
Phil
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Military Small Arms Training: Iron Sights Vs Optics
Phil replied to Dawes's topic in Weapons other than Tanks (WOTTs)
What Simon said! -
Military Small Arms Training: Iron Sights Vs Optics
Phil replied to Dawes's topic in Weapons other than Tanks (WOTTs)
Optics are key to being able to ID enemy firing points and positions. From my experience and I know from others too, finding where the bastards are shooting you from is very hard work and very demoralising if you're sat there taking rounds and can't locate the enemy. It makes you feel like you're not doing anything if you're not shooting back, but shooting at ghosts is just a waste of ammo. On Ops now everyone gets an optic (SUSAT, ACOG or the new sight) but in training there's still iron sights for non-infantry. I don't know when they'll change that. -
That's every decision made by someone senior at my work.
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Agree with nigelfe, the ROE were suitable for the context. And in reality it depended a lot on the sanity / insanity of the chain of command. An aggressive and competent commander with an eye and ear for the local conditions and context, and who was able to tune into the locals and influence them would use the ROE to their advantage. Weak commanders would use them as an excuse. It's very difficult to ambush insurgents in the old fashioned sense. We used to manage it by using ISTAR and IDF from our mortars because they were responsive and under local control. But if you tried to do the whole lie in a ditch and wait thing, you'd just get the kids coming up and asking for pens with the inevitable comedic effect. No point doing it at night either because you wouldn't see many people because they knew they stuck out like a bulldogs bollocks in our night vision whilst we couldn't be seen so they'd just get their heads down.
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In Afghan we had the right to self defence (which was the least restrictive option ironically). There were also several other types of ROE that were devolved down to sub-unit commander. We used to use the other ROE quite often which whilst less restrictive in some senses, were more in others. I don't think we ever had any real issues in practice on the ground - people who needed killing more often than not got killed once they made themselves known to be bad men. I know questions were asked at TF level when our small FOB had lobbed 3,500 mortar bombs within 4 months but the leaf eaters were told they were welcome to go on an advance to contact without the promise of mortar fire. The mortaring continued. Really taught me how powerful those things are when they're being used properly.
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The more you stack the deck Ken the more you can withstand set-backs. Plenty of mistakes were made by the Germans around May 1940 at the beginning of their invasion of France especially around Sedan etc but they had sufficient power and mass to absorb a lot of mistakes. The more taut your plan the fewer mistakes and unfortunate happenings your force can tolerate. That is especially so when the enemy realises your intentions and is vigorous and aggressive in their response.
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Crikey Bill do you want some salt and vinegar to go with those chips? Good luck with the book, I am sure it will be an interesting repository of information. However, as I have said I believe that the failure of Market Garden was systemic and structural in nature and you'll not find any real insights at the tactical level as to why it didn't work. And from my research, as I have argued before, "poor decisions" and "incompetence" are phrases bandied about but often a deeper look at perceptions and the context at the time shows that decisions might have been bad in hindsight with hindsight bias, but were more often than not sensible and justifiable at the time from the PoV of the decision maker, or at best as good a course of action as any other. Had it all worked then the tactical level might be more interesting because then we'd be looking into how the blokes managed to polish a turd. The whole operation was so tightly coupled that once that first cog flew out of the machine that was it - game over against the Germans. There was simply never going to be enough capacity in the operation to ensure resilience against plans going wrong. It was too taut, too tightly coupled with next to no margin for contingency. As for gobby? That seems to include anyone with a different opinion than you on the matter. I am simply looking at it from a different perspective than you and applying some theories of risk perception and organisational behaviour to the situation. But you'll probably throw rocks at the words you don't understand I imagine.
