So, when we left off, you'd gotten yourself into a nice fighting position, but that's just the beginning. Once you've dug in and improved your position somewhat, you need to begin a Range Card. It's basically a mini-map of your sector of responsibility (and sector of fire, should it come to that) with particular emphasis on obvious landmarks, dead space, and ranges from you to everything you can see. It's your team leader's job to tell you three things when you're digging in: 1) Principle Direction Of Fire The PDF is where you should be looking, alerting anyone else of anything notable that happens into view, and shooting at it if anything worth shooting at appears, consistent with your team's ROE (Rules Of Engagement). Your hole should be sited to cover that. 2) Your Sector Limits How far to the left and right of your PDF you should be paying attention to, and/or shooting at, with suitable landmarks or compass bearings for both. 3) Your Final Protective Fire line The bearing along which, if everything goes to hell, you should be shooting to put a curtain of screaming lead to prevent your team's position being overrun.
Your responsibility is to put in limit stakes (or rocks) at your end, so that you can point your weapon alongside them to the limits of your sector to either side, along with similar arrangements for your PDF and FPF, so that, even in the dark and absent NODs, you could fire a line along either and hit anything from 0-72 inches above the ground along that bearing. Then to walk your sector, or have someone else do it, to see if there are any spots where a person could successfully hide from your fire. This is called dead space, not because they'll be dead outside it, but because you can't put any live fire into it.
If any of that is within hand grenade-throwing range (25m or so), you'll want to find ways to put something there to make it less attractive to occupy, whether that something is just noisy (to alert you), or actually painful or hazardous (to penalize attempts to occupy it without you shooting at it). Ideally, both, and in such a way that it's not obvious that whatever is put there has been deliberately placed, but rather appears natural to casual observation. Jumbled piles of sharp rocks and old brush, with jagged points and edges, are better for this than obvious human-constructed spikes, and accomplish roughly the same effect. But mainly, you want to visually identify obvious landmarks and your sector lines, and range the distance from you to them, out to the limit of your own weapon's effectiveness or the limit of your vision, so that you know at what range any target(s) at those landmarks are at, or what ranges they're between, to use all that rifle marksmanship you learned, and deliver accurate fire on them if necessary. Assuming your rifle is BZO'ed, everything from 0-300m will be hit on a man-sized target with the same sight setting for you, so your primary concern is the 300-600m range, where correct range settings are more important to hit accurately. You can pace it off, or have your battle buddy do that while walking the area looking for dead space, but a modern expedient that's probably easier and more accurate would be a simple laser rangefinder available from dozens of websites, hunting suppliers, etc. If someone has a dedicated rifle for marksmanship beyond 500m, get a rangefinder that will accommodate all such possibilities.
Otherwise, one that'll handle 600m or less will suffice for 7.62mm and 5.56mm modern battle rifles at all probable ranges. In heavier cover, 100m may be all the distance you've got, but ideally, you're somewhere inside the edge of that heavy cover, looking out at open ground. Second choice, everything's open, but your position is camouflaged and has sufficient cover. In any event, once your hole is basically prepared, learn the ground outwards from where you are, unless you want your fighting hole to become your burial hole.
This is the US military standard phonetic alphabet in use since the 1960s. (It's also the ICAO alphanumeric used by all aircraft flight crew, and the international radiotelephone operator's alphabet. So kind of useful to know. You will see this material again.) Memorize it. Period.
Warm up: Daily Seven + one rep higher than first week. Then LBD: Lower Body Development Pick 5-7 exercises that work out your abdomen and legs. Do one until you can't. Jog in place or sprint for a minute to shake it off. Do the next one. Lather, rinse, repeat for each exercise, for 30 minutes. Cool down, clean up, breakfast, and then on to the last day of fieldcraft.
At this point, if it doesn't hurt a little, you ain't training. No one ever drowned in sweat.
1) Spelling correction noted. Apologies for the misspelling.
2) You're assuming an enemy that is not, necessarily.
3) You're assuming that's the only enemy, or even the primary threat.
4) Hives are a target, not an asset. Ask a bear how that works.
5) Replacing lost air assets takes time, money, and inordinate amounts of personnel.
(It takes 1-2 years, minimum, to make one competent pilot, at a training cost of $1-3M. That's why we move heaven and earth to recover them, not just because we're nice guys. And most of our current airframes are no longer in production. Once they're lost, for any reason, they're lost forever. They're also the most expensive, expensive-to-operate, and fragile asset on the battlefield, even when they're coming at you fangs out. You don't squander them on covering every patrol in Indian Country, or pretty soon, you don't have them any more. Then where are you?)
6) The bases for those airframes are generally amidst red states. So are the manufactories for spare parts, ordnance, and their precious POL. In an insurgency, how long do you think Lockheed, Boeing, Northrup-Grumman, and General Dynamics would stay open in the middle of the functional equivalent of Anbar Province? They are a tank made of bone china in a world full of slingshots.
7) The Diversity of the Free Shit Army is the enemy that's likeliest to need ambushing after that. Probably long before as well. They have no armor, no artillery, no air support, no QRF, no training, no doctrine, little equipment, and very little in the way of command and control. This is what is known in the trade as a "juicy target". And as Team Stupid will find out, when the EBT cards go away, they will go rogue, and won't respond to prior command and control measures. Just bullets in the head. That's a feature, not a bug.
8) Anything amidst your AO, by definition, is worth ambushing. That's the difference between your AO, and free ground.
