Volley fire

Common card · No. 298109

Volley fire, as a military tactic, is (in its simplest form) the concept of having many soldiers shoot in the same direction at the same time. In practice, it often consists of having a line of soldiers all fire their weapons together at the enemy forces on command, known as "firing a volley", followed by more lines of soldiers repeating the same manoeuvre in turns. This is usually to compensate for the inaccuracy, slow rate of fire (as many early ranged weapons took a long time and much effort to reload), limited effective range and stopping power of individual weapons, which often requires a massed saturation attack to be effective. The volley fire, specifically the musketry volley technique (also known as the countermarch), requires lines of soldiers to step to the front, fire on command and then march back into a column to reload, while the next row repeats the same process. The term "volley" came from Middle French volée, substantivation of the verb voler, which in turns came from...

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