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There were a lot of ways in which the operation failed simply because the Allies couldn't help themselves around obstacles imposed by chance. Or, to put it another way, the Allies failed to make a robust enough effort to withstand such exigencies. I understand the desire to wish upon the Allies better leadership and better "application". The problem is that if we could wish all of that on the Allies, we need only wish one single better choice on the Germans to make the whole thing fall apart -- the prudent and timely destruction of the Nijmegen bridges (or the Arnhem road bridge; either would have done). If the Allies could be argued to help themselves to so much more, some of it questionably within their grasp, certainly the Germans could be argued to help themselves to so little, unquestionably within their power. To reasonably mitigate that one capital risk, the Allies would have had to land many more troops a lot closer to the bridges, in order to take them quickly and decisively at the beginning of the operation. But I think we all know that that was simply not within the capability of the 1st Airborne Army, no matter how well led, given all of the other responsibilities assigned that formation. Instead the Allies trusted to luck that the Germans would miss on that most obvious of expedients while the British airborne worked its way to the Arnhem bridge and the US Airborne secured the Groesbeek heights (freeing up more than the single battalion that was actually earmarked for capturing the bridge). This is illustrative of the level of unreality that permeated the entire operational concept. The operation's overall success was totally dependent on good luck, and a lot of it. That was the kind of luck that the Allies had no reason to believe in at that point in the war, certainly not when dealing with the Germans in the field. Yet they talked themselves into believing in it. Indeed. I think the operation would be more interesting had it succeeded. How did a light infantry force behind enemy lines meet the dilemma of force protection versus striking the objective behind enemy lines and succeed against a reasonably competent and vigorous enemy? The failures were latent, not active. Arnhem didn't succeed not because someone went left instead of right or got a brew on when they should have kept going, it failed because there was not the resilience or capacity in the force to compensate for the above inevitable frictions. We must understand the risk perceptions at the highest levels to understand why it was thought worth it to launch an operation which people knew would be operationally compromised because it was knowingly based on so many dilemmas. The moment 1st airborne got into trouble the reality of a strung out force unable to be mutually supportive and with limited supplies and with units moving about with no anchor points and poor communications became apparent. I think many military scientists or strategists would never have been surprised that Arnhem went the way it did. 3 light infantry battalions with an 8 mile line of communication and a 2-3 day window of vulnerability before it is supposed to reach its final defensive disposition.
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So who were 1 and 3 PARA shooting at as they moved toward the bridge? So the situation on the western front was precisely as the allied leadership believed? No it's a summation of what the Allied leadership believed the state of the German forces to be, both at the strategic level and locally around Arnhem. One can drown in the details but the reality is the Germans weren't as beaten as was believed and light infantry with limited supplies are next to useless against hasty defences when those hasty defences don't represent the final objective and are indeed still some miles from it. Fundamentally the limited combat power of light infantry met German forces which shouldn't have been able to contest the operation and that contesting of the battle-space turned the allied plans up there inside out. Your options are limited when half your limited striking power has to concentrate on force protection whilst the half that you could send to the objective is fragmented, isolated and strung out with virtually no punch - all of it getting weaker and weaker literally by the second with every round expended and every man killed or wounded.
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Nothing to do with the limitations of light infantry advancing against even hasty defensive positions? Misreading the strategic situation resulted in the blokes being lobbed in, them being light infantry meant they were more often than not, going to be unable to fight through the forces that simply shouldn't have been there or be able to put up a proper fight.
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European Disdain For Combat Shotguns
Phil replied to Gman's topic in Weapons other than Tanks (WOTTs)
They werent being told to carry them - they just weren't that useful. Everyone was all over them at first because they were tacti-cool with their holographic sights etc but the novelty wore off and they dropped through the food chain. Personally I don't see a use for them over an assault rifle set on auto with a bayonet. At least if the rifle jams you can follow it up with some steel at close range. -
European Disdain For Combat Shotguns
Phil replied to Gman's topic in Weapons other than Tanks (WOTTs)
We were issued automatic shotguns in 2010. At first, the carriers of said shotguns represented a type of Lord of the Flies pecking order with the most vocal, psychotic and hardest blokes wanting to have them. After about a week it was the other way around, and not long afterwards even the crows got bored of them. -
Which is all well and good except in a real shooting war history shows that the tactics, intelligence and command and control matter far more than ability of the plane in a one on one dogfight. Aerial victories drop dramatically in a dog-fight. It's the bounce which is the gold standard.