9) Your apparently complete ignorance of the military's composition and disposition is telling. Every unit is a mix of all states, and overwhelmingly composed of the people least likely to go along with bombing and shooting folks back home, anywhere, being inordinately represented by exactly the red-state redneck mofos who'll not merely refuse, but turn their guns around first chance they get, or simply desert, with everything they can carry off. Ask me how I know.
10) Colonels and generals can wave their hands all they like, but it's the troops (who largely won't want to play) who are the ones who load the machine guns, sling the bombs, gas up the vehicles, and maintain them. Or not. This is why the douchebags stand out, even now, after the last eight years' attempt to mold the military into some amalgation of Queer Eye For the Straight Guy, Meals On Wheels, and Black Lives Matter. It didn't work then, and it's being shrugged off as we speak. Slow learners get fragged. Hit by jeeps. Disappear in the woods. Smother under their pillows. It's a dangerous business at the best of times, and doubly so when your men won't follow you. Especially when they perceive that command is a greater threat to them than the nominal "insurgency", as will become the case two seconds after this starts, and in many cases, before it even goes wheels up.
Look for the military, in any sort of major crisis, to stand down completely, park their vehicles, and protect their bases, and no more, until further notice.
11) As I said, LE cannot even secure the cities they nominally protect, on their best day, now. (It pissed OIF/OEF vets and some prior service folks off when I posted in earlier days that the KIA rate in Chicongo was worse than serving a tour in the Army in the Sandbox, until the numbers proved the point.) Throw in even an insurgency of a mere 1%, and they'll be dead and non-existant in weeks, if not days or hours, never to return. If most of them don't elect to stay home and take care of what matters to them: their families. What's left won't be much to write home about, and the bigger cities will be worse in this respect than the smaller communities, because few of their numbers actually live there to begin with. Just getting there every day will become a non-starter, and that'll be that.
They depend on two (very fragile) things: automobiles, and radio communications nodes. Otherwise, even the NYFC PD couldn't control six blocks around city hall. And that's with 100% staffing, another thing they won't have.
They don't have individual MRAPs for all hands, and the black and whites and radio towers go away forever with a pint of gasoline in a glass bottle. Oh, wait, they're going to mount a guard on the towers, and only deploy as flying squads? Hello, ambush TTPs.
Game over for them on Day Two. Week two at the outside.
cf.: law enforcement in Mexico, now, except against a population that's armed to the teeth. Anybody not plainly and obviously on the side of The People - and not the Free Shit Army people, btw - will be playing Butch & Sundance to the population's Bolivian Army. (And in many cities, they're about a whisker away from that day right now.) Best wishes with that plan.
12) LE air assets make military air assets look robust by contrast.
They're mainly rotary-wing, the most maintenance-intensive and fragile airframes in common use. The biggest LE air fleet AFAIK is that of LAPD, and you could take out most of it in twenty minutes on any given day, from up the street, with one or two shooters, the will, a SASR or two, and a few dozen rounds. (Important operating tip: number of Bell and Aerospatiale products that run well with a .50BMG through the gearbox: 0.) That assumes no one wants to simply play silly buggers with thermite and Molotov bombs using drones. They wouldn't be securing anything after that, nor replacing lost assets in ten years of trying. And the farther they get from Downtown, the harder it becomes to secure their attempted replacements.
So there won't be two airframes or helicopters, by Tuesday of Hell Week.
For bonus points, any surviving assets would be lured in purposely to ambush them, and any nominally-supported ground force, paving the way to more audacious follow-up activity.
13) And then we get into the fragility of POL, electronics, and maintenance supply chains. The dot Mil learned that lesson in VN from '65-'72. The LEO community has never learned it, and never attempted to operate in a non-permissive environment, nor ever could, for more than about a week. Just-in-time becomes just-too-late in sporty times. Massive amounts of the population they'd nominally try to lord it over know how to play that game blindfolded, and once again, that would be that.
I can do this all day.
More importantly, both the .mil and law enforcement, while not known for a lot of PhDs, have quite a number of pretty street-smart folks thereabouts, from bottom to top. The really big cesspool chunks get all the media attention (mainly for entertainment value, don't kid yourselves; the press are just as big kind of smartasses as anything I write, they just dress it up better), but it's the guys with mechanic's garage and barber shop common sense that get about 99% of things done, in both organizations.
And I can assure you, nothing written here is particularly news to them, which is why I doubt it'll ever be an issue so long as either organization exists in functional form.
Of course they do stupid sh*t institutionally, and occasional individuals are real moron standouts, which makes the internet entertaining most days; the stories are legion.
But what people fail to realize is that the story every day for hundreds of years hasn't been the overwhelming majority of either group who don't crash their ships, fly their airplanes into mountains or the ground, drown in swamps, or shoot themselves in the groin holstering their pistols, because they're just not that f**king stupid, despite official efforts to recruit stupider ones, and lifelong efforts to keep them all as dumb as possible consistent with doing their jobs.
It doesn't work well, because Darwin is a dangerous servant and a cruel master.
Law enforcement and the military, as long as any civilization worth the name survives, are either going to be on your side, or neutral, for the reasons laid out above. Any other choice is a decision for their own suicide.
The real problems come along when civilization doesn't survive, and you will have neither of them, and a keen appreciation for the lack.
That day is what these basic training skills are FOR.
You're going to be your own 9-1-1: Police, fire, EMS, and the muthaf**king Cavalry.
