Or is it like in the movies, they just keep fighting as if nothing happenend?
In: 191
When I served as an IFV gunner, the vehicle commander would report on radio that we i.e had engaged and defeated enemy infantry of squad size and defeated i.e 1 enemy IFV to the platoon leader (or company hq since I was the platoon leaders gunner).
Often soldiers have no idea they’ve killed someone.
The artillery fires from dozens of km away. The troops pulling the lanyard will often never know what they were shooting at.
Even the Infantry often just let fly in the general direction of the enermy. It is often difficult to even correctly ascertain where fire is coming from.
I’ve fired my rifle in the direction I believe I was getting contact from. If I hit anyone it was purely luck/accident.
I was in the army. For regular soldiers, we just engage – there is no reporting or confirmation. After it’s all said and done you relay an estimate to command, but there is no official tally on an individual service members record.
It varies depending on country, war, branch of service, job, mission, etc.
But very generally speaking, there’s reporting conducted at the end of the engagement.
We had to do BDAs in Afghanistan, and then shot reports once we got back to our patrol base. Everyone knew who the good shots were. Only the psychos boasted about their count.
Not really. As pilots we can log our actual weapon release and impacts in a training activity report that goes in our flight records but unless you’re keeping track yourself there is no tracking people. Honestly it’s a little morbid but I do know folks who do it.
If there was a process to report kia outside of a daily sitrep for the ODA, I wasn’t aware of it.
After action report. “We took ambush fire, I popped a guy in the melon and he went down.”
“Yeah I saw that.”
Confirmed kill.
If you are thinking of the movie trope about “confirmed kills”, know that that’s only really a thing for snipers and pilots.
Snipers have logbooks (and spotters), because a sniper’s primary job isn’t necessarily even sniping. It’s scouting. They’re reporting enemy activity they saw, to include anyone they killed. Especially those of higher consequence (ie, high ranking).
Pilots keep track of air to air kills because they’re extremely rare, since the last real peer to peer fight we had with an enemy air force was in Vietnam. Five kills makes you an “ace”, and there hasn’t been one of those since Vietnam.
Normal soldiers/Marines may keep track personally of how many or who they’ve killed, but it’s not an official statistic. It will absolutely be mentioned and tracked as part of a larger after action report after any enemy contact, because that plays into the larger intelligence picture on enemy activity. But it doesn’t work like a tally sheet, where PVT Ramirez has 13 confirmed kills and the most in the platoon.
usually units from platoon upward report their BDA (battle damage assessment). this is fed to the intelligence sections so they can produce reports on percentage of remaining effectiveness of whatever adversary unit they were facing.
a BDA will include estimates on vehicles damaged or destroyed, by type (ex 2 tanks, 1 IFV) and number of adversary personnel killed and captured.
Latest Answers