Dispersal (military)

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Dispersal is a military practice of dispersing or spreading out potentially vulnerable military assets, such as soldiers, aircraft, ships, tanks, weapons, vehicles, and similar equipment of an army, navy, or air force. Its primary objective is to minimise any potential effects of collateral damage, from incoming munitions such as artillery, bombs and missiles. Dispersal increases the number of artillery rounds needed to neutralise or destroy a military unit in proportion to the dispersal of the said unit. If a division doubles the area it takes up, it will double the number of artillery rounds needed to do the same damage to it. As more targets are spread out or dispersed, more artillery and / or bombs are required to hit all the individual targets.

It can also be used on a squad level, notably in counter-insurgency, to minimise the effects of grenades, land mines, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), explosive booby traps, and to a lesser extent, automatic gunfire. When individual soldiers are spaced apart, it is much more difficult for a single grenade to incapacitate them all.

Force dispersal may also be used in urban guerrilla warfare and as a tactic by militias to combat military intelligence instead of collateral damage. In this use, breaking up into covert cells is meant to make it harder to eliminate the whole organisation at once, and to reduce the damage when portions of it are discovered.^[1]