Most people would do far better wrapping their heads around 35 BC, 535 AD, or 1735, rather than around 1935.
Dollars to donuts if you're shooting at any troops, they'll have red stars on their gear and not white ones, but your targets are far likelier to look like looters in Ferguson or Lord Humungus' posse in Road Warrior than they are to look like a SWAT team or the local Notional Guard.
There will be outliers from time to time, and worth noting, but primarily as exceptions to the rule.
If things have gotten to the point that you're patrolling in small bands, I think you can pretty much kiss any idea of police work or a functional military goodbye as nothing but fond memories of happier days.
Look at the whole board, Mark.
You're worried about a military or LE with air and IR assets. If you have a military and LE with IR assets, WTF are you patrolling around in small bands for? More importantly, if you're already patrolling around in small bands, you probably haven't seen LE or military air assets for a long time, nor will again for even longer. You're playing checkers, Mark. This is a chess game.
This was far too long to post in comments to this post, so here it is on the front page.
Dear Mark Matis,
I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here. Whether you have sincere questions, or are simply trying to sharpshoot the post, the answers are the same.
Firstly, you've perhaps just tumbled into this series of posts, and are therefore wholly unaware of anything else prior to five minutes ago that I've previously covered or of which I'm well aware. I would gently suggest therefore that you go back, read what I've posted to date under the topic "Basic Training", going all the way back to the precepts enumerated here and then get back to me from a common frame of reference. Bearing well in mind that "basic training" has an actual English meaning to it, and wasn't chosen just because it was tacti-cool. I'm addressing those who need the fundamentals, with little if any prior explanation of things.
If anyone is planning on taking on First-World first-line forces at the height of their current capabilities and powers, walking fat, dumb, and happy into their AO, and then going toe-to-toe with them on a regular basis, they'll lead a short but interesting life, and they're probably not tall enough for this ride. If you're not planning that, then perhaps you might revise and extend your remarks with a better goal in mind.
There are also white phosphorous weapons available to potential foes.
So should we therefore require our side to deploy only in flameproof and shellproof suits?
They have cluster bombs.
Should we therefore disperse, and no one approach closer to his fellows than 500M?
They've had air forces for 104 years, and dedicated close air support for 95.
Yet somehow, unaccountably, we're still sending people on foot to take and hold ground, and all life on earth has not come to a screeching halt, nor has warfare itself.
Yet this is the approach you seem to be taking.
@1:04 "Albuquerque! See, I can do it too. Snorkel!"
I might also point out that despite your trenchant objections, the standard US military doctrine up to thirty seconds ago, when last I looked, is neither more nor less than what I've laid out, as far as it goes.
I would therefore humbly suggest that if you can run a better military, there are jobs for such going begging in the DoD, and consulting contracts let regularly, in the billions-of-dollars range.
Otherwise, provide a link to the magical TTPs that take into consideration all that you imagine to be such an overwhelming and world-beating problem, and we can discuss how that may or may not work out in reality.
Those technologies you mentioned are also completely defeatable with nothing more complicated than a camouflage-fabric retractable umbrella or simple poncho, with a mylar lining. Ask me how I know.
If, OTOH, you're worried about Terminator T-100s and HK drones, you probably need to run your own sci-fi combat blog.
Military-grade thermal detection systems have been in existence for going on forty-plus years, and workable IR systems for something approaching seventy years. Including by many forces of our potential opposition. But I have yet to note the abandonment of the concepts laid out in basic form here, at any level of US or other nations' infantry training program, and point out for your enlightenment yet again the four dead SF troops from last October in Niger, the nineteen dead SOF forces dead in Operation Red Wings, and any uncounted number of first-world forces regularly ambushed and killed from 2002-present in Iraq and Afghanistan by nothing more complicated than what I laid out here, essentially by conscripts and goatherders with Cold War arms, despite all the advantages that would seem to have you in quite the state.
If technology made ambushes obsolete, people wouldn't die in wars we fought, as our side is the acknowledged reigning master of technology.
Yet to date, we've sustained nearly 7000 KIAs in SWAsia, despite overwhelmingly one-sided possession of the exact capabilities you note, from B-2s to Predator drones to MRAPs to SAPI plates, with little lasting effect, no long-term success, and no end in sight until we abandon wholly the idea that people who will not be subdued can be, short of their total annihilation.
We've also had nuclear weapons for 72 years, so you may as well throw them into the stew as well, and we should therefore all simply give up any notions of fighting anyone, and simply burrow into the ground and learn to love living in caves.
Then start talking about how conventional combat itself is impossible, because those possessing them will simply nuke any opposition.
Like we've done never, anywhere, at any time, since dropping the first two, nor has anyone else, despite nuclear-capable forces having fought, by my count, some thirty to thirty-five wars since their invention.
Technology can be a useful force multiplier, from the point since someone discovered sharpened rocks worked better than blunt round ones.
It is not the dread Eye Of Sauron, nor a magic bullet that suddenly invalidates six millennia of recorded history on the subject of ground warfare.
And BTW, were the entire US military to be returned to the continental US, with all forces from active duty to national guard mustered and available, and 100% up-checks on every weapon system we deploy, they would be hard-pressed to control and dominate an area the size of Texas. Even less if they actually tried that in Texas. Leaving only 49 other states, or an area equal to it, wholly undefended, or at most, patrolled by the local constabulary, who with the same advantageous technology you're worried about, can barely keep up with the most serious crime in most cities on a day of relative peace and quiet.
