gatnerd said:

Not that my youthful days of playing paintball and airsoft count as combat experience, but what I observed was the closer one was to the 'enemy' the more ROF increased and aiming decreased.

Likewise when taking close fire, the natural reaction was to duck, stick your gun over the top, and put out as much fire as you could to try and counter the fire without exposing too much of your body to getting shot.

I've seen a number of combat videos that looked much the same.

Having played paintball in the past as well and having participated in some quite intense simulated combat for training my opinion nowadays is that paintball and an actual firefight have a lot in common. Except for the dieing part. The behaviour of the participants is pretty similar. Unless we talk about the highly sportive small field, inflated obstacle paintball. But if you are crawling around in the woods or an abandoned factory building in camo its pretty close. So IMHO conclusion can be drawn.

gatnerd said:

I suspect in a real war, HIC combat, lots of NGSW employment will look quite different then the expected 'aim carefully and engage from long range using the smart scope' thats envisioned.

As Farmplinker I agree.

The thing is that the US now has gone full circle with their small arms.
They entered WW2, a no holds barred HIC scenario, with a full caliber rifle. Which has been found unnecessarily powerfull. Basically all other participants came to the same conclusion. So they started to downscale. Which worked great in the following wars. But with the steady move away from HIC and imposing self limitation on what means can be used heavy weapons, that dominate HIC type scenarios since the invention of rapid fire cannons and the machine gun, had less and less effect. This caused a change in the behaviour of the opposition and all of a sudden the short range optimised equipment intended to function under the umbrella of massed heavy weapons showed drawbacks and limitations. The reaction has been to move back to step one, more than a century back to befor heavy weapons being a dominant factor... only they are. A self imposed limit to heavy weapons doesn't mean they are not there.
Now in UA we see what modern HIC really looks like. Since the NGSW has been optimised for a different scenario its IMHO very likely that it will work less then optimal in a similar one to UA.

The Modern Tactical Shooting channel had a video on why NGSW is a bad idea. One of the things he pointed out was most Ukrainian firefights are 100 meters and in, he hadn't seen evidence of any past 300 meters.

The "explosive-heavy" infantry talked about here is probably a good idea based on Ukraine.

Interesting thread on Russias shifting tactics and formation of 'Assault Units' and the weapons employed. Whole thread worth reading.

Twitter

Tatarigami_UA on Twitter

1/16 Russian forces are revamping their assault tactics after experiencing failures with their current structure.... https://t.co/pJfEGJhX5X

Read more from Twitter

New tranche of weapons being ordered - lots of Excalibur, SHORAD, HIMARS, GMLRS, and possibly GMLRS-ER...

Twitter

Thomas C. Theiner on Twitter

A new Pentagon budget realignment file dropped (with $3.8 billions of new orders). Again it has a lot of interestin... https://t.co/KOEsHMtDHr

Read more from Twitter

This is a fun one. Cardboard drones from Australia - and they apparently work well.

Twitter

CasualtiesOfTheDay on Twitter

At least 100 incredibly cheap ($1000-$5000) Australian drones made of cardboard+rubber bands are being delivered to... https://t.co/U2EQLku94L

Read more from Twitter

Meanwhile, at least on sector has decided to transition from grenade dropping drones to FPV Suicide Drones, presumably because they can use RPG warheads.

Twitter

Veteran Aid Ukraine on Twitter

Changes to "OP Ragnarok". A After meeting with Ukrainian commanders and drone operators we have decided to chan... https://t.co/royNxzLQPd

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Interesting look at how 40x53 grenades are modified to work as drone dropped munitions. They basically have to completely tear them down then re-fuse them.

YouTube

Ukrainian Territorial Defence Brigade shows off pin point accurate drone attacks

This footage released by the 'I.T.' and 'Batya' aerial recon teams of the Lviv TDF Brigade shows Ukrainain troops using weaponised drones to attack Russian f...

Russian disguised fuel truck with integral 'Nyet Net' for stopping drone dropped grenades. It's a cargo truck, which is packed with cubic fuel containers to make it into a fuel truck.

Waiting for Schnuersi  to tell us his great-grandfather carried one like it in WW1;).