Give ’em hell!
Via The Drive:
Since the U.S. military began its campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, American troops, primarily special operators, have been creeping closer to the front lines and toward increasingly active combat. A new, official video provides measurable clues about just how close conventional forces now are to enemy in the fight to finally eject the terrorists from their de facto capital in Iraq, Mosul.
On May 19, 2017, the U.S. Army’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division published another in a set of videos of its soldiers supporting Iraqi security forces (ISF) in and around Mosul. Unlike the other footage – which showed paratroopers flying in to a helicopter landing zone on UH-60 Black Hawks, driving and walking through liberated streets inside the city, delivering ammunition, and training Iraqi police snipers – this particular clip followed a mortar section providing relatively close-range fire support. Other images show the mortars in action in or near Mosul as early as March, 14, 2017.
The team from the 82nd Airborne fires or prepared to fire both the 81mm M252 and the 120mm M120 mortars in the video. The M252 has a maximum range of almost three and a half miles, but can also hit targets less than 300 feet away. The significantly larger M120 can toss shells nearly four and half miles away while still able to hit the enemy at ranges just over 650 feet. […]
What this means is that, most likely, these soldiers from the 82nd Airborne were within that range of their enemy. The top American command leading the coalition campaign against ISIS, Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR), appeared to confirm the close-in and less precise nature of the mortars. “CJTF-OIR considers mortars an area weapons system used for protection of Coalition forces and for suppression of enemy forces,” the task force’s media office told The War Zone in an Email.
While the U.S. military has employed artillery in support of Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting ISIS before, it had done so at appreciable distances thanks to 155mm howitzers and 227mm rocket artillery systems. Both of these weapons have the ability to attack targets with GPS-guided rounds dozens of miles away.