(Recall that with roughly 10 times the divisions, 8 times the number of men in arms available now, and three times the navy, we could fight WWII in two theatres. Current forces were stretched to breaking in two 6th C. piss-ant countries, with little in reserve elsewhere, and we could only muster that at one time and place due to the collapse of one enemy, and the limited force-projection of the other. Then, imagine how well force projection works when your bases inside the US are suddenly subject to insurgent action, like they haven't been in this country since 1812. The dot Mil facing a home-grown insurgency would probably be hard-pressed just to feed themselves inside their own wire beyond two weeks' time, and protect their own families and dependents, let alone go hunting anywhere else. And they'd be getting sniped and ambushed on their own posts 24/7/365, in all likelihood. It gets a lot less fun to wage that kind of warfare, when you can get taken out while taking out the trash.)
Color me less than impressed by the opposition, most days and times, unless one is stupid enough to walk right up to Leviathan and poke it in the eye while wearing a clown suit and floppy shoes.
Cats see in the dark with exquisite clarity, and have since time out of mind, yet there are any number of their trophy mounts on walls worldwide.
Learn that military lesson from nature.
If not that, then at least learn another one from Predator:
The ambush is the basic component of warfare for any infantry (or indeed every hunter, fisherman, or trapper) worthy of the name. Master it, and live. Fail, and die.
ambush n.: a surprise attack by people lying in wait in a concealed position.
It combines most of the tactical principles of war into one simple lesson:
Objective Offensive Mass Economy of force Maneuver Unity of command Security Surprise Simplicity
A hunter in a deer stand or a duck blind is an ambush. Every trapper's trap ever placed, and every fish hook hiding in a worm is an ambush. As is every submerged submarine torpedo attack in history. So is a mugger in an alley.
And still, it's easy to get it wrong, if you're an amateur and you don't know what you're doing.
Conducting an ambush assumes several things:
There's someone you need to ambush.
You can identify them positively when you see them.
Your team leader can therefore control whether or not to fire by the members of the team if #1 and #2 are not the case.
I've lost friends in the real world to slob hunters who shot at unidentified movement in the brush; it's even less funny when we're talking about slob infantry. The common words for that is brigands and bandits, and they usually end up shot themselves, or swinging on a rope, neck-first. They are everyone's common enemy, which is a lot of opposition to bite off and chew for your little group, especially if you don't have to do so.Don't be those guys.
Learn the difference between enemies, and unknowns, and how to deal with each one.
So, assuming you can tell who's who, what next?
Determine the type/style of ambush. The classic forms are Linear, L-shaped, and Area/Dispersed.
Linear ambush
L-shaped
Area/Dispersed Ambush
Other ambush type variations
But the varieties are really limited only by imagination, provided you organize them properly.
1. Select the site.
Pick terrain favorable to you, and unfavorable to your intended target(s).
In A-stan, the mujahideen work with light arms, from mountains. Their kill zones are roads below. It works great, especially against road-bound enemies heavily-burdened and tied to vehicles. Ask the Soviet Army about that. (Against supporting arms like artillery and air, with no such mobility problems, and no means to counter it, not so much. Which was why we gave them Stinger MANPADS missiles. The Soviets got their clocks cleaned, and we did commensurately much better, because they didn't have missiles to shoot down our air cover.) Takeaway lesson, the terrain must be selected to take advantages away from your prey, and hand it to you.
Nota bene: The enemy gets a vote. They know about ambushes too, unless you're unnaturally lucky, and meet someone who's clueless, in a Darwin Award-winning manner.
So barring that stroke of fate, they'll naturally be warier and on higher alert when entering ambush terrain. You may have to use elaborate and problematic means to draw them into apparently open terrain in order to spring your surprise, as in the first vignette in this clip:
2. Secure the ambush site.
Nothing would be worse for you, than to be ambushed in your ambush site, while planning and setting yours up. You have to reconnoiter and clear the area, and do so without making your presence obvious, and keep it so until your trap is ready.
Your security element also serves as the gatekeepers on the ambush site, keeping watch for any target(s) approaching the trap.
They also need to know an ambush-worthy target, versus one you might want to let pass by. Think in terms of size. A patrol team or squad shouldn't bite off an ambush with a battalion of several hundred guys as a rule, unless they all have terminal cancer and nothing to lose.
But a lone platoon wandering around fat, dumb, and happy is another story altogether for that same squad. IOW, leveraging surprise and initiative into 3-to-1 casualties is reasonable, and perhaps necessary. Expecting to inflict 20-to-1 or 50-to-1 casualties is farcically foolhardy and futile.
3. Set up forces to conduct the ambush
The team leader on an ambush patrol, whether the ambush is hasty or deliberate, needs to individually place every person where he can see them, communicate with them, and control them, and they must be "in the loop" non-stop, with every person acting in concert, or else you risk premature inititiation, which could turn failed surprise into your funeral.
It is exactly like a symphony: the entire band has to be on the same sheet of music, and the conductor sets the timing.
Know also that your ambush may be conducted relatively near (i.e less that 100m away) or far (greater than 100m away). Those distances are arbitrary, but should give you an idea, for planning purposes. Near ambushes can expect a trained enemy to charge your forces. Plan appropriate disincentives to this response. Spikes, barbed wire, etc.
