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Well, we
had a full fire team tonight for missions, and welcomed a new member, Terry
McCann, Alias ‘Mac’, The
Mission was the BMP mission of 070509, and we were sure that with four real
infantry, and two AI’s, we would have success. However the best laid plans get
washed out sometimes. The mission objectives are here
if you want to recap on
last week’s debrief of this mission. Some
very important issues were raised in my mind, and I want to expand on some of
them. There are two difficult aspects to this mission, the second is the T72,
and the First is the our initial separation in a hot LZ (landing zone).
I’m going to give this some discussion, and we can work on the anti
tank tactics at a later time. Getting
back together seemed to take an inordinately long time, and we tried different
approaches, from all running in a particular direction, to all running towards
an identifiable landmark. One thing was certain to me, we were very
‘exposed’ to enemy roving teams, when we were in the forest. I think
there’s huge potential for improvement of situational awareness, and basic
navigation. No matter where we get to, we need to be able to identify fairy
closely, and quickly from the map, what grid we are in. This can only be done
with practice, and by constantly cross referencing what you see with the map. In
normal fire team or squads this can be done by one or two senior team members,
but everyone must know it for this mission. I would argue that we all need it
anyway, beccause we can get disorientated, and quickly separated from our team in
the heat of threat or conflict. This gets even more complicated on night operations, but thats for another day's dicussion. There
are many other benefits to this situational awareness approach, By looking at
the map, we see the terrain ahead, behind, places for cover and potential threat
locations. Its all part of our ‘feel’ for where we are. We should be able to
individually move out of the forest in a general direction, and out of harms
way, identify the grid reference of our location, with some identifiable
feature, eg. “group of 6 trees in north east of grid 047,
034 (east-west, north south). The team leader should then co-ordinate the safe re-union! A little
bit on teams first. A team is one of more players. Yes. If you end up alone, you
must consider yourself as a team, with all the team leader responsibilities.
Your first responsibility is your (team) safety. Always. It
overrides all others. Second responsibility is to return to you fire team. If an
individual is on a heading through the forest of 050, and there’s an enemy
fire team of several units north west of that position, the obvious course of action
is to move south west, 130 or something like that, carefully covering 040 as you
go.
Here's a quote from www.globalsecurity.org
The team
leader must do the map work, and co-ordinate the mission progress. The others
should be providing cover fire, not also looking at the map. Team members may
provide an input, but the leader must make decisions, and quickly, and implement
them. If you are on your own, you must cover, map read and make those decisions. I would
like us to work on map reading and grid reference, and we will continue with
this mission next week, I the hope of cracking at least the first part.
There’s a huge amount to be learned with this mission.
Fish. |