reconnaissance by fire
- noun
- /rɪˈkɒnəssəns baɪ faɪər/
- Specialized
:
reconocimiento por fuego
- To establish where the enemy was hiding, the commander ordered a reconnaissance by fire to provoke a response.
Examples
-
The soldiers conducted a reconnaissance by fire to determine the enemy's position in the dense forest.
-
Put half a dozen men in the back and make a reconnaissance by fire.
Fiction book (1995) -
We leapfrogged, doing reconnaissance by fire, toward the guard towers.
Fiction book (1997) -
In the chaos of battle, the troops executed a reconnaissance by fire, firing into the suspected enemy area.
Synonyms
67
8.2
A search to find information about an area or enemy before an attack
5
6.8
A military trip to find out where the enemy is and what they are doing
Surface Forms
Morphology
reconnaissance + by + fire
The phrase is directly compositional: 'reconnaissance' (surveying for information) + 'by' (indicating means) + 'fire' (gunfire) yields the idea of surveying conducted by firing weapons to provoke a response. The 'X by Y' means construction is cross-linguistically common and the military nuance does not obscure the literal composition, so a learner who knows the constituent words can infer the meaning.
Etymology
Reconnaissance by fire comes from a simple battlefield image: soldiers would shoot into a likely hiding place to force anyone inside to 'shoot back' and so show their position, with reconnaissance meaning looking for the enemy and fire meaning shooting. So the phrase means 'using gunfire to test and reveal where the enemy is'.