In far ambushes, the enemy may elect to remain in place, find nearby cover, and attempt to return effective fire. You may wish to do things to make taking cover nearby problematic for them as well. Nasty surprises in nearby ditches and behind boulders, etc., are long-standing procedure in ambushes, as Blaster will explain:
In planning, be aware that enemy columns put out security to the front and flanks, since forever. It's rather awkward to have their flank security wander right into your position, as they're designed to do, and then be yourself surrounded by the larger force now alert to your presence, and pummelled into hamburger by them, because you were inside the boundary of their flank security. Pay heed to that lesson.
4. Assign key tasks and targets
Someone may be designated to hit high-priority targets. These would include, in order, opposing command and control, radio carriers, and anyone operating crew-served weapons like machine guns, especially if your team lacks them. A machinegun against 10-15 men, even in cover and concealment, isn't a disparity of force, it's a turkey shoot. You're the turkeys on that cast list. If there's no command and control, no means of calling in supporting arms, and no force multipliers like automatic weapons or grenade launchers, it's down to your guys under cover vs. their guys, in the open. Shoot priority targets first, every time. Life is dear, and bullets are cheap; use more than one.
5. Set up signals plan
You'll need a way to convey signals for shoot/no-shoot, initiation of ambush, and breaking contact, and actions afterwards. If it's an annihilation ambush, where you destroy the opposing force, you'll need a signal to enter the kill zone, and gather any material or intelligence items. You may even elect to bury the bodies, making discovery less likely, and preventing whatever larger force may have sent the targets into your area from knowing what happened to them.
Or, if things go wrong, the force isn't subdued/destroyed, or their QRF forces reinforce them before you break contact, you need to be able to tell everyone when to cheezit, and get outta Dodge, without it turning into a rout.
You'll need primary, alternate, contingency, and emergency signals for all the above situations.
Ideally, these should all be group-standardized, and part of your patrol SOP, so you only have to do a cursory reinforcement each time out, rather than re-inventing them wholesale, on the fly, time after time.
6. Actions afterwards
Prisoner details, search details, weapons recovery, material destruction, and who'll carry off what, for openers. Burial details possibly, as well. You'll also need medical and casualty evac people assigned; rounds going both ways make you getting off scot-free unlikely.
7. Establish after-action rally points
Everyone should know your primary and alternate places towards which to exfiltrate and fade away, in case enemy action or other eventualities require your team to split up and reconsolidate elsewhere afterwards. Everyone needs to know where, and for how long, each one is active.
8. Wait for a target
9. Initiate the ambush on command
This is the leader's job, based on the information from flank security.
The signal to open fire, if desired, must be foolproof, and immediately understood.
This is why signals that rely on a chain of intitiation, like explosives, need back-up. Things go wrong, and getting a fizzle or a click, when you wanted a bang, is never a good idea. Have redundant redundancies. E.g. "When I shoot, everyone opens fire. If my round misfires, I'll blow this whistle." are better than "When Enemy Squaddie X steps on this cleverly-placed boobytrap, we all start shooting." Squaddie X may not have read your script, and no one steps on the initiating device. This lesson has been written in blood. Don't add a new chapter.
10. Take care of business - rapidly.
Like a bank robbery, every minute you're ambushing someone, is another minute reinforcements may be setting up to ambush you. Do unto others, and get it over with ASAP.
11. Cease fire and enter the kill zone, or break contact and head to rally points.
Command and signals for each option.
Then either depart, or enter the target area, search and strip what's useful, or destroy it. Then split. Orderly, but in haste, once you've accomplished your objectives. Security watching outboard as well as towards the ambush is critical at this point. Police up all brass and anything else to minimize information and intel to enemy follow-up forces sent to look for the missing group. Even if you just haul it a distance away and bury it, make everything you can disappear.
Account for all your people, signal security to collapse back, and un@$$ the area.
The less trace you leave, the better. It confuses and demoralizes opposition to fight ghosts.
If, at some point you choose to leave things behind to point to another entity as being responsible, even a mythical one, this is the time to do that.
12. Patrol back to your next objective, or return to base with your casualties, prisoners, and spoils.
Although the typical examples posit the ambush in a rural setting, be well aware: there is nothing whatsoever that prevents everything in this lesson from being applied in an urban or suburban environment. Precisely as rival narco-cartel gangs, and occasionally government authorities in Mexico and other failed states find out on a regular basis, week after week. Vehicles block targets in a kill zone, and the assault element opens fire. Done correctly, it's brutal and overwhelming. Something even Hollywood (with Tom Clancy's help) could get right.
The only way to learn this, as "fieldcraft" ought to make obvious, is by learning it and practicing the details in the field. By all means, practice it on paper, or even rehearse it as a group on a tabletop with Little Green Army Men (if it sounds stupid, but it works, it's not stupid! No points for guessing how many {that would be all of them} multimillion dollar stunt and driving scenes in movies you've watched are rehearsed by the stunt men with a lunchpail full of little green army men, and Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars. Gospel serious.). But nothing is as good as actual training, out in the boondocks. This is why all military bases are sited in BFEgypt, by design. A number of the entities in the upper right column offer regular skills training out in the woods, and will likely put you in the position of ambusher and ambushee, to drive the points home. You are strongly and heartily advised to take advantage of those training opportunities, or similar, before you get a pop quiz on this information whilst out and about.
You can be the ambush master, or you can be its prey. Your choice.
So, when we left off, you'd gotten yourself into a nice fighting position, but that's just the beginning.
Once you've dug in and improved your position somewhat, you need to begin a Range Card. It's basically a mini-map of your sector of responsibility (and sector of fire, should it come to that) with particular emphasis on obvious landmarks, dead space, and ranges from you to everything you can see.
