How do they prevent friendly fire between the base of fire and manoeuvre force IRL?

[Gungalley]

So, in circumstances where a manoeuvre force has to advance while the base of fire provides suprressing fire and flanking is not an option (assaulting a building, or a wide line of trenches for example), they would have to advance from more or less the same direction (say from bearing 180 and bearing 135 respectively). How do armies IRL prevent friendly fire in such cases? In CM, small arms fire dont seem to cause a lot of friendly fire (from my limited experience), so I'm really curious how this works out IRL.

 

Thanks.

[chuckdyke]

12 minutes ago, Gungalley said:

I'm really curious how this works out IRL.

 

Here is a guy worth watching. 

 

[womble]

4 hours ago, Gungalley said:

 In CM, small arms fire dont seem to cause a lot of friendly fire (from my limited experience)...

I can't give much useful help about your main question but I can shed light here... Your limited experience is 100% accurate within certain parameters in CM. Small arms are defined as bullets of less than 12mm calibre, so your Ma Deuce and its peers will inflict friendly casualties. And ricochets don't have any concept of "friendly", so even standard rifle and pistol calibre ammo can cause damage to your friends once it's bounced off a wall.

[Thewood1]

Part of it is in squad and platoon training around fire lanes.  Even a hasty attack has some semblance of fire lanes.  That's why training as a squad and platoon is so important.  They really don't mean much in the CM AI mind.

[Erwin]

Yes, the AI doesn't care about causing friendly casualties.  One has to be very careful never to position inf that may end up between an enemy and an AFV with LOS to that enemy.

[Howler]

Watch your suppression meter though. It is effected by nearby fire from friendlies.

[Cepheus76]

Section III in Chapter 2 of FM 3-21.8 The Infantry Platoon and Rifle Squad gives some insight how the US Army seeks to avoid danger to the own troops when engaging the enemy. Somewhere else there's also a table showing minimum distances to fire lanes to avoid that the own soldiers are endangered by the sabots discarded by armor penetrating ammunitions. I think for a Bradley its somewhere around 70 meters lateral offset and for tank main guns it's much much more.