Strafing is the military practice of attacking ground targets from low-flying aircraft using aircraft-mounted automatic weapons.
Less commonly, the term is used by extension to describe high-speed firing runs by any land or naval craft such as fast boats, using smaller-caliber weapons and targeting stationary or slowly-moving targets.
A-10 Thunderbolt II in a dive, conducting a strafing run
A German vehicle column destroyed by ground-attack aircraft close to Arnhem, 23 September 1944
Messerschmitt Bf 109E strafing Australian positions in North Africa, 1941
Beaufighters strafing a Vorpostenboot, 1944
An autocannon, automatic cannon or machine cannon is a fully automatic gun that is capable of rapid-firing large-caliber armour-piercing, explosive or incendiary shells, as opposed to the smaller-caliber kinetic projectiles (bullets) fired by a machine gun. Autocannons have a longer effective range and greater terminal performance than machine guns, due to the use of larger/heavier munitions, but are usually smaller than tank guns, howitzers, field guns, or other artillery. When used on its own, the word "autocannon" typically indicates a non-rotary weapon with a single barrel. When multiple rotating barrels are involved, such a weapon is referred to as a "rotary autocannon" or occasionally "rotary cannon", for short.
US M242 Bushmaster 25 mm autocannon mounted on an M2 Bradley armoured fighting vehicle
ZU-23-2, a twin barrel 23×152 mm anti-aircraft autocannon from the 1960s still in service with some former members of the Warsaw Pact
German BK 5 50 mm aircraft autocannon displayed in front of the Me 262A jet, a design once tested with it
XM307 25 mm caliber man portable Automatic Grenade Launcher, part of the cancelled OCSW program