It's your team leader's job to tell you three things when you're digging in:
1) Principle Direction Of Fire The PDF is where you should be looking, alerting anyone else of anything notable that happens into view, and shooting at it if anything worth shooting at appears, consistent with your team's ROE (Rules Of Engagement). Your hole should be sited to cover that.
2) Your Sector Limits How far to the left and right of your PDF you should be paying attention to, and/or shooting at, with suitable landmarks or compass bearings for both.
3) Your Final Protective Fire line The bearing along which, if everything goes to hell, you should be shooting to put a curtain of screaming lead to prevent your team's position being overrun.
Your responsibility is to put in limit stakes (or rocks) at your end, to that you can point your weapon alongside them to the limits of your sector to either side, along with similar arrangements for your PDF and FPF, so that, even in the dark and absent NODs, you could fire a line along either and hit anything from 0-72 inches above the ground along that bearing.
Then to walk you sector, or have someone else do it, to see if there are any spots where a person could successfully hide from your fire. This is called dead space, not because they'll be dead outside it, but because you can't put any live fire into it.
If any of that is within hand grenade-throwing range (25m or so), you'll want to find ways to put something there to make it less attractive to occupy, whether that something is just noisy (to alert you), or actually painful or hazardous (to penalize attempts to occupy it without you shooting at it). Ideally, both, and in such a way that it's not obvious that whatever is put there has been deliberately placed, but rather appears natural to casual observation. Jumbled piles of sharp rocks and old brush, with jagged points and edges, are better for this than obvious human-constructed spikes, and accomplish roughly the same effect.
But mainly, you want to visually identify obvious landmarks and your sector lines, and range the distance from you to them, out to the limit of your own weapon's effectiveness or the limit of your vision, so that you know at what range any target(s) at those landmarks are at, or what ranges they're between, to use all that rifle marksmanship you learned, and deliver accurate fire on them if necessary.
Assuming your rifle is BZO'ed, everything from 0-300m will be hit on a man-sized target with the same sight setting for you, so your primary concern is the 300-600m range, where correct range settings are more important to hit accurately.
You can pace it off, or have your battle buddy do that while walking the area looking for dead space, but a modern expedient that's probably easier and more accurate would be a simple laser rangefinder available from dozens of websites, hunting suppliers, etc. If someone has a dedicated rifle for marksmanship beyond 500m, get a rangefinder that will accommodate all such possibilities.
Otherwise, one that'll handle 600m or less will suffice for 7.62mm and 5.56mm modern battle rifles at all probably ranges.
In heavier cover, 100m may be all the distance you've got, but ideally, you're somewhere inside the edge of that heavy cover, looking out at open ground. Second choice, everything's open, but your position is camouflaged and has sufficient cover.
In any event, once your hole is basically prepared, learn the ground outwards from where you are, unless you want your fighting hole to become your burial hole.
It isn't necessary to reproduce an exhaustive detailed survey map of everything you can see. What you're going for is something that will allow you, and your buddy in a shared hole, to know everything they need to know about what's out there with a quick glance, in order to land hits on target. Less may very well be more. This most everything you need to know:
You could print up a few hundred examples of any or all of the range card(s) illustrated. Better idea: make up a dozen or two. 5"x8", if you please. They'll fit in a leg cargo pocket, or the top flap of a pack, where they belong. (You can put the cheat sheet order of completion on the back, if you're clever.) Print them on the heaviest card stock you can, short of actual poster board. Laminate those suckers so they're waterproof. Write your data on them with your grease pencil (you're carrying at least one apiece, right?), and then when you move, wipe it off for the next position. make enough for everyone on the team, plus spares, and keep them in waterproof bags as well.
Yes, you could try and memorize all this every time, but you may have to change holes for various reasons, or you may have been the guy asleep when Mr. Murphy comes calling, and are a bit hazy on details despite the adrenaline dump of waking up to fires exchanged on a two-way range. Also, recall that first standing order of Robert Rogers to the original Rangers was "Don't forget nothing." That is why we write things down.
This embiggens. Words to live by for 250 years, and counting.
And BTW, range cards work great at your ultimate retreat as well, for the same reasons. And even in your current home. You don't have to put them in plexiglass holders under the windows in the living room (the wife would probably freak, right?). But there's nothing that says you can't have a pre-made set that detailed, ready and sitting in a handy envelope in the gun safe or filing cabinet. Nothing wrong with that, in case the Free Shit Army comes calling after the next disaster, is there? ;)
It also could be that someone (what? who?) might see some value in placing a rock or ten, painted white on one side out in the distance at either regular ranges (say 100m distances), with a number in hundreds of meters facing back towards their position, for long-term occupied positions. Like a home, or whatnot. A more surreptitious approach might be to put rocks in a line outwards, with 1 rock for 100m, two together for 200m, and so on, particularly aimed at obvious avenues of approach, out to the limit of your effective fire. (Whether you seal a wad of Tannerite facing inboard towards you, for future warning purposes at the property line terminus, is between you and your conscience. So is appropriate signage, to preserve the sporting purposes of the endeavor. Just saying.)
Now you know why all the original graduates of the service academies were trained surveyors and engineers (which experience seems to have helped out Geo. Washington too), and why Sun Tzu and von Clauswitz spent a lot of time talking about the ground you fight on.
Some principles of warfare never, ever change. So learn the job, before you have to do the job.
