refuse many post-federalization requests for help."
Regarding the "cover me" story at the beginning of this article:
According to the footnotes at the end of the paper, a man, woman, and their two children were inside the house at the time this happened. Fortunately, in what could otherwise have been an absolutely horrible situation, no one was injured or killed.
Not to make light of something so serious, but does anybody else find it a little disturbing that a team of Marines can unload 200 rounds into a small house without actually hitting anything?
Well to be fair, Dave, they're not taught to aim. The average soldier is taught to fire as many rounds as they can into the general vicinity of the target or enemy.
This is because in (I think) WWII the US army discovered that their troops often failed to fire shots back at all, or didn't fire many shots back. Too many of them were taking time to try and aim every last shot. Well, when you're a unit you're (in theory) just better off randomly peppering an area with fire rather than each soldier trying to aim. And I believe it was in Vietnam (though I could be wrong), that they started finally teaching and using the "Shoot As Much As You Can in the General Vicinity of the Enemy" technique. The army likes the idea of more firepower outpower over betetr-aimed, more-efficient shots.
Suppression fire is just as valuable (if not moreso) as deliberately aimed fire in most modern militaries.
-- Primis.
Well, yeah, I see the advantage of quantity over quality when it comes to mowing down the enemy in a hail of bullets. It's like a Massive Spanking From the Arm of God, as opposed to a well-placed precision b****-slap. But even so, 200 bullets and not a scratch on anybody seems miraculous.
Speaking of Massive Spankings From the Arm of God, I'm reminded of a story I heard once from a guy who operates a paintball course. He occasionally hosts a group of prison guards who use the course for training, and apparently you never ever ever want to play paintball against prison guards. They have a tendency to unload an entire canister of ammo at close range in the process of making a kill. (And they crank up the pressure on their guns to two or three times the normal amount, for extra sting.) But if you can imagine that, it should illustrate how mean and nasty a giant wall of incoming rounds oughta be.
Having played paintball, and having charged an "enemy" position concealing multiple opponents *by myself*, and having summarily been subjected to a withering amount of fire and hit by about 8 shots int he span of about a second and a half while other shots whizzed by.... I think I can imagine it. ;-)
Speedball is also a fun paintball variant if you enjoy the sun being blocked out by paint rounds flying everywhere. The course is so small that you're required to constantly fire from start to finish.
It's not totally unusual to turn the pressure up on guns though. Most courses won't let you for liability reasons, but most groups who play on private land or whatnot tend to do just like you described because, well, they can.
-- Primis.