The Americans now use their own variation of the FN MAG, akin to our L7A2's.  I don't know if they use SF kits with them.

 

I don't know about the FN MAG although I doubt it has the same capacity to be used like an artillery piece by which I mean that a GPMG line can be tasked to fire on pre-recorded map coordinates at night 4km away. 

Something like that

 

 

I met up with the guys at a Regimental dinner last year.  It seems that things have not changed too much since I left. 

 

The Op's still have to draw their panorama's.  They still have to do silent marking.  There is a ground track radar and portable laser which work very well together.  The same principles of old fashioned 'steam gunnery' still apply.  If you are in a dedicated Warrior OPV then that is much easier.  One of the biggest advances is the way in which the data can be sent directly to the CP rather than relying on laborious and exacting fire orders sent over the net.

 

They are doing a lot more fire planning nowadays.

In the SF role the GPMG can be fired like a mortar using the C2 sight.  I don't know about the range however, and the calculations are more complex than for mortars (due to the extra effect of wind drift etc on the lighter projectiles).  I heard that it takes up to 40 mins per gun to set it up.

Does it really take that long to set up?  They can certainly switch fire quickly.  It is good fun to stand on a GMPG line and bark out some quick orders,

 

"Gun group commander?"

 

A hand shoots up.

 

"Cease fire on Bond Street , fire on Oxford Street."

 

The order is repeated. The sights are then recallibrated and the guns swing round and fire off in another direction.

 

Soldiers have often been killed in live fire exercises when the order to switch fire has come too late.

The method of fire you are refering to is direct fire using the weapon with iron sights, if the target is visible, or the C2 sight, if the target is obscured and its location previously logged/marked.  It is indeed very fast switching from target to target with a well trained section.

 

I have never actually seen the guns fired like a mortar, I have only heard about some theory, from talking to a SF section commander.

As a side note, I think it fairly stupid that we still use the C2 sight in the SF role, it is far more suited to mortars.

 

As I said, we never seem to use the guns in such a role (I believe we tried to once in the Falklands, but for whatever reason the guns were not employed).  I think we would be far better off spending the money on modern thermal sights for the guns, which obviously mean you can see through night and smoke, vastly reducing the chance of the target being obscured.