Above is the standard basic fighting hole that every person should be digging prior to settling in for the night outside of friendly locations. The rule of thumb in the day was one M-16 wide, two helmets or bayonets long, and armpit depth of the man occupying the hole.
The team leader assigns sectors, and the hole should be sited such that anyone inside it can shoot in the indicated direction.
The point of the hole should be obvious: it reduces the amount of you that can be seen, or hit by direct (someone shooting at you) or indirect (mortars, artillery, and grenades going off nearby) fire, and it also decreases your visibility and personal signature when you aren't on watch.
It's not any more complicated than that. But the longer it's occupied, the more it should get improved.
The first improvement is doubling it up to a two-man fighting hole.
Now you get more coverage, and no one is left alone at any point. It also means that, as a rule, one of you can be eating, sleeping, etc. while the other is on watch, at some point, and if anything happens to one, the other becomes the first aid guy for him.
Consistent with the unit leader's directions, the sectors of fire can be angled to the oblique, meaning anyone shooting at you is shooting at a lump of dirt, and you're shooting at anyone approaching from their sides, which protects your guys, and leaves their guys vulnerable.
This depends on adjoining fighting positions to cover the entire perimeter with fire in order to work. With a small group, the fire sectors (and your vulnerability) increase commensurately. But you always try to set yourself up so that you can shoot, while minimizing the chance of getting shot, if you're doing this right.
Remember, the longer you're inside it, the more you improve the hole. You'd want to add a firing step, improve water drainage, make a spot to put your ready ammunition, and add a grenade sump (a place for grenades thrown at you to fall and explode without killing you is the theory).
The next improvement is adding overhead cover, to provide additional camouflage, protection from rain and weather, and additional cover from explosives, shell fire, or fire from the air or above, depending on terrain.
It should be obvious, but if you're not going to be in one location long enough, you won't have time for building the Hilton. And if there's no natural material for overhead cover, like small trees, you won't be having any of that either, because you're not toting engineer stakes or 4"x4" lumber with you to make the supports.
Fighting holes in fixed emplacements and long-term bases should start taking on the appearance of WWI trenchworks, possibly to the point of dedicated timber or reinforced concrete emplacements and shelters. But learn the basic e-tool constructed version, as you'll be dealing with that far more often than not.
On the basic hole, you'll want to make things easier by constructing elbow holes in the spot necessary for you to be pointing in the primary direction you should be looking, and firing if attacked.
Prior to darkness falling, you'd also best find some sticks to make limit stakes and aiming stakes. As the name might imply, limit stakes are the limits of your sector of fire. (In less vegetated areas, you may necessarily have to make do with limit rocks.) Aiming stakes are aligned in your primary direction of fire, so that in the dark, you're delivering fire along a given line "to whom it may concern".
And once you go to the trouble to construct a fighting hole, you want to camouflage it with natural vegetation cover from the surrounding area, to make it harder to see and identify. Otherwise, having an obvious position just invites all the incoming fire to your address.
The more time you have to spend, and the more attention to detail you give to your fighting hole, the better the camouflage, the more effective the protection, and the more lethal and surprising it becomes if attacked, or blundered into.
Above: Japanese fighting position, Makin Atoll 1945 Bottom: Vietcong bunker, Cu Chi, 1975 Neither one was captured during the wars during which they were used. Now you know why your fathers and grandfathers in each case hated those little bastards, and respected them.
Fighting holes save lives, and take them. You need to master their construction and improvement, and respect what they bring to the table when done right. You won't get a second chance if you get it wrong, on either offense or defense.
So, you've answered nature's call, well away from your team, after dark. Or you're a smaller patrol from a larger body, returning to your patrol base, or your main camp, during darkness. Or just a good teamleader, checking on your people in different spots in the middle of the night. They know someone's out there, but the question is, how do you get close enough to prove it's you without getting shot at?
That's the problem challenge and password were designed to solve, going back centuries.
When someone hears you approach, you're told to "Halt!"
(Important safety tip for those who aren't prior-service military: "Halt!" is always shorthand-speak for "I see you, and my front sight is leveled on your center-of-mass." Halt is therefore not a suggestion, any time it is heard. You may safely assume your position is even sketchier than that, depending on the darkness level, the experience level of a given group, or the tactical situation. Respond appropriately. Bullets in flight have no friends forward of the muzzle, and neither do sentries on post until the my team/not my team question has been sorted out to their satisfaction.)
Pay attention at this point, because getting it wrong will see you experiencing fire that is anything but friendly.
Having frozen absolutely in place, the next words will be some version of "Who goes there?" The correct answer is never, "It's me!", because it's dark, and nobody can tell who "me" is.
You may not get the formal version, you may simply get the challenge. A previously agreed upon word will be spoken, and you'd better come up with the correct reply, quickly, because when this is done right, bullets coming your way are a couple of pounds of trigger squeeze from happening. (This is why you pay attention during daily briefings, and always know the challenge and password.)
The idea is to pick two words that have nothing to do with each other, so that no one can work out even by guessing that the challenge "Indiana" might be answered with "Jones".
A list of them may be generated randomly, and any team or person leaving for multiple days should have each day's challenge and response for the days they're out (ideally memorized, rather than written down).
You're looking for word pairs like "octopus" being answered with "banana", not "banana" and "split".
And to prevent someone nearby in the brush hearing the pair of words correctly, and using them against you, your original challenge at distance may be (ought to be) a number.
The way it works is that at the same time a challenge and password are announced, there is also a number selected. It should be an odd number, from 3-11 or so.
