Modern Defensive Fighting Positions
Modern militaries publish and distribute elaborate field manuals for the proper construction of DFPs in stages. Each stage develops the fighting position, gradually increasing its effectiveness, while always maintaining functionality. In this way a soldier can improve the position over time, while being able to stop at any time and use the position in a fight.
Typically, a DFP is a pit dug deep enough to stand in, with only the head exposed, and a small step at the bottom that allows the soldier to sit down in the hole to avoid fire and tank treads. Also, there are usually deeper, narrow slits called grenade sumps at the bottom to allow a grenade to be kicked in to minimize damage.
Time permitting, DFPs can be enlarged to allow a machine gun crew and ammunition to be protected, as well as additional overhead cover via timbers.
-
US Marines digging 'fighting holes' near the Iraqi border, 2003.
-
US Navy Seabees digging 'hasty scrapes', 2003.
-
US Navy Seabees near completed fighting position, 2003.
-
US Navy Seabees constructing a defensive machine gun position during training, 2010.
-
US Navy Seabees with a completed defensive machine gun position during training, 2008.
-
US Navy Seabees completed defensive machine gun position during training with camouflage netting and timber supports, 2010.
Read more about this topic: Defensive Fighting Position
Famous quotes containing the words modern, defensive, fighting and/or positions:
“Families have always been in flux and often in crisis; they have never lived up to nostalgic notions about “the way things used to be.” But that doesn’t mean the malaise and anxiety people feel about modern families are delusions, that everything would be fine if we would only realize that the past was not all it’s cracked up to be. . . . Even if things were not always right in families of the past, it seems clear that some things have newly gone wrong.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“We find that even the parents who justify spanking to themselves are defensive and embarrassed about it....I suspect that deep in the memory of every parent are the feelings that had attended his own childhood spankings, the feelings of humiliation, of helplessness, of submission through fear. The parent who finds himself spanking his own child cannot dispel the ghosts of his own childhood.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Every good cause gained a victory when the Union troops were triumphant. Our final victory was the triumph of religion, of virtue, of knowledge.... During those four years, whatever our motives, whatever our lives, we were fighting on God’s side. We were doing His work. What would this country have been if we had failed?”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)