The way that works, is that if the number announced is "nine", you may hear a challenge of "two". You answer the number it takes to make nine, so having passed first grade, you say "seven". At that point, you advance until you're within a couple of steps, and the standard challenge word "octopus" is uttered in your direction very quietly, whereupon you offer "banana", and everyone relaxes a bit as you approach, until they can see you're okay.
If you're the only one, we're done. If not, you tell them, "friendly patrol of eight", and you stay close by to count and ID the other seven members.
This isn't just cool-guy stuff, enemy have infiltrated friendly patrols on dark nights in the jungle or forest, in the real world. (This is also why you do head counts at halts. I've been out and fallen in along a trail among a group of border crossers at oh-dark-thirty, who had no idea they had picked up several additional members in the dark, until we threw the lights on at their next halt; and war stories abound of NCOs on patrol in places like Vietnam who suddenly had larger patrols than they'd started with, mid-way through.) Things can understandably get messy if you don't notice things like that.
So the number may need to get repeated with each and every approaching member, then the challenge and password when they're up very close.
The reason you picked an odd number is so that the number answered is always a different number than the one challenged. If the number were ten, and the challenge were "five", someone ignorant of your language could mimic "five" in reply, and get it right by blind luck. So odd numbers always.
You may chose to pick and use numbers (or be in the position of someone else doing it) in another language. So you'd better be able to count in whatever the language agreed upon is. It may be advantageous not to let the group in the dark know who you are, whether you're using Spanish in the southwest desert, or using French in the Canadian border woods or bayou swamps, instead of English numbers in either event.
There may also be challenge/password pairs for your home group, and a different one just for your team's use, and different numbers for both. A good idea is to change both daily, at an agreed upon time (probably during the daytime - say, at noon, or 9AM - so no one leaves under one set of passwords/numbers at 6PM, and comes back to a new set after midnight. Imagine if someone's watch were off a bit, and the ensuing mischief that could cause.)
You may also issue codes for duress, which lets a sentry know that you're giving the answers with a gun to your head or a knife to your own throat, or that of someone else in your party. You may also assign an "everything's okay" word as well. Work this out before the day, including if you're going to use it at all.
Working at a gun store, if anyone heard the word "hamburger" spoken aloud by counter staff or the cashiers, a number of guns carried there were going to be coming out momentarily by way of greeting. There's little worse to greet someone trying to stick up the place than eight guys all pointing guns at you. Whatever the decision, and the word, decide on the response to such a code in either case. The person who knows what's going on should be hitting the deck just in time to let the party crashers catch the incoming lead.
That's what challenge/password and number codes are for: to keep your guys alive, and recognize bad guys trying to get in your position when it's too dark to see them. They don't need to know whether or not you can see them in the dark with NODs. They just need to know they're in the crosshairs when you can hear them, and they can hear your challenge.
Responses should be instant, because at night, when people are pointing guns, delay increases stress, and the consequent likelihood of someone getting lit up.
Yes, we really are going to cover How To Sh*t In The Woods.
Get it right, and life is happy. Get it wrong, and you may get a visit from Mssrs. Dysentery and Hepatitis. They are not your friends., and if you give them to your team mates, they won't be your friends either.
Option 1: The Cathole
Step 1:
a) Downhill from your position b) Downstream from your water supply point c) 200' away from that or ideally any water source, or your campsite, minimum
Step 2:
For the uninitiated, the stick replaces toilet paper when you don't have that, or the three seashells if you're from San Angeles in the dystopian future.
If you don't have an e-tool (WTF?), or you were going lightweight, these things are the bomb, for about $10 @ WallyMart, etc.:
Option 2: The Slit Trench For larger units and/or a longer stay in a lay-up or patrol base.
Bury as you go. The cans over the toilet paper are to keep it dry in rainy environments or on misty nights and dewy mornings. And if you're using MREs, everyone whose BTDT knows you always save the TP bundles, and put them in a ziplok. They may be all you get for some time, and beggars can't be choosers. Otherwise, find a really good stick, without bark or splinters.
Option 3:
Pack it in, pack it out. You'll want plastic, with no holes in the bags. This is the option selected by elite reconnaissance units, going back years. If you don't leave it in the field, there's nothing for anyone to find later on. You can also elect to deposit all the bags at one central location later on, away from your area of interest, buried and concealed well, and far off your line of march. And you do what you like, but if it's going in my pack, I'm double knotting it, and double-bagging it.
And wash your hands afterwards!
The way to break the fecal-oral disease vector is to clean up after yourself, scrupulously.
And although it's grey water and not black, you should do the same with anything including water or residue left over after washing eating or cooking utensils, brushing teeth, shaving, etc. Dig a sump hole, far from water supplies, and bury it. Getting discovered because someone saw your sudsy crud floating by downstream will be painful, was stupid, and is easily prevented.
And BTW, baby wipes and disinfecting hand sanitizer are your friend.
Not counting the news outlets or websites along the full range of accuracy and veracity, I follow multiple actual individuals' handwritten blogs. (Bot news aggregators don't thrill me.) Looking them over, many are current serving or former military and a couple are some variation of high-speed low-drag elite forces ninjas. Or just funny as all. Because life without humor is just despair. So in other words, the same folks I trusted in the military not to wet the bed, sh*t themselves, or otherwise run around like headless Nancys, are the same folks I trust on the interwebz, for demonstrating pretty much the same trustworthiness and circumspectly responsible behavior. Color me shocked.
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